Broken (Book 3 of The Guardian Interviews)

by Michael Clary

  “I don’t know, Dudley,” Mr. Hardin answered. “I’m not sure why Major Crass took him alive; it certainly wasn’t a part of his original plan. I don’t even want to hazard a guess about his current intentions, but I think we can all be sure that those intentions aren’t going to be anything good.”

  Dudley said nothing. Then again, what could he say? We were screwed. We couldn’t move left, and we couldn’t move right. Major Crass had assumed Mr. Hardin’s job. If we went after him directly we’d have to fight our way through the military, and killing soldiers wouldn’t make a great case for our innocence. We had zero options left to us. Mr. Hardin going to Albania in an attempt to clear our names seemed like a long shot as well, but it was all we had left.

  “What types of evidence did Major Crass have against you?”

  We had no idea at the time but we eventually found out that he had everything from cell phone recordings all the way to photographs and videos. All things that could be faked with the right equipment, but under the circumstances, nobody was questioning anything.

  “Do you think Major Crass told anyone about Max?”

  Hell no. Max was connected straight to the Albanians. Major Crass couldn’t be a part of that mess. The three of us running to El Paso for revenge probably just looked like we were trying to regroup with our Albanian buddies and plan out our next steps.

  “So what did you do after Mr. Hardin left?”

  We waited.

  I think we stayed in that location for about a month. After that, Father Monarez took us to Detroit. The church had places set up for us all over the country. We had to move every few months because the Men in Black were always right behind us.

  I don’t know how they managed to track us down, but they just kept coming. It was frustrating. In the first six months alone, we had about five gunfights with them.

  “Wait a minute. In the first six months alone? How long were you on the run?”

  We were in hiding for a year and a half.

  “Oh my God, I had no idea.”

  That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Everyone thought we were all in El Paso doing our thing but nope, we were hiding the entire time. Georgie flirted with a girl at a gas station once during a transfer to another safe location. The next day she turned up dead. The Men in Black were probably worried that he was passing information to her somehow. I still don’t know how they even knew he talked to her. I guess they probably saw his mug on a security camera or something.

  “A year and six months after the attack on the awards ceremony is about the same time that Jaxon was taken to a hospital in Ruidoso. Supposedly he was injured in El Paso. I always thought it was odd that they sent him to Ruidoso for medical attention but very little information was ever released about the incident.”

  You’re jumping ahead.

  “Am I?”

  Yes. Jaxon was indeed taken to the hospital in Ruidoso. He was indeed very injured but he didn’t receive his injuries in El Paso.

  “Where did he receive his injuries?”

  I’ll get to that, but first, let me tell you what it was like to be in hiding for a year and a half. I’ll skip through the boring day to day repetitiveness. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but there are other things you need to know. Things that will maybe give you a better idea of what we were dealing with when things finally came to a close.

  “I’m listening.”

  It was rough. It was really rough. Mind you, Father Monarez took us to some pretty nice places. We weren’t roughing it by any means, but we had no contact with our family members. We couldn’t risk them being killed. We rarely received news from Mr. Hardin, and when we did, it wasn’t anything good. Life for us became very tedious, sprinkled with occasional bits of paranoia over being discovered.

  Week after week went by at a snail’s pace. All of us were ready to fight. We were eager to get back into the game but the game was over. Our lives were an endless road of boredom. We hoped for the best but the light at the end of the tunnel grew dimmer with each long day.

  Eventually, the Men in Black realized that Mr. Hardin wasn’t with us. So Snake Charmer left to go meet up with him and his small group of soldiers in order to provide protection. At that point, Father Monarez, Miriam, Dudley, Ivana, Georgie, Javie, and I were the only ones left.

  Father Monarez was the one that held everything together. He’s the one that kept us going. That man never gives up. He never gets defeated. He’s a very strong man. The church believed in destroying monsters. Father Monarez believed in us. Therefore, we continued to receive the aid of the church.

  I think all of us were pretty worried that the church would eventually get tired of hiding us, but Father Monarez is pretty well connected. Their support never wavered.

  I think we were in Florida when things turned ugly. It was probably about six months after we went on the run. It was a nice place, if I remember correctly. At least it was on the inside. On the outside, it was just a rusted metal door in the middle of a swamp. I got out of bed sometime in the afternoon. My back was killing me, and I was trying to stretch it out.

  Dudley started screaming.

  Everyone came running. He was in the bathroom. We all got to the door at the same time. Apparently Dudley was shaving, and had somehow nicked his face. It was a pretty decent cut but nothing to get concerned about.

  “It’s just a cut,” Georgie said. “It’s not that bad.”

  Dudley ignored him, and started to rub water on the wound.

  “Dudley,” Georgie said. “You need to calm down buddy. It’ll go away, just pour water on it.

  That got Dudley’s attention.

  “I have been pouring water on it!” Dudley shouted. “I keep washing it out. It’s still bleeding. It won’t stop bleeding.”

  I couldn’t figure out what his problem was. I was more concerned with my aching back. I was in the middle of another stretch when everything clicked into place. I don’t get aches and pains. At least, I haven’t gotten them since I became a member of the Regulators. Something was wrong.

