They used the stairway to reach us, and it was a good thing they did it when they did. A few moments after Martha, Ruben and Charlie reached our floor, the zombies found the door to the stairs on the ground floor. They had flooded into the stairwell within moments.
From the noise levels echoing through the walls, ceilings and floors the only safe place in the entire hotel was probably the floor we were currently occupying.
We were trapped.
Fortunately, they had more food with them. Even better, we now had some weapons. Ruben had a Smith and Wesson .38 special and Charlie had a baseball bat and a big fireman’s axe. I chose the axe. I wasn’t a fan of the large red handle, but the black coating over the metal blade area looked pretty cool.
I would rather have taken the .38, but no amount of bribing could make Ruben part with it.
“How long did the six of you stay there?”
It was kind of hard to keep track of time, but it was a few weeks at least, maybe more. The only reason we left is because we ran low on food.
“Did anyone know about the EPUA website?”
Martha had heard about it. She probably got her information from the TV, before the stations went off the air. All of us were curious about it. None of us knew what was happening outside the floor of our hotel. We could see things from the windows, of course, but they weren’t pretty things.
“What did you see?”
We saw an army of zombies. We saw blood on the streets and rotting corpses. I actually spent most of a day watching a zombie with two broken legs crawl down the sidewalk one time.
It was depressing. We were basically just waiting to die. Eventually, the time came when we were so low on food that it became mandatory to replenish our supplies. Someone would need to leave the safety of our sealed off floor.
I volunteered.
I knew where the kitchen was, and I knew where I had left the pillowcases full of canned food. Ruben agreed to come with me just in case I got turned around. He also knew where the hotel manager kept a laptop. We were all anxious to find out what was going on in the world.
I watched Ruben engage the elevator and down we went.
The trip was over way too quickly. I wasn’t at all anxious to run for my life again while fighting off what was now more than likely hundreds of zombies.
The situation was terrible. I wasn’t all too convinced that starvation was worse than being eaten.
When the doors opened on the ground floor, my heart was threatening to burst out of my chest. Fortunately, the hall was deserted.
I followed Ruben as he led me down the quickest path to the pillowcases full of food. I jokingly whispered to him that he didn’t even need me and for all the good I was doing, I might as well just wait for him in the elevator. He laughed at that and squeezed my arm.
“You’re the hero here, my friend,” he said. “I may know the way to the food, but I may also need your muscles to get us there.”
I didn’t like the idea of everyone seeing me as the tough guy. Like I said before, I wasn’t feeling very tough. I gripped the handle of my axe very tightly. I was determined not to let him down, no matter how I was truly feeling.
I used the axe four times in order for us to get to the food. In all four times, we were lucky and had the element of surprise. Therefore, there were no screams. We didn’t want them to scream. Screams led to more zombies. Too many zombies and Ruben and I were going to die.
After the food was gathered up, we headed to the manager’s office. Ruben pulled the laptop out of the desk drawer along with a power cable. All of it and some of the manager’s personal items were safely secured in a nylon case complete with a shoulder strap. I carried the laptop along with most of the food.
“Did you gather more food along with the pillowcases full of cans?”
Yeah, we were pretty set. We gathered up enough to last us about a month and maybe more if we rationed them properly. After those ran out, we were out of luck. At that point, the kitchen was empty.
The attack came when we reached the elevator.
Ruben and I were busy marveling about how easy things had been. We were amazed at how much food we had gathered. We were just happy to have succeeded.
The corpse came at us as soon as Ruben stepped into the elevator behind me. He was joking around and pretending that he was having problems dragging the large trash bag he was carrying through the door.
The zombie was moving so fast that he actually collided with the one side of the elevator doors before he fell on top of Ruben and tore into his stomach.
Ruben screamed. I will never forget the sound of that scream. I will never forget the way he reached out for me as if I could help him. Once the bite punctures the flesh, it’s all over.
There was blood all over the floor by the time I managed to pull the zombie off of him. I threw the corpse against the wall opposite the elevator. It was a young man. He was probably in his early twenties. There wasn’t a mark on him except for the bite on his hand.
He screamed and charged at me. I swung my axe and took him off his feet. I stomped my foot on his neck in order to retrieve my weapon. I enjoyed the crunching sound the weapon made as I pulled it free.
Three more zombies responded to the call. They were rushing down the hallway as I stepped back inside the elevator and closed the doors.
Ruben died on the ride back to our floor. Later that night he came back and I killed him again.
Up until that moment, they had all been faceless and unknown to me. It’s a different feeling when you know them. It’s not a good feeling. I liked Ruben. I liked him a lot.
Nobody ever asked what happened. Nobody said a single word the rest of that day. I threw my clothes away; they were covered in Ruben’s blood.
It took another week or so before we even remembered the laptop.
“Is that when you first heard about the General?”
Yes, but we didn’t pay much attention to the rumors at first. We were more concerned with how the rest of the world was dealing with things. Imagine our surprise when we realized it was only in El Paso. On one hand, it was great news. If we ever got out of here, we would be safe. On the other hand, we had the misfortune enough to be stuck at ground zero when the undead bomb went off.
