The Regulators - 02

Jaxon

After
El Paso
Under Attack
was published, I was happily
sitting on top of the world and, to be honest, I truly felt I deserved it. I
alone had managed to piece together a series of interviews that told the
complete, true story of how the Regulators were formed. I had covered all the
events that led up to the famous fifteen minutes of footage. I even had managed
to cover the aftermath which led to the kidnapping of the General’s wife and
the battle between the past and present Guardians.

I was pretty happy
with myself.

I had accomplished
something that no one else had been able to do, and when it was all over, I
went on my merry little way. The interviews, the talk shows and the meet and
greets…I loved every bit of it. It was nice to be famous. It was nice to be
thought of as the reporter that gets the job done.

But did I get the job
done? I certainly thought I had found out everything there was to know about
those terrible dark days.

It turned out, I was
wrong.

It began with an
email, one single email with a short, little command. It said to dig deeper. It
told me to ask about the Battle of the Sun Bowl. I didn’t know who the sender
of the email was, and I didn’t have much interest in pursuing events that had
been covered by other reporters like the Battle of the Sun Bowl had.

I blew it off.

Three days later, the
mysterious writer of the email contacted me again. He sent me a video of a
grown man having a nightmare. It was a scary thing to watch him thrashing about
in his bed, but it was the one word he shouted out after he had woken up
screaming that really captured my attention.

One word.

It took months to
arrange the interview; the General is a busy man. But in a small compound, near
but separate from Fort Bliss Army Base in El Paso, Texas, I once again found
myself waiting for him.

I didn’t know if he
had read my book, so I wasn’t sure if he would be altogether happy to see me. I
never embellished the story. I had that going for me, but not all of the story
was exactly flattering. The General has his detractors.

So, as I sat there
patiently waiting to meet with the General, I was just as nervous as the first
time I had ever spoken with him.

He finally walked into
the room as if he were without a care in the world. Before me was a man totally
at ease with his surroundings. Nothing seemed to bother him. I couldn’t help
but stare. His shoulders were still immense, and I could see the muscles of his
large arms moving underneath the flannel of his shirt. He’s not extremely tall,
but he’s certainly not short. His hair was a sort of light brown. He had it cut
just as short as before, almost as if it would be a nuisance any other way.

I didn’t know exactly
what it was, but the man was imposing. At least until he cracked a smile that
shattered his normal scowl and pulled up a seat across from me.

This was a surprise; I would have thought you’d be sick of
me after hearing me ramble for so long during all those interviews.

“
On the contrary, I
was amazed by all the things I lear
ned.”

Amazed or horrified?

“
Both actually, it’s
amazing to hear what happened back then. It’s also rather horrible to hear how
bad things were
.”

And yet you’re back for more.

“
I am. I’m not sure
that the story is finished
.”

Hmm, perhaps you need me to elaborate on something?

“
I was hoping that you
could walk me through the ‘cleansing’ of El Paso
.”

The military already did a pretty good job of keeping the
media informed of those events. Why don’t you just go through some old
newspapers?

“
The media does indeed
have a great supply of information about the military’s involvement of those
events, but I would be much more interested in hearing about what happened with
your team
.”

Care to tell me why?

“
Care to take a guess
?”

I was taking a risk by
being coy. The General wasn’t a man to play games with. Just ask those three
intoxicated men that tried to give him a hard time at a restaurant in New
Mexico. Their hospital bills were staggering.

However, I was hoping
that by keeping things fun and light-hearted instead of confrontational he
might be at least slightly amused and tell me what I was there to find out.

I’ve been wrong
before.

When he narrowed his
eyes and sized me up, I almost bolted out of the room. His green eyes were
piercing. They had seen things that would cause me to have nightmares for the
rest of my life.

There was a clock on
the wall. In the silence I could hear the second’s ticking off. I was just
about to apologize when he finally spoke
.

Where do you wanna start?

“
Take it from the
beginning
.”

The beginning is kinda boring. It would take us back to five
days of meetings as Hardin, my team and a bunch of nerds tossed around different
ideas about how to take El Paso back from the zombies.

“
In the end, you made
different teams that basically went from house to house saving and evacuating
people. Is that correct
?”

Sort of. Extracting the survivors was our first goal, but we
didn’t go to every single house, just the ones that had the survivors in them.

“
Did you use EPUA to
track down where the survivors were
?”

Yeah, that website was very beneficial in helping us find
survivors. It’s just that not all the survivors were hooked up to it. You would
be surprised at the amount of survivors that never even had an internet
connection, but Hardin was pretty damn good at finding them anyway. There has
been a lot of talk about whether that was the right way to handle things or
not, but from our end…it was the only way.

“
Why is that
?”

I guess we just wanted to get those people out of there. It
wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do, but it needed to be done. Our thinking was
that once the survivors were all removed from the city, we could then go in and
destroy all the undead with larger teams.

