The Spy's Little Zonbi Read online

  The soldiers retreated, their jobs apparently done. What remained was the smell of gunpowder and the hush of death. Across the field, the cheerleaders began their slow motion exit of lurching blankets. Chase and Stoney looked from body to body. Movement of any kind might have forced them to do something. Chase stood listening to his own heartbeat raging in his ears, as if he were deep underwater. A single siren announced the approach of an emergency vehicle, and within minutes two policemen were casually taking statements from the American students as if they’d witnessed a fender bender in a mall parking lot.

  One of the policemen used his radio to summon a group of blue-shirted men who climbed out of an old truck and began dragging the dead boys to midfield. Chase watched over the shoulder of the officer conducting the interview in broken English as the bodies were piled up. Henri was last, swung by his ankles and wrists, thrown on top. Chase looked at all the holes that weren’t seeping blood, knowing that’s what happened when the heart stopped pumping. All these boys had dead hearts. He wanted to count his soccer players, but it was too hard because they were piled in a mound of black skin and shiny gore. He could only guess, like those contests where a store would fill a jar with jellybeans and challenge customers to come up with the right number in exchange for a gift certificate.

  “They’ll get a good cemetery spot,” the policeman assured Chase, but that wasn’t what was about to happen. They weren’t being piled up like that to be loaded into trucks, but Chase knew any argument was useless. And dogs just dug things up anyway.

  The policemen drove Chase and Stoney back to the orphanage. They were told to pack quickly, that the last plane was leaving in less than an hour. They stuffed their backpacks, grabbed the few cheap souvenirs they’d collected, and jogged back out to where the officers waited.

  Chase watched the column of black smoke rising from the soccer field as they turned onto the highway.

  “Twenty-four,” Chase said out the window. “I think there were twenty-four boys.”

  Chapter 2

  They were driving fast in a convertible, the wind too loud to follow the Allman Brothers’ song.

  Thump. A brief pause, then one more thump as the speeding car bounced over yet another object in the road.

  “What the hell?” It was the pretty girl in the back seat. She leaned forward to hand over the joint rolled with strawberry paper.

  “Chickens,” Chase shouted over his shoulder, then drew a massive hit, his body lurching to hold in the smoke. It took a mighty sick bastard to booby trap an entire highway with chickens. Where would you get so many chickens? And how did you keep them from running away? Chase imagined little chains and leg irons then had to cut the wheel after drifting toward the muddy ditch. “There’s a lot of them,” he added, and coughed hard.

  Thump.

  “My tongue!”

  “Sorry.” Chase’s knuckles went white on the wheel, trying to keep it together, the remains of the joint a glowing orange nub between his lips.

  Chase watched Stoney inspect the girl’s tongue in the rearview mirror. They’d been dry-humping ever since Bob Marley.

  “Could you stop running over fucking chickens, dude?”

  Thump-thump.

  Chase took the last hit and chewed up the roach. “They’re everywhere, man. It’s a real bad scene up here,” he said, then broke into guilty laughter, giggling from the good pot. He started to ask for a beer to be passed up from the cooler, but they’d be coming up on Salisbury soon. Better to straighten up a little until they hit the far side. Chase drained the last of a can of flat orange soda plucked from the cup holder. It tasted like heaven.

  The pretty girl wore an American flag bikini and had a peace sign tattoo just below her right collarbone. Her long hair had tangled into a crazy whirl since they’d dropped the Mustang rag-top back at the dorm lot in Fairfax. With Memorial Day weeks away, traffic was light. Final papers had yet to be written and the ocean was still winter-cold despite these first hot days.

  They caught up to the lumbering chicken hauler, a squat truck filled with crated birds surrounded by rusting wire. The chickens had found a hole big enough to squeeze through, and were lining up to make their escape. It was disappointing to solve the mystery.

