The Spy's Little Zonbi

by Cole Alpaugh

  The Nazi chapter called their organization the White Armed Warriors for America, or WAWA for short, not to be confused with the convenience store.

  The WAWAs decided to make their statement on a grander, more historic scale, Tooman warned Chase. It wasn’t a new plan, by any means, since retired exterminator Elkins “Pinkie” Gunder had been just bugging the heck out of his Nazi buddies to use some of his hoarded poisons for years.

  “Now they’ve had a kick in the pants,” Tooman whispered through a puff of menthol smoke, “and they got a boy with some bad know-how.”

  Among piles of unlabeled, noxious chemicals, the Nazis stored pounds of Gunder’s thallium in Maxwell House coffee cans in their meeting hall basement. Chase had researched thallium in microfilm files at the city library, discovering it had once been used as a rat and ant poison but was eventually banned because of high toxicity and human cancer risk. One of the earlier uses of thallium was as a hair remover, according to a ten-year-old Baltimore Sun story. It said the CIA had come up with a plot to have it applied to Fidel Castro’s shoes while they were being polished. The plan wasn’t to assassinate him, an informant had told the Sun reporter, but to emasculate him by making him as beardless and bald as a baby.

  The plan hatched by the Nazis, according to Tooman, was to assassinate a poultry house full of chickens owned by old Abraham Greenberg, a local Jew who had fired more than one of the WAWAs over the years for not showing up for work. Those who did show up were stinking drunk from the night before.

  ***

  Chase parked his car near Greenberg’s irrigation pond and killed the engine, eyes adjusting to the light from a three-quarter moon. Twenty minutes later an old Ford pickup rolled past the farm with its headlights off. Chase watched three WAWA boys dressed in blackface paint jog across a bean field toward the sleeping chicken houses. The one taking up the rear had a Styrofoam cooler Tooman had said was filled with a mix of soy chicken feed and thallium shavings.

  Chase slid out, clicked the door shut, and made his way to one end of the building the trio was trying to enter. The heavy ammonia smell seeped through the vents and made his eyes burn.

  “Man alive, this shit does stink,” he heard one of the WAWAs say over the hum of the circulations fans, as they found the door latch and stepped into the coop. “I never knew anything could smell so fuggin’ bad.”

  “Will you shut the hell up!” another nearly shouted, and there was a murmur from stirring chickens. Chase saw the three silhouettes take careful strides through the mass of chickens toward the center feeding trays.

  “Smells like somebody poured ammonia on dog turds.”

  “Breath in an out yer mouth, dumbass.”

  “Feels like it’s burning the nose off my face.” Chase could see the lead man hike his shirt out of his pants to use as a filter mask as they squished across the thick layer of chicken shit.

  The man with the cooler dumped some of the lethal contents into the steel tray and they slowly retreated as birds began to feed. One house done, they slipped back out and proceeded to poison the other three coops in an easy and terrible crime.

  With every fiber of his being, Chase wanted to yell out from the moment he saw the first poison being poured, but there was more to this assignment than covering a story. His job was to take control of an event, to work under the cover of a journalist while producing results as a spy.

  Their mission accomplished, three black-clad figures ran from the last chicken house toward their truck, one tripping over a garden rake and falling headfirst.

  Reaching into his pocket, Chase pulled out a thick black marker and looked for a flat surface to write.

  ***

  The slaughter of thirty-seven thousand chickens made newspaper headlines and was the lead story on both local TV news stations. You didn’t mess with chickens on Delmarva.

  But it wasn’t the poultry industry that had Chase feeling as though he no longer possessed a soul when he returned to the scene of the crime later that morning on a spot news assignment. He spent two miserable hours wandering among lifeless white lumps, shooting a few frames of old Abraham Greenberg comforting his wife. He was careful with his exposure inside the chicken house, where hours earlier he’d used a thick marker to rob credit from the WAWAs. He’d drawn three large Ks over the door frame and matching crosses on each side.

  According to Tooman, the Klan was nervous about accepting responsibility for the massacre even though it had been Jew chickens.

