I felt that the final interview about the Battle of the Sun Bowl should be with someone other than the General. I wanted to hear what it was like to watch the fight between Jaxon and the Master, and not be able to interfere. I also wanted to know what happened to the rest of the team after they had left the church. I chose to speak with Dudley.
I wasn’t disappointed.
It sucked.
“What sucked?”
Every single bit of it. From the fight at the church, all the way to the end—it just sucked.
“Tell me about it?”
Where do you want me to start?
“Start at the church, if you’d like.”
The dirty bastards started throwing in zombies to set off the traps and attack us. It was a cheap move, but it worked. Before any of us knew what was happening, the battle was being fought inside the sanctuary. They had broken through our defenses and were putting a serious hurt on us.
I remember the screams.
I remember all the blood. We were fighting zombies, then vampires, and then zombies again. It was too much. We were losing. We were failing, but we never gave up. There was no reason to give up. One way or the other, we were all going to die. So we may as well go out fighting.
I still get the shakes when I think about that night. Every now and then, I would catch sight of a team member. They had that look in their eyes. You know that look? Probably not, but it’s a nasty look. When you see it, you know the situation is hopeless.
Then the voice came.
Everything came to an abrupt stop. That was fortunate, but then the voice began to ask Jaxon to come outside. He didn’t want to. I don’t blame him for that, but when the voice promised to spare everyone’s lives if he agreed to its demands…well, Jaxon had no choice at that point.
He gave me a look when he walked out. He didn’t think he was coming back, but that didn’t stop him. Nothing stops my uncle.
The funny thing is, I don’t think the Master wanted to come inside the church. I always heard that vampires had an aversion to churches. I think there may be something to all that.
“Didn’t the other vampires enter the church easily enough?”
I’m not sure how easily. They seemed to move pretty sluggishly. We were even able to kill the first three that tried pretty easily. Then again, maybe I’m just imagining things. We still don’t know a great deal about vampires, but I did find it odd that all the survivors were sent to the Sun Bowl. My guess is that the Master wanted them away from the church to make slaughtering them easier.
“What happened after the General came back inside?”
He told us how the Master wanted to fight him and then we helped patch up all the wounded and gather up all the bodies. I was against Jaxon fighting the Master from the very beginning.
When we went into the office, Javie, Nick and I tried to come up with a plan, but we were pretty much screwed from the get go. We didn’t have enough cars to drive everyone from the church out of the city, and walking out of El Paso is way too dangerous with all the zombies. We also couldn’t abandon them because the vampires would continue their attack with a vengeance in our absence.
As we talked, Jaxon sat alone with Merrick. When he finally spoke up, he had a plan. I hated the plan. It involved him fighting the Master. There didn’t seem to be a way to avoid that, but I stopped bitching when he reminded me that the vampires still held Hardin, Miriam, and Ivana.
Shortly after Georgie came back and Jaxon began to sew his Ti-Lite inside his shorts, Jaxon revealed his next idea. It was a pretty decent idea, but I wasn’t really sure we could make it work. Fortunately, Javie has some experience with plumbing.
After the plan was set, everybody got really quiet. It was almost like we couldn’t really believe we were going to go through with it. To me, it felt like I was throwing my uncle to the wolves. He had to survive long enough for the plan to work.
“Tell me about the guitar.”
It was funny to see the smile of embarrassment on Dudley’s face.
Javie found a guitar, and he, and Jax, started singing. That’s what started everything. The rest of us just joined in because it would have been rude to let them tackle the entire song all by themselves.
“What song was it?”
“God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash. A song like that causes the adrenaline to start pumping. I merely brought out the Jack to calm everybody back down. Obviously it didn’t work. We just got louder and louder, but it was nice. We were finally able to relax a bit. It reminded me of the early days back at the Safe Zone.
The survivors joined us, of course. Even Father Monarez began to unwind just a bit. Before any of us knew it, we had ourselves a pretty decent party going on. A crowd had even gathered around Jax, since he was finally behaving like an approachable human being. He was telling them some pretty humorous stories about his younger days. I swear I almost fell off my chair laughing when someone actually asked him why he was so rude all the time.
“What did Jaxon do?”
