After sacking Baltimore, General Jim Schwartz led his troops on an exhausting overland trek to the West Coast, marauding through the heartland, burning and pillaging as they marched, like a Napoleonic army on PCP. They would have returned to Detroit but the General received a phone call from the Mayor informing him that agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal had gathered outside of Castle Ford, awaiting the Lion army return, where they would have arrested several of the General’s best men for crimes against humanity, especially Private Fairley for his baby eating rampage. The General asked the Mayor what they should do and the Mayor responded “Fuck if I know, Jim. Go fuck up Oakland. Those motherfuckers hid a goddamn vampire named Al for over a hundred years. ‘Bout time they get what was comin’ to them. Oh, and thanks for the pants, Jim. You didn’t have to mail them first class, but fuck am I glad to have ‘em. They a little tight in the dick region, Jimmy, but hell, good luck findin’ me a pair of pants that ain’t.” And then he laughed and hung up the phone and so the General gathered his men and set off for Oakland.
It would be a hard fight. The General was under no delusions there. The Kingdom of Oakland was like a scene out of Mad Max. Its people were said by some to all be vicious hooligans and reprobates, animals really, who feasted upon the corpses of their own dead and were rumored to drink the blood of their own children and howl at the moon, drunk on their own degeneracy, monsters devoid of morality, swept up in their own profane perversion of life. Others said they were just typical Californians.
But the General surveyed his army and knew that if any group of scum were capable of outdoing those vile Oaklanders when it came to the dark arts it was his group of warriors. But tragedy struck somewhere around Iowa when agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal snuck into the camp, put a black bag over Lieutenant Delmas’ head and dragged him away like an animal, accusing him of being a voodoo priest and of violating no less than 168 different international health codes for what he did with those chickens and goats. Incensed, the men wanted to go after Delmas, rescue him and butcher the War Crimes Tribunal but the General explained that that probably wouldn’t help their cause unless, of course, the War Crimes Tribunal were fans of irony. This was lost on most of the men and a few of them took off after Delmas anyway. This left the Lion army shorthanded and the men were never seen again. It is rumored that they are currently being held in a detention camp somewhere in the Alps, but until The Great Willie Young returns either with more information, the rescued men themselves or the bloody pelts of their captors, no more can be said at this time.
And so after that unfortunate bout of attrition, the men kept up their brutal march. Private Backus was tricked in Nebraska by a cruel farmer into making love to his prize sow and the resulting paternity suit bogged the army down for another several days. While they were stuck in that depressing land, Lord Suh went AWOL. A price was put on his head but Corporal Gun eventually found him in a Lincoln whorehouse, and was stunned to find that Lord Suh was attending to no less than 78 bastards he had spawned during his training days in the Nebraska wasteland. Corporal Gun was a kind man beneath his gruff surface and rather than pistol whipping Lord Suh, as was the customary punishment for desertion, he merely gave each of the bastards ten dollars each out of the army’s petty cash and then escorted Lord Suh back to camp in leg irons. Lord Suh then broke his chains, flipped a Chevrolet and punched a farmer’s wife before Corporal Gun soothed the rogue Lord with promises of both glory and blood in the coming Oakland campaign.
Once that was all sorted out, the army crossed the Rocky Mountains, losing several more men to an unfortunate bout with cannibalism. When informed of their horrible act, the General was dumbfounded, saying only “But it’s the middle of summer, no one was trapped . . .” The offending men were executed and flung from the top of Pike’s Peak. This understandably shook the army’s morale, but still they soldiered on, stopping in Denver to run whores and sack that mountain hamlet. Sergeant Tulloch even entertained the rest of the men by throwing a saddle on a conquered John Elway and riding him up and down the city’s main street while the Denver citizens watched from their cages, weeping and begging Tulloch to spare Elway’s life. But then Elway threw a shoe, was hobbled, and Tulloch had no choice but to slit the poor beast’s throat in front of his own children.
