Jaxon walked into the meeting room with a bottle of Jack, a pitcher of soda, and two glasses filled with ice. He was smiling as he poured.
If you wanna hear the end of this story, you’re gonna need to drink with me.
“That sounds fair enough. Dudley told me all about the battle. It was a good thing Father Monarez and all those people showed up when they did.”
You’re not kidding. Imagine how we felt.
“What I’d like to know is how you felt when the former Guardian jumped into the canyon?”
I knew he’d make an appearance eventually. I needed him to. The exploding zombies were fucking us up. I needed to see him, so I could stop him.
“After what happened before, were you at all worried about fighting him?”
Jaxon scratched his chin and considered my question a bit before answering.
I think I was. I think I was very worried, but I also wanted that fight. I didn’t want help. I didn’t want to burn him down or shoot him with really big guns. I wanted to beat him myself, and despite what anyone said, that was my plan from the moment my powers returned. I guess I just needed my Batman moment.
Merrick was helping Georgie. The rest of the team was distracted. Dudley was the only obstacle in my way, aside from the machine gunners, and they couldn’t fire anyway, for fear of hitting all the humans scattered around the area. I made my move before Dudley could stop me. He tried, I’ll give him credit for that, but he wasn’t nearly quick enough.
The Monster and I passed each other at full speed. He swung his battle axe. I swung my tomahawk. I opened him up, and he missed me completely.
He growled out his fury, and homed in on me. We ran at one another again. Despite his strength, his battle axe was a slow-moving weapon. It was too heavy to be of much use against somebody as fast as me. I went into a roll at the last possible second. His weapon nicked off a piece of rubber from the sole of my shoe. I sliced his leg open.
A normal human would have been covered in blood, and on their way to the morgue after the wounds Max received. However, his pink-tinged, gelatinous, blood refused to pour. My attacks didn’t even weaken him, but I expected that.
“I knew you would be here,” Max said. “Your pride made you come, but you should have run. Let the outbreak spread. What do you care? You could survive it. You could keep your loved ones safe, at least until I come for you, and I’ll always come for you.”
We sized each other up from a safe distance.
Max wore only combat boots, and camouflage pants. His body was burned even worse than his face. He had never healed from his wounds. He had merely continued on. From his pale blue-hued skin, to the metal showing beneath his wounds, the man had become a true monster to behold. He had replaced the glowing disk over his heart, and I made a mental note not to strike him in that area. I needed his power source functioning.
He made his move.
I dodged out of the way, but his sudden charge clipped me on the shoulder and knocked me off my feet. Before I knew it, he was standing over me, and raining down punches on my face.
I raised an arm to defend myself, and sliced away at his stomach. The cuts didn’t hurt him, or slow him down. Still, he eventually stepped away, as if he was worried about the cosmetic damage I was causing him.
I rose to my feet. I took my time. The effort it took was obvious, and Max started smiling.
“You aren’t as tough as you were the last time we fought,” Max said. “Back then, you were able to absorb a lot of punishment before your body finally gave out. I’m a bit disappointed.”
I ran at him.
He expected me to swing my tomahawk. Instead, I jumped in the air, and struck his knee square with the heel of my boot, and all my weight behind it. His knee cracked. Max grabbed a hold of my neck, and lifted me into the air.
I sliced off his nose.
I dropped and rolled when he tried to kick me. I found my feet, and swung my tomahawk into his other knee. Max wasn’t moving very quickly after that. Metal armor under his skin or not, take out the knees, and the body will soon follow.
He scooped up the battle axe he had discarded when he was pummeling my face, and hurled it at me. I dodged, but lost my balance. Max was on top of me in an instant. His feet were stomping down at me, and I curled in upon myself. His hands began another assault on my face and the arm I raised to defend it with.
In turn, I slashed at his waxy arms, and rolled away as quick as I could. I got my feet under me, but as soon as I stood up, Max had me wrapped in a bear hug.
