The Spy's Little Zonbi by Cole Alpaugh

Louisville Slugger in his left hand while using his right to battle wind that was trying to rip his hood off. A lefty hitter, Amos wasn’t getting as much action as righty Tiny Simms. Chase sat with his back to the cab, thumping up and down on his rear, trying to hang on in a churning ocean of half crushed beer cans.
    â€œ Cliffy, heads up on the right!” shrieked the four-hundred pound Tiny Simms, who’d already lost his hood a dozen mailboxes back. Simms, a right-handed hitter who was three-for-three tonight and hitting a respectable .400 in the league games the Times sometimes covered, took a few practice cuts, then got ready for the next mailbox coming at him at fifty miles per hour. With a slight uppercut, Simms sent the green metal box soaring into the front yard of a double-wide.
    â€œ Home run!”
    â€œ C’mon, Cliffy, you shit!” Amos complained from the opposite side of the truck bed, as they barreled on, coughing smoke and shedding empty beer cans. “It’s my turn to hit!”
    The party went on like that until the gas tank got down toward empty and nobody had the guts to work the pump in a Klan sheet. They headed back to the field in Princess Anne and everyone drove off with the look of impending hangovers.
    Late the next morning, the phone in Chase’s apartment rang with a tip about an arrest. Jimmy Ray Jones had been hauled in after being overheard bragging to one of the girls behind the Salisbury Dunkin Donuts counter. Chase was allowed to sit in on the interrogation as Jones confessed to the mailbox bashings, as well as a few other crimes they’d committed. Jimmy Ray had been driving one of the other trucks that had been responsible for five smashed car windows and a dumpster fire behind the elementary school. The group obviously had no respect for the rules of mailbox baseball.
    When both the Times and the Delaware State News up in Dover ran front page photos of the mailbox and property destruction, a Delaware neo-Nazi chapter didn’t take it too well. In fact, it turned out they were jealous of all the Klan’s attention, according to one of the Times delivery drivers who had friends in both groups. These little crime sprees were good for attracting new members, and new members meant more guys pitching in for beer, Leon Tooman had told Chase in exchange for a pack of smokes.
    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.
    â€œ 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