Blood & Tacos #2

by Ray Banks

  Blood & Tacos

  Issue 2

  Summer 2012

  Published by Creative Guy Publishing

  ISSN 1929-011X

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents:

  Welcome Back!

  End of the Renaissance

  The Xander Pursuit (review)

  Never Say Good Night in Saigon

  Burn In

  SNIPER! Blast Out in Lebanon (review)

  Operation Scorpion Sting

  FROM AMERICAN VIKING TO ZANE: A Brace Godfrey Chrestomathy (review)

  The G-String Gundown

  From The Publisher

  Welcome Back!

  Welcome back! CGP is very pleased to present another issue of blood and guts, mayhem and … tacos.

  By now you’ve had a while to get to know what we’re all about, but if for some reason you missed that stage, feel free to click on the About link above to see where we’re going with all this.

  There was a time when paperback racks were full of men’s adventure series. Next to the Louis L’Amours, one could find the adventures of The Executioner, the Destroyer, the Death Merchant, and many more action heroes that were hell-bent on bringing America back from the brink. That time was the 1970s & ’80s. A bygone era filled with wide-eyed innocence and mustaches.

  Those stories are back! The quarterly magazine Blood & Tacos is bringing back the action, the fun, and the adventure. Also, the mustaches.

  In each issue of Blood & Tacos, some of today’s hottest crime writers will choose an era and create a new pulp hero and deliver a brand-new adventure. Each issue will include 5-6 stories featuring action-packed mayhem written in the style of that bygone era. The stories might not always be politically correct, but whether satire or homage, they will deliver on every page. Fast and fun, action and adventure, Blood & Tacos.

  Within these virtual pages, we’ll bring you fiction, reviews, artwork, even a recipe or two, all centering around those halcyon days when most questions could be answered by a pistol-whipping.

  So dive into our current issue and enjoy stories by all those authors listed on the snazzy cover. We at Blood & Tacos would like to specifically thank Roxanne, Michael Batty, and all the authors and reviewers for their efforts in helping us bring this ridiculously awesome business to life.

  DEAD EYE in: End of the Renaissance

  By Guy Rivera

  (discovered by Ray Banks)

  As RAY BANKS is the definitive authority on the life and work of Guy Rivera, I will defer to him for insight. From the introduction to his monograph, "The Writer, the Man, the ‘Guy’: A Critical Deconstruction of Guillermo Rivera":

  "Guillermo ‘Guy’ Rivera (1935–1989) is primarily known as the creator of the Dead Eye series, which started with Dead Eye (1979) and ended with the posthumous Lay Down Your Arms (1990). The series was, as Rivera himself put it, "the sum total of my passions*," and was a sometimes schizophrenic attempt to mix the legends of Zatoichi and Zorro with spaghetti westerns, Italian Mad Max rip-offs and leftist political ideals. A heavy smoker and drinker, Rivera died of congestive heart failure in 1989 in his home town of Agua Prieta, Mexico.

  * "In the Zone," interview with Bob Leland in Dangerous Horizons magazine, July 1988.

  They were headed for Yuma, six of them in the back of an open truck, another two squeezed into the cab. They’d been travelling for a couple of hours when they saw the young Mexican kicking dirt by the side of the road. The Mexican wore a dark suit, and a pristine white shirt. On his feet were black cowboy boots with silver spurs that jangled every time he dug his toe into the dirt. He carried a white stick in both hands. Behind his sunglasses, his sightless eyes were open and dead in their sockets. He said his name was Victor Cruz, and he was grateful for the ride.

  Eduardo, a talkative man with a farmer’s accent, was the one who told Cruz where they were going. There was work in Yuma, he said. They were trying to rebuild, start again. Cruz nodded like he was listening, but all he really heard was an old story badly told. There was no hope in Yuma. There was no hope anywhere.

  After a while on the road, Cruz closed his eyes, a force of habit, and felt himself drift, the gentle rocking of the back of the truck like a hand on a cradle.