  As Chase watched through the smudged windshield, another chicken popped through the narrow gap in the wire, launched like a champagne cork. The bird made no attempt to flap its wings, simply freefalling away from the only life it had ever known. Chase imagined that for one fleeting moment, the chicken gloried in its freedom, uncrowded, unpecked, and breathing in fresh cut grass and wild flowers instead of the heavy ammonia of droppings. Why would it waste time trying to fly when this instant was so perfect? It exploded in the Mustang’s front grill, a violent blast of white feathers and pink gore. The girl in the back seat spit out one of the feathers and mouthed a single word into the mirror: killer.

  “Fuck, dude, it was better when you were just running them over,” Stoney said.

  Pulling past the old truck, the girl returned to chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, while Stoney went back to work chewing on her ears and feeling her up.

  They were on a four-hour trek to Ocean City, Maryland. Occasionally she caught Chase’s eye, staring him down in the rearview mirror, maybe daring him to say something, or maybe flirting despite what he’d been doing to the chickens. Girls who hung with Stoney were hard to figure because they were usually in it for the good drugs. Stoney performed magic with drugs. He rarely wore more than ratty old cut-offs, but a flick of the wrist produced a tightly rolled baggie of Columbian Gold the size and weight of a big dog turd. From behind an ear he could snatch a tab of blotter acid. And he always knew where the keg tap was, just in time.

  Stoney’s girl would raise her right arm every few minutes, extending her cigarette into the strongest current of wind, a line of firefly-like embers bursting from the tip. Chase found it impossible not to watch her tuft of black armpit hair, also caught in the wind, a dancing nest of spiders. She was bigger than Stoney, long arms and legs painted at their ends. Stoney had climbed into her lap to work on a hickey or something. She kept her eyes half shut, either from pleasure or the hot wind.

  As they slid past a steel milk-tanker that reflected their wavering image, Stoney slipped one bikini top strap over her round shoulder, prompting the driver to pull the air horn chain. The flag’s white stars folded into the blue sky and a pink nipple rose like a full moon in the middle of her jiggling breast. Yes, Chase thought, God bless America for these small treats. Again, she stared at the mirror, daring him, but he kept silent, just listened to the wind and the Allman Brothers.

  They were alone again on Route 50, flanked by bean fields, the smell of unseen cows and the swirling heat of the black highway. The ride was much smoother now that they were out in front of all those chickens.

  ***

  Chase focused on the road, trying to keep the crappy debates he’d been forced to endure from harshing his buzz. His journalism professor, a man who claimed not to own a tie but whose flowing beard would cover most of it anyway, was ready to sign off on the fifteen credits of work study in Haiti. The department chair, however, wasn’t having any of it. Doctor Wrinkled Bitch had grave concerns with regard to rewarding students for incomplete work. The fact that the school had tossed wads of cash at a bogus charity for god knows how many years wasn’t much of an issue. The fact that Chase and Stoney had nearly been shot to pieces was discussed with the same casualness as their lunch order.

  Stoney had been little help during the two tedious meetings in the crammed office. Both times he’d burst through the door wreaking like old bong water and beer, causing Doctor Wrinkle Bitch to bury her nose in a hanky. Both times he’d fallen asleep right before it was his turn to speak. Startled awake, he’d excused himself, fleeing the room for the toilet down the hall.

  “It’s going around,” Chase said weakly, but he knew it was probably for the best after seeing the cartoonish drawing Stoney planned to en
ter as evidence. It had stick-figure soldiers shooting guns at stick-figure children and was captioned with words like bang, ouch, and help me.

  Chase had dreaded walking inside that room, too. The flight of stairs had been a mountain climb. The carpeted hallway was quicksand. He’d wanted to turn and run downhill, but he had no place to go. He’d practiced calling home to announce he was quitting school, but only when he was good and drunk. He’d even held a beer bottle to his ear because he was too chicken shit to get that close to a real phone. Not with that sort of news.

  Chase had become the Golden Child of his family after their dad had caught his older sister Amanda diddling the dog. “A violation of nature,” was how the former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant and current plant foreman described the incident to his wife.

  If he only knew.

