The Spy's Little Zonbi (21 page)

T
he bullets fired in his dream left the black steel rifle barrels in slow motion. They worked like heat-seeking missiles, able to change course while tracking the running boys. Chase held a clipboard, the pencil in his right hand checking off each child's name as they were struck dead. Stoney was arguing with him, something about wanting to add new players to replace the ones being slaughtered.

“
There are thousands of boys,” Stoney was saying. “We'll never run out. We can keep getting more.”

Chase had finally relented, allowing Stoney to blow the dented whistle to bring on reinforcements, little black boys screaming and darting in blind hysteria. But the bullets never missed, not even the boys who'd slithered into nooks among the growing piles of dead flesh. Stoney kept blowing and blowing, and the soldiers kept firing.

“
I don't know their names!” Chase had begun panicking, willing to make up names because it was suddenly important that they didn't die anonymously. Stoney would keep blowing the whistle until Chase woke up, right hand cramped from squeezing an invisible pencil. A stewardess brought Chase a plastic cup of water without being asked.

During his junior year of college, Chase had raided the campus library for every book on Haiti, quickly earning a reputation as the jerk who left deserted coffee cups everywhere. This opportunity to create a recreation program for Haitian kids was too good to be true, the perfect escape for an entire semester. He remembered thinking what a breeze it would be. He'd abandoned the smoldering bong in his dorm and pored over every relevant book. He'd even learned to use the microfilm machine to filter through
Washington Post
stories. The application to his Department Chair was going to be so compelling that it would overshadow the slacker reputation he had earned by association with his roommate.

Stoney had ridden shotgun to a D.C. bookstore that sold international newspapers and maps from around the world. Chase had boned up on Haiti's past and present politics, the diseases and the long, crazy history of voodoo. Stoney had bought a stack of zombie comic books from a shop in Georgetown for his own research. The trip with Stoney had begun with powerful emotions. It was filled with hope and charity, until the first shot. Chase's return was lonely and disorienting. His row was empty, no reek of hash oil or spilled gin wafting off a trusted friend.

When Chase's plane rolled into the terminal, nothing was familiar. His first trip—the one that ended with boys being exterminated like a pack of rabid dogs, then the rush to the airport in a police Jeep—might have happened in a movie. The walkway carpet was clean and new, bright orange. People were in a hurry but smiling. Voices were loud but not shouting.

Chase had spent hours reading through the file emailed from DB6. He also had to retrieve a small package crucial to the assignment at the Post Office. According to the file, the ranch owner had political aspirations with plans to overthrow the current government led by René Garcia Préval. The rancher, who was being referred to more and more as a rebel leader—a dangerous moniker to have in any country—wished to make an official statement to the world with an exclusive interview provided to the Associated Press. But first the winter marijuana crop on his mountain farm needed to be fully dried, packed, and distributed to his small army of dealers from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo.

The file made no mention of Jean Luc Moreau's motive in risking a thriving drug business, other than the usual hunger for power. President Préval still had the authority to order farms such as his raided and burned, so it was assumed Moreau was offering the government the usual payoffs and profit-sharing. Any income would surely be welcome because of the heavy-handed sanctions imposed on Haiti by the U.S.

The geopolitical section of Chase's file included a rehash of what he'd learned his junior year. Nothing seemed to have changed. Maybe it had gotten worse. Deforestation was nearly complete—a few clumps of pines in the mountains and mangroves in the swamps remained. The forests were dying at the hands of the poor, who pillaged wood and sold it for charcoal. Once cleared of trees, rains began carrying the soil, the lifeblood of Haiti, into the sea at the rate of fifteen thousand acres each year. All the native animals had been hunted to extinction except for a few stray caiman and flamingos. An outbreak of swine fever had killed the pigs, leaving farmers to scratch out an existence in dead soil, raising sugarcane, coffee, and sickly cotton plants.