He was laughing right along with me. I don’t remember him answering the question. I think he just laughed it off. Then we laughed even harder when Georgie asked Javie to play some Rascal Flatts. Javie stopped strumming his guitar and tried to throw Georgie out of the church.
“What’s wrong with Rascal Flatts?”
Boy bands don’t belong in country music. Georgie was lucky Nick didn’t pelt him with another bottle. Anyway, the party was great. It was unexpected, but it was needed. Father Monarez even led us in some toasts for the lives that we had lost.
Then he had to screw everything up and ask Jax if he’d like to have his last rites. Jaxon, of course, had a fit. He stormed off, and when the little priest tried to go after him, I stood in his way.
“You need to let him calm down now Father,” I said.
“I’m not sure what I did that was so offensive,” he said.
“You can’t confront a man like Jaxon with the possibility that he might lose,” I answered. “He can’t think along those terms. He needs to believe he’ll win. You basically just told him that you expect him to lose.”
“My son,” he said. “Do you expect anything different?”
I didn’t answer the man. I walked away. I didn’t want to think about it either. That’s when I noticed the party was over. Everyone looked as if they were ashamed to be having a good time after all that had happened. Or maybe they were ashamed to be having a good time when Jaxon was about to have a battle to the death to ensure everyone’s survival.
I didn’t sleep that night. I’m not sure anyone slept that night. Instead, I parked myself outside the office door in case Jaxon needed anything during the night.
Shortly before sunrise, everyone was up and getting ready for the team’s departure. They gave us a nasty station wagon since we would need something to carry supplies in. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a truck around to spare. A truck would have suited us much better than a station wagon.
Jaxon gave us a quick pep talk, and went over all the details once more before we left. He was counting on us. If we failed, everyone would die. When he was finished up and everyone was hopping into the car, Jax pulled me aside.
He handed me his tomahawk.
That gesture almost brought me to tears. He had already loaded up his guns and backpack into the station wagon, but he made sure to hand the tomahawk to me. I looked at the weapon, and actually saw it for the very first time. It was a simple design, but in the correct hands it was an incredibly dangerous weapon. Jaxon probably bought it, played with it for about a week, and just stuck it somewhere in his house when he grew bored. He couldn’t have known at the time that he would someday become famous, and that simple tool would become his primary weapon.
The blade was hair-splitting sharp. The black paint over the metal was faded and scratched heavily, but not a ding could be seen on the edge. The pale wood of the shaft was stained an odd tan color from sweat, blood, and hard use. The weapon damn near screamed in my grip when I thought about all the killing it had done in my uncle’s hands.
“Don’t let them die,” Jaxon said. “If I fail, you need to succeed. Don’t let them die.”
It was hard not to get emotional.
“What about Skie?” I asked. “What do I tell her if things go bad?”
My uncle just stared at me. He tried to say something but couldn’t find the right words. Instead he gave me a quick hug, and nudged me towards the station wagon. I watched him turn his attention to Merrick for a bit before he led her to the station wagon. He wanted her well away from his fight so she wouldn’t be hurt.
Nick drove us away.
We had a job to do and failure wasn’t an option. The plan had two parts. For the first part, we had to search the inside of the stadium. It took about three hours before we found the maintenance room we were looking for. It was a relief that the room still existed. Javie studied the controls and figured out what we would need.
It was going to require a lot of work. He wasn’t even sure everything would still function, but we had to try. We had to make it happen. Lives depended on us. My uncle was depending on us.
We drove to the hardware store.
This took time as well. Before we could gather up any supplies, we had to clear the parking lot, and store, of all the shamblers. There were a lot of them, let me tell you. After the area was cleared, we backed up the station wagon, and loaded up.
When we got back to the stadium, Javie worked his magic with Georgie and Nick, and I got started on the second part of Jaxon’s plan.
“I’m a little bit lost.”
You should be, I’m leaving out all the key parts, but I’ll dig in deeper when the time comes, so don’t worry yourself silly. Just know that we worked the entire day in an effort to set things up. That was the plan. It would have been a lot easier if the stadium still had real grass, but that kind of luck wasn’t on our side.
