The Spy's Little Zonbi (24 page)

“
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.

L
ife 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.

“
Hotel security was dispatched to the subjects' Fiesta Americana Villas room just after midnight on Christmas Eve in response to guest complaints of loud music, people urinating from the balcony, and thick smoke described as smelling like burning hair. The encounter resulted in the six subjects being ordered to immediately vacate the premises. One security guard reported being assaulted with an object described as a plastic penis pump, which subsequently required twenty seven stitches to the guard's head. Subjects' rental car was found overturned and abandoned on the fourth fairway of the Club de Golf, east of the hotel on Costera Miguel Aleman. Acapulco Police located the vehicle following the resident groundskeeper's complaint of a gang of banditos burying a body on the front nine. Upon further investigation, police determined from the pattern of divots and the collection of fishing gear left behind in the car that the shovels the men were seen carrying had been used to dig for night crawlers. Subjects contacted a taxi company to pick them up on the fairway, but instead agreed to meet in the parking lot next to the club swimming pool. The cab dispatcher described the caller as drunk and belligerent, and that only his unusual accent made him conclude he was not American. Police arrived at the golf course minutes after subjects escaped in the taxi. Police reported the locked pool gate had been pried open with a shovel, as had a liquor storage cabinet behind a pool-side bar. An unknown quantity of bottles was missing, although several were recovered empty from the pool's shallow end. Subjects were taken eight kilometers across town after demanding to witness the famed La Quebrada Cliff Divers. When the driver suggested three a.m. was much too late for the show, one subject brandished a garden shovel. The driver, fearful that his poor English had caused the upset, delivered the subjects to their last known whereabouts. Two additional empty bottles of locally produced tequila, one empty salt shaker with cocaine residue, and six pairs of men's shoes were found atop the unlit, forty-meter cliff-diving platform. Acapulco Police have left the case open until bodies are recovered.”

Chase and Mitra also disappeared, buying a small chalet-style home in the Pocono Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania. The move was only three hours from the apartment, but night and day when it came to the congestion of traffic and people. Chase didn't ask permission from DB6, mostly because he wasn't sure how. He responded to an earlier incoming email that he had a new address and was leaving the key on top of the television set, like you might do at a hotel. The email bounced and they finished packing.

Mitra had left her science lab to work as the director of a small community library tucked inside a former church parsonage, while Chase wrote newspaper feature stories for a weekly and skied most winter days. His DB6 email account remained empty.

On New Year's Day, Chase dug the vibrating phone from his Spyder jacket. He'd just hopped on the North Face chairlift at Montage Mountain, a dilapidated ski resort overlooking Scranton-area rooftops. Despite the natural beauty of the Northern Poconos—and the Endless Mountain Range just to the north—Scranton had long been the butt of snobby jokes having to do with its proliferation of the bowling alley industry. When Hollywood arrived in Scranton to shoot on location, it was a good bet that beer and bowling were key elements of the storyline.

“
I think it's time.” Mitra's voice was breathless at the other end. She was back at their new home, a half hour from the ski hill parking lot. Chase had left her on her own after she'd promised not to have the baby while he was off skiing.

“
Time for what?” He reached forward to loosen his boot buckles. The Phoebe Snow lift ran up the steeper North Face slopes and was painfully slow at the poorly funded county-owned resort. Montage's unusual layout was split in two: the easier slopes at the top and the more difficult black diamonds at the bottom. The vast gravel parking lot was in the middle plateau, right where the Phoebe Snow lift deposited skiers. Getting off the lift, you either turned right, left, or went to your car.

“
The baby is coming,” Mitra answered, and Chase dropped his phone thirty or so feet, just where the snowmaking runoff created frozen waterfalls over the terraced boulders below. The phone shattered amid the litter of chewing tobacco tins and lone gloves.

“
Uh, hey, excuse me?” Chase leaned forward against the retention bar to face his fellow passenger, a guy with high-end gear he remembered zipping past on the diamonds. “Do you have a cellphone?”

The man looked down between his expensive Volkl skis in the general vicinity of where Chase's phone lay shattered.

“
Not one with a parachute.”

“
I'm having a baby,” Chase pleaded.

“
No you're not.”

“
My wife is having a baby at this very moment.”

“
And you're off skiing?”

“
The baby is early,” Chase lied. The baby was right on time, but the man didn't need to know that. Mitra had promised to wait. He was only going to be gone for two hours, maybe three. A few quick runs and right back to her side, ready for fatherhood.

“
There's a payphone in the lodge.” The man pulled up the collar on his shiny Obermeyer one-piece ski suit for privacy.

Chase hummed nervously, pulling off his glove to check his watch as the lift stopped three excruciating times, the minutes trudging by.

“
You really having a baby?” The man handed over his phone.

***

Tylea Rain Allen was born the next morning, weighing in at six-pounds, one ounce. She was seventeen inches long.

“
Is there always so much blood?” Chase had asked the nurse, who assured him everything was fine. “Why does she look purple? What's all the crusty stuff? Do other babies cry like that?”

“
She doesn't look purple.”

“
What if she stops breathing?”

The hospital sent mother and child home a day and a half later despite Chase's concerns.

“
It's seems too soon,” Chase told Mitra, who appeared confident in the belief that all this stuff was natural. Nothing got to her and it was frustrating. It didn't make sense. Having a seed planted inside her, then having it grow to the size of a melon, didn't begin to faze his wife. Having it turn out to be a human whose care you would be in charge of for decades to follow, after painfully squeezing it out a too-small opening was something she seemed to relish. And what if the child turned out more like him than her? There was no re-do in childbirth, according to the pamphlets Chase read.