Free Zombie Killers: AMBUSH: Irregular Scout Team One Book Six (Zombie Killer Blues 6) by John F Holmes Page A

Orange.” I grunted in surprise as she unstrapped my spare prosthetic leg from her pack. I started to strap it on, but fell over, exhausted and feverish.
    Crawling over to where Martin lay on the ground, stood up, and jammed my boot down on his shattered hip, making him scream. “That’s right, fucker,” I whispered in his ear. “Were you raised a Catholic, Martin? Want me to get you a priest? Absolve you of your sins?”
    He nodded his head yes, and I knew I had hit the mark. Irish Corrections Officer. “Well, guess what. No absolution for you. You’re going to hell. I’m going to let you bleed out here, and die slow.”
    I saw the fear in his eyes, and he gripped my shirt. “Please, don’t let me die!” he whimpered. Coward. I stood up again and kicked his wound, feeling the bones grate together, and although I was satisfied by his scream, I didn’t enjoy it. It took a full minute for him to die, and I watched the whole time, then went back to the tree.
    I sat there, next to Brit, and watched the teams in action in the growing morning light, looking through the open gate. They moved quickly and smoothly, assaulting each building in turn by kicking in the door, tossing in a flashbang, and then flowing in smoothly to engage any targets inside. Their weapons were suppressed, so the assaults were silent, except for the screams of women and children and the harsh guttural shouts of men in combat. Twice we heard return gunfire, and after assaulting the third building on the street, the boom of a shotgun. One of my team mates came limping over to us, blood streaming down his leg, and I recognized Captain Hideyoshi, who I hadn’t seen since Seattle. The other guys had put Billy Ball into a body bag, zipped it closed. I always hated that, when the zipper went up over their pale bloody faces, and I thought how it must feel to be zipped in alive … Brit shook me.
    “Hey, don’t get like that. Shit happens. He knew what he was getting in to when he came down here, and he knew you would have done the same for him.”
    “I know, but…”
    “But my ass, Nick. No darkness for you. You stumbled on a bunch of slaver keeping bastards; if you hadn’t come down here on your midlife crisis vacation, all these people would still be slaves, and that sick fuck Martin would still be torturing people.”
    Around the settlement, the gunfire had died out, finally stopping all together. An older black man, who I assumed was Colonel Jackson, came walking up, a bloody axe in his hand, leading more than two dozen other people of various color, including a bunch of whites. As if to punctuate what Brit had been saying, he reached down, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me up and into a bear hug, almost squeezing the life out of me.
    “I just want to thank you” he said, then taking a step back to encompass all of us “you and all your friends, for setting us free.” The crowd spontaneously burst into cheers and applause, and I sat back down, embarrassed.

Chapter 227
    “And what” asked Ryan Szimanski, dragging a bloody Burns behind him “do we do with this piece of shit?”
    I turned to Colonel Jackson. “This is yours to deal with, unless you want me to. I have the authority under Martial Law, but I think your people might want a crack at him. Remember, though,” I said as I saw the hate blaze up in his eyes “justice, not revenge, Colonel.”
    Jackson cooled off a bit, and Ryan dumped Burns on the ground in front of me, not too gently. He fell hard; a lot of the blood on him must have been his own. Jackson turned to me and said “You do it. You’re the law; if I do it, it’s being a vigilante.”
    I nodded and stood over him. “Burns, under the Emergency Powers Act and Section One of the Thirteen Amendment to the Constitution, I hereby charge you with unlawful enslavement of United States Citizens. Also, you swore an oath as a corrections officer to protect and serve the people of the State of New York. By your own words,