Dudley and Jaxon were still laughing when they left the room.
Okay, what was your last question?
“I was wondering if you could continue where Jaxon left off.”
I can do that, yes.
“Before we get into that, I’m just wondering, do they act like that a lot?”
Dudley and Jaxon?
“Yes.”
All the time. We all sort of act crazy and immature. I think it comes with the job. The minute the stress is over we live it up. Because sooner or later we are gonna be put back into those dangerous situations again.
Then again, those two have always been assholes. Just don’t tell them that I said that.
We laughed for a moment and suddenly a new person was starting to emerge. He was actually very funny as he told me stories of the antics the team often got caught up in. It was a fun time. Georgie is an excellent storyteller.
When the laughter finally stopped, Georgie became a little serious again.
It was pretty rough. At the time, I didn’t know everything that Jaxon had gone through, but it was rough on him. He looked worn out. I was a little worried about him after I saw the damage on his arm with the torn sleeve. Even through his tattoos, I could see the bruises.
You see, it’s the team’s job to worry about Jaxon because he never worries about himself. He will often throw himself into the most dangerous situation. It makes us pretty nervous to tell you the truth, but that’s Jax. He’s the hero. If he didn’t act that way, I don’t think he would have been chosen to be the Guardian.
If a vampire had been hunting me, I would have pissed myself. Jax isn’t like that. He’s just wired differently. He took the news from Hardin with barely a shrug of his shoulders.
“So how do we kill it?” Jaxon asked.
“Jaxon, you are not listening to me,” Hardin answered. “We don’t know how to kill it. We don’t even try to kill it. We evacuate you from the area until it goes away.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jaxon replied. “I’ve heard it before. Weren’t you the one that told me the last Guardian was going to kill me? What happened there?”
“This is different, Jaxon. Even the last Guardian was evacuated if we thought there were vampires in the area. It’s just not safe.”
“I’m not running. So why don’t you figure out a way for me to kill that thing and get back to me. Also, I need some new gear. Javie will give you a list.”
With that, the conversation with Hardin was over.
After Jaxon told Javie everything that he needed, Javie vanished into another room in order to relay Jaxons request in relative quietness. The kitchen was getting rather loud as Jaxon relayed his story of the last couple evenings. Nick’s new friends Katie and Jason even joined in on the fun. It probably wasn’t the type of story that the kid should have heard, but he stared up at Jaxon with a vast amount of hero worship.
Jaxon pretty much ignored the kid.
When the tale was told, we all sort of sat around in amazement. Things had just become even more difficult. It was one thing to rescue people from zombies, but what the hell were we supposed to do about the vampire that was trying to kill us?
“I imagine that it must have been more than a little upsetting.”
It was, but Jaxon tried to break the tension. At least, I think that’s what he was doing. For all I know, he might have been serious. It’s often hard to tell with him.
“So Nick,” Jaxon said. “Why are you here and how do I get rid of you?”
Nick sort of just looked at him for a moment as if he wasn’t sure how to respond. That, by the way, is a normal reaction when people aren’t sure if he’s joking or not. Nick eventually decided to laugh it off and even threw in a few expletives for revenge. Jaxon just kept looking at him as if he were some sort of weird insect never before classified.
I relaxed just a bit when Javie returned with the news that Jaxon’s gear would be parachuted in within the next half hour. That was when Kingsley began to question Jaxon.
“Are you sure about this, Jax? Should we be continuing this? I mean, a vampire? What the hell do we know about vampires? I think you’re in over your head.”
“What did we know about zombies until we were stuck in the middle of an outbreak?” Dudley asked. “It’s not like we can choose which battles we want to fight. What do you expect us to do, turn tail and run every time something wants to kill us? If we plan on killing evil monsters for a living, we had better get used to evil monsters wanting us dead.”
“I agree with Dudley,” Nick said. “That bitch ain’t got shit on us. We can take her out easy. All we need is to do is fill her up with bullets whenever she comes around looking for Jaxon.”
“I’m still wondering why you’re even here,” Jaxon said to Nick. “And Dudley is right. Regulators do not run. We didn’t come back to El Paso just to run away when things get rough. There are people out there that need us, and nothing out there is going to stop me from helping them. Anyone that wants out, feel free to catch the next chopper out of here.”
“Here, here,” I added. “Only pussies run from sparkly vampires.”
“Shouldn’t you be long gone then?” Nick said.
“Jax was wondering why you’re still here,” I replied.
“How about I hit you with another bottle?” Nick asked.
“Jax,” I said. “Will Nick be leaving when we extract Katie and Jason?”
“Yes,” answered Jaxon.
“What the fuck?” Nick roared. “Are you off your rocker? You would really want a pussy like Georgie and a candy ass like Kingsley fighting next to you instead of me? Look at Kingsley, he’s terrified. He doesn’t even want to be here and Georgie has always been a wimp.”
“I’m not a pussy when I have a gun in my hand,” I replied.
Jaxon had also taught me some hand to hand. It wasn’t something I wanted to rely on when facing either zombies or vampires, but I really wasn’t that big of a wimp.