When all was ready, we crossed our fingers and locked Javie and Merrick in the maintenance room and went outside. It was beginning to snow harder, and that was a good thing. It made finding a hiding place just a bit easier, though not very comfortable. You see, the snow was blowing down in a certain angle that kept the field from being filled with snow, but was still piling up mounds of it about midway up on the bleachers.
Georgie, Nick, and I, buried ourselves in the mounds. Each of the three of us took a side of the stadium, leaving only the entrance we were hoping Jax would walk through free. To say the least, we were freezing our asses off. I think we shivered in our respective mounds for at least two hours before the foot soldiers led the survivors into the stadium. I was glad when they finally showed up for two reasons. One, it wasn’t pleasant listening to Nick bitch and moan through our ear radios while we all turned blue in the cold; the arrival of the survivors finally shut him up. Two, the survivors came through the entrance we were hoping they would be using. They were led to the immediate side of the field, situated behind a couple rows of large PVC piping that marked the out of bounds line. The foot soldiers sat on the opposite side of the field behind another couple of rows of PVC piping, as if they were supporting an opposing team.
The waiting game was almost finished.
An hour after sunset, the Master arrived. It wasn’t some type of grand entrance like I had been expecting. He simply walked through the same entrance everybody else had, and strolled rather casually to the middle of the field.
My entire body was shivering uncontrollably in the cold, while the Master was barefoot and shirtless as he stood in the middle of the field waiting patiently. I was afraid my shivering would make the mound of snow above me vibrate, and give away my position. Fortunately, the Master never even looked my way.
I never saw the other vampires, but I knew they were there. Jaxon warned us about that. He said they were predators and wouldn’t want to be out in the open. He figured they would stay hidden until the final moments of the fight. Then, they would appear somewhere high in altitude since they seem to like being above their prey.
Time began to slow down after the Master had taken his position. I felt the adrenaline surge rampaging through my veins as I waited for Jaxon to make his appearance. Or maybe it was fear. In fact, yes, it was fear. I didn’t want to see my uncle walk into the stadium. A part of me was hoping that he suddenly grew a brain and decided to run off and hide. I knew it would never happen, of course.
Jaxon was coming to fight.
When I first saw him walk out of the tunnel and step into the stadium, I almost didn’t recognize him. He was stripped down to his shorts. I’m not sure how he had known that one was coming, but he had. He looked too skinny, almost emaciated, like a fighter during weigh-ins after a huge weight cut. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him eat. The scruff on his face also looked a bit longer than usual. I had just seen him that morning and yet he looked so different.
I was worried about him more than ever before. I began to doubt the plan. I began to doubt everything. I wanted to jump out of the mound of snow and join him on the field. I wanted to grab him and drag him away, and if the Master didn’t let us leave, then we’d both fight him.
Almost in unison, every single survivor began to salute him.
It was a somewhat surreal moment. It was a way for them to show respect to the man that was risking everything for their survival. Jaxon of course, didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on the Master. His head was slightly lowered and his face was utterly frozen in a grim expression.
He really didn’t look like the Jaxon I knew.
He began to walk to the Master. I could see his green eyes smoldering in the darkness. It was a scary sight. The stadium was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. That was the kind of tension and fear filling the air. When the voice came, it literally pierced through the nighttime sky. It was a voice of pure innocence, but it was loud and powerful at the same time.
It was a little girl. At first I thought she was shouting something and then I realized she was singing. Her voice was amazing. I can’t even begin to describe it. Her Mother tried to pull her back into the crowd, but she would have none of that. She really got into it. She was even jumping up and down and pounding her fists as she sang. She started things off wonderfully, but imagine my surprise when every single human being, with the exception of the foot soldiers on the opposite side of the field, began to sing along with her on the chorus as Jaxon walked by. It was amazing. It was the most incredible show of support I think I’ve ever seen in my life.
It’s funny: my uncle isn’t always a pleasant person, and he’s normally somewhat awkward around strangers, but man oh man, do people support him. He may not be good at talking, but his actions speak a thousand times more than any words can convey.
I asked Mona what song she was singing when I met with her. It was “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. Apparently she sang the song almost nightly to all the survivors at the church and that is why they all knew the lyrics.
