Blood & Tacos #2

Blood & Tacos

Issue 2

Summer 2012

Published by
Creative
Guy Publishing

ISSN 1929-011X

Amazon Kindle Edition

• 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! 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.

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."