Blood & Tacos #3 (5 page)

Dax opened his eyes to see that Sheriff Parsons had arrived to greet the trucks. A limo pulled up next to him and a tall, brown-skinned man with dark, slicked-back hair, wearing a dark suit and mirrored sunglasses stepped out. Chico Juarez. All the players were here. Time to mix it up, like a chemist mixing chemicals in a big chemical mixing machine.

Suddenly, something whacked Dax on the back of his skull, and everything went black. Blacker than carbon, thought Dax, which was ironic because carbon’s chemical symbol was C, and he couldn’t.

Dax regained consciousness when someone emptied a bucket of cold water on his head. He was inside the factory, tied to a chair. Around him were dozens of pallets holding plastic bags of crazy candy. Women wearing nothing but g-strings and steel-toed boots loaded the pallets into the trucks on forklifts. Sheriff Parsons, Chico Juarez, and several of his goons stood over Dax.

“Enjoying the view?” asked the sheriff.

“I am, actually,” said Dax, taking a good long look at the warehouse personnel. Either there was a correlation between bust size and forklift proficiency that Dax wasn’t aware of, or these women had been hired as much for their centerfold-quality bodies as for their warehousing skill.

“Women are better workers,” said the sheriff. “We keep them nude so that they don’t try to steal any product. And also so that they are nude.” A stunning redhead walked past with a clipboard, and the sheriff slapped her on the behind. She scowled playfully and went back to work.

“Well, three cheers for equal rights,” said Dax. The sheriff grinned. But Chico Juarez wasn’t in a jovial mood.

“Joo theenk joo can just walk een here and blow up my merchandise?” growled Chico Juarez, in a thick Hispanic accent. He was holding Dax’s pack, which was filled with his custom-made bombs. “Who do joo theenk joo are?”

“Name’s Dax Maxwell,” spat Dax. “I’ve got a score to settle with you. Those are my drugs.”

“Your drugs!” exclaimed Sheriff Parson. He and Chico Juarez laughed the hysterical laugh of evil men.

“How do you figure?” asked the sheriff.

“I came up with the formula,” Dax said. “I’m the only one who has the right to sell that brain-busting bromide, and I’m closing up shop.”

“I remember joo,” said Chico Juarez. “Joor wife screamed like a leetle girl when I killed her. And so deed joor daughter.”

“My daughter
was
a little girl,” growled Dax, straining against his bonds.

Chico Juarez laughed again. “Well, chereeff, maybe we chould let Meester Maxwell sample some of
hees
drugs.” Chico Juarez sneered at Dax, his eyes hidden behind the mirrored shades. Looking into the sunglasses, Dax saw his own reflection, and he reflected on the time he had seen his reflection in the front window of the drugstore earlier that same day, reflecting on his childhood and wondering where it had all gone wrong—and at that point, things hadn’t gone nearly as wrong as they had in the hours since.
Or had they
?

Laughing, the sheriff grabbed a plastic bag full of fairy flakes from a nearby palette, sticking a knife into it and pulling out a knife-full of the demonic dust. He stuck the point of the knife into Dax’s left nostril.

“
Dios mio
!” cried Chico Juarez. “That cloud candy is
dieciocho
times more powerful than regular cocaine. That much will keell him!”

“That’s the idea,” said the sheriff. They both laughed. The sheriff put his hand over Dax’s mouth. “Take a deep breath!”

Dax bit down hard, his incisors puncturing the sheriff’s hand. The sheriff jerked his hand away. The flesh tore, spilling blood on the factory floor. The sheriff screamed, and the goons raised their guns. Dax sucked air in through his mouth and made himself sneeze—a trick he had learned in Nam. A cloud of djinn dust exploded from his nose. As it did, Dax bit down hard on a fake molar and breathed out, blowing a red gas into the cloud. Dax clamped his eyes shut as the two chemicals reacted with a brilliant flash, blinding everyone in the room.

“Nice treeck, Meester Maxwell!” cried Chico Juarez. “But joo’re going to need more than magic treecks to get out of thees one!”

What Chico didn’t know was that the trick wasn’t over yet. The rabbit was out of the hat, but it hadn’t yet transformed into a beautiful dove. Dax had worked for months perfecting the formula for the chemical in his tooth. His eyes still closed, Dax reflected for a moment on the long hours he had spent in his lab, feverishly working on the perfect mixture. It had taken him weeks, barely sleeping, subsisting on a diet of glucose, caffeine, and his own urine. It was probably the most difficult thing he had ever had to do, except for seeing his wife and daughter killed in front of him. That was rough.

The flash disappeared, leaving behind a thick gray cloud that made it impossible to see. Chico Juarez’s goons fired wildly. The cloud’s corrosive properties proceeded to eat through the nylon rope binding Dax’s hands, and soon he was free.

Dax put on a pair of infrared goggles he had hidden in his rectum (behind the bag of corrosive powder he had extracted earlier) and made his way through the maze of blinded goons. Topless women screamed as he ran past, but Dax kept going.

The cloud cleared. “Stop heem!” yelled Chico Juarez.