I was proud of Jaxon. I was terrified for him. Each bit of emotion began to fight, and wrestle, with the others until I was a wreck.
The snow was still falling. It drifted lazily past the stadium lights as the song ended and Jax moved closer to the Master. The vampire began to blab about something. It was hard to hear him under the snow, but Jax wasn’t about to play the talking game. He hates talking smack. When things are past the point of no return and a fight is inevitable Jax won’t waste any time mixing words, he just starts punching.
Or in this case, he charged and I swear to God I saw him smile when he did it.
The takedown he used on the Master was picture perfect. The vampire never saw it coming, and despite being like a thousand times stronger than Jaxon, he ended up on his back. The punches began to rain down upon the Master.
For a brief and shining second, I thought Jax was going to win right then and there. A normal human being would probably have been ready for a trip to the hospital. The Master, on the other hand, easily backhanded Jaxon away from him. I was devastated to see how easily he stopped Jaxon’s attack. I was horrified to see how easily the vampire got back to his feet and turned the tables on my uncle.
Jaxon was lifted straight into the air and brought close to the vampire’s face. I don’t know what the monster said to him, but I’m sure it was pretty nasty. It just wasn’t nasty enough. Jaxon opened up the Master’s neck with a slice he never saw coming. The black blood shot straight up in the air, and poured all over Jax.
The fight, to say the least, was extremely brutal. The vampire had strength on his side, to be sure. He pummeled Jaxon mercilessly. Every single strike that landed was life threatening. I could hear the sounds of his fists colliding with skin and bone, and I could hear the bones breaking from under the snow.
I thought my uncle was going to die.
I was amazed that he kept getting to his feet. He wouldn’t give up, and the cuts he landed on the vampire were nothing short of lethal. My uncle knew how to fight. He knew the areas to attack. He reasoned that the vampire would become weak if it lost enough blood.
The field had been covered with a light snowfall. The blood of the vampire had painted the field black all around them. Every time he seemed to grab a hold of Jaxon, Jaxon would cut the vampire again. It wasn’t very long before the blood stopped gushing, and the vampire’s wounds were no longer healing so rapidly.
The Master was fighting stupidly. He should have never met my uncle in an open field. He should never have allowed my uncle to bring a knife. The vampire had underestimated him. Jaxon was a Guardian. Guardians were created to kill monsters.
Jaxon had weakened him, but the price for doing so was high. My uncle had lacerations across his face and chest. His face was battered so badly he was unrecognizable. Each blow the vampire had landed had been effective. When the Master punched his entire hand through Jaxon’s back and lifted him bodily into the air by his spine, I knew the end was near.
My uncle had lost.
The question now was how badly the vampire would torture him before he put Jaxon out of his misery. I wanted it to be over. I didn’t want to watch anymore. I couldn’t watch anymore. It was too much. To see a family member go through so much pain, I just couldn’t bear it.
“This is your champion!” the vampire shouted. “This is the man chosen to protect…”
He never finished his thought. Jaxon somehow turned and slashed at the arm imbedded into his back. The vampire dropped him instantly, but before Jaxon fell to the ground, the knife lashed out again and opened the vampire’s stomach. I saw grey organs begin to slide out through the wound. Jaxon sliced his neck when the vampire bent over to hold himself together. The last of the monster’s blood dumped onto the field.
The Master did the only thing he could do. He kicked the heap that was my uncle away from him. Jaxon’s body rolled across the bloody field. The vampire was no longer healing. With one arm holding his organs inside his body, he stumbled towards my uncle, reached out with his free hand and crushed Jaxon’s fingers before throwing the knife aside.
Jaxon was defenseless, worse than that, he was barely even moving.
“I’m shocked that he was even alive after the vampire grabbed a hold of his spine. I can’t imagine what kinds of injuries that must have caused.”
Be assured that the injuries were indeed fatal, but Guardians are built differently. They can withstand a lot of damage and continue to function. However, Jax was dying. He could barely lift his arms in defense as the vampire began to stomp his body.
I was crying and my tears froze to my face as I watched Jaxon’s body being abused. I was sure he was dead. He had to be dead. I wanted him to be dead so the suffering would end. The plan had failed. The other vampires never showed themselves, not even towards the end like we assumed they would.
