The Spy's Little Zonbi

by Cole Alpaugh

  Moreau led them back to the Jeep and Chase climbed into the front passenger seat, carefully stowing the backpack between his legs. Moreau had donned a white Panama hat and the kind of oversized wrap-around sunglasses usually found on slow-driving retired folks in Florida. He seemed somewhat entranced following his successful interview-turned-rallying-cry, soon to be delivered to the masses. Chase had to piss like crazy, but still needed to know about this accent.

  “Where did you learn to speak English so brilliantly?”

  Moreau paused before popping the Jeep into reverse. He struggled to pull a new, larger handkerchief from his back pocket. He removed the Panama with his left hand and rubbed tight circles all around his sweaty, black bald head with his right.

  “As a young boy, my father took me away to the New York borough of Brooklyn. It was in 1963, I believe. My wonderful father was a proud man, with no fear of speaking his mind. But unfairness followed him because of his brave words. Sadly, my mother was coerced to stay behind, as the criminal Duvalier forced our exodus.”

  Chase took from this that his father was booted from the country and the boy was taken along because his mother didn’t want to go.

  “It was in a small restaurant in Brooklyn that my father toiled as a waiter. It was during these years that he taught me the value of hard work. And it was during this period that another Haitian ex-patriot began working side by side with Papa. But this was an evil man who did not believe in the brotherhood of men and families forced from the homeland. Instead, he stole my father’s tips. And when he stole the tips of other waiters, he blamed my father.”

  Chase interpreted this to mean Moreau’s father was a thief.

  They sat in the idling Jeep, the rancher’s gloved hands locked on the steering wheel as he stared off into the hazy sky.

  “The restaurant owner confronted my father with the weakest of evidence, nothing more than the words of a lying turncoat pig. And my father defended his honor mightily. When the owner tried taking my father’s life with a kitchen knife, Papa had no choice but to kill him.”

  Moreau’s father murdered the restaurant owner when he tried firing him, Chase concluded.

  “And do you know who the treacherous thief was?”

  Having long ago read excerpts of Préval’s biography, Chase recalled that he’d been a waiter in Brooklyn for five years before returning to Haiti. “President Préval?”

  “Yes, oui, oui!” Moreau shouted gleefully, fully reinvigorated to his post-speech state. “My journalist friend, you are very smart to know what kind of man Rene Préval is. He is a dog! Yon chyen!”

  Moreau jammed the gear shift into reverse, spinning tires, and Chase almost smashed the windshield with his forehead. Back in forward motion, he led them in the opposite direction from which he’d arrived, and that was fine with Chase. He was curious about a better escape route, one that didn’t lead past the zombie factory. The driveway was narrow at that point and some of the workers were armed. Chase wasn’t worried about the zombies, but sure didn’t want to provide spare parts for any of those lunatic undead dollmakers.

  The Jeep bumped down the rutted drive, jolting Chase’s bursting bladder, as Moreau happily gestured toward the panorama of marijuana plants.

  “You know your first American president was rich because of his marijuana crops,” Moreau shouted over the engine noise and splashing puddles. “It is a plant that brings joy and not the suffering of tobacco.”

  “Yes, I read that George Washington grew marijuana.” Chase clutched the door handle and dashboard to keep from flying out. Moreau was going much too fast and nearly ran over a few of the half-buried zombies that lined the road as they made their way down the mountain, away from the ranch. Chase wouldn’t have been surprised if Moreau credited Lincoln with using zombies as scarecrows to help emancipate the slaves.

  Moreau brought the Jeep to a skidding halt and a cloud of dust caught up and consumed them. Here was a clutch of small concrete buildings, ten in all, neat but with a haze of cooking fires and a heavy stench of raw sewage. They were just beyond the far edge of Moreau’s fields, in a dry ravine, maybe a half-mile from the main house. Chase was disappointed at the dead end. No escape route here.

  “Fanmi mwen!” Moreau proudly declared, rising on the Jeep’s floorboard, knees against the steering wheel. He made a sweeping gesture with his Panama hat to bundles of native blankets huddled in the open doorways of most of the buildings. As Moreau dismounted, the bundles began to lurch toward them, crawling, limping, or dragging themselves in a slow-moving rush.