  Chase was eleven when he’d woken in the dead of night to Amanda pressing the barrel of one of their father’s guns to the center of his forehead. He’d looked up at her cross-eyed at first, the glow from a Flintstones night light enough for him to take stock of his circumstances. With great stealth, she’d mounted his chest, straddled him in his sleep, and with her left hand pressed the cold and impossibly hard metal of the .45-Caliber revolver to within millimeters of his brain. Her other hand had been shoved down inside her white panties, which were decorated with little blue dancing hippos in skirts. That hand, just inches above his belly button, had been making small circles he vaguely understood to be a girl’s version of jerking off. Frozen in fear of his lunatic sibling, he could feel the circular motion of her right hand transferring all the way up through the barrel of the gun. He’d wanted to cry because he was so scared and because she was so sick.

  Maybe because of the long strand of drool reaching for him from the corner of her pursed lips, he had been certain she was going to eat him.

  But after she’d finished, she’d pulled the gun away and leaned down to bestow a quick, sisterly kiss on the bulls-eye mark the gun had left. She brushed away the spittle and disappeared from his room.

  Chase had tried falling asleep as fast as possible to escape.

  By the time he’d entered high school and Amanda had been caught violating their German Sheppard, she had made her own escape to Upstate New York with a woman she’d described as her Venetian Love Goddess. The family knew her general whereabouts from the postmarks on the homemade pornographic postcards that would arrive in their mailbox. The Post Office would intercept some and they’d be delivered in official-looking brown envelopes also containing dire-sounding form letters regarding federal mail crimes. But more often than not, the five-by-seven inch close-up photos she’d lovingly and carefully mounted on white cardboard would arrive directly. The slightly out of focus images of what appeared to be her vagina filled with things you’d find around the house on the front; little hand written notes on the back.

  “Wish you were here!” and “Thinking of you!”

  The mostly out of focus pictures could have been of the Grand Canyon, or maybe Fidel Castro’s beard. A stainless putty knife protruded in one, a battery operated stud finder in another. She and her Venetian Love Goddess might have been doing home renovations.

  Chase could not go home a failure. Maybe it would have finally killed his father. More likely, his father would have killed him. He had no choice but to ascend the stairs and brave the precarious hallway to beg for his credits.

  ***

  “Can we stop?”

  The sharp female voice in Chase’s ear nearly made him crash into a camo-painted pickup they were flying past at eighty miles per hour. He eased off the gas pedal.

  “I really have to pee.” The bikini girl reinserted her breast into the flag top.

  “We’re almost in Salisbury.”

  “Cool,” she said, and Chase felt a fingernail run along the back of his neck in an elliptical pattern. “You know who you look like?”

  Chase shook his head. He couldn’t see her in the mirror, just felt that sliver of a touch.

  “If you had round glasses and cooler hair, you’d look like John Lennon,” she said, and then her fingernail was gone.

  Near the middle of the last leg of their journey Chase stopped at the 7-Eleven where he found the local newspaper. He opened the crisp edition and spread it on top of all the other bigger papers, which included The Post, The Sun, and The Inquirer. Each were huge and important papers carrying news from their grand and considerable cities, as well as from around the world. The Daily Times was skinny by comparison—skeletal, actually. But Chase sensed every front page story was important to the people in these parts, from grain prices to a new parking meter proposal. Inside The Times was a section listing who was expected to have dinner at a neighbor’s house, right next to a grainy photo of a migrant worker wanted in connection with a shooting. Chase had learned in class how a newspaper was supposed to hold a mirror up to its community. And here was a perfect mirror, however thin and irrelevant it might seem to outsiders.

  These weren’t stories about egocentric professors who held the ultimate power of grades over frightened eighteen-year-olds. Narcissistic, bullshit-laden blathering about recent sabbaticals to their homeland or wherever. These were real human beings, real people. This was real life. And on the front of the second section was a picture of an old man in even older clothes. In glorious black and white he was kneeling on wet grass, with long wild hair, and his tears were caught by the camera streaming down his face. In his bony arms were three dead cats he’d apparently scooped up for the photographer. There had just been a fire and these were the victims. They were his only family, the caption explained.