My uncle was no longer moving. He was nothing more than a broken and bloody heap on the ground.
The vampire wasn’t much better off. His wounds were ghastly. The organs began to slip out of his body and the loss of blood finally caught up to him. He dropped to the ground. It took the Master a long time to find his feet once again. He looked at my uncle, hesitated, and then he motioned to his foot soldiers. I saw them ignore his summons. In a rage, the Master turned his back on Jax and took a weakened step or two in their direction.
I knew he wanted their blood.
I simply couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Jaxon reach down to the cuff of his shorts and pull his backup knife. I was amazed when he reached out and sliced through the tendon above the Master’s heel and dropped the vampire to the ground. I was completely astonished when Jaxon crawled after him and slashed apart the Achilles tendon of the other foot as well.
The vampire began to crawl away, but Jaxon could no longer follow. He was truly dying. What happened next was the moment I had been waiting for. I only hoped it wasn’t too late. Jaxon raised one hand into the air and pointed his index finger towards the sky.
I radioed to Javie immediately and told him to turn on the water main. You see, the PVC pipes that lined both sides of one half of the field were one of the things we spent most of the day working on. Once upon a time, the Sun Bowl had an actual grass field, but some time ago the real grass was replaced with artificial grass. The maintenance room that controlled the water for the old grass field was still inside the Sun Bowl. It hadn’t been used in years, but all the right pieces were in place. All we had to do was follow the old pipes they used to water the grass, find where they had been blocked off, and add our own pipes. When all was said and done—trust me it wasn’t easy, because the stupid pipes kept breaking apart—we had a working sprinkler system, and a lot of water pressure.
Jaxon was right when he guessed that the vampire wouldn’t know the difference. In fact, the vampire never gave our crappy watering system a second glance. He probably just thought it was an outdated sprinkler system, if he even thought anything at all.
His oversight was about to cost him dearly. Javie turned on the water. The pipes on both sides of the field grumbled under the pressure, but they held. Large jets of water sprayed out of the hundreds of holes we drilled into the pipes. The water shot high above the ground, met their cousins on the opposite side of the field in midair, and came crashing down on the field with the falling snow.
We had created rain.
While the vampire crawled towards his foot soldiers in search of the healing blood, we gave Jaxon a continuous dose of healing water. It was a beautiful thing to see. The black gore was rinsed from Jaxon’s body almost immediately. He was instantly soaked, and the water would continue to spray until I radioed Javie and asked him to turn it off.
Jaxon wasn’t moving.
I panicked. I broke free of my stupid snow igloo, and stood straight up on the bleachers. I shouted for Jaxon to stand up. The vampire was getting closer, and closer, to his foot soldiers. They didn’t come to him, but they were too afraid to back away.
I saw Jaxon’s arm move.
It wasn’t a twitch or anything. His arm simply slid to his side, and he used it, along with his other arm, to push himself to his knees. The water was pouring over both Jaxon and the vampire. I saw Jax wipe his eyes. Then he looked over at me and smiled as he got to his feet.
The crowd of survivors began to roar and cheer.
I left my spot on the bleachers, and entered the field. It was a stupid thing to do. I left my position, but I had to see the end.
When I was close enough, I saw the drenched vampire look over his shoulder. I saw his eyes go wide in fear as Jaxon slowly closed the distance. The blade of the Ti-Lite was gleaming in his hand. The crowd was still cheering. The foot soldiers were looking nervously from the Master to the General.
The vampire began to scream as he crawled. He began to plead for his life. Jaxon simply smiled. He was the monsters’ monster. Does that make any sense at all?
“He’s the thing that monsters fear?”
Exactly, he is the Guardian. He is the one man that can beat them at their own game, and do you know what the vampire’s worst mistake was? He thought he could go toe to toe with my uncle.
When I finally reached Jaxon, I realized that he was still in pretty bad shape. He was having trouble breathing. He didn’t seem able to keep his eyes open for long periods of time; he was hunched over awkwardly, and walking funny. Still, I didn’t interfere. He wouldn’t have wanted that. This was his fight. It was his to end. I simply handed him his tomahawk.
