Bakersfield, California: City of the Dead [Paladin]

Southern California was the site of some of the most vicious fighting of World War III (1984-1986), when the supervillains of the New Order clashed with the Justice Guild of America and the United States Armed Forces. Most New Order foot-soldiers were metahuman gangbangers hired as mercenaries or radicalized with the New Order's ideology, though the leaders also made use of kidnapped and weaponized metahuman children stolen from special facilities, six of whom were used near the end of the war in SoCal (when the US military came close to crushing the last of the New Order at the Battle of Anaheim, to unleash the full power of the San Andreas Fault Line, which reduced virtually the entire state to rubble. Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana were completely destroyed, as were most major cities across central and southern California. The central coast was practically torn off the continent, created a massive peninsula with a long gulf; the San Francisco Bay was widened catastrophically, pulling the Golden Gate Bridge apart and turning most of the lowlands of the San Joaquin Valley into a nasty, polluted swamp (today home to a large population of American kaiju and other teramorph metahumans); and a gigantic fissure in the south running from Anaheim to Yuma ripped newfangled inland seas and gulfs across the Southwest Corner of the US.

While the New Order was ultimately defeated, the US was trashed. Civil War nearly broke out in the 1990’s due to the Senate and the House picking rival presidents to fill the vacancy left by the assassination of the entire line of presidential succession at the outbreak of WWIII. It was a whole thing, very complicated, and not the focus of this story. However, by the start of the 2000’s, the country was whipped back into shape. Mostly. Part of the "Plan for a New American Century" was rebuilding America’s cities, the majority of which were left devastated, condemned or quarantined following WWIII. Some were rebuilt or reinhabited with varying levels of success, while others are still kinda just spooky post-apocalyptic ruins in 2020 - common hideouts for criminals and vagrants. In other cases, totally new cities were built from scratch. In the blasted and twisted lands of the Southwest, this came in the form of cities like Arizona Bay along the shores of the Yuma Sea in Arizona, New Palmdale along the shores of an engorged Salton Sea and the “crown jewel” of the New American Century: Millennium City, built on the broken archipelago where Greater Los Angeles once stood, as a testament to the new postwar American optimism.

And then there’s Bakersfield.

The entire population of Bakersfield, California was killed off in WWIII. Pretty common story for 1980’s SoCal, to be sure. The problem was they didn’t stay dead. They all came back from the dead as zombies in the weeks following the Fall of Bakersfield. Now, by the 1980’s, people rising from the dead wasn’t all that unusual, and when the US government took back control of Southern California, sanctioned government necromancers were tasked with breaking the spell cast on Bakersfield, to lay its citizens to rest - a common enough practice by this point. One small problem. It wasn’t necromancy that raised them from the dead. It wasn’t even a spell. This was someone’s metatype, and the necromancers therefore couldn’t reverse it. Fast-forward to 2020, and Bakersfield is still zombie-majority. Weirder still, there are...zombie pregnancies in Bakersfield. Yes, baby zombies, who grow into zombie children, and zombie teenagers, and zombie young adults, and zombie boomers, and zombie senior citizens, and they just get more and more decrepit as they rot, very slowly as they age, apparently never dying. The only way to “die” is to be incinerated and have your ashes pumped into the wind - evidence shows you’re still technically alive in this state, but your particles become too scattered to remain coherently conscious. The metahumans who died in Bakersfield during the war have all seemingly lost their powers upon death, and the zombies appear to be neither baseline nor metahuman.

Oh, and the residents of Bakersfield are in fact hungry for brains. They’re totally civilized about it, however. Cow brains work fine, deer and pig, too. They only eat every couple of days or so, so it’s not too much of a hassle. They also eat rotting food and general carrion, though brains they seem to need to eat relatively fresh or they get kinda unreasonable.

Bakersfield is just like any American town. Actually, it’s kinda still in ruins, but they’ve patched up the holes and taken ownership of the damage by incorporating it into the city’s own new architectural style. Even new buildings are built to superficially resemble ruins. There’s classy all-American diners where you can get fried brains, broiled brains, brain sandwiches, brainburgers, brain burritos and more. Most of it is safe for ordinary humans to eat. Mostly. Most of the zombies are irreligious, though there's a very prominent Christian sect in the town which believes their resurrection is a sign that they'll be the ones to enter the Kingdom of God. They're friendly enough, just don't talk politics with them. Crime is pretty low, but when it does happen, it’s uber gruesome; can’t kill anyone, since the zombies of Bakersfield appear to be immortal, but getting dismembered and crushed still ruins your life, whether you die from it or not. Paladin Force (SoCal’s resident superhero association, based out of Millennium City) technically has a branch in Bakersfield, but it’s kinda just The Specter (no “real” metatype, but really smart and tough, with gadgets and a sick-ass cape) doing all the superhero crap here. I should stress that most of the zombies are very polite, if kinda grumbly, so all he really has to do is break up occasional bar fights and ask homeless people to stop bothering locals, but occasionally a villain saunters on in thinking he or she can push around the dead, only to get a rude awakening.

Paladin Force has twice opened and shut down investigations into the source of the Bakersfield Zombies - currently speculated to be an individual sustaining an area-of-effect metatype, somewhere in Bakersfield. The topic is controversial, however, since most of the residents have kinda just moved on. There was a long time in the 90’s when a bunch of them really just wanted to die and were supportive of the investigation. Their Social Security claims were denied, family members cut them off, oh, and they were turning into rotting ghouls hungry for brains. And many did in fact have themselves incinerated, infatuated by the idea of shedding their rotting husks and “becoming the wind” with near- and actual religious fervor. Late-90’s zombie death-cults in Bakersfield rose and fell almost weekly as all of their members reduced themselves to ashes, or waited their turn to rent an incinerator to do so. But after a while, as the investigation dragged on inconclusively through the 2000’s, the zombies acclimated, accepted their new lives (or rather, undeaths), and petitioned for the investigation to close for good in 2013.

Today, Bakersfield is beginning to bounce back. The initial hurdle of all the rotting flesh turning away outside investment is starting to wear off, because it turns out, when you don’t have to pay for things like AC or health insurance or non-spoiled food that nobody else would eat, you rack up lots of money very quickly, and this drew outside business into the previously-isolated city, starting around 2007. There’s still some tension between the living and the dead in Bakersfield, mostly the living complaining that the dead aren’t more considerate (re: the smell of cooking brains), which probably discourages the town from fully reinvigorating. But they do make a killing every Halloween from hosting city-wide celebrations. Folks from Millennium City flock right in every October 31st. This is also when all manner of debauchery and mischief usually unfolds, due to the influx of out-of-towers wearing disguises and getting drunk, so Paladin Force usually throws their lower-string heroes and sidekicks over to Bakersfield for security detail during the festivities, under Specter's oversight.