At no point did we ever want to go in and just start
dropping bombs. If we did that before we removed the survivors, we would end up
killing innocent people. If we dropped bombs after they were removed, there wouldn’t
be a city left to return to.

We also considered using large armored vehicles and driving
around neighborhoods with a loudspeaker. The thought was to call out the
survivors, load them up and drive outta dodge.

“
That would probably
attract a lot of unwanted attention
.”

Exactly. No matter how many guns we had firing; the masses
of the dead would eventually overrun us. It would have just been a matter of
time.

We tossed around a ton of ideas, but in the end…the only
viable option was to go in quietly with small teams. That way, we could
hopefully avoid large scale detection and try and save some lives.

“
All while putting
down any zombies you encountered
?”

As long as we could do so without attracting undo attention.
We also had the benefit of air support if the shit hit the fan. That was
definitely an added plus. A .50 cal machine gun ripping and roaring from a low
flying chopper can do massive amounts of damage to large groups of zombies.

“
Couldn’t you have
just sent helicopters to patrol the city and shoot down all the large groups of
undead
?”

We did. We had all the large groups that could be seen from
the air decimated before we ever motored in. It worked great for the gigantic
hordes. The only problem was that not all the zombies were walking around in big
bunches. Many of them had wandered into stores, buildings and homes. A street
might seem deserted, but one loud noise and a zombie scream later and you would
have a pretty decent mob running you down.

Another interesting tidbit about the choppers is that the
zombies learned that a flying helicopter was dangerous to them, but a landing
helicopter was a meal ticket. Therefore, once we gathered the survivors, we
couldn’t just call in a chopper and air lift them away. We would have gotten
mobbed the minute the chopper started lowering from the air. To deal with that
problem, Hardin and his people had to find relatively safe places that we could
defend and then escape after the survivors were lifted away.

“
How many teams went
in
?”

There were four teams including the Regulators, one team for
each major section of El Paso: the Northeast, the Eastside, the Westside and
Downtown. These teams came from all over. We had Rangers, Green Berets, Seals
and even some SWAT members all on the teams together. All of them were
volunteers. The amount of people on each team was different, but started at
around five; sometimes there were more if there was a particularly hostile area
they needed to clear. Sometimes there was less depending on what was needed.
People who had never dealt with this before often needed a break after seeing
so much nasty.

“
Did the Regulators
ever take a break
?”

Not very often and certainly not when we were still on the
Westside, but towards the end sometimes one of the guys would take a weekend
off to go visit his family. That kind of thing was entirely acceptable. Hell,
it would have been acceptable to me if they just needed a break, but my boys
are troopers. For the most part, they stuck with it. Georgie was even going
through a divorce.

“
Georgie divorced his
wife while the Regulators were cleaning out El Paso. How did that affect his
job
?”

It didn’t. Lucy wanted the divorce the second she heard he
was going back in. It wasn’t because she was worried about him; it was because
she was selfish. She didn’t want to spend that much time alone. He knew it was
coming. He had already recognized that she changed somehow; maybe it was
because of all that happened…I dunno. The funny thing was that the judge
couldn’t even make him show up for court. Our job takes precedence over any of
that stuff.

I actually knew many
of the details of Georgie’s divorce, at least as reported by the magazines.
Aside from Jaxon’s wife, most of the women that the Regulators date didn’t last
very long. As a result, it would get difficult to keep track of who has a
girlfriend and who didn’t. The gossip magazines, however, seemed very
interested in those statistics. The divorce stuck with me because, for a while
there, it felt like Lucy was one of the most hated women in America
.

“
The reporters tried
very hard to dig up information on what part you played during all the
extractions, but the military wasn’t very forth coming for the first few weeks
or so, at least until the Battle of the Sun Bowl. Is it safe to say that you
were in the trenches with the other Regulators, and there were no problems
?”

I wouldn’t say that there were no problems. We were in
hostile territory fighting to save lives. There were problems every day, but
you could definitely say that I was in the trenches.

“
I was actually
wondering if you had any problems within your team
.”

Yeah, I know what you’re getting at; we lost a teammate. The
military released that information in a press conference so it’s not exactly a
secret. I was surprised you didn’t mention it in your book or ask me about it
in our last set of interviews. I think what you’re really wondering is how we
lost him and why the military refused to release any information about the
Regulators during the first few weeks.

“
I didn’t cover the
loss of your teammate because it wasn’t part of the story I was covering. I was
covering your origins. I felt that there was already enough information out
there about your return trip, but if my sources are accurate and no one is
pulling my leg, there’s a whole new story that the media never knew
about…and…well, I’m not sure if it’s an incredible story or a terrifying one
.”

Go for incredible, it will help you sleep at night.