Grave Mercy

With a kick, Bolan freed his foot from the board’s leash. He speared into the surf with lightning quickness. Even as he swam to shore, powerful chest and shoulder muscles exploding with force that thrust him to land, another detail came to the forefront of his thoughts.

The man’s eyes.

They were blank, unfocused, even though his lips were peeled back from his teeth in an enraged rictus.

Bolan had encountered chemically reprogrammed opponents before. They were driven by their orders, sanity ripped from their drugged minds. The poor, brainwashed zombies felt little pain and even less restraint, using every ounce of their strength at such a rate that even when they recovered from their altered mental states, their bodies were wrecks.

Because of that wild abandon, their strength pushed beyond their normal limits.

Even at his strongest, Bolan was hard-pressed to deal with these blank-eyed murderers.

The Executioner dug his feet into the sand, pushing toward the man. He would make no excuses for failure.

Not when children were in the path of a machete-wielding maniac.

THE CREATURE THAT HAD once been Guillermo Rojas winced as the first rays of light poured in from the opened doors of the shipping container on the back of the truck. With that first touch of day, he burst through the door with savage fury and speed. He didn’t notice the harsh gravel that sliced the soles of his feet.

What he was aware of was the extra weight in his right hand. Memories were few and far between in his chemically landscaped brain, but he recognized the object as a fearsome weapon, almost as long as a sword. He didn’t know the word for it—he had no more words for anything. He did remember the depthless joy he felt when he had sunk such a thing into human flesh, a cathartic jolt of vengeance that rolled through him.

More thoughts coalesced in his fevered mind, clearing through his fog of madness. Pain and terror washed over him in unyielding waves, phantom memories of injuries inflicted at the hands of people—blacks, whites, men, women, adults and children. All of their faces and appearances were associated with agony and impotent horror. His only anchor was a single voice cutting through the omnipresent nightmare.

“Kill them!” the resonating voice boomed. “Kill them and end the fire in your blood!”

Rojas understood only two words, but they were all he really needed now. He had to lash out and destroy everyone because they were all a part of the torture he’d been subjected to. All the addled medical student knew was that humanity as a whole had turned on him, scourging his flesh and sanity. He also had a hint, a feint trace of another loss, a beautiful golden angel.

That pushed Rojas forward, and he staggered on, hearing the lilt of music and bubbling laughter of joy. He knew the sounds of the creatures who had left him to suffer unspeakable horrors.

What Rojas hadn’t seen were his fellow brainwashed assassins, two more men and two young women, all wielding machetes. The five of them charging toward the surf camp’s sounds. Rojas had been programmed to ignore them, his psyche masterfully twisted so as to allow Morrot’s killers to work in groups without attacking each other. Injected with amphetamines and twisted by a multimedia assault that filled them with false memories of a living hell, the people were no longer human. They were dedicated attack dogs, no longer possessing pause or reason.

The trees and foliage between Rojas and his prey were little impediment to him. Despite branches and blades of tall grass gouging his chest and legs, he barreled through the undergrowth. The others were slower, or simply taking the path of least resistance.

Nothing would keep him from the bloody revenge he sought.

Not even the man who charged out of the water, naked except for surfer shorts and a black sheath on his leg.

Rojas opened his mouth, releasing a wild screech, raising the machete to attack.

CHAPTER FOUR

Any doubt that Mack Bolan possessed that the machete-wielding Latino was reduced to an animalistic state disappeared when he released an unholy howl that split the air, turning the heads of a half dozen kids lounging and listening to music on the sand. Running through water and in wet sand felt like trying to pull his feet out of the tendrils of a hungry octopus, but his long legs gave him enough of a stride to reach the edge of the water.

The attacker’s maniacal eyes flitted toward the prone children who weren’t aware of their danger. Bolan knew he only had a few moments to stop him.

“Over here!” he called, the boom of his voice pinning the drugged man’s dead, cold eyes to him.

Another bestial hiss erupted from him and he swung his machete toward Bolan. In any confrontation between human and terrain chopper, the foot-and-a-half-long blade won every time, so Bolan didn’t bother with blocking. He sidestepped, avoiding the swing that started from above the attacker’s head and ended up slicing only air.

Bolan considered drawing the Atomic dive knife, but he could see that his opponent was young and despite his scratches and blank gaze, it was possible that he was an American. It didn’t take much more than a gauge of his age to realize that this could be one of the kidnap victims, and as such, one of the many innocent lives that he’d sworn to protect.

