by James Mullaney
Cover by Mark Maddox
SPLAT IS WHERE IT'S AT!
A trendy new drug nicknamed “Splat” has come out of nowhere and is suddenly sweeping the nation. The designer narcotic boasts it will get kids higher than they’ve ever been before. But coming back down is murder.
With a body count rocketing up from coast to coast, MIC Director Simon Kirk decides to send in the cure for what ails America’s youth. Enter Podge Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the most lethal therapeutic MIC can prescribe. Their mission: find out who’s behind this synthetic drug and give them a dose of their own medicine. The permanent kind.
Except, as usual, nothing is exactly as it seems.
Splat is just the opening gambit in a much larger game. Unknown to Podge and Dr. Wainwright, all the pieces are in place for a fatal final match involving the underground drug scene, the Soviets, and a couple of old enemies of the Red Menace eager to prove themselves.What goes up must come down, but the bad guys soon learn the masked man with the target on his back won’t crash so easily. Before this trip is over the psychedelic seventies drug scene will find out the hard way what it’s like to O.D … on Red!
***
WHO IS THE RED MENACE? Throughout the 1950s, this was the number one question from Moscow to Beijing and in every communist palace and malaria-ridden backwater in between. The mysterious masked figure was a shadow and a whisper. For the Kremlin and its fellow travelers, he was a damnable monkey wrench tossed into the gears of the not-so-glorious worldwide revolution. Wherever Reds schemed, the Menace was there to set things right. Then, 1960 came and the whisper grew silent ....
Twelve years later, Podge Becket, computer tycoon and security expert, thinks he’s hung up his mask and cape for good. Aided by his partner, inventor and physician Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the Red Menace is dragged back into the hero game. But it’s a whole new world out there ...