He began squeezing, and I began suffocating.
I spun in his grasp. We were facing each other, and I leveraged my legs against his pelvis while pushing against him with all my might. After a brief struggle, I escaped his grasp. He was punching; I was slicing.
I went for quick cuts. I wasn’t worried about deep cuts. I just wanted to open him up. I had no dreams about bleeding him out and weakening him. That simply wasn’t going to happen. The Monster was a living weapon. He would never weaken.
He threw a right cross. I ducked under the swing, and came around behind him. I placed the handle of my tomahawk over his head and under his chin. I squeezed it against his throat as hard as I could.
Max wasn’t stupid. The moment he felt pressure against his throat, he ran backwards as fast as his damaged knees would allow. It wasn’t extremely fast, but when my back collided onto the wall of rocks behind me, a few of my ribs broke, and my spine made a nasty crack.
Max stepped away as my body dropped to the street.
“Judging by the sounds of breaking bones,” Max said. “This fight has officially ended. You lost once again.”
I crawled to my feet. My legs barely held me upright. My steps were clumsy as I backed away from him towards the bridge.
He came at me moving impossibly fast for someone with messed up knees.
I took a chunk of flesh from his shoulder with my tomahawk, and he in turn lashed out a front kick that connected with my sternum, sending me flying closer to the bridge.
My eyes were beginning to swell shut but I saw him advancing towards me anyway. I couldn’t get to my feet. I was trying as he swung a meaty fist into my face, shattering my cheekbone.
I paid him back by chopping down on his foot with my tomahawk. Surprisingly, his feet weren’t armored. I split his foot in half. The Monster roared in anger, and possibly a small amount of pain.
He kicked out at me, and my body went limp as I slid right in front of the drawbridge. I made a show of trying to rise, only to fall back down. Max limped towards me.
I sliced deeply into his hand as he grabbed a hold of my utility vest and hoisted me into the air. He ignored the cut, so I chopped off his ear with my tomahawk.
“I am done with you disfiguring me!” Max shouted. “DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM DONE WITH YOU!”
He slammed me down hard against the ground, raised me back up and threw my body all the way to the center of the drawbridge.
I didn’t rise back up from where I landed on my back. Instead, I started talking.
“I’m not done with you,” I said in a garbled voice. “I’ll kill you. I won’t stop until I kill you.”
Max stepped onto the bridge and walked towards me. When he was about five feet away, I stopped talking funny, and started laughing.
Max stopped dead in his tracks when I slowly rose to my feet. You see: I was suckering him. I wasn’t nearly as injured as I had led him to believe. Don’t get me wrong, I was absorbing a lot of punishment, and I hurt all over, but I did my very best to make sure he never connected with anything vital.
I wasn’t looking very pretty either, but the worst blow I received was cracking my back against the rock. I had learned a thing or two from the last time we faced each other. I knew the areas Max liked to target. Therefore, I protected my head as best I could. His punches that got by my protective arm landed mainly on my face, and his kicks to my body landed mainly on my legs as I curled up in defense. I took some pretty decent damage; Hell, I even saw double for a bit, but a Guardian is built to absorb damage and keep functioning.
I had more than a bit of fight left in me. Unfortunately for Max, our fight was over.
Max looked at me as I laughed at him. I could see the confusion all over his ugly face. He knew he’d lost. He just didn’t know the details.
“How?” Max asked.
I pulled the detonator out of my utility belt.
“This time, I won’t leave anything left of you to bring back,” I said, and pushed the button.
The corners of the bridge blew immediately, and the bridge dropped into the water of the Rio Grande. I went underwater, and covered myself against the raining debris. When all had settled, I stood up in waist-deep water and searched for Max.
He was twenty feet away from me. His body was jerking around crazily and sparks were shooting out of the many slashes I had cut into him, while he slowly electrocuted.
“Black energy.”
