The Regulators - 02 (15 page)

She turned and looked right at me.

How she managed to find me again, I had no idea. I was
beginning to really dislike the woman. So I shot her. The crack of the rifle in
the quiet evening was loud as hell, but my aim was true, kind of. The bullet
punched a nasty hole in the right side of her chest and spun her around so that
her back was facing me as she dropped to her knees. The exit wound pretty much
took out her entire shoulder blade.

I heard the familiar zombie screams echoing out from a few
streets over in response to the gunshot. I would have company very shortly. Too
bad I wasn’t going to be here for them. I had a smile on my face as I stared at
the crumpled form of the woman-thing that had been stupid enough to try and
hunt me. I can’t even begin to tell you how satisfied it made me feel when I
shot her, as morbid as that sounds. In my defense however, let me remind you
that she led my entire team into a zombie filled nightmare trap. She blocked
off the roads and dinged up a beautiful car and last, but certainly not least,
she had been hunting me. She probably wanted to eat me. I didn’t know that for
a fact, but she certainly wasn’t human.

She stood back up.

I don’t know how she did it. The damage should have been
fatal enough for three people, but she stood back up. I shot her again. This
time my aim was a bit better, and I nailed her right in the spine. I knew the
wound had severed her spinal cord at the very least. She just rag-dolled onto
the rooftop. I watched as long as I dared, but there was no further movement,
and I could hear the sounds of pounding feet from farther up the street.

I left the rifle on the roof and jumped down to the side of
the house where the dirt bike was waiting for me with Merrick sitting grumpily
in the basket. I grabbed the handlebars and ran the bike to the street.

The zombies were a mere house length away from us, and there
were a whole bunch of them. I never actually stopped to count just how many; I
was too busy running down the street while they got closer and closer to
catching me. The zombies must have been just a few feet away when I jumped on
the bike and popped the clutch. None of them even managed to tag me. I was too
fast on the bike, and I didn’t need to spin around. It was a straight shot down
the hill.

I heard a chilling scream just as I rounded the turn and
sped off down Westwind. It wasn’t a zombie scream. It was something different,
and, if you can believe it, the scream sounded somewhat angrier.

Whatever, I wasn’t sticking around. Things had gotten way
too hot for me on Tarascas. I flew down Westwind and slid around the first turn
I came to. I don’t remember the street name, but it wasn’t really important. I
grew up around that area; I didn’t need to know what street I was on. I would
find Oveja just by heading in the right direction.

“
You were still going
back to where you left your team. Even though you believed that you walked
straight into a trap the last time you visited that area. Did you believe that
the team would still be there
?”

I doubted they would still be there. It’s not good to stay
in one place very long when you are visiting a zombie occupied city, but I was
hoping that they’d left me some sort of message as to where I could find them.

Imagine my surprise when I rounded the last turn with my
craptastic bike and found my super Jeep waiting for me just as pretty as you
please. I can’t even begin to tell you how relieved I was. The Jeeps we were
using would plow through just about any road block my shaggy haired, drooler
friend could come up with.

“
Speaking of her, did
you believe that you had killed her
?”

I wasn’t sure if I had killed her or not. That scream I
heard didn’t sound zombie like at all. However, if the scream did indeed come
from her, I was pretty sure that I gave her enough damage to keep her off my
ass.

At least, that’s what I was hoping.

Whatever the case, I was certain that once I reached the
Jeep, I’d be safe enough from anything until I could reunite with my team. So,
I dropped the craptastic bike right in the middle of the road, set Merrick down
in the back seat of the Jeep, and hopped behind the wheel.

The keys were waiting for me in the ignition. There wasn’t a
note telling me how to locate them, but the vehicle did have a computer with a
direct link to Hardin. It took a moment to figure it out, but I finally got
through to him.

“Jesus! Jaxon, is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I answered as I turned the key in the
ignition and revved up the engine.

“We’ve been worried sick about you,” Hardin said. “Where the
hell have you been?”

