Free The Regulators - 02 by Michael Clary Page B

in my room once again and I had even managed to save my new
friends.
    “ Were things different
with Katie and Jason with you ?”
    It wasn’t just Katie and Jason, somewhere along the lines we
picked up some more people. I was introduced to a chubby guy named Ruben, who
was a janitor for the hotel. A teenage girl named Martha who watched her entire
family get devoured; and a business man named Charlie, who happened to be
staying in the hotel when things went down just like I had been.
    They were all pretty impressed by my performance. Jason
couldn’t stop talking about how I fought off all the zombies. I could tell he
was terrified. It was probably just his way of dealing with things.
    “ What do you mean ?”
    Well, he was acting like I was some sort of hero. I think
that maybe in very bad times it helps to have a hero. I didn’t feel like much
of a hero, in fact I felt pretty scared. I just wasn’t going to let anyone know
that.
    Ruben was smart enough to freeze up the elevator on our
floor, so it couldn’t move. He was also smart enough to seal the stairway. Somehow
Martha, Ruben and Charlie had been together since the dead came back. I kind of
tuned out when they were sharing their stories with Katie. They had holed up a
few floors below us, but when they saw the elevator move on our return trip
they decided to go investigate the floor it landed on.
    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