The Regulators - 02 by Michael Clary Page B

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