Yeah, Hardin said black energy behaves very much like traditional electricity. I decided to put that to the test, and see how the current running inside of his body would react to water, after I opened him up a bit.
Despite the jerking seizures, Max was still trying to climb out of the river. I stopped him when he reached the banks. He didn’t even turn around to look at me when I grabbed his ankle and pulled him back in the water.
That was unfortunate. I really wanted to see the expression on his face as I buried my tomahawk into his head, right on the seam of bone and metal. I have Dudley to thank for that one, by the way. He lit the Monster up. If the flesh hadn’t burned away from his skull, I never would have known where to strike.
Max died for the second time.
I left his body smoldering on the bank of the river and ran to where I had stashed my shotgun and the second remote detonator in the rocks. I pushed the button, and imagined a hundred or so small house fires breaking out inside the many homes just beyond the rock walls of the canyon.
I didn’t know if Ivana’s idea would work, but under the circumstances, it was worth a try. We only had to hold out until our reinforcements arrived, and that wasn’t going to be easy. Despite the new army led by Father Monarez, we were still grossly outnumbered.
Up ahead, I saw Georgie, and Merrick.
Merrick was fine, since zombies still had zero interest in dogs, but Georgie was underneath a pile of shamblers. I ran up and kicked three of them away. Then I blew their brains out. The kick of the weapon was nice. The pumping action was manly.
“I’m bit,” Georgie cried. “Fuckers got me. I’m a goner. I need a hospital.”
“If you’re a goner,” I said, “you won’t be needing a hospital.”
I looked at the tiny bite mark on his wrist, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Fuck you, Jaxon,” Georgie growled. “You don’t know.”
“I’m not even sure that’s a bite mark,” I said. “Go stick your arm in the water until it heals.”
I yanked him off the ground, shoved him towards the river, called Merrick, and I was back in the fight. I blasted everything that came my way until I was in the thick of things. After that, I could no longer shoot for fear of hitting a living human by mistake.
I didn’t use a shield. I pulled my tomahawk and Bowie knife.
I went to work. Just another day in the office: it was that easy. The water had washed away the tiredness. I was still hurting, but not enough to sit out. I wasn’t moving very fast either, but it was fast enough.
My favorite plan of attack was to come up from behind. The zombies all had their intended targets picked out. They never even noticed me until I nailed them, or Merrick dropped them to the pavement.
Working this way, I could help out anyone I saw that needed support. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have any casualties. We lost many brave souls in that battle, and then we fought against their reanimated remains.
It was a long fight. Dudley eventually made his way to my side.
“I guess you won,” Dudley said.
“Are you in awe of my awesomeness?” I asked.
“That was pretty stupid,” Dudley said as he hacked down the shambler grabbing onto his shield.
“Actually,” I said. “It was pretty brilliant. Besides, those suicide zombies were kicking our ass. I had to do something.”
“Well, what are we going to do now?” Dudley asked. “We can’t keep up this pace forever. We’re losing too many, and we’re getting tired.”
“Look above you,” I said.
Dudley did as I asked. All along the tops of the boulder canyon walls were ghouls. Ivana came up with the idea. The vampire eventually told her how to summon them by drawing a certain symbol in vampire blood, and then setting the blood ablaze.
El Paso was filled with ghouls. They lived under the streets in tunnels, fed upon fallen zombies, and the remains of their victims. They were highly aggressive when attacked, and it was about time they earned their keep.
The ghouls were hungry. We hadn’t been killing zombies in a long while. I think that’s why they crept silently down the boulders, and entered the field of battle. At first it was only a few of them. The others were shy. Ghouls don’t like to be seen. They normally wait until the battle is finished before they feast.
The braver ones went after the fallen zombies closest to them. They weren’t interested in the living dead at all, but that didn’t mean the living dead weren’t interested in them. The minute a zombie spotted a crouching ghoul, it rushed to attack.