Afterward, the team made a concerted effort to keep it together until they reached Oakland. Unfortunately, several of the men were set upon by Mormon zealots in the Utah desert and were converted to the faith. They simply could not resist the promise of countless servile wives and the General had no choice but to watch with disgust as they settled down amongst the natives. After that, the army had to pass through Las Vegas. Naturally, ¾ of the men were lost either to social disease or to gambling debts, and by the time the Lion army stumbled out of the desert and into California, they had been badly reduced and the remaining men were both exhausted and disillusioned.
To make matters worse, at the border the army was set upon by agents of the War Crimes Tribunal, who had finally caught up with the army thanks to its repeated forays into degeneracy. A sort of running battle was fought between the army and the Tribunal all the way to the Oakland borders. There, amidst heavy fighting, several of the Lion army’s most promising officers were abducted by the Tribunal, including Lord Suh, Field Marshall Snake Stafford and half of what remained of the Lion army’s defensive perimeter.
And so it was with that as the backdrop that a ragtag group of survivors, bloodied, exhausted and half naked, marched on the walls of Oakland. The people of Oakland met the charge by flinging their own feces and the heads of their own pets at the army. And still the men fought on. By now The Great Willie Young had joined the army once again after spending time in China dealing with family business. And with him leading the charge, the men broke through the Oakland walls and began to savage the people. Private Fairley, who had somehow avoided the War Crimes Tribunal, was last seen riding the same police horse he had stolen in Baltimore – and my God, that horse had become something more akin to some sort of bear from hell by the time they reached Oakland, and it was even said that Private Fairley fed the animal a diet consisting of baby left-overs, various prisoners from the army’s previous campaigns, steroids and the prostitutes the army had broken, oh and apples because horses love apples – marauding through the streets, skewering children and eating them raw while their mothers wept horrified tears and cried out in terror. The General has reportedly been mulling turning Private Fairley over to the War Crimes Tribunal himself because, goddamn man, enough is enough, but until they find the degenerate, there is little he can do. Besides, Private Fairley could implicate the General in the grisly demise of John Harbaugh and so I’m afraid that they’re all in it together, for better or worse.
And so Oakland began to burn, the same way that Baltimore had burned. But in a cruel and shocking twist, it seemed that the people of Oakland had anticipated what was to come and had imported a secret weapon, a crackhead from Ohio named Pryor, a terrible beast who had been raised in the rust covered hellfires of that savage land. That animal Pryor flummoxed the Lion army by slaughtering his own people and stacking their corpses in an impenetrable wall in the heart of the city. And from atop this corpse wall, Pryor rained down his own radioactive feces on the Lion army, burning the men like acid. The men wailed in pain and were forced to pull back while that ogre Pryor laughed and ordered more Oakland bodies stacked around the wall’s base. The Oakland people wept with fear and recognized their terrible mistake – putting the city in the hands of an Ohio barbarian was worse than the worst fate that the Lion army could ever deal to them – and they tried to fight back by pulling the stake from the heart of the vampire Al Davis.
This bout of foolishness only worsened their plight as Vampire Al then began devouring the Oakland people who, savage as they were, were in way over their heads here. This then pulled The Great Willie Young away from the terrible battle, as he was forced to engage Vampire Al in single combat. With the Great One busy, the Lion army’s depleted reserves were slaughtered by Pryor’s vile counter-offensive. Private Wendling was last seen, flesh burning from his body, trying valiantly to climb the corpse wall before Pryor unleashed a terrible weapon – a cluster bomb which when detonated released the stench of a million poop filled Ohio coolers. The smell was overwhelming and powerful, a piece of dirty chemical warfare that would horrify even Saddam Hussein. Both the Lion army’s reserves and the people of Oakland withered under the stink bomb, and as their flesh melted and their eyeballs burst, their brains cooked and their hearts seized, Pryor stood like a fell beast atop the corpse wall and laughed the laugh of the truly corrupt of spirit.
Meanwhile, The Great Willie Young fought valiantly against Vampire Al Davis, slaying the beast over and over and over again. And yet, whenever the monster fell, he would arise again and The Great Willie Young was forced to battle him all over again. At one point, The Great One vomited when the monster’s rotting flesh peeled off of its body, revealing cankerous sores. And yet he battled on for that is what heroes do and eventually he slay the terrible Vampire Al Davis, set the corpse of the beast on fire and then, in one last heroic act, gathered up the remains and dove deep into the Pacific Ocean, to deliver Vampire Al to the bottom of the Marianas Trench because he didn’t know what else to do and that is how they dealt with the evil robots at the end of Transformers.