“What the hell do you want to be a part of this for?” Jaxon asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick answered. “I spent so much time just being terrified and so much time trying to survive, I guess I feel bad for anyone else going through what I went through. It just feels like something that I need to do.”
Nick was actually getting a little teary-eyed. Jaxon just looked at him for a long moment and then shrugged his big ole shoulders once again.
“Whatever,” Jaxon said.
“What did that mean?”
Basically it meant that Jaxon wasn’t happy about it, but he was still going to give Nick a chance. Javie then announced the gear was being dropped, and we all rushed to the front of the house to see how this was going to go.
The helicopter was already headed home when I looked out my front door. I was impressed with how quickly they were able to deliver the new gear, but I had no idea where it was.
It was Dudley that first noticed it. He pointed his finger up into the nighttime sky and after a brief moment, I located what he was pointing at. There were three large canisters silently floating down towards the street beneath black parachutes that weren’t big enough for a person but suited the canisters perfectly.
The only problem was that they landed in the middle of the street.
All of us sort of looked at each other and then as one, we gazed down the road towards the fence. There were about a hundred or so zombies wandering aimlessly at the gate. They hadn’t seen us, so they weren’t trying to break in, but the noise we made from the brief fight with the vampire girl had attracted them.
Left alone, these zombies would probably just wander off eventually, but if they happened to see a living person inside the safe zone, they weren’t going to go anywhere and their screams would only attract more of them.
“Oops,” Dudley said.
“Send Georgie out to go get them,” Nick said.
“How bout no, bitch,” I responded.
“Sounds like a job for the new guy if you ask m
e,” Jaxon said.
“I agree,” Dudley said. “Go get those canisters, tough guy.”
“What the hell?” Nick sputtered. “There are zombies out there.”
“There sure are,” Jaxon said. “But a big, tough guy like you isn’t afraid of a bunch of shamblers. Hell, you should have seen all the zombies Dudley and I had to deal with back when we blew up Tito’s apartment complex.”
“Good times,” Dudley said.
“Pussy,” Jaxon whispered.
Everyone was starting to snicker at Nick’s expense.
“Here pussy, pussy, pussy,” Dudley whispered while tapping his legs as if Nick were a dog, and Dudley was trying to call him forward.
“Oh, you guys are funny,” Nick said.
Even the little kid was starting to laugh.
“Let’s just wait until that crowd wanders off,” Kingsley said. “They won’t stick around if they don’t see any people.”
“Well duh,” Jaxon said. “But where’s the fun in that?”
Everyone began to laugh, but the funniest part was the look of relief in Nick’s face when he felt confident that Jaxon didn’t really want to send him out to retrieve the canisters.
“It wasn’t so much the zombies that were making me nervous,” Nick said. “I just didn’t want to run into that vampire all by myself out there.”
“Regulators are never by themselves,” Dudley said. “We have each other’s backs or we don’t survive.”
“What about when Jaxon charges a horde of zombies and then disappears for two days?” I replied.
“Jaxon’s special,” Dudley answered.
“You trying to say that I’m short bus special?” Jaxon asked.
“Of course not,” Dudley said.
“Because you had a definite tone,” Jaxon added.
“I’m not sure what you are referring to,” Dudley said.
“Well maybe if you removed your head out of your ass, you would understand things a bit better.”
“Keeping my head in my ass is the only place I have to get away from you.”
“Well maybe I should…“
“Would you guys stop fucking around,” Kingsley shouted. “There are zombies at the fence and a freaking vampire somewhere out there, and you guys are still joking around like our lives aren’t in serious danger.”
“Now who’s a pussy?” Nick asked. “It’s not me.”
Kingsley became angry at the comment and stormed off up the stairs to the bedroom he always used when he crashed at my house.
It was the last time I saw him alive.
Javie was the one that went to go check on him. The rest of us were eating in the kitchen. I remember the look on his face when he told all of us that Kingsley wasn’t in the room. He looked like he already knew that we had lost a teammate. I also remember getting angry at the look on his face. I wasn’t ready to write off one of our guys until I saw the body.
All of us ran to the bedroom.
The window was wide open. Cold air was gently blowing into the room. There were blood spots on the window sill. Jaxon approached cautiously and peered outside.
“There are broken shingles on your neighbor’s roof,” Jaxon said. “She must have grabbed him and carried him off.”
“How do you know it was the vampire?” Nick asked.
“Because I don’t think Kingsley can jump thirty feet to the neighbor’s rooftop,” Jax answered.
“Yeah, but what if…,” Nick said before Jax cut him off with a wave of his hand.
We had lost a teammate. We had lost a dear friend. It hit the entire team pretty hard. So hard, in fact, that none of us really spoke the rest of the evening.
“Nobody went after him?”
How could we? The vampire traveled over the rooftops. Plus, there were zombies out there and we couldn’t let them see us, or we would never get out of the safe zone. It was a bad situation. All of us wanted to go after him; it was just impossible at that moment.
