The Regulators - 02 (5 page)

She’s an expert on the scary stuff. She knows all about
what’s out there going bump in the night. In other words, she knows stuff about
monsters.

“
I get it
.”

Awesome, so we’re on the same page?

“
Yes we are
.”

Then you can understand how confused I was, because right in
the next room was a woman that seemed to be improving after being bitten by a
shambler.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I just looked at the bite mark
and it really doesn’t look too bad. It actually looks like it might be healing.
On top of that, the woman herself seems to have a lot more energy, and she’s
taking foods and liquids.”

“Really?” Miriam asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Are you sure she’s not faking. The poor woman is probably
scared to death.”

“I guess she could be faking the whole feeling better part,
but I’m not sure how she could be faking a healing wound.”

“Do me a favor and put the camera close to the wound, so I
can see it this time,” said Miriam.

I did as Miriam asked. I went back over to Michelle; I took
my earpiece off and held it close to her bite mark for a few seconds. After
that, I place the contraption back on my ear, I think my actions kinda freaked
out Michelle, but the woman didn’t get emotional or anything. That actually
impressed me. I remember when I was bitten. I was freaking right the fuck out,
and I would have probably freaked out a lot worse if I had started to feel any
major symptoms. The sigh of relief I breathed out when I realized I could heal
was enormous.

I tapped my radio for Miriam.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what to think. That bite doesn’t seem to be
showing any of the normal symptoms that a zombie bite typically shows. I need
to do some research on this. I will let you know when I have something. In the
meantime, do the evacuation as soon as possible…and get that woman on the
chopper. I want to talk to this person. That is, if she’s still alive by
nightfall.”

“Gotcha, as soon as the sun goes down we’re outta here.”

Adam wanted to know what was going on. I didn’t blame him a
bit. I just didn’t exactly know what to tell him. How do you explain to someone
that the so called experts are actually stumped? At that point, I was really
wishing that Jaxon was with us. Then again, Jaxon isn’t exactly the emotional
type and I can’t really even picture him being in my situation. He’d probably
just tell the guy to go talk to Kingsley.

I was a mess. I had no idea what to say to him.

“
Dudley, do you
realize that you’ve become somewhat popular around the world
?”

I may have heard that once or twice. Are you gonna hit me up
for my autograph?

After a polite
chuckle, I answered him. It somewhat crosses the line with unbiased journalism,
but I’m pretty sure that most people would agree that I crossed that line
during the first set of interviews
.

“
I’m actually not
going to ask you for an autograph. I’m going to pass on a little secret that
you haven’t seemed to grasp just yet
.”

Really, what’s that?

“
You among the other
Regulators (excluding the General) have become popular…because you are so very
human
.”

After seeing his look
of confusion, I went ahead and elaborated
.

“
The General is a
walking legend, he goes out and does these very brave things, but he seems
somewhat distant and cold. Don’t get me wrong, Jaxon is a hero; he saves the
day, but he isn’t personal. You however, are affected by the things you see.
You feel bad for people; you care
.”

“
It’s just something
that I’ve noticed. Obviously, a lot of other people have noticed your humanity
as well, or I don’t think you would be quite so popular in those internet chat
rooms
.”

Uh huh…are you trying to say that I’m a crybaby?

That time, I did laugh
.

“
Not at all, I’m just
saying that your emotions are what set you apart. That’s a good thing
.”

So not knowing what to do is a good thing according to you?

“
Being a human being
is a good thing, because in spite of how things affect you, you still go out
there and try to help people. So what did you tell Adam
?”

He paused and looked
at me for a bit, shrugged his shoulders and continued
.

I think I’d rather just be a badass know it all, but
regardless of that, I just told Adam the truth. I told him that his wife’s bite
mark was confusing us and that unless she took a turn for the worse, we were
going to evacuate her at nightfall.

This of course gave both of them a dangerous thing; it gave
them hope. I tried to explain that getting their hopes up might not be such a
good idea, but I had lost total control of the situation and just kept my
thoughts to myself as I wondered how badly they would hate me when things
turned ugly.