  “They were talking about wanting to turn in who done it,” Tooman told Chase on the loading dock after his rounds later in the week. “None of the boys are ready fess up and for good reason. Ain’t nobody supposed to be killin’ chickens. Kill somebody’s momma and a family wants revenge. Kill chickens and the whole Eastern Shore grabs the hangin’ rope.”

  Chase was called into Mack’s glass-walled office and sat next to a man who introduced himself as an FBI agent.

  “Seems we have a hornets’ nest stirred up.” The agent, in a gray suit with tan work boots, had tracked little rectangles of chicken shit into the small office. Chase could smell it.

  “We know the poison belonged to a group of boys up in Delaware,” said the agent. “But somebody used a Klan autograph on the job and stole their credit.”

  The look Chase gave Mack was as innocent as possible. Then he glanced down at the place on his right hand, where he’d had to scrub a spot of indelible ink with the rough soap they used in the press room.

  “Those boys get to drinking and some dangerous ideas get thrown around,” the agent said.

  “Like poisoning a chicken farm,” said Mack.

  “That’s right,” said the agent. “And we’re thinking that everyone in the media should take a little more care to double-check their locks at night and keep an eye on their pets.”

  ***

  During the second week of August, just as the temperature and humidity started evening out in the low nineties on the Eastern Shore, WAWA Captain Early Wayne nervously dropped coins into a gas station payphone and began to dial.

  “City desk.” The voice on the other end was tired, disinterested.

  Wayne reached into left front pocket for the handful of marbles he’d stolen from his little boy’s collection. He shoved them into his mouth and worked them into his cheeks.

  “We have Shockley,” Wayne said into the phone. From the video store he’d rented and watched all four movies that involved kidnapping. “You have twenty-four hours to come up with fifty thousand dollars in small, unmarked bills.”

  “What?”

  “Or Shockley dies!”

  “Buddy,” said the older male voice on the other end. “Spit out the marbles and try again. I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’.”

  Wayne nearly dropped the receiver. His heart thundered in his chest and his hands shook as he scanned the parking lot for cop cars. Was he being watched? How did the guy know he just jammed his mouth with a handful of marbles? Kidnapping, extortion, and they surely knew all about the animal porn. He’d never see his family again. But no SWAT team came swooping in with weapons pointed. Not a single blue light turned circles in the parking lot of the Exxon station that was about to close for the night. It began to dawn on Wayne that he probably just sounded like he had marbles in his mouth. His heart slowed as he dropped his chin and let the little glass orbs spill out, bouncing off his work boots. He cleared his throat.

  “We want fifty grand or Shockley dies,” Wayne told the man.

  “Fifty grand, huh?”

  Emboldened, Wayne strayed from his notes for added effect. “Or this time tomorrow he’ll be swimmin’ with the fishes.”

  There was a pause and Wayne was sure he could hear the man lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag. That was a good sign. He had him shaken. Wayne patted his pockets for his own pack.

  “Look, buddy, I don’t know what bar you’re callin’ from, but Shockley’s right here. Hold on.”

  It wasn’t po
ssible. He’d left Shockley hogtied back in the basement of the WAWA meeting hall not fifteen minutes ago.

  There was a click on the other end of the phone. “Limp here,” said the voice. “I work for chocolate, so you better be sweet.”

  Early Wayne ran for his idling pickup, the receiver still swinging at the end of its metal cord. In eight minutes he was taking the meeting hall basement stairs three at a time.

  “Where’s the fire, Early?” Some of the guys were playing poker around a folding card table as Wayne darted past. He knocked over half the empties, breaking a couple on the concrete floor.

  Wayne pulled up in front of their captive in the dim end of the basement, hands on his knees, gasping for breath. Limp Shockley was tied every which way and hadn’t budged from the old wooden chair.

  “What’s got into you, Early? Everything’s been quiet as could be.”

  Wayne reached out for the Agway corn sack covering Shockley’s head and slowly lifted it up. The duct tape over his mouth had turned into a weird, robot-like smile and the man’s hair was wet and all crazy. His nose dripped snot and his eyes were bloodshot and fearful.