  Chase refolded the paper and dropped the twenty-five cent issue on the counter with the rest of his drink and candy bar breakfast order, while his passengers climbed over the car doors. It was hard not to watch the girl in the tiny bikini pull off this gymnastic move, not the least bit modest, with an unchecked wedgie exposing most of her lovely rear end.

  The clerk, who was observing Stoney tickle the writhing girl just outside the big glass storefront, was having a hard time making change with his ancient black fingers.

  “Daz one fine use of Ole Glory,” the man said under his breath, his yellow eyes flashing.

  “Can you give me directions?” Chase pointed at the newspaper.

  Climbing behind the hard plastic steering wheel, Chase was careful not to spill his gigantic cup of raspberry slush.

  “I wanna check something out,” he told his passengers, but they were oblivious, again busy groping and slurping one another. The Times was just two quick right turns off the highway, according to the clerk, and he wanted a fast look before heading back toward the ocean. Among the sandy towels and boogie boards in the trunk was a batch of cover letters, a few résumés, and sets of student newspaper clippings left over from his summer internship applications. Why not hit this place?

  After three years of covering the who, what, where, when, how, and whys of grade-cheating scandals and anti-Iran marches on the Capital, Chase had been rejected by all the big-time papers and attracted only the mild interest of crappy little rags that wouldn’t do much for a post-graduation résumé. The crappy rags were just looking for convenient ways to get coverage while their regular reporters were on vacation during the typically slow summer months in non-resort towns.

  The Daily Times’ lot was nearly full of reporters and photographers meeting deadlines, as Chase backed into a visitor’s spot to sit comfortably and get a good look at the heartbeat of the town. Stoney and the pretty girl continued their softcore sex acts. It sounded like someone was eating a ripe peach behind Chase’s head.

  The sprawling one-story brick building was squat and ugly under the glare of the hot sun, and yet Chase’s stomach churned with envy as an old blue Honda Accord sped into the lot on squealing bald tires. There was an awful, metal-on-pavement thud as it bottomed out, screeching to a halt in the last open spot directly in front of the employee entrance. The thirty-something-year-old guy jumped
out of the driver’s seat and raced to the building, fumbling with a set of keys, the car door banging open on its hinges and slamming shut behind him. Chase saw the yellow pencil behind one ear and in the back left pocket of his corduroy pants the narrow white reporters’ notebook, curved from being sat upon for the hurried ride to make this deadline. Chase had burned through dozens of the same brand of notebook for the school paper, not one filled with anything of real consequence.

  Seconds later, the scene was over. The heavy door slammed behind the harried reporter, leaving only the ticking sound of his cooling Honda.

  Had there been a fire? Was he coming from the courthouse where a murderer had been brought in for a first appearance? Were the words scribbled in his notebook less than an hour away from becoming some huge banner headline announcing a suspect arrested for a string of sexual assaults? Chase’s hands were cramped from clenching his own grooved steering wheel.

  “Wow.” He relaxed his grip and looked up into the rearview mirror, where Stoney had his right hand casually cupped under the girl’s bikini top. She’d turned her face up to catch the rays, a small bead of sweat drawing a line from one temple, oblivious or not caring who saw her getting felt up in the back of a convertible.

  “That dude really had to take a dump,” Stoney announced, struggling with a pack of matches to light a joint one-handed.

  “Yeah, maybe.” Chase climbed out to rummage through the trunk for his résumé. His heart was pounding.

  Chapter 3

  There was a coin flip that decided an awful lot.

  The quarter spun through the haze of bong smoke, parting the molecules with ease, then clacked off the ceiling and was lost among the empty beer bottles and dirty laundry that had overrun every square inch of floor space.

  “Shit,” Chase said, blinking hard to try and clear his vision.

  Stoney laughed, flicked the Bic lighter, and added more pot smoke to the blue haze in the second floor dorm room.