Blood & Tacos #1 Read Online Free PDF

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."
    Now it was Bronte's time to smile. "We?"
    The Wino touched her hand. "Yeah,
we
. You may be just some rich albino girl gone off the rails, but I ain't letting something as beautiful as you end up in some crazy hippie's stew."
    Bronte placed her forehead to the cage bars, her lips poked succulently
through the metal lattice. The Wino rinsed his mouth out with a swig of rum
from the minibar bottle, thought about spitting it out, but swallowed instead.
As his lips met hers, the chanting started from outside – the longhairs were
feeding.

    "You're special, man, don't ever forget that. What you got, what you are, man,
the universe has blessed you, man." That was what the male longhair said to
The Wino shortly after he and his girlfriend picked him up.
    The Wino was adverse to hitchhiking, but he needed to split the city and split it quick. The car picked him up ten miles outside the city limits, passing him at first, then stopping and eventually reversing back to where The Wino walked along the roadside.
    It was the girl who convinced him to take the ride, strawberry blonde and braless. If longhairs did one thing right, it was that their women didn't mind showing what they had and sharing it around. The girl could've filled out a sweater two times larger than the one she wore. She smiled and beckoned to him and told him they were going more than halfway towards where he wanted to be. Still, The Wino was suspicious. It was the cop car that tore past, sirens blaring, heading right back from where he'd come from that convinced him, finally, to accept the ride.
    It was the biggest mistake of his life.
    They gave him beers and called him "man" and asked about his life.
    They mocked the war, they mocked the establishment, they mocked the President, they mocked all but the place where they were headed.
    The Wino, beer-buzzed, felt his lips loosen, felt a rant coming, felt the urge to tell them that their side, their bullshit "counterculture" side was just as bad as The Man was, that the only way out was to be alone, was for a man to forge his own path, seize control of the universe by the throat and punch destiny in the face until it yielded.
    But he made not a peep, which was strange because he wanted to.
    And then things blurred and went spacy and for a moment he thought that maybe they were right, these hippies, maybe, just maybe, there
was
something more, something