  “When’s the money comin’, Early? We’re outta beer.”

  Wayne pulled the newspaper clipping out of his breast pocket and unfolded the small byline photo of Shockley. He held it out and squinted in the bad light. Same fat cheeks, same eyes, same everything. Wayne switched hands with the clipping and took hold of the duct tape. Slow didn’t work, so he put one palm on Shockley’s sweaty forehead and gave it one big rip just as a flash grenade burst through one of the high narrow windows and exploded at his feet.

  Temporarily blind and partially deafened, Wayne hurled himself to the floor and tried crawling on the dirty concrete. His boots kicked out behind him, searching for traction, but snapped one of the wood chair legs and brought a screaming body falling over him. He was pinned. Wayne thought he heard someone shout FBI and he was half certain he heard someone call out the name Mrs. Shockley.

  Wayne felt the hogtied body inch higher up on his torso, pushing air out of his lungs. Hot breath was on his neck and in his ear. Wayne, helpless as the mouth hungrily probed his cheek, was repulsed by the great looming blur. Early Wayne knew he was never going home again and it caused him to surrender. The boots stomping down the stairs were coming to carry him away and that left nothing to fight for. The pain of Mrs. Shockley biting off his nose was somehow comforting.

  ***

  “They should coin a phrase for this kind of journalism.” Chase was packing away prints and negatives he wanted to keep from the summer while Limp sat eating a peach over a napkin. Limp’s slurping was accompanied by the darkroom radio playing classic rock.

  “You saved my mother’s life.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “The Feds would never have tapped those boys’ phones to know what they were planning.”

  “They kidnapped your mother—well, they thought it was you—because I stole their credit.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.” Limp hadn’t shown any real emotion over his mother’s abduction. She’d suffered a sore hip but had refused a trip to the hospital and was more upset over missing an afternoon of soap operas. “She’s a tough broad.”

  “My mom would be under psychiatric care.”

  “My mother scares psychiatrists,” Limp said, folding the peach pit into the napkin. “You aren’t having any second thoughts?”

  Chase stacked three empty photo paper boxes on the counter and began filling them with five by seven prints he’d made over the last eight weeks. Many were over- or under-exposed discards, but some were duplicates he’d made of his best work. There were a few good feature pictures, but most were spot news, the parade of weekend fires and car wrecks.

  “I’m dropping out as soon as I get back to campus.” Chase flipped through a new stack of black and whites. Limp had told him to expect a letter with instructions on where and when to report for a two week training and orientation session. “I don’t know if I could sit through classes even if I wanted.”

  Limp tossed his pit in the trash and stood over his shoulder. “You never showed me this one.”

  Chase held the accident scene photo of the severed hands still attached to the steering wheel—the one the cop had asked him to shoot. “I don’t know why I took it,” he lied.

  “You’ll do just fine in your new job,” Limp said, reaching for the photo. “You see the beauty in such awful circumstances. That’s a rare gift that’ll come in handy.”

  “I’m going to miss my friends,” Chase said, meaning Stoney and the dopey girls they both managed to bring back to their dorm.

  “I’m going to surely miss you, too, Pie.” Limp embraced him from behind, his head in the nape of Chase’s neck, his right hand still clutching the photo. “It needs a name, don’t you think? How about Driving with Severed Hands?”

  “That’s fine.” Chase tried wriggling out of the bear hug that reeked of Old Spice and sweat.

  “You keep yourself safe. There’s going to be places where they cut off more than just hands.”

  Limp’s tears dripped down the back of Chase’s shirt.

  Chapter 8

  Stoney wasn’t taking Chase’s new plan well.

  “Where the fuck are you really going?” Stoney was following him across campus toward the registrar’s office, shirtless to show off his deep tan, wearing mirror sunglasses and cut-off jeans. “You’re full of shit. No way you’re going home.”