  Some of the blankets began to fall away, getting caught on this or that or abandoned to get to Moreau faster. Chase saw that Moreau’s family members were lepers, maybe thirty souls inflicted with Hansen’s Disease, all making their way toward their smiling benefactor.

  “Such a terrible, terrible disease.” Moreau seemed genuinely distraught. “This is the suffering of my people which goes ignored. They are shunned by Préval and his followers and so are shunned by everyone out of respect and fear of that thieving pig.”

  As the sorrowful, ragtag mob reached Moreau, Chase backed up to the Jeep, dug out his Nikon and quickly took a light reading off his palm. Those able to hobble over first now sat resting with the others at Moreau’s feet. All had their hands outstretched, begging in Haitian Creole, but Chase couldn’t believe even a native would understand all the excited wheezing and hissing; most were missing noses and lips. The disease, which flourished in the cooler oral and nasal membranes, had rotted the flesh and opened nasal cavities.

  Moreau removed a clear plastic bag of jerky from his pocket and gave each one a small piece. Those with no arms he fed directly, like baby birds, but Chase noticed Moreau kept his driving gloves on. He used his twenty-four millimeter lens for these photos—the wide-angle lens Limp had once recommended because of its great depth of field—giving the scene a “You are there” quality. A lot of work in dangerous countries requires long telephotos for most pictures, but Chase was ignored here. There was food in Moreau’s hands and these people didn’t seem to see much of it on a regular basis. Nobody cared or even noticed they were being photographed, except Moreau, of course. He was puffing his chest, chin held high over his loyal family, offering the camera his best side.

  “A society will be judged by how it treats its weakest members,” Moreau proclaimed over his shoulder. Was that Truman?

  “There is a change coming, my journalist friend.” Moreau removed his gloves and placed them inside the empty food bag. He handed the gift to an old man with milky gray eyes who seemed to have most of his fingers intact. The leper tried tasting the gloves before realizing what they were. He stuffed them down his shredded pants and crawled away.

  With the food gone, the rest of the lepers began their struggle to return to their own doorways. Chase had to piss that very second and told Moreau so.

  “Please go back up the hill to the field.” He gestured toward the lush growth, smiling broadly. “The plants love the urine of humans. Then we’ll have some more photographs.”

  As Chase climbed over a small rock wall that delineated the edge of the pot field, he was startled by yet another bundle of twitching rags and blankets. It was an elderly woman, also a leper, but in a more advanced stage of the disease than the others. Much too debilitated to have crawled over the low wall for the jerky treats, Chase wondered how she’d found herself on this side of the barrier.

  She sat propped against the jagged stones. “Blanc, blanc,” she whispered hoarsely, her tongue extending out beyond her teeth to make the sound. No lips, no nose, and only one remaining eye. But the fact that she called him a blanc—a white—meant she could still see through the gray, cloudy glop. A filthy scarf covered seeping sores on her head. Gigantic flies swarmed her lazily, in no particular rush, as if they knew they couldn’t be swatted.

  “Hello.” Chase paused, didn’t know what else to say. His bladder cramping, he shifted from foot to foot.

  “Blanc,”
she repeated and, with what seemed like great effort and pain, began fishing with one hand inside the clump of rags she wore. She nearly toppled, but finally came up with what she was searching for.

  Chase couldn’t wait. “I’m sorry, I’ll be right back.” He held up one finger, gesturing that he needed a minute. He jogged about thirty feet into the low mass of pungent pot plants, unzipped his fly and peed in an almost never-ending stream. His eyes teared as he soaked a dozen plants, spraying an arc that rained down three rows up the hill. Through blurry eyes he saw two sweat-slick black laborers about fifty yards across the field, spreading what might be fertilizer by hand from large packs on their backs. Ever-present machetes dangling from their belts, they paid no mind to the pissing blanc.