“It’s a story to tell,” I said. “But right now I need to
find my team.”

“Yes,” Hardin said. “I think that would be a pretty good
idea. Miriam has found something that is worrying her. It has to do with a bite
mark on one of the survivors the team extracted while you were missing.”

“Yeah,” I answered loudly in an effort to cut him off before
he really started going. “Just tell me where they’re at.”

When he told me that they were at the Safe Zone, I started
laughing and clicked off the computer before he could start blabbing in my ear
again.

“
Why were you laughing
?”

Because I spent the last couple of evenings knee deep in
shit and those assholes were hiding out in the relative safety of the Safe
Zone. That was kinda funny to me. I had every intention of picking on all of
them mercilessly.

I was about to drive off when a thought occurred to me. So
instead I backed up a bit to one of the houses in which the zombies had poured
out of two nights ago. The windows had been boarded up. I hopped out of the
Jeep and walked up to the front door of the house. The door was reinforced, and
the wood along all the locks had burn marks where it had been cracked and
broken. Further investigation showed me small shards of some unknown plastic
lying on the floor.

“
The locks were blown,
weren’t they
?”

I’m no explosives expert, but that would be my guess, and I
bet that if I checked out those other houses, I’d find the same kind of damage
around the locks. I was now certain. We had walked into a trap.

I just didn’t understand the why of things.

When I was about halfway back to the Jeep, Merrick gave a
little warning growl. In response, I pulled my pistol out of its holster. I
didn’t see any sign of danger on the road, but just in case I moved as quickly
as possible to the Jeep.

As soon as I was in the vehicle, I hit the lights and saw
her standing in the middle of the road.

I was really beginning to hate this woman. I tore off with a
very serious attempt to run her down, but as soon as I was about to hit her,
she leapt onto the hood of the Jeep, stepped over to the roll bar and dropped
over the back.

She waved to me as I drove off.

Then she started to chase after me. I didn’t realize it at
first; I was watching her in the rear view mirror of course, but I took my eyes
off of her for one brief moment to avoid some shamblers in the road, and when I
looked back she was gone.

The zombies were beginning to swarm on the area. There
weren’t too many to make me nervous, but that was going to change rapidly.
Fortunately for me, I wasn’t going to be there, but it made me wonder if my new
friend left the scene to avoid the zombies.

Merrick began to whine as soon as I hit open road. I looked
back in my rearview mirror and there she was, running behind us. I freaked out
a bit and hit the gas, but even full throttle she was gaining rapidly.

As soon as she reached the back left corner of the Jeep, she
rammed it with her shoulder. Merrick and I spun around at least twice before I
managed to bring the vehicle under control once again.

I didn’t waste much time looking for her as we came to a
stop. There were zombies all around the vehicle. I’m not sure where they came from;
I had been too busy dividing my attention between the road and the evil bitch
chasing us down.

It sorta freaked me out.

I stopped the spinning, tried to grab a quick breath of air
and suddenly there were a bunch of decaying hands grabbing at me. Merrick began
to savage the first zombie that tried to crawl over her as I smacked away some
hands, put the Jeep in gear, and tore out of there like a bat out of hell.

There was a zombie clinging to the back of the Jeep. I
pointed him out to Merrick, and she gleefully hopped into the back seat and
tore chunks out of its hands until he fell away.

I looked into the rearview and saw her once again. She was
tearing right through the mass of zombies. She was like a force of nature.
Anytime one of them got in front of her, she just smacked them out of the way
like a little kid knocking down a stack of dominos.

It wasn’t long before she reached the rear corner of the
vehicle once again. This time, however, I was ready for her. When she rammed
the side of the vehicle, I counter turned just right and kept the Jeep from
spinning.

This must have pissed her off, but I’ve been driving Jeeps
since the day I turned sixteen. She wasn’t about to make me lose control again.
I responded to her attempt by hanging my left arm out of the side of the
vehicle and giving her the finger again.

