State Of War. Don Pendleton

him! Kill him!”

      Bolan staggered. He couldn’t tell if his armor had held and couldn’t get any air into his lungs. Three junkies converged on him, and Bolan’s limbs responded too slowly to stop them. The iodine and death stench was overpowering as they swarmed him. Another arm snaked around Bolan’s neck. A ten-inch boning knife chopped into the degraded armor covering Bolan’s chest. A fist crashed into his jaw. Bolan shot out his hand and seized the throat of the knife-wielder. With her hood fallen back, she was little more than a halo of wild hair and stark bones. The soldier’s fingers sank into the suppurating wounds where she had been injecting into her neck. Two more croc-zombies hit the pile of horror, and Bolan found himself in a rugby scrum of the living waiting to be dead.

      A girl grabbed his arm in spindly hands. A palpable cloud of corruption exhaled out of the dying junkie’s mouth and broken and rotting teeth sank into Bolan’s biceps. Another set of teeth sank into his thigh. The knife chopped into the soldier’s chest again, and this time he felt the cold burn as it slid home and the hideous grating on bone as it jammed between his ribs. Another fist hit him in the face and more hands grabbed at his legs.

      The paean of dead junkies walking was almost a moan of benediction.

      “Kill him! Kill him!”

      The knife ripped free from Bolan’s ribs and the skeletal, witch-thing wielding it pulled back for another stab. A small revolver popped from one side, and Bolan took three more in the chest. He dropped to one knee as a starving, rotting junkie chop-blocked him in the back of his legs. Bolan felt tooth stumps scrape against the back of his neck as suppurating limbs smothered him.

      The ghouls were dragging him down.

      Bolan roared like the apex predator he was and erupted upward.

      The knife-wielder shrieked and took her blade overhead in both hands for the kill shot. Bolan snapped his head forward in a butt. The junkie would most likely not even register a smashed septum or cracked cheekbone. Bolan went skull to skull. Purple pinpricks danced around his vision, but his would-be butcher dropped like a bullock in the slaughter shoot.

      The Executioner risked multiple concussions and snapped his head backward into the face of a junkie biting at his nape. He felt a jaw break and that gave him just enough room to rip his arm free from the ghoul eating his biceps. He gave the withered, rotting girl an elbow that sent teeth flying and eyes rolling. The addict chewing on his leg took a knife hand to the temple and went boneless. The chop-blocker was still on hands and knees, and Bolan drove his heel into the top of the addict’s right hand and shattered it.

      A Goth-looking junkie screamed and shoved his revolver forward. “Die! Why don’t you die?”

      Bolan jerked his head aside as the revolver snapped and spit fire. The hair ripper behind him howled as he took a bullet in the shoulder. The soldier chopped his left hand into the shooter’s needle-tracked wrist and the revolver went flying. He took his bit of room and spun, his back fist unhinging the addict’s jaw. The drug-addled assassin dropped to his knees. Bolan slammed a knee up into his jaw and sent him into a temporarily blissful sleep.

      Savacool’s rifle broke into rapid semiauto fire. Bolan heard tires squeal out on the street, but he had no time for it.

      Kaino was suddenly beside him and he dropped junkies with Ali-worthy left jabs and Foreman-worthy rights.

      The crowd fell back.

      Bolan suddenly had space. He stood with his bloodied fists clenched. The mob’s moral check returned. The degenerate drug addicts reverberated between the two opposing poles of need and fear, but the battle dynamic in West Miami had changed. The dozen junkie croc-zombies still standing visibly deflated like balloons. Bolan’s voice was ice-cold. “Now, which one of you primate, screw heads lit up my ride?”

      A frizzy-haired young man with a claw hammer in his hand dropped his weapon on Savacool’s lawn and fell to his knees in supplication. “Please...”

      “All of you!” Bolan bellowed. “On your knees! Now!”

      The standing junkies knelt. Some moved to hands and knees and others assumed the prone position with obvious practice. Savacool came down the steps with her weapon shouldered.

      Bolan looked out onto the road. “He got away?”

      “I didn’t want to risk firing into the crowd when he fired into you. I got a shot at him when the van screamed up, but I don’t know if I hit him. I gave the van the rest of my magazine.” Savacool shook her head unhappily. “He got away.”

      Kaino stared at Bolan in awe. “I have never seen anything like it.”

      Bolan took in the army of broken, moaning, drug-addicted and rotting humanity littering the field of battle by firelight. “Neither have I.”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Mercy Hospital, Miami

      The doctor was appalled, both by Bolan’s smell and by his condition. She shook her head at the massive, blackening contusions where Bolan’s armor had taken .44 Magnum hits and held. “These are firearm-related blunt trauma contusions, Mr. Cooper?”

      “Yes, ma’am,” Bolan replied.

      “That one’s a knife?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      Dr. Gubatan had already known the answers. She sucked in her breath as she looked at his neck, biceps and thigh. “These are human bite wounds?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “I’m required to inform you that I must report this to the police.”

      Agent Savacool held up her badge. “It’s already been reported to the FBI.”

      Dr. Gubatan sniffed Bolan again. It was pretty clear it was a smell she had encountered before. “This wouldn’t happen to be related to an incident in the West Miami area that is blowing up across all channels?”

      “Doctor, I’m afraid I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

      There were few things E.R. doctors in Miami hadn’t seen. Dr. Gubatan was even shorter than Savacool but about five times as wide. She scowled at the FBI ID like it was a personal affront, but her features set into a grimace of concern as she prodded Bolan’s blackening biceps. “The bite wounds are already going septic.”

      Bolan wasn’t surprised, but he just didn’t have time for hepatitis. Anything even more chilling that a krokodil addict’s bite might be carrying would just have to be dealt with later. “I’ll need a round of full spectrum antibiotics.”

      “You’re telling me.” Dr. Gubatan left the room nearly at a sprint while rapidly typing into her tablet. A nurse came in and began cleaning the bites.

      “You all right?” Savacool asked.

      “I feel like a zombie crawl just stomped a mud hole in me and tried to chew it dry. With a few shootings and stabbings in the mix.”

      “No, Cooper. You went down in that rotting crowd, and I was too scared to shoot into it. Are you okay?”

      “That was bad,” Bolan admitted.

      Savacool was about an inch from collapsing in tears. “I’m still shaking.”

      Bolan nodded. “Me, too.”

      Savacool laughed, but it was laced with tension. “Not you! You’re stone cold.”

      “I shake on the inside. I don’t shake on the outside until the job is done.” Bolan winked. “And I’m someplace safe with someone I like.”

      “You know? Speaking as a black female Southern FBI agent—you’re the first man of any color or description who ever made sensitive sound cool.”

      “That’s how I roll.”

      “So how are you?”

      “Hungry.