  With the pain drained away and leaves dripping all around as if from a spring shower, he turned and made his way back to the old woman, careful not to crush any little plants.

  “Blanc.” The women nodded down at her hand, reaching up toward him. She held out a small object wrapped in dirty cloth, offering it to Chase as some sort of gift. Her hand began shaking violently and he bent down to accept the item, mostly to stop the awful shaking. He feared her hand might break off.

  Then, his blood froze as she spoke in perfectly clear English, “Take me with you, blanc. Take me with you.”

  He was about to return the small shrouded object when a loud racket broke out somewhere back in the leper compound. First screams, then angry shouting. He turned from the woman, jumped across the wall and ran back to where he’d left Moreau.

  The first thing Chase noticed as he came past the Jeep was his backpack, open, on the passenger seat. He reached in and saw the can of poisoned nuts was missing. Shit! There was no immediate sign of Moreau or any of the lepers, but Chase assumed the rancher had noticed the can in the open bag and decided to continue spreading more good will to his family.

  Shit! Shit! Shit!

  He jogged to the nearest building and peered into the dark, only to see a frightened bundle cowering in the farthest corner. Chase turned, went to the next doorway and found a similar scene, just in a different corner.

  He hurried back out to the shared fire circle in the center of small buildings and called out. “Mister Moreau? Hello?”

  Chase was finally answered with more hissing screams just ahead, coming from the building farthest from the Jeep. He ran toward it, very aware that he had no weapon. And then he noticed the trail of nuts under his feet, leading the way like Hansel and Gretel. Instead of bread, it was a pecan here and a hazelnut there. Shit! Shit! Shit!

  “Diable!” The accusation came from inside, the voice joined by others shouting the same word. “Demon!” He stopped just before the threshold, taking some cover at the side of the door frame, and sneaked a peek inside, his hands craving a weapon, his heart hammering.

  Inside, Moreau was naked from the waist down, his pants actually still attached at one ankle where they didn’t get over his shoe, trailing him like a kite tail. His Panama hat was gone, as were his old man sunglasses. He was pinning down one of the bundles, grotesquely trying to work his small, erect penis inside one of the lepers. His black body was shaking and pouring sweat down on the hapless pile of rags and bones, whose pencil thin legs were exposed and spread apart like toothpicks poking from a raisin.

  “Ggggrrrrr!” Moreau struggled to position himself over what might have been a very old woman. It was hard to be certain in the low light, but she didn’t appear to have arms and was unable to defend herself in any way. She seemed to be arching her back, head lolling from side to side on a long, narrow neck, small grunts and moans escaping her that could have been interpreted as pleasure. Moreau was panting like a dog, drool spilling from his mouth, fumbling from the high dosage of acid pummeling his brain. His coordination was a frantic mess, trying to match movement to electric brain commands being interrupted and skewered by the LSD.

  Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, “Diable! Diable!” And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of “Diable!” They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.

  Before Chase could intervene he was knocked into the room from behind, sent sprawling to the ground within a few feet of Moreau’s humping, dog-like motions. Chase saw his face. It was clear he was long gone, lost to some crazed train of thoughts and actions, maybe some brutal fantasy sent to the surface, which his body was performing.

  In that instant, Chase had the perfect angle to see Moreau’s little purple member finding purchase in the helpless leper. The success encouraged what was once Moreau’s mind and he doubled the piston action, head bobbing from side to side, giant veins threatening to burst through the skin of his neck. Moreau’s lips drew back and his eyes widened fantastically, which momentarily froze the two men who had slammed past Chase, machetes clutched in sweaty black hands. These were the men who had been spreading fertilizer in the field.

  The shorter, more muscular of the two machete-wielding men looked from the coupling mess on the floor to the chanting lepers surrounding them. He just happened to be the closer of the two to Moreau when they’d crashed past Chase and burst into the room, and seemed to accept charge of the immediate game plan.

  “Ggggrrrrr!” Moreau repeated, perhaps at his ejaculation, but the sound was cut short as the razor-sharp blade of the machete swooped down and separated Moreau’s head from his body with a whump.

