Free Blood & Tacos #1 by Johnny Shaw, Matthew Funk, Gary Phillips, Christopher Blair, Cameron Ashley

to the yard below.
    Sunset. McCreary carried his wife's limp form across the high school football field. He could barely take it. The unholy lines that passed on the turf at his feet.
Those aren't yard lines,
he thought.
The goddamned Reds turned this Texas high school football field into a soccer field. Soccer!
    Suddenly the sound of hoofbeats erupted. McCreary turned. Here came Whitefeather, astride a brown and white paint, with streaks across his face, the color of Russian blood. Behind him was LaRoy on a gimpy palomino and no less than a hundred Comanche warriors. In prewar life, they'd been proud working men and boys on the Reservation, content to do whatever it was Indians did. But now, they proudly had revived the spirits of their ancestors.
    "The battle is ours, Captain!" Whitefeather cried. "The Russians didn't quite know what to make of this outfit."
    "Well, a fitter bunch I never did see!" McCreary said, happy but weary.
    "Captain, look!" LaRoy held aloft a long knife. "They made me an honorary Injun!" McCreary nodded, his eyes drifting to the dark, dripping mats that hung from their saddles.
    McCreary didn't want to know.
    "We have to get moving," Whitefeather said. "The Russians retreated, but you know they'll be back. We have to get back to General Pearce and tell him what we know." The big Indian turned and raised an AK-47, and let loose a war whoop. The warriors behind him responded in kind.
    McCreary turned and hunkered down to his wife. "Did you hear that, Sunny? We have to get going. … Sunny! Sunny?"
    Lying beautifully on the grass, Sunny opened her eyes.
    "Sunny! Did you hear me?"
    His wife smiled faintly.
    "
Da,
" she said.
    THE END
     
    Christopher Blair is a teacher, freelance writer, and
former crime reporter. In addition to being raised on ten-for-a-dollar used
paperbacks, he grew up on a nutritious diet of comic books, Stephen King stories,
and pure cane sugar. "Texasgrad" is his first published short story.

Raker: A Review
      By Thomas Pluck

     
    He knows what proud America stands for, and he'll fight for it.
    After reading RAKER by Don Scott, I'm still not exactly sure what that is. Raker works for The Company. But he's strictly freelance, not some government stooge. They call him when no one else can do the job. He's tall. He's white. He's blond. And he is not homosexual. Raker is Hitler's wet dream, and when white cops are being gunned down in the ghettos, he's let off the chain to mete out justice…
    Published by Pinnacle, who gave us the immortal Destroyer series, Raker is Remo's very pale and blond shadow. The Destroyer destroys. Raker, well, if ungrateful minorities are the leaves, Raker is the gardening tool the Company uses to tell them to shut them up and be glad they're allowed to be Americans. Whether they're homosexuals, suspected homosexuals, blacks, Chinese, or Jews- I'm sorry, I meant liberal pansy radical lawyers with "large features"- Raker hates them and wishes they would stop their whining and work harder so they could be rich and white someday.
    Raker lives in New York and hates everything he sees except the Statue of Liberty. And he doesn't even like her as a work of art, but the idea of her. "Because of the idea of her, he sometimes had to kill people." How can you not love a line like that? If Don Scott had run with that, instead of going off on racial tirades about how the Chinese were a hard-working people until the Reds took over and made them run drugs, this could've been a good fun read. Instead, it's like drinking with your crazy racist uncle, except you can't leave or call him a jackass. You can only throw the book at the wall so many times.
    Raker works with a black man named Lawson, who's a "real Oreo, black on the outside, white inside." A Harvard grad who can talk jive, he's Raker's eyes and ears on the streets. In fact, Lawson does all the work, really. Raker just shows up when someone needs killing, or he gets bored and poses as a mugging victim to