  “How long have you been bleeding?” I asked.

  “About five minutes,” Dudley answered.

  “What the Hell is going on?” Georgie asked.

  I shoved everyone out of my way. I grabbed Dudley’s razor, and I slashed a slight cut into my hand. As soon as the blood started to flow, I put my hand under the water faucet. Despite the water, the wound continued to bleed.

  “Oh shit,” I muttered. “What does this mean?”

  Miriam’s hand went to her mouth.

  “Miriam!” I shouted. “You need to answer me. What does this mean?”

  Tears began to fall from her eyes.

  “You stop that!” Dudley shouted. “You stop that right now. He can’t be dead. He can’t be dead. He’s my uncle. This is bullshit. We’re gonna find him. Mr. Hardin is gonna clear our names, and we’re gonna rescue my uncle.”

  Everyone figured things out at about the same time.

  Javie put his arm against the wall and buried his face. Georgie walked away. Ivana fell to the ground and started sobbing. Miriam hadn’t moved an inch. I walked back to my room. I needed some privacy.

  “The Guardian has fallen,” Miriam said as I slammed the door shut.

  Father Monarez was out picking up supplies when all of this happened. He returned to a rather gloomy house. In the six months we spent together, all of us had gotten pretty tight. I mean, we were close before, but now, I don’t know. We just needed each other. We relied on each other. We had to, how else could we get through all the bad shit?

  There were a lot of tears, and there were a lot of hugs as we explained to Father Monarez that Jaxon had died. Later on that evening we all traded stories about him. Everyone but Miriam and Father Monarez had known Jax for a pretty long time. Jaxon was, without a doubt, a funny individual. I mean, the shit that boy got into.

  It was a fun time. It was a sad time as well. One of us would be in the middle of a stor
y and just lose it. The person next to them would hug them tightly, until they regained their composure. Dudley never said a word. He just sat in a chair the entire time with his legs folded up under his chin.

  The next day we had a funeral.

  Father Monarez led the services. We had no body, but that didn’t matter to us. We wanted to pay our respects to our leader. We wanted to honor our friend. Jaxon was an incredible human being. He was one of a kind.

  Dudley went before everyone to say a few words.

  “You all know my uncle,” Dudley said with tears in his eyes and a tremble in his voice. “He was the best of all of us. He threw himself into harm’s way more times than I can count. He was a hero. He didn’t deserve…he didn’t deserve…I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill every single one of them. The man was a hero. He saved everyone. He risked his life so many times. I used to get so worried about him. When he fought that stupid vampire, I thought we were going to lose him but we didn’t. He actually won that fight. I couldn’t believe it. After that, I thought he was invincible. He should have been invincible. All of those fuckers are going to die. Everyone that did this to him is going to die. I don’t care how long it takes. I won’t give up. They’ll have to kill me.”

  After that, Georgie led him away. There was no way we were going to be able to avenge Jaxon’s death. We had all lost our power. We were normal human beings. We were no longer durable, we no longer healed, and we were no longer strong. We were just regular human beings, and we could die just as easily as everyone else.

  For the next month or so, we all just sort of moped around. At that point Father Monarez began to talk to us about leaving the country. There were places in the world that were protected by the church. We would no longer need to run. The Men in Black would never dare chase us to the places Father Monarez had in mind.

  None of us took him up on his offer.

  We wanted our revenge. We began to ignore the fact that we were no longer empowered by the Guardian. We refused to accept our defeat. Six long months on the run with all of us desperately clinging to a failing shred of hope, only to discover that our friend and leader had been killed. No, scratch that, I misspoke. We were more than friends. We were family, and we were bound by the blood we had shed in the defense of others. It was a brother we had lost.

  Due to treachery and deceit, my brother had fallen. We began to plan. We had long discussions about how we could take down Major Crass and the Monster. Unfortunately, the obstacles against us were too damn insurmountable. Attacking him outright wasn’t going to work. Without our powers, we would have been killed instantly. Our ideas were more like suicide missions, and we were okay with that.

  Ivana tried to talk us down. She didn’t want us to die.

  “We’ve lost so much,” Ivana cried. “I can’t stand to lose anymore. Let’s go away. Let’s go somewhere safe. Please, I’m begging you. I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

  She broke my heart, but I never gave in to her pleas. Neither did Dudley, nor Georgie or Javie. The latter two were quieter in their thoughts, but you could see the hatred boiling just beneath the surface of their calm expressions.

  A few months later, Dudley began to behave erratically.

  Something wasn’t right with him. He began talking to himself at night. He began drinking profusely. We were all worried. He kept his pistol with him at all times, and he began cleaning it every four hours.

  One night, after he had downed an entire bottle of whiskey, he snuck out and assaulted a police officer. By the time we tracked him down, he had the cop on the ground. He had his pistol in the back of the man’s head and was demanding to know where the vampires were hidden.

  It took both Miriam and Ivana to calm him down.

  It was Father Monarez that explained he was exhibiting the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Miriam eventually explained that the Guardian power protected us from such things. Well, we were no longer protected. We moved to the next location a day later.

  Georgie was the next to have problems.