  The workers smelled of stale sweat, even staler mescal and nickel cigars. They chattered about television, the US Army rerun favorites that had the main character’s name in the title—Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett—and then they talked about drinking and gambling and their families. They complained about money, and there was a brief spate of filthy joke one-upmanship, culminating in a long story about a vaquero’s daughter with a snatch like a bucket. The man sitting across from him had too much phlegm in his throat and he breathed heavily. He told a joke about Eduardo’s mother. Eduardo exploded in mock rage. There was laughter, a chorus of jeers and some horseplay—slapping and play-fighting—before Eduardo’s voice cut short and a warm spray hit the side of Cruz’s face.

  He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. He felt the air buffet at his right, Eduardo toppling forward into the middle of the truck. The other men panicked. Shouting, moving around, a lot of noise.

  They were so loud that Cruz barely heard the second shot.

  One of the front tires blew. The truck fishtailed. Cruz hung on. He turned his face upwards. The sun was gone, so they were in the mountains. Which meant there was a sniper up there somewhere and his aim was good. Cruz yelled at the men to jump. He felt hands on him, guiding him to the back of the truck as it careened off the road. Then he leapt, airborne for split-second before he dropped to the ground, kneeled into a roll which he broke by digging his stick into the dirt and hoisting himself upright. He heard the men scatter around him, looking for shelter. He heard them yelling at each other.

  Then he heard the other men. They shouted in bad Spanish and better English. They were broad-voiced, professional bullies, the kind of men whose confidence came from the large guns they pointed at small people.

  Cruz spat the foul taste out of his mouth and turned. The men continued to yell in a monotone. "Get on the ground, face down, palms flat, mouth to mud, mouth to goddamn mud." He heard the workers do as they were told. He tapped one of them with his white stick as he walked past. They were all on the ground. That was good. It meant they wouldn’t get in the way.

  Another shout, rising in pitch. The man shouting at him was keyed up and obviously armed, and there was already too much blood in the air for him to take it easy.

  "Get your ass in the dirt, Pedro. Mouth to mud."

  Cruz stopped. His left hand moved to the top of his white stick, his thumb pointed up. One man in front of him, over six foot in height, the smell of fresh sweat on him and something else, unnatural, coming in small bursts, punctuated by a wet clicking sound that came from his mouth.

  Juicy Fruit.

  The gum, accent and psychosis added up to an American, and not a soldier, but Army trained. A merc, then, and a cocky one at that.

  He felt a punch in the middle of his back. "You deaf? Down on the ground."

  Similar height to Juicy Fruit. He’d shoved with his right hand, which put the gun in his left and made him a southpaw. He heard the scuff of a boot about thirty feet away behind him to his left, at about eight o’clock. A cleared throat belonged to another merc about ten feet behind the Pusher. That was four. Probably at least another two in the pickup that rumbled at one o’clock, no doubt blocking the Mexican truck’s path. This new pickup was a customized Dodge, the chassis hanging low and most likely armored. It was tooled under the hood, a high-horse police interceptor engine
with a nitro feed. That kind of customization was a white man’s folly, and one that required money, just like this small private army that surrounded him.

  Six of them, maybe more, armed with machine guns and God only knew what else.

  Cruz liked those odds. They were interesting.

  "Goddamn it," said the Pusher. He scuffed his boot, telegraphed his move to shove another square hand against Cruz’s back.

  Cruz dropped, twisted, let the white stick show itself as a shikomizue, separated now into blade and cane, and then he lifted the sword high, hard and tight. He jammed the sword up under Pusher’s ribs and swung him round as he heard the thump of rifle butt to Juicy Fruit’s shoulder. Juicy Fruit unleashed a bark of bullets that tore the scream from Pusher just as quickly as they tore through his back. Cruz leaned in, found Pusher’s sidearm with his free right hand, pulled it upside down and squeezed the trigger with his little finger until he heard Juicy Fruit hit the dirt. He straightened, tossed the sidearm, kicked Pusher from the blade and then dropped to where Pusher’s rifle lay. A rattle of machine gun fire tore up the ground by his knee. Cruz span, pointing the rifle at the source, let rip in a tight arc, round after round punching through flesh, metal and rock before the clip snapped empty. He tossed the rifle, picked up his sword and rose through a blanket of smoke.