“I’m sorry, that was insensitive of me. I should have realized that you would have done something had you been able.”
Well, I didn’t say that we didn’t do anything. We just had to wait until daylight.
“Why daylight?”
Daylight is when the zombies finally drifted away. Jaxon stayed up the entire night waiting for them to leave. It finally happened when the sun rose over the mountains.
Jaxon and Dudley ran out the door, gathered the canisters and returned to my house in a matter of seconds. It actually took us a bit to figure out how to open the canisters, but as soon they were opened, Jaxon changed into a new bite suit and a new vest.
The new vest was pretty cool it had a skull and crossbones design on it. Except that instead of crossbones, they were musket pistols and the skull had a bandana over its mouth like an old western bandit. He also received a new mp7 to replace the one Nick had commandeered. Nick had wanted the vest with the skull and crossbones, but that was never going to happen.
The big oaf wasn’t left out, however; Jaxon had gotten him a bite suit and gear as well. Both of them also had new earpiece radios. The rest of the gear consisted of back pack supplies like food and ammo.
When the ammo had all been divided between us, Jaxon asked if I was ready. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Am I ready for what?” I asked.
“You, me and Merrick are going to go look for Kingsley,” Jaxon said.
“What do you want us to do while you’re out?” Dudley asked.
“Just stay here and keep our survivors safe,” Jaxon answered.
“Jax,” I said. “It’s daylight. Why are we searching for him in the daylight? What about the zombies? They could spot us.”
“Because we need the daylight to follow any signs or track we may find, and in case you’re wondering why I’m taking you, it’s because you are the only hunter in the room with tracking experience.”
“I can track,” Nick answered.
“Anyway,” Jaxon said. “Get your gear and let’s get going.”
Jaxon was on my neighbor’s roof when Hardin contacted him. It was easy enough to listen in; Hardin was using the open frequency.
“Jaxon, can you read me?” Hardin said.
“Yup,” Jax answered.
“You already lost one teammate. Let’s get you boys out of there before you lose anymore.”
“Not gonna happen,” Jax answered.
“I was afraid that you were going to say that. Come this evening, I’m going to pull out the other teams until this mess is over and done with. I don’t want to risk good men.”
“That’s your choice. What kind of information have you found out about vampires for me?” Jax asked.
“All we really know at this point is that sunlight will kill them,” Hardin answered. “I have Miriam and Ivana going through the old, old records. Maybe they will come up with something new, but I doubt it.”
“So if we found out where this thing hides during the day and drag her out into the sunlight, she’ll burn?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Alright,” Jaxon said. “I will contact you later.”
A few moments later, he was standing next to me.
“She didn’t stop on that rooftop as far as I can tell. I think she kept on going up the hill. There are scuff marks on the edges of the roof where somebody scraped against the stucco. I’m guessing that she was dragging Kingsley, and he was putting up a fight.”
“Makes sense to me,” I answered. “Kingsley is a big boy and she’s a somewhat small woman from what I could tell. He’d definitely have enough length on him to scuff up against some things.”
“What’s at the end of your street? I’ve never been up there before.”
“There are a few other streets that intersect, but if you continue going up it’s just desert and then mountains.”
Jax appeared to think about this for a minute while he knelt down and scratched Merrick behind the ears.
“I
doubt a vampire would want to be stuck in the desert come sunrise,” Jaxon said when he was ready.
“Not if a suntan is fatal,” I replied.
“Let’s grab a Jeep and take a drive up towards the mountain and see if we find anything near the desert.”
We didn’t bother to stop back in my house and let everyone know what we were up to. Instead, Jax just tapped his earpiece and let Dudley know where we were going as we drove off in the Jeep that wasn’t so beaten up.
We didn’t see any zombies. The bastards still weren’t very active in the daylight even though it was rather cool outside. Well, at least as cool as El Paso can get during the day. It’s the nights that get pretty cold during the winter months. Zombies apparently dislike the sun and not the heat, at least that’s my belief. The sun won’t stop them from charging if they see you, but they are certainly more active at night.
This is actually a much debated topic. Some people think that zombies prefer to avoid the sun, while others feel that they seek shelter to avoid the heat of the day.
The ride to the desert didn’t take very long.
Once there, the three of us left the safety of the Jeep and began to walk along the edge of where the desert began. We were looking for footprints in the sand or anything else that would tell us that there had been recent activity in the area.
I thought we were pretty much grasping at straws. The odds were against us. From what I understood, the vampire preferred to keep herself off the ground. She liked the tops of houses and buildings, that way she could swoop down like some demented bird of prey and attack.
Imagine my surprise when Merrick found footprints.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I would have found them myself. It wasn’t like they were hidden or anything. Merrick just happened to be walking about ten feet in front of us so she was the first one to find them. Leave it to Jax to be an asshole.
“Wow,” Jax said. “Makes me wonder why I even brought you.”
“I would have found them,” I answered.
“One of these days,” Jaxon said with a smirk. “You are going to need to prove to me that you’re actually good at something.”
“I’m going through a divorce,” I said.
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