Dax dove behind a row of barrels as the goons opened fire with their AK-47s and AK-48s. Bullets ricocheted around Dax as the men converged on his position. There was no escape. He was surrounded. Dax began to wonder if he’d gotten the formula wrong. Could it be? After all the hours he had spent in his lab, checking and re-checking all of his calculations, drinking a little urine, and then re-checking them again? Having briefly opened his eyes, he closed them again, re-re-re-checking the calculations in his head. He cursed himself for not bringing any urine with him—but despite its balloon-like elasticity there simply hadn’t been room in his rectum.

Just as the goons were almost upon him, it happened: the corrosive vapor ate through the plastic wrapping around the cocaine on the nearest palette and the contents spilled out. When the pernicious powder made contact with the vapor, it exploded in a flash. Then the rest of the palette exploded with a massive roar, tearing several of the women in half. The bottom half of one woman ran past Dax frantically, spurting blood from her severed abdomen. Dax shook his head. He’d seen a lot of topless babes in his day, but nothing like this.

He had to remind himself that as gorgeous as the women had been before being torn apart, they had gotten themselves into this. Chico Juarez hadn’t shown Dax’s wife any mercy, and Dax wasn’t about to alter his plan to save a bunch of drug-pushing floozies, even if they were knockouts with boobs like giant Bunsen burners.

The blast knocked the goons near Dax off their feet, and Dax got up and ran, making his way past the trucks and into the night. Behind him, a chain reaction was occurring, one palette after another exploding with a deafening roar.

“Noooo!” he heard Chico Juarez cry. Dax turned to see the once-powerful drug lord on his knees, shaking his fists at the heavens in despair, his precious pallets of gutter glitter exploding before his eyes.

“
Adios, muchacho
,” said Dax, as a stack of pallets behind Chico Juarez erupted, ripping Chico Juarez to pieces.

Dax Maxwell stood in the rain, regarding the gravestones grimly. “I did it, baby. I got ’em. For you and Argonia.”

There was no answer, but Dax didn’t expect one. His fingertips traced the lettering on the cold stone, and Dax thought about the acid the gravestone maker had used to etch his wife and daughter’s names into granite. A simple chemical reaction, thought Dax. That’s all it took to mark a piece of stone forever. That’s how his heart felt, a piece of stone forever marked by his memories of Stephanee and Argonia. He had tried to live a normal life, but you couldn’t live a normal life when your heart was made of stone, and it was etched with the names of the dead.

A newspaper fluttered in the wind, coming to rest against his daughter’s gravestone. The headline read:

Son of drug lord Chico Juarez elected mayor of Los Muertos, Mexico

Promises to provide employment for thousands in new lawn furniture factory

Chiquito Juarez swears that factory is not secretly a drug factory for making drugs

So, thought Dax. Drug City has moved south. I guess that’s where I’m headed too. He hitched his pack up his back.

The Chemistrator had work to do.

THE END

Rob Kroese
is the author of the
Mercury Falls
and
Mercury Rises
. The conclusion of the Mercury Trilogy,
Mercury Rests
, is being published by 47North in October.

By Ryan Jackson

Let me just come right out and say that I love exploitation cinema—what some like to call B-movies. I’m also an unabashed fan of awesomely bad, cheeseball action, whether it’s in big-budget studio fare or no-budget schlock. So when Johnny Shaw asked me if I would be interested in writing a piece for
Blood & Tacos
about the cult action films of the 1980s, of course I jumped at the opportunity.

When I sat down to write this piece, I made a list of my ten favorite B-movie action titles of that decade. I was somewhat surprised to discover that the notorious Cannon Group produced literally all of them. For those unfamiliar with Cannon, they ARE the ’80s in a lot of movie-geek circles and are responsible for some of the most beloved B-movies of all time.

A brief history: in 1967, Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey formed the Cannon Group. While they ran it, they released numerous soft-core sex comedies. Ultimately, they discovered that the only type of sex film that turns a legitimate profit is of the hardcore variety. So Friedland and Dewey cut their losses and sold the Cannon Group to two Israeli-born cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, in 1979.

Menahem and Yoram were to the ’80s what Bob and Harvey Weinstein were to the ’90s (albeit less successful critically and at the box office). Under new ownership, the company flourished. Cannon left the “titty era” behind and started churning out exploitation flicks of a different sort. The Cannon brand quickly became synonymous with the low-budget, balls-out action flick. The Golan-Globus era lasted for ten years, and in that span Cannon’s legacy was cemented. The company did produce some art house titles that garnered them some critical praise, but Cannon will always be known as the house built on the films of Norris, Bronson, Van Damme, and Dudikoff.

I’ve chosen titles from the Cannon library that I feel are worth a view. These films are, in my opinion, quintessential Cannon flicks. Movies in which, when the hero is called to action, he readily responds, “Show me who to punch or shoot.” The kind where lowlifes with high-caliber weapons are left riddled with more holes than the plot. These flicks are all about packing as much kick-assery on screen as possible. If you’re into that kind of thing, look no further.

Ninja III: The Domination (1984)