The humans hadn't fared much better than the native animals, with ninety percent of the population living in poverty. Expanding neighborhoods of cardboard shelters were built around growing mounds of human feces. And with brutal dictator after brutal dictator, it was no wonder so many Haitians grew up wielding machetes on their way to a voodoo-injected version of the Roman Catholic Church. The file read like a depressing novel, only with no surprises.

Moreau's plantation on Montagne Terrible, north of Port-au-Prince, thrived because he could afford to import tons of Mexican bat guano, rich in nitrogen and perfect for early vegetative growth.

Roughly translated, an old Haitian voodoo saying refers to the native soil as being as “dead as a zombie at a salt lick.” Salt was the only known cure in Haiti for anyone unlucky enough to be turned into a zombie by a local
bokor
, or voodoo sorcerer. Pot farmers, according to the DB6 file, were infamous for using zombies to protect their crops from poachers. The file claimed Moreau had created and posted hundreds of zombies to protect the perimeter of his ranch, an actual crime under Article 249 of the Haitian Penal Code.

Chase had pored over the zombie literature in the campus library, sharing the best parts with Stoney. He'd used it to keep his roommate from backing out at the last minute. The books described how a living person could be turned into a zombie by the introduction of two special powders, usually through an open wound. The first powder, a toxin called terodotoxin, was found in the puffer fish and left the victim in a near-death state, barely breathing and seemingly without vital signs. The second powder, composed of datura, removed free-will and allowed the
bokor
to take charge of the new zombie.

Terodotoxin worked by blocking the sodium channels to the muscle and nerve cells. Once salt was introduced to the subject, the zombie was said to simply drop dead. Thus, the “dead as a zombie at a salt lick” saying. Stoney had proposed they make t-shirts.

“
The entire George Mason University cheerleading squad,” Stoney had said. “Imagine the possibilities.”

The books had described the most brutal former Haitian dictator of all, Papa Doc Duvalier, who was believed to have had a secret zombie army called Tonton Macoutes. A devout voodooist, Duvalier had promised to come back from the dead to rule Haiti forever, which is why, after his fatal heart attack in 1971, authorities posted a guard outside his tomb. It was believed that his son, the ousted dictator who had assumed his father's rule, grabbed his father's still dead corpse before fleeing to the South of France fifteen years later. All that was left of his grave in Port-au-Prince was a jumble of white bricks and a shattered tomb.

“
We have to go!” Stoney had said. “I gotta have one of those bricks.”

***

Chase missed Stoney more than ever. This new destination was a ranch of swaying green marijuana fields on a plateau of Montagne Terrible, a place his friend would have surely braved the zombies to see. Chase was met at the airport by two of Moreau's men, loaded into the back seat of a freshly washed and waxed green Jeep Wrangler, and whisked north, into the hazy afternoon sun. He was traveling light, carrying just the one backpack loaded with two camera bodies, lenses, film, notebooks, microcassette recorder, several sets of socks and underwear, and a few shirts. The top was rolled down and he leaned back to enjoy the fresh wind, but buckled up tightly as the Jeep sped along the blacktop, passing buses and slow-moving trucks even on blind curves. The driver was either feeling invincible or suicidal. Happy and in love, Chase was also feeling pretty invincible.

The only tricky part of this job—which included killing Moreau and ending the coup plans that would completely destabilize the nation—would be slipping out of the country. Aside from authentic papers, Chase had a hidden pouch sewn into his pack that contained a clean passport under a different name, as well as three separate plane tickets to Puerto Rico departing on consecutive days. Even if things got hot, he'd still have a good shot at getting back out through the main airport. A secondary plan was to sneak across into the Dominican Republic, but recent reports said those roads were currently controlled by machete wielding bandits.

