61. CHANDLER INVESTIGATIONS

Barnaby Chandler was a good cop, a loving husband, and a doting father.  That all changed when he and his wife Elizabeth were driving to see their children graduate from the Police academy.  Barnaby was nearing retirement and was proud to see that his offspring would carry on the family traditions.  Then the explosion went off.  Elizabeth was killed and Barnaby’s body was so damaged it had to be replaced with a full conversion package.  The family wasn’t wealthy, but his son and daughter used their mothers insurance money to purchase a Gemini package for Barnaby, paid in full, rather than let the police equip him with their standard package and indebt  him for life.  The only lead police had disappeared into the Combat Zone, and the brass would not give him the backup or resources to go in after him.  Chandler went in anyway, he found the perp, and dragged him out of the Zone.  Then Chandler turned in his badge.

His children followed after him, and together they founded Chandler Investigations, a private detective agency in the Combat Zone.  They specialize in finding and retrieving people, be they criminal or otherwise, from the Zone.  Barnaby’s children, Laurel and Marlow, are twins.  Both have extensive police training their father keeps them up to date on, even having them train with members of the Walking Dead to stay sharp.  Laurel had originally hoped to get into Net-Sec, and is a fairly skilled Netrunner.  Marlow is an expert marksman who was being groomed to be a police sharpshooter.  Barnaby, with his full conversion body, tends to rush headlong into the enemy, often unnecessarily, and often ends up taking multiple gunshot wounds.  The entire family still has their citizenship, which allows them to travel freely to and from the Zone, and have the proper permits for most of the hardware they use.

Chandler Investigations sits in the corner office just above a small liquor store facing the wall.  Laurel and Marlow have apartments in the city, as does Barnabas, but he spends nearly every night at the office.

Written By Deric Bernier, image by Hard Boiled, Hypnophobia

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