  Someone behind him, approaching slowly. Cruz waited, played dumb until the sneak was within range, and then swiped a high boot across his face. Spur caught cheek, there was a brief sound of skin flapping like a pennant in a strong wind, and then Cruz lunged with the sword. The sneak grabbed Cruz’s shoulders. Cruz pushed him off and heard him drop.

  Breathing hard. Throat dry. Again, waiting.

  If there were any alive and well, they’d try to kill him. They always did.

  But there was something else. A slow clap that sounded as if it came from the Dodge. Cruz raised his head.

  "Very good, Mr. Cruz."

  Cruz smelled ozone, heard a crackle off to his right, growing louder.

  And then something grabbed him by the heart and the world shattered into nothing.

  He awoke to the smell of a woman, the touch of a woman and the voice of a woman telling him to be still. He ignored her, tried to sit up, but someone had replaced his spine with an iron rod and his head with a cement block. He grunted in pain and felt himself weaken. The woman hushed him back to the pillow. She spoke Spanish, she was young and she smelled like the air after it rained. She had a voice that spoke to him from the past, reminded him of girls who were too pretty to talk to, and for a second he felt like drifting off again.

  "Where am I?" he said.

  "Fort Johnson." She moved a cloth over his forehead. "You are a guest of Captain Glenister."

  "Guest?"

  "Yes, señor. He looks forward to meeting with you."

  Cruz moved away from her. The simper of the "señor," the lightness of her touch and her cowed manner told him she was a whore. She stayed away as he shifted himself upright and gritted the pain away long enough to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. His boots found a stone floor. He tapped the floor with one foot. They’d taken his spurs. He felt the girl move to the end of the bed, heard her dip the cloth in water. He stood slowly and stamped his boots a couple of times, just to hear the echo. He was in a small room, open to a corridor to his left. He went over to the open space and his hands found bars. He breathed out. No spurs, no stick, and a whore to keep him company.

  "What’s your name?" he said.

  "Rita."

  "What is this place, Rita?"

  "This is Fort Johnson. This is Captain Glenister’s new settlement."

  "A building?"

  "A town. Built by us for them."

  "Them?"

  "The Renaissance Men, señor."

  The Renaissance Men. Of course. Back before the Wall, there had been a border, and that border had been patrolled by a group called the Civil Defense Corps. These men and women good and true used to pack high-caliber hunting rifles into their armored trucks and go looking for wetbacks to cap.

  Good clean American fun.

  When the Wall went up, the corps members lucky enough to have made it to Mexico or the Upper States became Minutemen, Wall walkers. They were cowardly scum to a man, smug and fat and safe behind the scope of their sniper rifles, and Cruz had already burned a few on his travels, but they were saints compared to The Renaissance Men. The Minutemen went home at night; The Renaissance Men continued fighting their good fight and broadcasting their white power propaganda to what was left of the nation. Captain Glenister must have been this chapter’s leader. It wasn’t a name he knew, but he would soon enough. Because Glenister had known his name, and that spelled trouble of a different sort.

  "How many of us are there?"

  "I do not know, señor. Hundreds, maybe a thousand. The men they keep in barns down by the river, the women in dormitories by the big house. The men work until they fall."

  "And the women?"

  "We are for play."

  He returned to the bed and took Rita’s hand in his own. He touched something rough and raised on the back of her hand. "What’s this?"

  "They mark us, señor, they—"

  He put a finger to her lips. She breathed warmly against his touch. He leaned in to her. "Tell me everything you know about this place, Rita. And tell me as quickly as you can."

  He counted the steps from the cells to what Rita had called the big house. Two armed guards flanked him. They were both taller than him and they didn’t speak much. They smelled of good sleep, old sex and chewing gum.