The most critical item in Chase's backpack was from the package picked up at the Post Office. It was a can of Planters Mixed Nuts that had been tampered with by the CIA lab people. This particular can, with a smiling Mr. Peanut tipping his top hat, contained an extra type of nut beyond the normal six—Moreau's favorite, Macadamia nuts. Five average-sized Macadamias, each containing a lethal dose of LSD, were positioned at the top of the nut pile. The container was then resealed with the original aluminum protective top. Chase had been assured that no acid would leech into the other nuts, so it would be safe for him to munch a few pecans should Moreau insist on sharing the reporter's gift.

The lysergic acid diethylamide, according to the DB6 file, was chosen for Chase's safety because it would mimic the more mild poisoning symptoms of the voodoo potions already in use at the pot ranch. They'd include rampant hallucinations, but have a more measurable dosage because it was a synthesized drug. LSD is one of the most potent drugs available; a typical dose is equal to one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. Chase's Macadamia nuts each held two hundred times the normal dose, but in various time-release coatings. Moreau would start with a euphoric acid trip lasting a few minutes. The file described how his hallucinations would intensify, ramping up in stages, likely resulting in seizures before death. The plan was to make Moreau's death look accidental, or like an inside job because of the drug's similar properties to those his people were already using.

Leaving the highway near a town called Riobe, they turned west toward the sun, climbing in elevation on a pitted dirt road. It had recently rained, making progress slow, as the driver shifted into the lowest gear to ford rushing streams and test the depth of flooded potholes.

Thirty minutes of four-wheeling brought them to the edge of Moreau's ranch and the first zombie guards. The four bodies were buried to their hips, two on each side, with backs turned to the muddy road. They were naked, emaciated men, with curved spines and leathery skin so black it shone blue. Their arms were posed unnaturally in front of them, and a large hand-painted sign nailed to a post on the left side of the road read, “Y AP MANJE.”

“
They are eating,” the driver translated over his shoulder in a hushed tone, possibly not wishing to further disturb the undead. For real? Chase had flashbacks to the haunted hay rides his parents took them to as kids at Halloween time. The campy idea of posing corpses with signs saying they were eating trespassers or lost children was amusing, except that these were real dead bodies, according to the file.

A mile or so farther up the mountain, Moreau's men jumped out of the Jeep to unlock and push open a swinging gate. They followed the road to the right, along a ridgeline and into the shadows of Montagne Terrible's lone peak. In a few hundred yards they passed another collection of zombies in more stark and threatening poses. Some were upright, wielding machetes, while others were stretched on the ground with arms forward at the very edge of the road, crawling into passing traffic. These hands might have been crushed by the Jeep's tires, had the driver not been careful to maneuver just beyond the probing fingertips.

These were dead bodies. Or real zombies.

Most disturbing were the zombies scattered among the remaining dead trees, barely visible. Rotting faces peeked around decaying trunks, watching over the road from a distance.

They bounced along the rutted road in silence until approaching a two story, open-sided concrete building, where a half dozen or so of Moreau's workers were busy employing their
bokor
magic.

This was the zombie-making factory.

“
Gardyen yo.” The driver pointed to a row of sewn together human remains just outside the structure, probably the finished products, perhaps mismatched by size, color, and sex on purpose. The Jeep stopped a few yards from the wide open building, likely on Moreau's orders, to give the journalist the full effect of this plantation. Chase gasped. The rancid stench came and went in palpable waves that seemed to be heated contractions in the air.

The driver and his coworker pulled the bottoms of their shirts up over their faces, trying to filter out the smell that apparently no longer fazed the workers inside the factory. This had to be absolute proof a person could get used to the smell of anything.

The smell transported Chase back to his summer at the
Daily
Times
. There was the hanging corpse, and then another body right before Labor Day. A suicidal man had used a short length of rope to suspend a boat anchor from his neck; he had then stepped off the end of a dock into the Wicomico River. After a few weeks of late-summer heat, his body gasses had built up enough so that he was floating upside down in eight feet of water. A gray, comically bloated bare foot—waving gently to and fro under the surface—was eventually spotted by a family from their pontoon boat bow.