Blood & Tacos #1 (4 page)

THE END

Among discoverer
Gary Phillips
' latest is another short
story, "Feathersmith's Excellent Plan," in the
Dead
of Winter
e-anthology, and a collection of his previously published
short stories,
Treacherous:
Grifters, Ruffians and Killers
, is out from Perfect Crime Books.

By Jimmy Callawa
y

Anyone who's spent even a few moments browsing in a used bookstore has seen
them: rack upon shelf upon rack of men's adventure novels. Most prominent is
The Executioner,
created in 1969 by Don Pendleton. Pendleton's protagonist,
Mack Bolan, an Army vet who takes the law into his own hands, is the star of
hundreds of novels.

Hundreds.

Can you even imagine? I mean, I am an avowed comic book nerd, and the big name superheroes I so adore have probably each had a comparable number of adventures. But there's something about these adventure novels that boggles my mind. Maybe it's because there are no pictures or something, I dunno.

Anyways, we're not here to talk about the Executioner series, but its progeny. In the 1970s, when the backlash to the hippie counterculture was at its highest, there were many, many Executioner knock-offs to be found in the spinner racks at your local A&P.
The Destroyer
was a series of kung-fu novels;
The Butcher
was another vigilante who moonlighted at a deli. Or maybe not, there's not a whole lot written about these lesser Bolans, aside from a few largely unreadable fan sites. One of the more popular series of the '70s was
The Penetrator
, who starred in over fifty novels between the years of 1973 and 1984. The fourteenth Penetrator novel was a little ditty with the delightful title,
Mankill Sport.

It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
Mankill Sport.
I dunno, I love it. Unfortunately, the title is the best part of this book, although I have certainly read a lot worse in my time.

Mark Hardin (any similarity to Mack Bolan here is, if not intentional, surely not accidental) is a Vietnam veteran who has come home from the war only to find the freedoms he fought so hard for in Southeast Asia to be taken for granted. Hardin becomes a one-man army, just like Bob McKenzie in
Strange Brew.
Or I guess a two- or three-man army, since he has backing his war Professor Willard Haskins, in charge of intel, and Hadin's trusty Cheyenne sidekick/mentor, David Red Eagle, also in charge of intel, but in a much more spiritual sense. But nothing sissy, y'know, more like a Bruce Lee spiritual.

Mankill Sport
, of course, needs a villain, and it has a doozy with the perfectly named Johnny Utah, drug overlord of Detroit, MI. The book opens with Utah brazenly executing two police officers. Granted, they're crooked police officers, but still. Pretty ballsy, Utah. Utah's M.O. is he runs Detroit, but since he technically lives out in the ‘burbs, the city cops can't bust him since he's bought off the soft, doughy Bloomfield Hills P.D. This seems a bit flimsy on the face of it, but having lived in suburbia all my life and dealing with the fat, mustachioed cops therein, I can believe it.

After this brash display of cop-icide, the Penetrator makes Johnny Utah his next project. Hardin (any similarity to "hard-on" here is, if not intentional, surely really creepy and gross) tracks Utah up into the great white north, which is apparently a beauty way to go (Boom! Two McKenzie brothers references! I'm on fire, don't put me out!)(Okay, you can put me out now). The suspense builds, but if you've been paying any kind of attention and slept through less than two-thirds of freshman English, then you'll likely guess that we're gonna get a rehash of Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game."

Sure enough, the Penetrator angles it so he's captured and held for Utah's most private game reserve, where the eating is good and the hunting is for humans. Naturally, Utah figures he's got the Penetrator right where he wants him, and naturally, he's never been more wrong. The Penetrator overtakes and kills all of Utah's customers on the Bloodlust Ranch, freeing the other captives, and doling out justice to Johnny Utah…Penetrator-style!

All in all, this is a little ring-a-ding dose of post-'Nam soldier-of-fortune
fantasy, written most likely with guys like your dad in mind. It's a fun way
to kill an afternoon, and at the very least read it for the unintentionally
hilarious sub-plot with the Penetrator and his lady love, ex-model Joanna Tabler,
as they discuss marriage and the possibility of a future together in a world
that still needs so much justice. It's a lot of laughs trying to wedge some
kinda feminist commentary into the series. Well, for me, anyways.

Jimmy Callaway lives and works in San Diego, CA, where he edits and writes for
Criminal Complex
among other things.

 
By Clifton Wetzel-Bulinger

(discovered by Cameron Ashley)

This time...they've hunted the wrong albino!

Special thanks to CAMERON ASHLEY for contacting Clifton Wetzel-Bulinger
directly. A lot has changed since this story was published in 1978, and we appreciate
Mr. Wetzel-Bulinger's bravery in agreeing to reprint the story, considering
that he is now the Poet Laureate of the Isle of Man (best known for his villanelle
"Alabaster Rainbows"). Look for the subtle social commentary that marks all
his work, as well as his trademark albinocentric underpinnings.

Bronte Fox slid a pale couple of fingers through the fencing that divided them and stroked The Albino Wino's head. "They hurt you," she said.

The Wino sat up, pulled away from her touch. He inspected his swollen face with his own large, rough hands, and, noting his split lips, he spat out a viscous glob of blood and mucous-flecked saliva upon the straw that lined his cage.