Turns out, things didn’t turn ugly. Michelle just kept on
eating and drinking. Her cheeks were flushed with the joy of leaving. Shortly
after the sun had finally set, we were on our way.

Hardin was back in the control room at this time so I was
able to talk to him.

“We’re moving out,” I said after tapping my earpiece.

“We have a new extraction point; the previous one has too
much activity at the moment. The chopper will be there within the next thirty
minutes.”

I was the first out the door. I was followed by Georgie,
then Adam and Michelle. Kingsley and Javie made up the rear. There were bodies
all over the street. This was just a bit shocking, I knew our gunfire had
brought down a bunch of shamblers before Jaxon charged them, but from inside
the house I wasn’t able to see all the bodies that Jaxon must have dropped as
he led them away.

Once again, I was somewhat amazed by my uncle’s ability to
bring forth so much destruction. I was glad he was on our side.

That’s when something caught my eye.

I motioned everyone to the Jeep and went forward to
investigate. As quietly as possible, I ran up the road and investigated the
object that had caught my interest. It was Jaxon’s earpiece. He must have lost it
when he attacked the horde. I would have grabbed it for him, but it looked like
it had been stepped on about a dozen times if not more.

Further up the road, I noticed something else. It was
Jaxon’s vest and mp7. Why he would ditch his neck protection and weapon I had
no idea, but I picked it up for him anyway.

Within seconds I was back in the Jeep. It was a tight fit
cramming everyone inside one Jeep, but I wanted to leave the other one for
Jaxon. I figured he would make his way back to this location with hopes that we
had left a radio for him to make contact. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

Georgie was driving, Javie was riding shotgun, Adam and
Michelle had the backseat and Kingsley and I were on either side holding onto
the roll bar for dear life, and that’s not an understatement with the way
Georgie drives.

Javie had already called up our extraction point on the dash
mounted computer. It showed a little map of the West side with a red dot on our
destination. It looked like we were headed to the top of the Coronado Tower,
which was located on Mesa.

“
What’s the Coronado
tower
?”

Oh yeah, you don’t live in El Paso. It’s just a tall
building on Mesa. It might actually be the tallest building on the West side,
but don’t quote me on that. At the moment however, I can’t seem to think of
anything taller. It also has a nice restaurant on the top floor. I heard it’s
pretty delectable, but I’ve never actually eaten there.

Also, just in case you didn’t know, Mesa is one of the main
streets on the West side of El Paso.

“
I actually remembered
that. Please continue
.”

Well apparently, the zombies that Jaxon had led away from
out location were all in the process of returning. It was evident the minute we
hit Mesa and random corpses starting charging the car and belting out those
nasty screams.

It was almost a game between Kingsley and me as we tried to
pop off headshots before they could scream. It wasn’t an easy game by any
means. There were too many deserted cars and blocked routes on the street and
the shamblers were coming from all directions.

I really don’t know how to accurately describe something
running out at you from behind an abandoned car. Their decaying yellowish
faces, their slimy bone-like hands. It’s nightmare material. Some of them were
limping, others just bolted towards us at a sudden dead run.

Still, we did a decent job. We kept all of them from
approaching the Jeep. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to keep all of them from
screaming. More and more of them were attracted by the screams and headed our
way. My main concern was that they were going to mass around the Coronado Tower
once we made our way inside.

“Hardin, there’s too many shamblers out here,” I said after
I gave my earpiece a tap.

“I think you’re okay, Dudley,” Hardin replied. “The dead are
pretty spread out in your area. Just to be safe, instead of doing the
extraction at the top of the tower, let’s pull this off in the large parking
lot behind the building.”

“That’ll work,” I replied.

It was a relief to all of us. Nobody wanted to go to the top
of that building. We had no idea what we would encounter and didn’t want to get
stuck if the exits got surrounded.