In the Executioner’s world, there was no such thing as an acceptable loss. Once the machete reached the nadir of its arc, Bolan lunged, putting both hands around his opponent’s forearm. With a hard yank, Bolan pulled the man’s face into his left shoulder, letting the uninjured joint take the brunt of the collision. Jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch and the drugged maniac’s eyes rolled in their sockets.

Such chemically enhanced foes were mostly immune to the pain of conventional punches, bullets and blades, but the Executioner was a master of all manner of combat. As such, he knew the weak points of the human body, and the trunk line of nerves just under the ear and behind the jaw was one such place that even in a haze of painkilling amphetamines would stop a person with one blow. The would-be killer jarred into submission, Bolan turned his attention toward disarming him.

A shriek from behind—the spine-chilling wail of a terrified child—turned him away from his attempt to render his attacker harmless. Two more figures rushed into view, blades held over their heads. Suddenly the Executioner found himself outnumbered, and his concern for the suffering of his opponent disappeared. With both hands holding the man’s forearm still, he knifed his knee into it. With a snapped ulna and humerus, the man’s grip on the machete disappeared.

That accomplished, Bolan released the limb and brought his left elbow up hard, another crashing blow across the man’s jaw that threw him into the sand, senseless and barely mobile.

He turned to see a growling young woman with ratty black hair rushing in pursuit of a ten-year-old boy, her intent to bury her blade in the kid’s back. Her rage was so focused on the youth that the Executioner was able to catch her by surprise, hammering his right forearm across her throat in a clothesline maneuver. The healed stab wound released a spike of complaint, and it felt as if the young woman had run headfirst into his ribs, but at the end of the collision, she was flat on her back and Bolan still stood.

She screeched in frustration, her blank, feral gaze locked on the man who’d stopped her. She still held on to her machete, but Bolan hopped over her and landed one heel hard into the inside of her elbow. The joint popped loudly, and she, too, was disarmed, but clawing, jagged fingernails sliced into the warrior’s right thigh, planing off ribbons of dermis.

Bolan cracked his heel against the young woman’s jaw, feeling it dislocate under the force of his back kick, and while it cut off her animalistic growls, she was still reaching up with her left arm to hook her gnarled fingers into his crotch. He sidestepped her effort to geld him and gave her another kick, this time to her temple. Even as he did so, he caught sight of his male attacker in his peripheral vision, bursting up from the sand in a rampaging rush.

The Executioner turned and met the man’s charge with his right elbow striking him in the collarbone. Through his arm, Bolan could feel the snap of his opponent’s clavicle, and the drug-crazed killer stopped as if he’d struck a brick wall. Even stunned from Bolan’s countermeasure, the man lashed out blindly with his left hand, fingers reaching for Bolan’s face where they could tear skin and burst one of his eyeballs. The soldier straightened his right arm, a palm strike deflecting those blinding fingernails as he hit the man’s other forearm hard.

A wail of frustration all but split open Bolan’s right eardrum, leaving the soldier wide open for his attacker’s next tactic. The Executioner grimaced as teeth tore into the skin of his right shoulder, splitting flesh and releasing a torrent of blood down his biceps.

With a grimace, Bolan brought up his left palm, jamming the heel of his hand between the eyes of the attacker. It took every ounce of precision not to strike the man in the nose and drive splinters of bone into his brain, but even so, the young Hispanic was going to feel the effects of his concussion for a long time. The blow literally lifted his attacker off Bolan’s shoulder and sent him crashing into the sand.

The young woman he’d clotheslined took the brief moments of scuffle as an opportunity to rise into a crouch. Her hand was nearly around the haft of her machete. Bolan regretted the need to cripple her, but she was determined to carve up a fellow human being. He kicked her in the wrist, snapping it like a twig and knocking her into the sand. Her howl was not of pain, it was too forceful, and her bared teeth were poised to rip open Bolan’s calf. He pivoted and snapped his heel into her forehead with the same force he’d use to kick open a locked door.

If she survived, she’d need plenty of physical therapy to use both of her hands again, and Bolan wasn’t certain he’d restrained himself enough to avoid giving her brain damage. She was still, for now, and that was all that mattered because there was a third killer on the loose, a fourth and a fifth now in view.