  “I got a job and I have to go to a training program.” It was the truth, but the letter Limp had advised was coming had warned Chase about the dangers of friendship. In his new career, Chase would put Stoney in danger if a foreign country identified him as a spy. Chase was less worried about his family.

  They wound around the banks of Mason Pond, through the Student Union, where Stoney bought a can of Coke from a machine. He punched buttons hard enough to send a few coeds scurrying away. They dodged Frisbees in front of the library as Stoney continued his rant.

  “Bullshit. You don’t drop out of school like this. A cult! Did some bitch lure you into joining a cult? I read about stuff like that. That shit never turns out cool.”

  “It’s not a cult.”

  “Jonestown, man. Think about the purple Kool-Aid.” He put a hand on Chase’s shoulder and slowed their pace across the short cropped lawn. “They’ll draw you in by giving you like ten wives, dude, all bangin’ you at the same time and making grilled cheeses and shit.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then the crazy leader will decide some asteroid is a spaceship coming for you, and he’ll pray it up and shit and make everybody drink poison. Porking ten chicks always has a downside.”

  “It’s not a cult.”

  “All you poor bastards.” Stoney seemed absolutely convinced he had it right. “I should tie you up in our room and have that chick you banged from last semester deprogram your fucked-up head.”

  “Okay, I joined the Army,” Chase lied.

  “That would be worse. The Army is just like prison, man. You’ll get ass-raped and then forced to do push-ups. Stop bullshitting and tell me why you’re leaving me. I followed you all the way to that open sewer to watch a bunch of kids get killed.”

  They were nearing the building housing the registrar’s office.

  “I know, man. I dream about it all the time.” There had been nightmares. They came less and less frequently over the summer, but Chase learned that falling asleep stoned made them come back vivid and hard. He’d even woken Stoney last night.

  “It’s friendship treason.”

  “It’s a chance to do something big, Stoney, you just have to understand.” Chase escaped at the doorstep of the registrar’s office. No shirts, no shoes, no service. Stoney had to wait outside while Chase withdrew his student status.

  ***

  Stoney drove too fast. Chase’s Mustang wasn’t meant for speeding down gravel roads at high speeds with a drunken k
id in aviator sunglasses at the wheel. Chase knew Stoney wanted to squeeze out their last hours together and didn’t complain about the long drive out toward Shenandoah National Park. They’d come twice before with girls and a trunk full of beer and ice.

  Stoney made the last turn onto a closed road, the wooden barriers with no trespassing signs knocked to the side long ago. They parked in a turn-around spot, each grabbing a backpack with a few cans of beer and a towel. It was buggy and hot and it took Chase a while to realize they’d made the entire trip in silence, no music and no talking.

  The narrow, overgrown path was a straight line to the flooded quarry. They climbed down the least steep wall, one careful step at a time, to a small patch of crushed stone. They drank the beer then swam the fifty yards across the deep, dark water to the side where people came to climb and jump.

  Every splash was echoed from the soaring rock walls. Some stories said the water was a hundred feet deep, others claimed it was a thousand.

  They emerged from the cold water and found the best climbing line to begin the ascent. The face was nearly vertical, but had easy hand- and footholds. You could turn and jump from five or twenty-five feet, or go all the way to the top for a hundred foot freefall.

  Chase followed Stoney, but stopped at a small ledge where kids had scratched curse words, names, and the height—they’d guessed it at twenty-five feet. He edged sideways then turned, his back to the wall, hands flat against the cool stone. It was a beautiful, postcard-kind of view, but he closed his eyes.

  Chase listened as Stoney climbed higher and higher, slipping and catching himself. He could hear his close calls, his swearing, and his determined grunts. If you started falling, you were supposed to push off backwards, away from the outcropping, hoping not to clip anything on the way down.

  “I made it,” he called from almost directly overhead. Chase craned his neck and could barely see him leaning over the edge. “It’s really high, man.”

  “You’re crazy, Stoney.” But Chase was really just in awe of him. Stoney always went farther, to places Chase was afraid of, and that wasn’t crazy at all. Stoney wasn’t afraid of anything.