How long had it been since his arrival here at this death farm? Weeks, easily. His hands shook. He needed a drink. Outside of a homemade Merlot that Theseus Jones, the leader of the longhair cult that kept him prisoner, shared with him right before his thrashing, he had gone pretty much sober.

There was a small minibar bottle of cheap rum he kept against his genitals in times of true emergency. And as true emergency was undeniably now, he pulled it free from its hiding place and drained half of it. It was nowhere near enough, but the rum's warmth spread down his throat and into his belly. He lay down in the fetal position (as close as he could get to a full stretch in this welded-together coop) and thought back to how it had all began.

He remembered being sick and tired of the city: Vietnam protestors, music gone to shit, the vestiges of Flower Power clinging more tendril than blossom to the culture at large. Concrete so hot it seemed to sweat. Being rousted from shady spots by cops who had more booze on their breath than he did, traces of whores' smeared pink lipstick on their crotches, bad intentions in their baton swings.

He remembered a brawl with The Silver Dragons, an Oriental street gang from Chinatown who picked on the homeless both for fun and to practice their roundhouses. The ensuing fight, ten-on-one with the one handily winning, was broken up by a big side of beef of a cop who saw the chance to vent some aggression on a stone drunk albino man just trying to get by.

The back-alley brawl was already won, silver satin-jacketed youths sprawled everywhere, their mean streaks punched out of them, at least for now. The cop saw The Wino standing at alley's end, blood dripping from his skinned knuckles, a butterfly knife stuck clean through a segment of thigh. A filthy circus freak, grubby as a pit fighter, pale as the Angel of Death. The cop went straight for him, nightstick swinging like a rotor blade. Little did he know that The Silver Dragons weren't the only cats in town who knew some Kung Fu. The Wino had learned much in his years on the road.

The Albino Wino blocked the first attempt at a braining, grabbing the cop's wrist, snapping it, and peppering his body with palm strikes and chops. The cop staggered back, snarled and scooped up the fallen nightstick with his good hand. The Wino grabbed it as it swung towards him. He snatched it from the cop's grasp at the very same moment he pushed the big cop back with a front kick.

The wino snapped the nightstick over his knee in a hopeful display of don't-mess-with-this-super-whitey and said, "Stop."

The cop shouted, "Screw you, pinky!" and pulled his gun. The Wino hurled a sharp shard of nightstick – he aimed for the gun barrel, but his aim was off, brain fuzzy from some strikes taken in the brawl with the Dragons.

The shard of nightstick buried itself in the cop's jugular. The cop cried out and dropped the gun. He pulled the stake-like piece of wood from his throat. Arterial spray graffitied the alley walls and he fell dead.

The Albino Wino knew he had to split. When the establishment and the anti-establishment were as bad as each other, all a man had was himself, his American know-how, his fists, and his will to survive. The world was going to hell. It was no place for one as distinctively snowy-haired and as alien-eyed as he.

The wino pulled the knife from his thigh. Just a flesh wound. He bound it tight with two tied-together bandanas and looked around for Chalky.

Chalky sat on a trashcan, the bloodied-up corpse of an alley rat in his mouth. As usual, when The Wino found action, Chalky had to have some, too. The Wino scooped up the albino cat, who purred at his touch and closed his eyes, one sky blue, the other emerald green, contentedly as The Wino wrapped him up in his bindle.

The Wino pulled a bottle of something cheap from his mid-size knapsack and took a healthy pull. He came up for air then went in again and drained the bottle.

It was time to hit the road.

It was whimpering that woke him. At first he thought it was Bronte Fox, but
even in the half-light he could tell that the beautiful albiness was not the
source.

It was the man in the third cage.

Bronte crawled to the cage wall that separated her from the Wino. "You passed out. It's Johnny. They took another piece."

In truth, all the Wino wanted to do was stare at Bronte, luminous in the moonlight that filtered through the cracks and gaps in the barn. She was unearthly and elven in her beauty, full-lipped and armed with eyes a hypnotising streak of light blue. Her hair seemed spun of stars, cascading over her slender shoulders.

Johnny cried again and the Wino wrenched his eyes off Bronte and focused on the whimpering mess on the floor of the third cage. The Wino knew little about Johnny. He was the first captured of the three; that much he knew and he knew it only because Bronte had said as much. He didn't care for Johnny, who was a bearded longhair himself – belonging more to the obsolete tribe of hippies refusing to give up their naive dreams of transcendental trips and free love than to the clan of the outcast albino. The Wino knew that there was no place but the here and now and that absolutely nothing was free. Johnny hadn't done himself any favors either, for when the cult members came for him, he begged off, pleading with the shotgun-wielding longhairs to take The Wino first, or Bronte, if only they would spare him. He returned hours later, unconscious and minus an arm.

The other arm had been taken this time. And a foot. Soon there would be nothing left.

As Johnny tried to push himself up off his piss-stained straw with nothing but stumps, The Wino cracked a smile.

Bronte looked at him. "Why are you smiling?"

The Wino playfully put an index finger to Bronte's nose. "Honey, we need something to toast with. Champagne would be perfect but I'll quaff the fumiest, most blindness-inducing hooch from the filthiest inbred-owned still if that's all we could get."

Bronte's brow furrowed. "Why?"

"They're savin' us, honey. They're savin' us for later. We got time to make a plan. Maybe not a lotta time, but we can get outta here."