Starfire blasted another zombie with her optic blasts and let the shield she had created between it and the officer fade. She briefly cursed her armor, the constricting visor preventing her from wiping the sweat from her brow. Creating the shields through the use of Jon's amulet was much more taxing than the standard use of her powers, but it had already saved three officers over the past hour.
As she had predicted, the attempts to constrict the cordon had been an exercise in frustration. The quarantine zone had simply grown too large to be easily managed, and with the bulk of the police force diverted to the warehouse district there were too few bodies to coordinate effectively.
The radio in her hand was constantly squawking with notifications of cordon breeches from the local officers, status updates from dispatch, and the half-screamed half-growled directions of the commissioner. It was the chaos of war, a familiar setting that she had become unused to given the different manner in which her team waged their battles.
Movement to her left drew her attention. The zombies had begun to perfect the art of climbing atop one another to scale the barricades. She launched a flurry of starbolts in that direction, aimed at the base of the pile. They were low-strength, their primary purpose being to impart enough concussive force to destabilize the pyramid. Accordingly, the pile tumbled.
They were barely keeping pace. For every breach she prevented, three more made it through. The officers were usually able to subdue the zombies that made it through, but sometimes they could not and the enemy received another soldier. Increasingly, the chatter over the radio were concerning lowering levels of ammunition. Something needed to change, and soon.
As though an answer from X'hal herself, the radio went briefly silent before a transmission came through from dispatch.
"All units be advised, STAR Labs has reported no available cure. Lethal force against 419s is authorized for all units. Repeat, lethal force against 419s is authorized for all units."
The battlefield was incongruously silent for a moment before the raw voice of the commissioner was heard shouting across the quarantine zone. "You heard them, you goddamned greenhorns! Light these fuckers up!"
A single concussive blast shook the air with the beginnings of the officer's final assault, freak chance causing every armed man and woman on the ground to fire their first true retaliatory strike in perfect synchronicity.
Zombies began to fall and remain down as bullets struck home. Even with the authorization of lethal force the battle was tenuous. Trained to shoot center mass, the officers were finding it difficult to strike the moving and relatively small target of the subjects heads. The only way to reliably strike their targets was to shoot from close range, a dangerous tactic that occasionally proved disastrous. Coupled with the dwindling ammo reserves, it was becoming apparent that victory was far from assured.
Starfire, meanwhile, was not floating idly. After confirmation from dispatch, she dropped the radio after a brief transmission to the commissioner and became an avenging angel of death.
Starbolts poured forth from the Tamaranean with machine-gun rapidity. The air took on an emerald hue due to the sheer volume of energy loosed from the raging alien, the sun comparatively dimming in brilliance against the horrific swarm of cohesive fury. A single starbolt was enough to dispatch a group of zombies, ferocious heat charring the ambulating corpses into True Death. Some escaped this initial assault, and the officers were treated to the experience of shooting zombies that had taken on the aspect of burn victims. Her eyes loosed a constant beam of beryl, sweeping across the battle and turning zombies, earth, and barricade alike into charred or molten slag.
An assault of this magnitude could not be sustained for long, however. Starfire felt, for the first time since childhood, the sensation of simply not having enough energy to manifest a starbolt. Powered as they were by converted solar energy, she had simply never depleted her reserves before.
Sparing a brief moment of regret for dropping her radio, Starfire dove towards the ground and landed amongst the enemy. She may not be able to use her preferred weapons of starbolts and optic blasts, but she was far from helpless. In addition to her military training, Robin insisted that all the Titans have at least a passing familiarity with hand to hand combat. Her enhanced strength would still allow her to dispatch the V'lha ruthanorks, albeit in a more personal fashion.
Punches and kicks interspersed with knees, elbows, and the occasional head butt became her means of ushering these souls to their final rest. She was thankful now for the foresight of donning her armor, as it deflected not only the teeth of those zombies which penetrated her defenses, but also the bullets that rocketed around the no-man's land.