The people on the website were really nice. They patiently answered all our questions. They were genuinely happy that we were alive. Some of those people were trapped just like we were. Some were as of yet undiscovered but had nowhere to run to.
“Don’t worry,” they wrote. “The General is real.”
“He’s going to save everyone.”
“He’s ten feet tall.”
“The zombies are afraid of him.”
“I’ve seen him; he drove by my house.”
“I know his real name, but I’m not telling.
“He’s just a legend. He isn’t real.”
So many random thoughts kept scrolling along the page. At first, I ignored them. I was only interested in having my many questions answered, but the people just kept writing about him. They never stopped.
Day in and day out, they never stopped.
I began to wonder if such a man truly existed. I wondered how he found the courage to stand up to these things and fight back. I mean, I’m not a weak man by any means. I couldn’t even tell you how many fist fights I’ve been in during my life. I don’t scare easily, but these things…these things…they’re monsters.
I read about his Safe Zone. I knew the location. Georgie’s house was right in the middle. I wrote to Georgie, but with so many messages scrolling by it was no surprise that he never responded.
“When did you first realize that the General was Jaxon?”
When he and Dudley went and rescued that punk-ass Tito. There was no lead up or warning. None of that shit. He was just suddenly there, on the EPUA website, asking Georgie how to blow up a stove or some shit. I recognized Georgie’s screen name. He hadn’t bothered to change it since college.
&nbs
p; It took a bit, but I made the connection. The General was rescuing Tito and blowing up a building in the process. Georgie’s house was located inside the Safe Zone. Jaxon had to be the General. Who else knew both Tito and Georgie and also had enough balls to do the kind of shit that he was attempting.
“So your old college pal was the General. What were you thinking?”
It was unbelievable. I mean, back in the day, Jax was more interested in getting laid than being any kind of leader. I realize that other people who met him later have different opinions, but many, many girls will tell you the same thing. Back then, he was only interested in having a good time.
“Why do you think other people feel so differently?”
Probably because he’s so damn famous. I mean, don’t get me wrong. He was undoubtedly highly intelligent. He outsmarted just about everybody. He just tended to use his intelligence to play practical jokes and to harass his friends.
“So you saw him mainly as a pretty smart guy that liked to have fun and joke around?”
Yeah, but those were really my initial thoughts. I could also see him as a fighter. That was another thing he got involved in on a somewhat regular basis. It wasn’t in his personality to back down from a fight.
He was also fiercely loyal to his friends. Their problems were his problems. He wasn’t the type of guy to let his buddies down.
I started remembering these things and everything slowly started to click together. The guy I knew in college, my fraternity brother if you must know, had all these gifts and personality traits even back then. They were the same traits that would one day assist him in his role as a hero. Of course he wasn’t making any beneficial use of his gifts and personality traits back in those days, but they were there. They were just waiting for him to grow up and become a leader. It’s those aspects of his personality that make him so effective.
Still, I was floored.
I had to laugh at that. I heard a roughly a similar story from Ivana. It’s nothing new, but it is entertaining to hear people tell me what Jaxon was like before he became the General.
“After all that you just told me, why were you still floored?”
I guess it’s just weird to think that you know the guy everybody was talking about. Hell I knew all of the Regulators. Jaxon, Georgie, Tito and I all went to the same college. I knew Dudley since he was a kid and I met Javie and Kingsley through Jaxon before I moved away. Jaxon and I kept up with each other after I moved as well. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen him in a long time. If I came into town, we would hang out, and he was always talking smack to me over the internet. We even went to his parent’s cabin in Ruidoso one weekend so I could take my son skiing. My son and Jaxon got along famously by the way. It’s funny, because Jaxon normally doesn’t relate very well to kids.
I guess it was when he blew up Tito’s apartment complex that things really sunk in for me. I just remember going to the nearest window that faced the West side. Everyone in my group followed me. I guess we all wanted to see what would happen. They were all pretty excited when I told them I knew the General and that he was about to do something crazy.
All of us crowded by the window. I told them where to look and we waited. I never told them what was going to happen, I just told them to watch.
BOOM!
We could see the mushroom cloud rise up into the sky. It was a beautiful sight. All of us started dancing around. That explosion meant something to all of us. It meant that the General was real. It meant that all of us could once again dare to hope. To hope for a rescue, to hope for a way out, you name it, we could once again dream it.
It meant that we were no longer just waiting to die, because, and this is important, there’s one other thing I forgot to tell you about Jaxon. He’s a stubborn guy. He’s so stubborn, he just doesn’t know when to quit. I knew he wasn’t going to stop fighting. That explosion was a declaration of war, and Jaxon was going to win.
Once again, Nick had managed to shock me. His eyes began to well up, and his voice began to crack as he told me this last bit of information about his friend. I didn’t think he was the type of man to get emotional, but I have long since realized that Jaxon’s deeds can often have an emotional impact upon even the hardest of people.
I gave him a few moments to get himself together. I could tell he was embarrassed, but he wasn’t the first to become emotional when discussing those days.