But without The Great Willie Young, the remains of the Lion army didn’t have a chance. They fought valiantly that day and eventually Oakland and the surrounding Bay Area was left in ruins. It is even said that the General stepped away from the battle and found Jim Harbaugh’s house and shit in his mailbox. He knew that the battle was lost and figured, hey, why not?
With the General busy defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, Corporal Gun was left to organize the men into a fighting retreat. The idea of surrender sickened him, especially to the likes of that Ohioan mercenary beast Pryor, but the Corporal loved his men and he couldn’t stand to hear their dying wails as they tried to climb the corpse wall only to be inundated with Pryor’s acidic hell-juices. And so Corporal Gun ordered his men to fall back and with a grim smile, he stripped himself naked and charged the corpse wall himself. He climbed and he climbed, gritting his teeth both against the stench and the damage wrought by Pryor’s acid-piss. Miraculously he reached the top and there, it is said, was fought a mighty battle between good and evil. The young Ohioan troll was said to know fear in that moment as he was beat about the head by the sword-hilt of the grizzled old Corporal. They fought and they fought and they fought atop that terrible corpse wall as the sun sank and then rose again, although you wouldn’t be able to tell for the skies had been darkened by the smokefire and the chaos of war. Eventually, the sky began to clear and the men pointed and cheered as The Great Willie Young appeared, blazing like a beacon fire, a bolt of heavenly lightning which vaporized all the hell-soot unleashed by Pryor. Some even say that in that moment it was revealed that The Great Willie Young and the sun were one and the same, and that every time you enjoy a sunny day, you are merely enjoying the reflected joy of The Great Willie Young, who shines so that we may all might live, but that is still just a rumor. Then again, the movement already has priests and a growing following and the worship of both the sun and The Great Willie Young has grown by 178% since I started writing this paragraph, so who knows? By the time I am finished it just might be the official state religion, much like it was in Ancient Egypt.
Anyway, religious discussion aside, when The Great Willie Young appeared and the sky cleared and he shown upon the world again, it is said that Pryor burrowed beneath the corpse wall, insulating him from the light which burned his Ohioan flesh, and that he now lives, plotting his revenge from a small pocket in that very same wall, surrounded by the rotting flesh of thousands of dead Oaklanders. Someday, the beast will have his reckoning, and someday The Great Willie Young will stand above him and pronounce his sentence as he dispenses his immortal justice but that day will have to wait, for when the General returned from defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, he wept at the state of his ragged army and issued an immediate pullback to Tijuana, where it is said the Lion army rests and whores and waits and whores and prepares and whores and plans its mighty comeback. For there is much to be done – revenge against Pryor, a brutal battle with the War Crimes Tribunal (by the way, it is rumored that this mysterious Tribunal is none other than the creation of the Lion army’s sworn enemy, Sheriff Goodell, and that it is headed by none other than the Lizard Man Pereira, which makes his escape from the Battle of Baltimore all that more tragic.) and the upcoming campaign against the army of Buffalo, a meager force that nonetheless is said to be preparing to march on Detroit as we speak. In fact, it is said that Mayor Bing has gone so far as to trade his new pair of pants in so he could afford to buy more minutes for his cell just so he could call the General and warn him of the new threat. The Tragedy of the Mayor’s Pants knows no end it would seem.
And so the battle of Oakland ended in misery and heartache for all involved. All of Northern California lies in ruins and half of the Lion army is either in custody or missing in action. But the Lion army shall return and when it does, led by The Great Willie Young, the rest of the football world will pay for the actions of that degenerate Pryor, the War Crimes Tribunal and those tantalizing Mormons who led so many of our boys astray in the Utah desert, and when they do I shall be here, a humble chronicler of Truth, and I hope you will gather before me to hear more Tales of the great Lion Army and of The Great Willie Young. Good night and Vaya Con Dios.