  The head of the man who would be the next president of Haiti rolled up next to Chase and he was glad it stopped face down in the dirt. Moreau’s body spasmed once, then collapsed on the poor leper, pinning her under the emptying flow of gore.

  At first there were orders from the two machete-armed men, but none of the lepers lining the walls budged an inch. The men yelled at the leper under Moreau, but she wasn’t going anywhere either. Finally the shorter man walked past the prone couple and grabbed a handful of Moreau’s pants to drag him off the cowering leper and out the doorway. With a grimace, the taller man used his boot to nudge Moreau’s head out the door, like a lopsided soccer ball, sending it over to its body with a nicely placed short pass. He wiped his shoe in the dirt.

  Chase slowly climbed to his feet, brushed dust from his hands and stepped out of the building, trying to feign the same sort of incredulous fear the lepers were showing at the sudden appearance and execution of a real demon. He didn’t want to be associated with the demon or anything that had caused Moreau to become one.

  “Diable?” Chase asked the two men, motioning down at Moreau, and they both followed his gaze and nodded heads in agreement.

  “Diable,” one croaked.

  But now that the adrenaline of the moment had been flushed away, fear began to flood in on these men. It is the type of fear exclusive to Haiti, where possessions and demons and witches and the undead are part of everyday life. Any type of anger or sense of duty was replaced by this growing knowledge of having just struck down an actual demon. And no regular run-of-the-mill demon, but one who happened to be the Boss Demon of the zombies in these parts.

  It was a fast and curious transformation for the machete men who, in the ensuing calm, were suddenly reduced to frightened children. They began backing away from the head and body, machetes held out in front of them for protection rather than any sort of threat. Their eyes darted from doorway to doorway as they stumbled backwards, shoulder to shoulder, crushing some of the mixed nuts under heavy black boots.

  They screamed out as they blindly backed into Moreau’s Jeep. The shorter man scrambled around and tore open the driver’s side door, fumbling at the steering column for the keys. No luck. He shouted at his companion, who opened the passenger door and upended Chase’s backpack on the seat. He tossed Chase’s things one by one to the ground, including the rest of his camera gear, while the other man searched under the visor and in all the compartments.

  The possibility of food being among the discarded items emboldened some of the braver lepers,
who began their torturous journey back to the Jeep. The site of the small converging legion of diseased outcasts was the last straw for the two men. They gave up their search, turned to the poison village, crossed themselves in unison, and then broke into a sprint back out into the field of green.

  The men far out of sight, Chase bent down and plucked the keys from Moreau’s front pants’ pocket. He made his way past the lepers, who were stuffing his t-shirts and underwear into their clothes as consolation prizes for not finding food. Chase checked to be sure the hidden pouch holding his passport and plane tickets was untouched, then started the Jeep and began the long, bumpy trip through what was suddenly a deserted pot ranch. Deserted, except for those half-buried zombies.

  Chase’s plane rose and sharply banked across the Windward Passage that separates Haiti from Cuba, then settled at cruising altitude for the short hop to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was night and he was exhausted. He thought about catching a bit of sleep and was getting comfortable in his seat when he noticed the small lump in his left shirt pocket.

  When he pulled out the dirty rolled-up rag, he realized it was the gift from the leper he’d encountered near the stone wall, just before Moreau went berserk. He slowly unraveled the musky treasure, encased by a material which may have once been a flowered scarf. The artifact seemed fragile and he gave each turn a great deal of care. Finally, out dropped a small brown object into his lap. He picked it up and turned it over and around, examining the brown, leather human finger.

  “Take me with you, blanc,” she’d asked.

  And so he did.

  Chapter 18

  Life for Chase and Mitra turned routine when the Iranian terrorist cell jumped to their deaths from a cliff in Acapulco.

  The Iranians had cashed in credit card points for airline miles and taken the party south of the border, to the new heart of the sunny Aztec Empire in Mexico. They missed their return flight and a local DB6 operative—who was also a stringer for Acapulco Today—retraced their fateful final night of mixing booze and illegal cliff-diving. Chase was forwarded an email with the last known details.