Dudley and I began calling everyone back towards the Rio Grande. I wanted the humans far away from what was about to happen. It took time; one couldn’t just up and run from a group of zombies. The zombies would chase after them.
The next time I looked, the zombie that rushed the ghoul was crushed on the street, and the ghoul was standing over its remains. More zombies came after that. The ghoul destroyed them as well, but the scuffle attracted attention.
A large group of shamblers bore down on the ghoul. There were enough of them to knock it off its feet. Once they had it down, they really went at it. A great wail screeched out when the many hands and teeth began to tear at the ghoul’s flesh.
The call of distress was answered by two more, brave, ghouls that had climbed down. They tore into the group of zombies. Their battle attracted more zombies. More wails screeched out. The ghouls on top of the canyon wall began to bounce around like agitated monkeys. Then they went to aid their companions.
I couldn’t tell you how many ghouls entered the canyon. They just kept coming, and coming. Some of them were fighting. Some of them were eating. It was disgusting, but the battle was pretty much over. The zombies were no match for the immense strength, and tough skin, of the ghouls.
We gathered our forces before the Rio Grande. Each of the Regulators had survived. We were battered, and bruised, but we proudly stood before our army and we shot down any stray zombie that chose to come our way. It was an easy win, despite the vast number of zombies. Or maybe it was an easy win because of all the zombies. You see, never before had an army of corpses come together like this one had. Without meaning to, Max helped us finish the zombie outbreak. He put all the fish in a barrel; we just had to start shooting.
The battle of monster vs. monster raged on until sunrise. The ghouls didn’t like the sun, but they had left very little for us to do when they left. A new bridge was brought out. Everyone but the team crossed over into New Mexico.
We stayed behind to mop up the leftovers. We spent the day making sure all the zombies were down for good, chopping up the ones that still had a little life in them. It was nasty work, but we didn’t mind. We were looking to the future.
At sunset, we left the dead where they had fallen. The ghouls came back for seconds, and they came back the day after as well. In less than a week, the boulder canyon had been picked clean, and I managed to burn the remains of Max’s body. I wasn’t taking any more chances with that prick.
The next few months were spent inside the city clearing the stragglers that didn’t follow Max. Again, it was easy work. My team never encountered more than ten of them at a time. I believe Snake Charmer fared pretty much the same, as did the other Special Forces teams. None of them had lost a single man, by the way. The Albanian Mafia were outclassed from the beginning of their behind the scenes gunfight.
When we were finished, having gone through every house, and every building, the rest of the military came in. They went over everything as well, and when they were finished, the gates were opened, and people were finally able to return to their homes. Of course, the military patrolled the streets, along with the police on a regular basis, just in case.
This base we’re in now was set up for us outside Fort Bliss. We wanted to be close to the city we fought so hard for.
One day, the President even came to the site of our final battle, and dedicated a plaque to all the brave people that died protecting our planet. The boulders on both sides of the street stand to this day, and probably always will. People come from miles around to walk that stretch of road where the battle took place. Someone even spray painted “The Regulators were here” in big black letters on one of the boulders.
The Safe Zone still stands as well. Nothing there has been touched, not even the fences we erected. Georgie wasn’t too happy about that. He wanted to get his house back. The last I heard, the entire area was being considered for National Monument status. They even conduct tours, just to show people how we lived back then. My favorite part is the souvenir shop they put up by the gate that sells t-shirts and little key chains of my skull and musket pistols emblem.
When the dust finally cleared, I went home to my family. I gave everyone a six-month vacation. I spent the time eating and being lazy. When it was over, I went back to work. The team gets called upon on occasion, but we’ve never come across anything as big as what went down in El Paso. That’s not to say it will never again happen. I’m just hoping that it doesn’t.
“What if it does?”
Then I’ll be there to fight it. Because I’m the Guardian, I’m the leader of the Regulators. We fight evil shit, and we don’t like to lose.