  He was no longer able to sleep at night. Instead, he would pace back and forth in front of his bed. He would also slap himself on the forehead and curse himself for whatever mistakes he blamed himself for making.

  I started getting nightmares. They were horrible dreams. All the people I lost. All the people I saw die. It was rough. After that, I dreamed about zombies. They were chasing me. They were cornering me. Every night in my dreams I would be ripped apart and devoured. I started taking pills in order to stay awake. I started hallucinating from lack of sleep but that was preferable to the nightmares.

  Georgie tried to kill himself.

  We should have seen it coming but we were all too busy dealing with our own private Hells. The things we had seen were just too much. All the violence we had committed was coming back to haunt us.

  It was Ivana that stopped poor Georgie.

  She bandaged up his wrist. She stopped the bleeding. He cried for an entire day, and she held him tightly the entire time.

  “Don’t you leave me, Georgie,” Ivana cried. “Don’t you dare leave me.”

  I started bawling when that happened, because honestly, I had been giving some serious thought about doing the same thing. That’s not easy for me to admit, mind you, but it’s true. I was in bad shape. There was no joy in my life, and I was haunted by all the things I’d been through.

  Dudley was the worst.

  He began to seclude himself from the rest of us. Where Georgie sought our help, Dudley kept his pain to himself. His mental health began to deteriorate rapidly. He no longer bathed. He no longer spoke to the rest of us. He just sat in his room cleaning his pistol every four hours.

  I tried to talk to him.

  “Dudley,” I said. “We’re getting worried about you. All of us are going through the same thing. You need to talk to somebody. Will you come out of your room?”

  He ignored me.

  Soon after that, Father Monarez moved us to another location.

  I’m not sure where we moved that time either; for some reason I’m thinking it was California. There were just so many places. I do remember it was in the woods. We were staying in yet another underground hideout. This one happened to be near a cliff overlooking the ocean.

  Father Monarez once again tried to talk us into moving out of the country. He wanted us to be safe. He could see that we needed help. Javie began to agree with him. Javie, out of all of us, seemed the least affected by PTSD.

  “At that point, how long had you been on the run?”

  We had been on the run about a year and a half. I missed my kids. I would never have let them see me in the state I was in, but I missed them terribly. Father Monarez, Miriam, and Ivana did their very best to hold us together but it was tough. They had three mental cases on their hands, and we weren’t getting any better.

  Dudley began to scream out bloodcurdling screams in the middle of the night. He yelled about taking revenge, but the rest of us no longer shared his thoughts. We knew we were broken. We were but mere shadows of what we used to be.

  I was in the deepest wave of depression yet when Father Monarez came to me a final time.

  “We need to leave this place,” Father Monarez said. “You need help. I can get that for you. I can protect you. I can give you back your life. All you have to do is come with me.”

  The thought of suicide sounded pretty good at that point. Still, I heard his words. I began to wonder if there was a way out. I wanted a way out. I wanted the depression to end. I wanted the nightmares to stop.

  I agreed.

  Georgie was probably worse off than I was, but it still took a while to convince him to leave. He felt that by agreeing to move away, he was turning his back on Jaxon. But Jaxon was gone, and the rest of us were wasting away.

  Ivana was the one that talked him into it in the end. She was the one with the patience needed to get through to him.

  Dudley was next. He pu
nched me in the face the first time I tried to talk to him. He called me a traitor. He swore he’d kill me along with everyone else on his hit list if I ever brought it up again. He wanted to wait. Something would happen. Our time was not over.

  Miriam and Ivana talked to him. Jaxon wasn’t coming back. Never again would any of us be touched by the power of the Guardian. Jaxon wouldn’t want the rest of us to waste away and die. He would want us to grab our chance at a new life and take it.

  “What about Skie?” Dudley asked with tears in his eyes. “Who’s going to rescue her? I feel like such a fuck up. I feel like I should be doing something other than hiding.”

  The guilt was killing him. He was blaming himself for Jaxon’s death. I searched for something to say to him. I came up empty.

  “Come with us,” Ivana said. “We need you. We need your protection. We need you to get back on your feet. Without you, all of us will die.”

  Those were the words that needed to be spoken. Despite all his pain, despite all the suffering Dudley was going through, he would never allow Ivana to come to harm. He would protect her with his dying breath.

  It was decided. We were leaving the country. We were headed for greener pastures under the protection of the church. We would all get the help we needed. We would be safe for the rest of our lives.

  The Men in Black had other ideas.

  Javie and I were packing up the car with our meager belongings when the bullets started flying. I ducked immediately behind our vehicle after getting nicked in the shoulder. Javie began shooting back at them. It had been a long time since they had last found us. I guess we had gotten a little too comfortable, or maybe we just didn’t care as much anymore. Regardless, we were in it big time.

  It figures that things would come down on our heads like that. We had fought them off easily in the past. I mean, there were a few scary moments but we always got away. Now, on the eve of our journey to a better life, they found us again.

  Dudley came out of the underground bunker.

  He wasn’t using cover. He wasn’t trying to keep himself safe. He stood there lining up his shots and shooting our attackers. His shots were perfect. Every time he squeezed his trigger, a man died.