The Regulators
Book 2 of the Guardian Interviews
By
Michael Clary
Kindle Edition
Copyright©2012 by Michael Clary
All Rights Reserved.
Editing by Sandi Powell
Proofreading by Claudia Rodriguez
Cover by Digitaldonna.com
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Chapter 1
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 learned.”
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 decimat
ed 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.
I think about his words. For a brief moment, I actually wonder if I want to know the truth. Maybe it would be easier to live my life in ignorance of the dark and scary things that go bump in the night, but then I looked over at Jaxon. He was smiling. It was a slight smile, but it was there nonetheless. I realized in that moment that I shouldn’t worry, because the man sitting across from me had but one purpose in life and one purpose only.
He killed those dark and scary things, and he was very good at his job.
“Take me back to when you first re-entered El Paso.”
We went in the same way we got out, Country Club Road and the border between El Paso and New Mexico. Those locations were part of the Westside if you remember correctly. I chose the Westside for my team just because that was the side of town I knew the best. I also chose to take it without any kind of backup, so it was just the Regulators.
“Can you give me the names of your teammates just to make sure I’m on the same page?”
It was the same team that went in to rescue Skie. It consisted of Dudley, Kingsley, Javie, Georgie and I.
At that moment, there was a scratching on the door to our room. Jaxon turned his head towards the sound and began to chuckle. When the noise level increased to the point in which I thought the door would break apart, Jaxon went over and opened it up. The large black pit bull gave a snort of irritation and strutted into the room.
I shouldn’t have left out Merrick; she gets a little irritated when I do that, but of course she was with us.
The dog was intimidating to be sure, but as soon as she came over and placed her head on my lap, I realized that she remembered me from our last set of interviews. I patted her head and scratched her behind the ears before she turned her back towards me and settled herself by Jaxon’s feet.
“Your bodyguard?”
Got that right.
“Okay, I’m confused…I thought that you guys blew up the bridge on Country Club Road when you left the city the first time?”
Oh yeah, Kingsley took that thing out big time. However, a military construction crew had erected a drawbridge kinda thing by the time we got there. They lowered it for us to cross and as soon as we were back in the city, they raised it back up.
We were driving two matte black Jeeps that had been armored up and customized for battle. Georgie was driving the second Jeep with Javie riding shotgun and Kingsley in the back with his weapon. I was in the lead Jeep with Dudley driving, Merrick riding shotgun and me in the back with an HK mp7.
Let me tell you about this gun, because it’s an excellent weapon. It’s small and lightweight; it has a collapsible stock and it even comes with a holographic sighting mechanism that puts a dot on the target while still in the optical. It eliminates the red laser, which is something that might give away our position. Georgie and I picked them out for everyone; we just headed out to a range and tried a ton of guns till we found the ones we liked. We also had silencers put on all of them, because a gun is worthless around zombies if every shot you crack off brings a mountain of corpses down on you.
“Can I interrupt very quickly before you get too far ahead?”
Sure.
When we interviewed before you made sure to tell me about the weapons you used. In fact, you were very descriptive about them. Did you still use any of the same weapons or had they all been replaced by the mp7?”
Well, I still had the Cold Steel Ti-lite in my pocket. It worked so well in my last fight I wasn’t about to part with it. I also added a Cold Steel Recon 1 folder with a tanto style blade. It was just a monster of a knife and I couldn’t pass up a chance to try it out.
“Were you still using the bite suits?”
Yes, all of us had bite suits. They look just like normal fatigues, except they feel a little rougher to the
touch, and the zombies can’t bite through them. All of us were also using tactical vests with built in back packs and high bite proof collars to protect our necks. Georgie was still the only one of us that wore a helmet.
“Any other weapons?”
I traded in my Glock for a Sig Sauer P226 with a silencer. No real reason, they are both great guns, but the Sig has a hammer release that I thought was kinda cool and it fits really well in my hand. The other guys had various firearms. Dudley was once again using the .45 he ‘liberated’ from Georgie.
“I’m actually wondering about a certain weapon that you used quite often in your earlier battles.”
Ah, my tomahawk. Yeah, that I didn’t change at all. It was resting in the small of my back on my utility belt. I had some special loops added so that I could fit it in there sideways and draw it out quickly. Now that you mention it, all the Regulators carry some sort of chopping weapon as a backup. It just pays to be prepared; we learned that from the last time. Bullets run out, but a good knife or tomahawk never lets you down.
“Excellent, just what I wanted to know. Now, did you enter the city during the day time or at night?”
We entered well after midnight. Our plan was to lay low while the sun was up and work our asses off after it had gone down.
“Was it safer to work at night?”
Yes and no. We would be able to sneak around a lot easier, but the shamblers would be harder to spot as well.
“Shamblers?”
Ask Dudley, it’s his new word for zombies.
So there we were, cruising at around thirty miles per hour. It was weird driving past the line of cars we had used to make our escape. We had a moment of silence as we remembered all that we went through.
“Looks different in the dark,” Dudley said. “Never realized what a scary road this is with all those trees.”
“Maybe you’re just a pussy now,” I replied. You probably just lost your nerve after we rescued Skie.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Well, it could be. Maybe you just need to take a deep, long look at yourself. You might just be able to see your inner pussy trying to shine its way to the surface.”
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