“You can have this back,” I said. “It scares the hell out of me.”
He barely even looked at me as he took the weapon. The vampire screamed in fear, but after the first swing of the tomahawk, he began to scream in pain. Four swings later, the vampire screamed no more.
The Master was dead.
The survivors were cheering and clapping. They stormed the field despite the freezing water drenching their clothes. The lot of them stood before Jaxon and gave him the salute one final time. Unlike the other times, however, Jaxon returned the salute, and then he collapsed.
“Dudley!” Nick shouted in my earpiece. “They’re here!”
I cursed myself for being an idiot and scanned the tops of the bleachers. Five vampires were perched up there, looking down upon us. They were on the survivor’s side of the stadium.
I enacted part two of Jaxon’s plan. I pulled out my detonator, and set off the Semtex underneath the bleachers they were perched upon, just as they rushed towards us. In case you’re wondering, my uncle got the idea from Kingsley when we first left El Paso…when Kingsley and some other guy blew up that bridge. Ever since that day, Jaxon carried Semtex in his backpack. He just never found a use for it until that day.
Jaxon predicted that the other vampires would only make an appearance at the end of the fight, and he was correct. They didn’t want any survivors, and they also weren’t about to pass up such a bountiful meal. He had also foreseen that the vampires would come at us from high altitudes, so when we weren’t helping Javie set up his makeshift watering system, we were rigging the tops of the bleachers to blow.
We didn’t have enough Semtex to take out all the top bleachers, so we made a guess and rigged up the sides, but left the ends of the stadium alone. Fortunately for us, we guessed correctly.
The explosion was loud, but it wasn’t big enough to take out the entire side of the stadium. It, more or less, just took out a few of the rows. Before the dust even cleared, Nick and Georgie had burst free from their respective mounds of snow and rushed to the debris field. I pulled my machete free, and joined them at the top of the bleachers. The three of us hacked and chopped the damaged vampires.
It wasn’t exactly difficult. All but one of the vampires was too dazed to put up a fight. As for the vampire that was still alert, it was missing several vital pieces by the time we found him. It wasn’t much of a problem to relieve him of a few more.
The survivors cheered and cheered. Everyone was patting one another on the back. The water was still pouring down from above us. Jaxon was alert, but in obvious pain as his body knitted itself back together. Several people tried to approach him as he writhed about on the sodden fake grass, but he yelled at them to leave him be.
I came down and sat quietly by him as he healed. I didn’t try and help him and I didn’t say a word. When it was over, Jaxon would once again be his usual charming self. I had no problems waiting.
Father Monarez went over to the foot soldiers and began to talk with them. I could occasionally pick up bits of the conversation. They were relieved to be free of the vampires. Everything was going wonderfully. Everyone was happy and safe.
We had made a serious error: we had forgotten that the city wasn’t safe.
It was Javie that alerted me.
“Dudley!” Javie shouted in my earpiece. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
“I’m right here,” I answered. “Come out and join us.”
“I’m on my way,” Javie said. “We need to get out of here fast.”
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Can’t you hear them?”
I found that a rather odd question. It took a brief moment or two before things clicked together and I began to understand. We had made a Hell of a lot of noise. First we had cheering, then we had an explosion and we followed all of that with a loud ass celebration.
“EVERYONE BE QUIET!” I shouted. “RIGHT NOW! STOP SCREAMING! STOP MAKING NOISE!”
It took a few moments for everyone to quiet down. I craned my neck in an effort to hear if anything was approaching. At first I heard nothing, but that was just my ears playing tricks on me. As soon as I began to relax I heard them. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.
The zombies were coming.
Everyone began to panic. The Regulators gathered around Jaxon, just as Javie, and Merrick, burst through the entrance and came running towards us. Javie was carrying a large bag of makeshift weapons. They were the same weapons the survivors had used in the church. We had taken all the ones that couldn’t be concealed underneath their clothes, just in case we needed the survivors’ help in fighting the vampires.
“We gotta go,” Javie said. “There are a lot of them.”
I looked down at Jaxon. Merrick was standing over him protectively, and he seemed to have lost consciousness. I knew that it would prove fatal if I removed him from the water. He was too fucked up, but I wasn’t about to abandon him.