Her mind slipped fully into her warrior mentality, all traces of the cheerful, bubbly teenager absent from her affect. There was killing to be done, and her blood sang harmony to the melody of her chanted Tamaranean war-songs. Enemies were alternately crushed with the inhuman force of her strikes or thrown, ragdolling, farther afield.
Somewhere along the line she had acquired a length of aluminum pipe, likely from some playground equipment given its cheery yellow paint job. She ripped the end off into a jagged point as she simultaneously thrust kicked a zombie into two of her fellows. Armed with this improvised spear, she began to meticulously carve her way around the edge of the quarantine zone, her strength making up for any deficiencies in the edge of her weapon. A bullet deflected off her visor, whipping her head towards the school building in the center of the battlefield with great protest from her neck. She turned back towards the offending gunman and screamed for him to be more careful, unwittingly in a pidgin of english, japanese, and her native tongue.
Her attention was averted for only a moment, but it was enough. Unseen, a group of child zombies that had been worming their way through the barricade leaped towards this closer prey. Unbalanced from the recent bullet strike, the half-dozen zombies managed to take Starfire off her feet, biting and clawing at her limbs with mindless ferocity. Thrashing in near-mindless terror and fury, she managed to dislodge two of her assailants. The remaining four had somehow managed to flip her onto her back, the exposed flesh of her face drawing ravenous glances. Instinctively, Starfire attempted to use her optic blasts, remembering a moment later that they were currently unavailable to her.
Salvation came in the form of a twelve-gauge roar, a smooth staccato of thunder, cli-click, thunder, cli-click, thunder, cli-click, thunder, cli-click. The four zombies' heads disintegrated before her eyes, accompanied by a blinding pain in her face and the dull percussion of her armor intercepting ballistics. She lay there, agonized, unable to bring herself to her feet and twitching slightly as her limbs spasmed in response to her brain's confused signals
"STARFIRE!" screamed a somewhat familiar voice. Her field of vision was suddenly filled with the worried face of the commissioner, lit cigar still in his mouth. The man assessed her quickly, then lifted her in a fireman's carry and pushed for the dubious safety of his patrol car. Along the way his sidearm barked twice and removed two zombies from their path, slide remaining racked back as the last of its ammo was spent. He dropped it without a thought, muscling the stricken Titan into the passenger seat of his patrol car.
Her head lolled drunkenly, thoughts coming slowly and with an incoherence she was unused to. The commissioner ("Gordon," she thought dazedly. "It's not right but it sounds right...") crouched beside her outside of the car, taking her chin in hand and lifting her head. He pulled a flashlight from his belt and shone the light into her eyes, cursing to himself. She noted absently that his hand came away from her chin stained with the slightly-too-pink blood that confirmed her as an alien on this world. It was with this observation that she slowly realized that she was injured.
The commissioner meanwhile had belted her in and moved himself to the driver's seat. With the doors closed the sounds of battle diminished a bit, leaving the ringing in their ears to gain new prominence. The radio was in his hand, but Starfire was having trouble understanding the words that were being said. Maybe she had somehow lost her understanding of the english language. She hoped not. She would have to kiss someone, and she only wanted to kiss Robin.
"Titan down! Do we have any EMT available at PS118...? YES I SAID TITAN DOWN, ASNWER THE DAMN QUESTION!" A pause. "Shit! Inform Jump City General that I am en route with patient, multiple gunshot wounds to face. It's the alien, Starfire. I'm coming in lights and siren, make sure someone's ready to treat her." Another pause. "HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IF THEY CAN TREAT HER, SHIT-FOR-BRAINS?!" In a fit of fury he rolled the window down and threw the radio into the chaos outside.
The commissioner flipped a few switches on the dashboard and the world was doused in ruby and sapphire radiance, accompanied by the wailing scream of a siren. "Hang on, darlin', I'm gonna get you help," he said as he whipped the car around and shot towards the shattered remains of JCGH.