It was as if someone had released a pack of velociraptors onto the beach, bestial shrieks filling the air. Bolan was already bleeding, though no arteries had been bitten, and he’d only dealt with a young man and an even smaller woman. He watched Spaulding wrestling with one of the attackers, a screeching little woman with dirty blond hair and thick legs that had wrapped around his torso.

The surf camp owner’s face was a crimson mask, and his wobbly legs betrayed severe blood loss or head trauma—perhaps both. As it was, Spaulding was still fighting, holding one at bay while the other two, both young men, were on the rampage. A fourteen-year-old boy stood his ground between one of the assailants and two eight-year-olds. His courage was admirable, but the machete severed his right hand as he held it up to the drug-crazed berserker.

Bolan didn’t have time to make choices, he charged the would-be killer who was about to take more body parts away from the teen. Three long strides turned into a leap, and Bolan hooked his arm around the head and neck of the machete swinger. Two hundred twenty pounds of lean muscle and hard-forged combat skill combined to make the flying tackle into an impact that hammered both men into the ground. Sand flew as the drugged assassin broke Bolan’s fall, and perhaps more than a few ribs.

The crash was hard enough to spin the machete out of his hand, but that only meant that he had a meth-fueled wrestler on the other side of this fight. Bolan didn’t see the looping left that whipped around and struck him in the back of his head. It was an eye-crossing blow, and because he hadn’t loosened up to roll with the punch, it felt as if his brains were sloshing around inside his skull.

Despite the recent impediment, Bolan could see the berserker’s right fist heading straight to his face. He lowered his head swiftly, swinging it into the onrushing knuckles like a wrecking ball. Fingers cracked as they struck the hard curve of bone at his hairline. That was why the Executioner had used the heel of his hand and his foot on the foreheads of his prior two opponents—the head was a tough mass of bone while knuckles were relatively fragile. Even though his foe’s right fist was now a useless jumble of bent fingers, Bolan felt the clawing fingers tearing at his nape and the back of his head. The short wisps of black hair back there were drenched with blood as nails tore skin.

“Enough,” Bolan grunted as he brought up his knee and twisted his opponent down so that he took the kick between his shoulder blades. The heavy vertebrae around his spinal cord was more than enough to prevent the man from ending up crippled, but not by much. Breath escaped his lungs in a fetid explosion.

Bolan took that brief second to slam his elbow into the attacker’s sternal notch. He tried not to let his anger over a crippled boy color his response, but the elbow chop struck the former machete marauder in his xyphoid process, another juncture of nerves and muscle that when struck properly could render a man helpless and breathless until he passed out. Too hard, and the target would die. Too soft, and with lungs full of air, it would just hurt.

The man bent backward over Bolan’s knee froze, his mouth stretched like a landed fish’s as it tried to suck in air, but foiled by unresponsive nerves and muscles. The soldier shoved the marauder off his knee and dropped him in the sand. His first instinct was to tend to the fourteen-year-old whose agonized screams echoed in his conscience, but there was another maniac on the loose with a wicked blade. He moved away from the Jamaican boy reluctantly. He had to locate the fifth of the attackers.

The Executioner turned when a strangled death cry escaped Spaulding’s throat. The dirty-blond psychotic was fighting to rip her chopper out of Spaulding’s skull where it had gotten stuck. Bolan charged toward her, knocking her off the latest addition to his collection of the friendly dead. She couldn’t have been half of Bolan’s weight, so when he shoulder-blocked her in the upper chest, it was like a freight train flattening a compact car. She flew off Spaulding, landing ten feet away, not in much condition to do anything more than gasp for breath.

He took a half of a second to evaluate her condition. Her hands were folded up into the air, twitching at the end of her forearms. Any movement now consisted of involuntary spasms as he’d knocked her completely senseless.

That would do, for now. Bolan had one more menace to stop.

A strange pop filled the air, and the Executioner turned to see Rudd holding his surfboard up, the fifth attacker’s bloody machete lodged in its body.

Bolan broke into a hard run, his long legs pistoning against the sand. Blood rushed, a torrent of thunder rolling through his brain at the same breakneck speed he charged the man attacking Rudd. It was a battle of wills between the two. The machete had been rammed into the surfboard’s fiberglass frame, and the drugged killer was trying to rip it free. It would be only instants before the assassin decided that the struggle wasn’t worth it, and he’d go at the surfer with teeth and nails.