The Spy's Little Zonbi (2 page)

The boy jogged out into the sun at midfield and began juggling the old ball with his bare feet. Chase struggled through the alphabet and came up with the name Henri.

“
Good job, Henri,” he called out. “Real good job.”

“
His dad was a ship captain yesterday.” Stoney pulled off his sunglasses to rub bloodshot eyes, curly blonde hair matted to his head. “And something like a general the day before.”

“
It doesn't matter.”

“
You think any of these kids even knew their fathers?”

“
Hey, they keep coming back and they love soccer. That's all I care about.” Chase grabbed the bottle of water Henri had left behind. Holding it up to the sky, he could just make out tiny moving creatures. “I bet it wouldn't be hard to raise money for some real gear when we get back to school.”

“
Yeah?” Stoney took a minute, rubbed his scruffy chin and seemed to give the idea some thought. “We could have a kegger. Five bucks a head, easy. And doin' something like that for poor kids would definitely score us some sorority pussy.”

“
It wouldn't take a lot to make a big difference.”

“
We'd have to find somebody to trust down here, though. The round dude who runs this program is totally sketchy. And these guys are from some other fucking planet.” Stoney nodded his chin toward the two Haitian helpers across the field. “Those dudes are grim fucking reapers.”

“
This is a fake charity,” Chase said, as they watched Henri showing off, the ball never touching the dirt. A few others had begun to make their way out onto the field. “That guy who picked us up at the airport is pocketing all the money. He was at Mason to accept one of those big, poster-size checks from the school. There was a picture in the paper. You see five thousand dollars worth of anything around here?”

“
No way, you think?” Stoney looked around the field. They'd spent their own money to buy sacks of flour to line the field by hand, using paper cups and getting sore backs.

“
All that cash woulda bought a truckload of shoes. And just look at this shit they have to drink.” Chase was holding the bottle out to Stoney when an angry male voice barked orders from where most of the boys still sat huddled.

“
What the hell?” Stoney asked as they both scrambled to their feet. They'd taken a few steps toward the cluster of boys when Chase saw a rifle lift above the head of a uniformed man then crash down with a heavy grunt. Chase froze in disbelief, a hand out in front of his friend. He'd heard the impact from twenty yards, but didn't see what had been struck until the group of boys sprinted away from the dead child. One side of the boy's head had been completely caved, a dark seeping liquid blooming out in the hot dirt.

“
Holy fuck.” Stoney's voice was a hiss in Chase's ear. “Holy fucking shit.”

The soldier wore mirrored sunglasses across a jet black face. His lips were tightly pursed when he brought the gory rifle butt up and tucked it into his armpit. He spoke more words, his voice muffled by the wood stock, but Chase didn't think they were meant for the running boys. The words seemed perverse, sexual, and Chase imagined they were the same words the soldier—or whatever he was—uttered at the moment of release while mounting a local prostitute, hands squeezing her throat.

More soldiers appeared around the field, some clambering down from the cement wall, some camouflage demons seeming to rise from the dust. Each man was leveling a rifle at a target, their fatigues recognizable from the G.I. Joe collection stuffed away in Chase's old bedroom.

The two smallest boys were cut down first, bodies bounding in different directions as they were shot from opposite sides of the field, like pinballs caught in a tight corner. Four boys who Chase recognized as his fullbacks made a break for the road nearest the midfield stripe. The lepers took cover in their blankets as they were hurdled by the sprinting boys. Bullet after bullet slammed the boys' backs. They were struck with slapping thuds that sent them sprawling headfirst into the ground, puffs of chalky dust enshrouding their sudden stillness. The cheerleaders held their ground, quivering and silent, as if waiting for the storm to end, seeming to understand that this time they weren't the targets.

As Chase helplessly watched the slaughter, he realized the stories were true. This was the government's unofficial extermination, the thinning of the homeless boy population. The boys hadn't bothered pleading with the soldiers, as when they were caught out on the streets swiping fruit. They had known right away to run or die because they'd all witnessed this before. Had he heard the boys joke about being caught together? Hadn't the older boys warned the younger ones that they risked being shot by the bosses if they were found playing in a group? Maybe, but his Creole was just too weak to be certain.

With nowhere to hide and no cover, Chase and Stoney stood frozen in place as the slaughter continued. Bullets whizzed by and crashed into the cement behind them, pricking their bare skin with tiny shards. The soldiers fired single rounds, either to save ammunition or provide better sport.

“
Oh, god, no.” Chase was watching the fourteen-year-old boy who planned to score against Brazil like his father. Henri was probably last to be targeted because he wasn't running, wasn't trying to get away. Instead, the boy was dribbling through imaginary defenders, the black and white soccer ball at his huge bare feet. Henri crossed the eighteen yard mark into the penalty area, doing a step-over move to fake out one pretend defender, just like Chase had shown him. Six rifles followed the boy's graceful movements, as he cut left and then right, an attempt at drawing the goalie away from the net. It made for a more difficult angle but Henri was executing the play perfectly.

With the goalie off his line, Henri took his chance. Instead of a booming power shot, he flicked an artful chip, lofting the ball softly over the charging invisible goalie toward the far corner of the net. It was one of those moments in soccer that is excruciating for the defense and exquisite for the attackers. The ball lifted in a slow arc, just beyond unseen fingertips.

Before the ball crossed the goal line, a single gunshot rang out. The sharp crack echoed from the cement walls as Henri fell in a heap, one arm stretched out above his head as if in celebration.

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.”

T
hey 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.