So where were we?
“You were talking about the Jaxon that you knew in college and how…”
Yeah, whatever, I wasn’t crying, so don’t think that. I was never able to get through to him or that idiot Georgie. There were too many people asking for help. I got lost in the shuffle. I tried pretty hard, but in the end, no luck.
We followed EPUA almost religiously as the days went by. Everyone was excited when Jaxon came Downtown. They thought he had come to rescue everyone.
“Everyone?”
Oh yeah, we were far from being the only group of people who were trapped. We used to communicate with different buildings by blinking our lights. It was nice to know that there were others.
It also gave me a fair amount of hope. There was a decent chance that one of those other buildings held some decent looking women.
I didn’t, however, harbor any hope of being rescued by Jaxon. One look out my window and I knew those odds would prove insurmountable for him. There were just too many zombies on the streets, and they were always on the move. One day we would only see about twenty, but on the next day, there would be hundreds down there.
Jaxon himself wouldn’t be able to clear out that area. There was no way. He was coming for a look. He wanted to see how many zombies were in the area. He would probably be driving his Jeep. Jax only drives two types of vehicles, by the way, and those are Harleys and Jeeps. Regardless, neither one of them were big enough for any kind of rescue mission.
There were gunshots when he was in the area. We knew it was him even before we saw the square taillights of his Jeep. We also saw the massive legion of zombies he led out of the area. At the time, I literally thought he was crazy. I mean, what was he trying to accomplish? Leading zombies around like that was crazy.
“He was trying to reduce the numbers of undead, so the people trapped in the area would have a better chance.”
You’re right, and he certainly gave me a better chance. The minute I saw that mob moving away from the area I was in action. I was gathering up the little bit of food we still had left, which wasn’t very much mind you. A pretty decent amount of time had passed between when Ruben and I had gathered up the food till the time Jax led the zombies out of the area.
I quickly informed everyone of my plan as I packed. They thought I was crazy. Charlie wanted to wait for help. I told him that help had just arrived and we were going to take advantage of it.
With much respect, I grabbed Ruben’s .38 special. I loaded the gun rapidly and pocketed the extra box of ammo we had found in his few belongings.
I pretty much shoved everyone into the elevator. I wanted to be moving. I didn’t want to give them any time to think about what we were going to do and begin to panic. We took the elevator all the way down to the parking garage.
They were on us as soon as the elevator doors had opened.
There were probably about twenty or so of them just wandering around down there. They screamed at us and charged. I chopped and chopped with my axe. Charlie swung his bat, even Martha and Katie did their part with my old bar stool legs. We kept Jason safe. That was the important thing. Not one of those suckers could get near him.
I dragged him behind me the entire way. That was the basic idea behind my plan. We would never stop. No matter how many of them came at us we were never going to stop. We would just keep pushing forward until we reached our destination.
The screams brought more of them. I could hear them in the distance; the screams, the moans, the sounds of running feet slapping against the concrete. If too many of them reached us, we weren’
t going to make it.
Martha was the first person we lost. I can’t really tell you how it happened. There were just too many of them. All it took was one to grab a hold and drag her down. She screamed for help, Charlie tried, he really tried. By the time he fought his way to her, she had stopped screaming.
So we ran.
We ran, and I swung my axe at anything stupid enough to get in my way. I can’t tell you the elation I felt when I saw my truck. My key ring was wrapped around one of my fingers. I was ready to go. Thank God the battery wasn’t dead as I remotely unlocked the doors.
I remember Jason and Katie diving in the cab as Charlie and I held off our pursuers. I remember trying to shove Charlie in as well and the look he gave me as the last of the zombies fell to the ground.
Time froze still for just a brief moment. Charlie should have been happy. We were almost home free. Instead, he looked miserable. His eyes left my face and moved down towards his hand. I followed his gaze and saw the bite mark. I don’t know when he was bitten, I never saw it happen.
At that moment another wave of zombies had entered the parking garage. There must have been hundreds of them. Charlie looked over at all of them as they rushed towards us. Then he looked back towards me with the saddest look on his face.
“We almost made it, didn’t we?” he asked.
I knew what he was thinking. I knew what he was going to do.
I punched him right in the gut and threw him into the cab of my truck.
“Day ain’t over,” I said.
Now Jaxon may prefer his Jeep, but I’m a big fan of Chevy trucks with big ole V-8 engines. I can’t say that I plowed through the zombies because that would have damaged the vehicle. I can’t say that I crawled over them either. I’m not sure how to describe my pace. All I can tell you is that I went fast enough to not get trapped by them and slow enough that I didn’t damage the vehicle and trap us all.
In just a short time, we were free and headed to the Safe Zone.
We were reaching Sunland Park Dr. when Charlie started getting sick. His bite was worse than I thought. The garage was pretty dark, but as the sun rose in the sky I could see just how bad the damage was. Two of his fingers were barely hanging on. He was in a lot of pain and the wound was already infected. Actually, that was an understatement. The wound had just about the worst infection I’ve ever seen in my life.
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