“Listen up everybody,” I announced. “I need everyone to grab a weapon and make your way to the same exit. Stay together, and be prepared to fight. The Regulators will hold them off as long as possible.”
“You aren’t coming with us?” someone asked.
“I can’t move Jaxon. He’s not healed up yet and if I take him from the water he probably won’t survive, but don’t worry about us. We’re the Regulators. This is our job.”
“Tonight we’re all Regulators!” someone shouted and everybody cheered.
“I will not abandon the man who risked his life to save all of ours,” Father Monarez said as he picked his chainsaw out of the bag of weapons.
In less than a second everyone was shouting different things at me.
“I won’t leave the General!”
“Let’s fight!”
“Protect the General!”
“I’m staying!”
“I won’t leave him behind!”
In the end, I lost total control. There was a large group of survivors trapped inside the Sun Bowl, and not a single one of them would abandon my uncle. I began to pace back and forth as my adrenaline flowed into my veins. They wanted to fight. They probably wouldn’t make it very far if they chose to run. They wanted to fight.
“REGULATORS!” I shouted at the tops of my lungs. “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?”
“WE WANT TO FIGHT!” hundreds of voices screamed back at me.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?” I shouted again.
“FIGHT!” they answered in unison.
“WHAT?”
“FIGHT!” they screamed.
“REGULATORS!” I screamed a final time. “KILL ‘EM ALL!”
When the zombies came, they came by the hundreds. They poured through the different entrances of the Sun Bowl, and charged us on the field.
I’m proud of each and every one of those people. They formed a protective circle around Jaxon and defended him. Not a single man, woman, or child, hesitated to stand in harm’s way. They fought, and fought, and fought.
The battle was brutal. The ammo ran out all too quickly, and the team quickly resorted to blades. Not a single shambler broke through our protective circle. Not a single person abandoned the man that fought so hard to protect them. They fought with everything they had. They protected my uncle.
We lost a lot of people in the opening moments of the attack, but still we fought on. A half an hour after the battle started, I heard a voice in my ear.
“Dudley,” Hardin asked. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” I answered. “We could use some helicopters with some serious fire power.”
“I’m on my way,” Hardin said. “Where are you?”
“Inside the Sun Bowl,” I answered. “We also have about four hundred or so survivors that are ready for an extraction if you have enough of those choppers.”
“Wait a minute. How did Hardin escape the vampires? Where were Miriam, Ivana, and the others that were being held?”
The vampires holding them left the area as soon as their Master was killed. I’m guessing they somehow sensed his death, and decided they didn’t want to stick around any longer. Anyway, Hardin is a pretty resourceful kind of guy. As soon as he realized there were no longer any vampires around, he escaped rather easily.
It took another thirty minutes for the helicopters to show up. The sight of three choppers flying over the bleachers was an extremely welcome one, but I think we enjoyed it even more when the helicopters began to open fire on all the zombies.
In no time at all, the stadium was relatively secure. More helicopters were brought in for extractions, and by that time, Jaxon was more or less himself. The Westside of El Paso had been cleared of survivors.
It was a battle that I will never forget as long as I live. In his one moment of need, it was the people that Jaxon fought so heroically to save that ended up saving him. It was a terrible battle, but the people supported one another. They stood side by side and faced the horde. In the midst of combat, I saw humanity, and let me tell ya, humanity is something worth fighting for.
In the end, eighty-four people lost their lives in the Battle of the Sun Bowl. The number was considered low, considering the odds that the people faced.
“Were the Regulators the last ones to leave the stadium?”
Yes, we were.
“Where did you go after you were extracted?”
Extracted? Sweetheart, the Regulators never left El Paso. There were still survivors waiting for help in different parts of the city. We had a job to do, and dammit we were gonna get it done. Jaxon made a promise. He told the entire world that help was coming to those in need. We weren’t about to leave until we made good on that promise.
“So you planned on leaving after all the survivors in the city had been extracted?”
I wouldn’t say that. Even after all the survivors were extracted, there would still be zombies in our city.
“Then you planned on completely eliminating the undead threat?”
You got that right, and if you thought vampires were pretty wild, wait until you hear that story.