  Rita had spelled it out for him, every last inch of it, so he could almost picture the journey he was on. He’d been in a cell down in an annex to the whores’ dormitory. The cells were rarely used. "The men have cattle prods," she’d said, and if the rebellion was any more serious than that, the offending party would be shot in the head as an example to the others.

  Workers, and their lives, were cheap.

  The stone corridors led to somewhere warmer and softer, and then outside, where Cruz felt the wind on his face. The wind carried the sound of the workers from down in the valley. It was all mechanical noise. No voices other than the odd shout from one of the guard, who tagged their pep talks with racial slurs.

  It was a short walk across open ground to the big house. This was where Glenister and his men stayed. Cruz was taken up four steep wooden steps that led to a porch and the front doors of the big house. The way Rita described it, the place must have resembled something like a plantation house, a huge white palace on a big brown hill. Inside, it was supposed to be decorated with scavenged luxury. The floor under Cruz’s feet was marble and his steps echoed through the large entrance hall as he was led to Glenister’s office.

  Captain Troy Glenister was a man who wore his influences on his sleeve. Rita had talked of a room draped with the stars and stripes and hung with paintings of stern men in old-fashioned clothes. Glenister’s chair was leather, large and heavy. It had to be, because Glenister himself was large and heavy. His breathing was labored, but Cruz didn’t take that as a sign the man was weak, just that he was overweight. The clicking sound that came from somewhere near his lap meant that Glenister was playing with Cruz’s shikomizue, sliding the sword from the cane and replacing it.

  When he spoke, his voice was thick with butter and low like a Baptist preacher. "I must say, Mr. Cruz, this toothpick of yours is quite the weapon. Doesn’t look like much at first glance, and yet you used it to carve up my boys like they were wet-eared grunts. Even more impressive considering your obvious handicap. You are actually blind, aren’t you?"

  Cruz nodded.

  "Not so impressive that you couldn’t see a shocker coming, of course." He chuckled. It was a throaty sound. "You’re not the only one around here with a talent for customization."

  "It won’t happen again," said Cruz.

  "I’m sure it won’t." Another click, louder, Glenister shutting the shikomizue unnecess
arily hard. "Perhaps I should have shot you. But the thing is, Mr. Cruz, I’m not a bad man, despite what that little whore may have told you. If I was a bad man, I’d have my boys pop a head every time someone looked weary. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of providing them with the cattle prods." He cleared his throat. "A chain boss don’t blow holes in his own damn gang just because they set it down without permission. Hell, you’d never achieve anything that way. Have one guy dragging six corpses, and besides, I’m well-versed in psychology, Mr. Cruz. I know the beaner mind. If I had my boys use deadly force every time your Pedro pals out there acted uppity, we’d have rivers of blood. A beaner would rather die than work hard, am I right?"

  Cruz smiled but said nothing.

  "But you buzz the son of a bitch with a thousand volts, he’ll know who holds his balls. And he’ll sure as hell think twice about resisting the yoke again."

  "Or he’ll learn to avoid the buzz," said Cruz.

  "Nah, your average beaner don’t think like that."

  "I do."

  "I said average beaner." There was a smile in his voice. "You’re Victor Cruz, boy. You’re the Dead Eye. Ain’t nothing average about you."

  "The price," said Cruz.

  "You’re goddamn right, the price." There was a wet sound as Glenister rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth. It was the noise of a hedonist. He ate too much, smoked too much, drank too much, and if Cruz didn’t kill him, a venereal disease would.

  "How much is it?"

  "Six million."

  "Old or new?"

  "Old."

  Getting up there. Add a couple of thousand for every uniform slashed to ribbons, every milk-fed American mouth that bit the dust. It would be a lot more soon enough.

  "I don’t see how you’re worth it," said Glenister. "But then I didn’t see the beauty in this here sword stick, either."

  "You want me to show you?"

  Another throaty laugh. "You’re unarmed and blind, and you don’t know what I have pointed at you."