She punched the side of the Jeep in frustration. I had a
laugh at her expense, but I also noticed the dent she just added to my armored
vehicle, and the damage to the rear left corner where she had been ramming me.

The evil bitch was strong. She was also running up farther
along the Jeep towards my open window. I waited till she reached out for me,
and I felt her hand scratch along my sleeve. The crushing grip of her fingers
was agony. I shot her point blank in the face.

“Bastard!” she cried as she tumbled away on the street.

I took the brief moment her fall had provided to contact
Hardin on the computer and tell him to connect me to Dudley.

As soon as he was on the line, she was back once again. I
was shooting at her even as I spoke with Dudley to make sure that my team was
still in the safe zone. I continued shooting at her as I told them all to wait
in the watchtowers and be ready to shoot anything that they saw chasing after
me.

Right when Dudley clicked off, she was at my side again, and
my pistol was empty. She grabbed at my arm, and I backhanded her in the face.
She reached farther into the Jeep and began to claw at me. I lost control of
the vehicle. I felt the bumps, bangs and the eventual crash as we collided with
something and came to a stop.

I saw none of this, though, because my attacker had shoved
me out of my seat and onto the floor of the vehicle. Most of her body was
inside the Jeep. She was scratching at my chest with her ragged nails. She was
banging my head against the metal flooring.

I reached towards my utility belt and felt for my knife. It
seemed to take forever before I actually felt it in my hand. I briefly saw
Merrick biting at her head as she attacked me. I plunged the knife into the
side of her neck, and she screamed. Black blood erupted from the wound. It was
an impossible amount of blood; it sprayed all over the interior as she thrashed
and jerked on top of me.

Suddenly, her weight was gone. She had pulled herself out of
the Jeep and was stumbling and thrashing on the road. There were shamblers
running towards us; I heard their pounding footsteps and their screams.

I hit the lever to the armored top of the Jeep. Protection
erupted around me at an alarming rate. I was safe inside the Jeep as the
zombies began to swarm on top of my pursuer. They brought her down in seconds.
I saw her fighting against them as one after another began to pile on top of
her. Eventually, I couldn’t even see her underneath the pile of bodies. All of
a sudden, the pile erupted.

She was standing there, holding her neck, and swinging at
all the zombies that rushed towards her. She looked horrible. There were bite
marks all over her body. Chunks of flesh and muscle were missing from her arms
and legs and that black syrupy blood was leaking freely from her many wounds.
Most importantly of all, the wounds weren’t healing. Or at least they weren’t
healing rapidly.

I started the Jeep. The crunching and the impact I had felt
was the collision of my vehicle with that of an abandoned car. The Jeep was
fine. I doubted that the front bumper even had a dent. Jeeps were made to be
tough and the ones we were using were reinforced and armored to be tougher
still.

She glared over at me when she heard the rumble of the
engine and then took off in the opposite direction.

“
Just like that it was
over
?”

Just like that. I hadn’t managed to kill her, but I
succeeded in causing her enough damage that she gave up the chase. The knife
attack had hit a major artery. She lost a lot of blood, way too much blood if
you ask me. That stuff just kept pouring out of her. The other wounds I had
given her barely bled at all before they closed up.

I knew she was going to be back. I had no misconceptions
about that, but my guess was that a significant amount of blood loss would fuck
up her healing. I didn’t know for how long. I didn’t know much of anything to
be honest with you. I just knew that major blood loss could slow her down.

That was the good news. The bad news came to me as soon as I
tried to reverse the Jeep. My bumper was stuck tight to the abandoned car. I
couldn’t free myself in reverse, and I was afraid to make the situation worse
by trying to plow forward.

The shamblers were, of course, all over the Jeep. They were
banging on the windows and scratching at the doors. I kind of felt like a
sardine in a can. If they managed to open the can, they were gonna have a nice
dinner.

“
You were safe in the
Jeep though, right
?”