The parking lot behind the Coronado Tower also was a bit of
a challenge. It was an open area with pretty much zero cover. According to the
plans that Jaxon and Hardin came up with, we weren’t supposed to hang around
when a chopper came to pick up survivors, because a landing chopper is pretty
much a dinner bell for the undead. The idea was for us to leave the survivors
in a safe place, while we retreated to a decent cover where we could provide
protection in case the survivors needed it.

There was no safe place for us to place Adam and Michelle
for extraction. We would need to be right next to them in order to provide
security, and that pretty much left us fucked when it came time to remove
ourselves after the extraction.

I wanted to explain this to Hardin, but I didn’t want to
look like a pussy. Man-pride won out in the end. I said nothing.

When we reached the location, I had already figured out a
plan. We parked the Jeep on one of the adjoining streets and left Georgie with
the Jeep. Then we pretty much covered the compass by using Coronado Towers as
south. Javie took north in an area where some construction was going on.
Kingsley and Georgie made up east and west. Georgie had the Jeep for cover, but
Kingsley found a group of cars in which to hide himself fairly well.

Everything was far from ideal, but we made do. There were a
few zombies in the area. I popped off some shots to bring them down as I walked
Adam and Michelle to the center of the parking lot. Both of them were
terrified, but Michelle seemed to have more energy. She was walking without any
aid from Adam, only holding his hand.

As soon as we hit the center, I tapped my earpiece for Hardin.

“We’re in position and the position sucks, so get that
chopper here now.”

I felt a little uncomfortable barking orders at him like
that; the guy was pretty hardcore. I’ve seen Jaxon bark at him a bunch of
times, but Jaxon barks at everybody when he’s in a mood. Fortunately for me,
Hardin didn’t get all emotional, and he ignored my tone. It would have sucked
if he decided to tell me off over the radio or, even worse, delay the chopper,
but the man’s a professional.

The helicopter arrived within moments.

So did the dead.

It was an immediate firefight as soon as the chopper started
to descend. Everyone was firing to keep us from getting overwhelmed. That is,
everyone except for Kingsley. There were no shots coming from his direction. I
had to cover myself and anything moving towards us from the area he was
supposed to have been taking care of.

My nerves got the best of me. I started to miss my targets.
When that happened, I started to fire more shots. It was a losing situation. We
would soon be overwhelmed. Things got real bad when I fumbled my mag change.

I had some serious shakes when I was finally ready to start
firing again; the zombies were just a few feet away. I sprayed that damn weapon
like a fire hose and fortunately dropped all the shamblers that got past Javie
and Georgie. I even had a moment of fear go lancing through my head about
Kingsley. Why wasn’t he shooting?

Suddenly, the chopper pilot was speaking in my ear.

“Sir, I can’t land here. There’s too many of them.”

“No shit,” I replied. “Do it anyway.”

The pilot started crying about this and that and how he was
going to get himself killed if he brought her down any farther. I don’t blame
him. How many sane people do you know that would place themselves in that kind
of danger? I just didn’t care. I needed to get Adam and Michelle on that
helicopter yesterday, and I needed to get the team outta the damn area.

“
The pilot refused to
land
?”

Yeah, he took one look at the situation and panicked. Even
Hardin was yelling at him to land. There was just no reaching the guy. With all
the bricks he was shitting, I could have built a house. Finally, after hovering
over us for way too long, he started gaining altitude. At this point, I was
barely going to be able to get myself out of the area. There was no way I was
going to be able to pull Adam and Michelle out as well.

Luckily for everyone, Ivana was in the helicopter. She
really shouldn’t have been. Jaxon kept her well away from any danger, and if he
found out that she was joy riding over El Paso, he was going to have a fit, but
it was fortunate for all concerned that she tends to ignore my uncle. She
didn’t like the situation one bit. I could hear her screaming at the pilot, and
the chopper began to hesitate. Suddenly, a rescue line and harness were thrown
down. I immediately dropped my weapon to hang around my chest and prayed that
Georgie and Javie could keep me from getting eaten for just a few moments.