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.
Bolan had been on the receiving end of those savage attacks. He didn’t doubt that Rudd would end up with his throat chewed out or his eyes burst.
At the last moment, the soldier lowered his head and shoulder-blocked the drugged berserker in the small of the back, the force of his impact hurling the brainwashing victim ten feet past Rudd, landing him in the surf. The splash of water over his body didn’t do anything to clarify the killer’s mind as he leaped back to his feet with unnatural speed and strength. Bolan knew that a tackle like he’d given this man would have left anyone else writhing in pain. Even Bolan’s shoulder ached from that contact.
“Well, come on!” Bolan shouted at the blank-eyed man. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but he appeared to have been on a football team. The youth in front of him was as big as the Executioner, and had a thicker musculature, making the soldier think of a linebacker. Tanned and blond, he was undoubtedly an American, and this one would be strong enough to twist Bolan’s head off his shoulders thanks to the chemical cocktail that had reduced him to a feral, froth-mouthed berserker.
Bolan had tried muscle, and ended up slamming into a brick wall, jarred himself by the very impact that had saved Rudd. Pure strength wasn’t going to be enough to end this conflict because if he struck any harder, he’d kill the young man. It was time to outfight, using his intellect. He summoned up his best “drill sergeant” voice and taunted the berserker again. “Kill me!”
That order spurred the linebacker-size attacker to charge, blind rage spurring him on. Bolan threw himself at the charging drug-crazed assassin, but he aimed low, striking the man across the thighs and flipping him head over heels. The berserker tumbled into the sand, throwing up a cloud, and the thud that resounded from his fall was a powerful drumbeat. The big killer’s eyes were now unfocused, dazed from the crash, and Bolan didn’t waste a single moment, scissoring his legs around his neck.
With all the leverage and strength of his calves and ankles pressing on either side of the marauder’s neck, Bolan had him locked in a true sleeper hold, not pinching the windpipe shut but pressing the knots of bone around his ankles against blood vessels that fed the brain. Deprived of fresh oxygen, the killer’s fevered brain faltered, losing consciousness even as the berserker clawed at Bolan’s shins.
The soldier grimaced, but with a proper sleeper hold applied, the would-be murderer was slumped, out cold in the sand.
“What the hell is going on?” Rudd asked, his voice shaky.
“Check on Antoine. One of these crazies chopped off his hand,” Bolan ordered.
Rudd paused, blinking at the bloodied and battered Executioner in front of him.
“Move it!”
Rudd’s senses returned to him and he rushed to the badly wounded teen’s side. Bolan knew that he’d have to find some form of cord to apply a tourniquet to the stump; direct pressure wasn’t going to work.
Luckily, the maniacal assassin had a belt on. Bolan whipped it out of the unconscious brute’s belt loops and started to stagger to Antoine’s side.
The only warning that the Executioner had of
