The Spy's Little Zonbi by Cole Alpaugh Page A

stinking drunk from the night before.
    ***
    Chase parked his car near Greenberg’s irrigation pond and killed the engine, eyes adjusting to the light from a three-quarter moon. Twenty minutes later an old Ford pickup rolled past the farm with its headlights off. Chase watched three WAWA boys dressed in blackface paint jog across a bean field toward the sleeping chicken houses. The one taking up the rear had a Styrofoam cooler Tooman had said was filled with a mix of soy chicken feed and thallium shavings.
    Chase slid out, clicked the door shut, and made his way to one end of the building the trio was trying to enter. The heavy ammonia smell seeped through the vents and made his eyes burn.
    â€œ Man alive, this shit does stink,” he heard one of the WAWAs say over the hum of the circulations fans, as they found the door latch and stepped into the coop. “I never knew anything could smell so fuggin’ bad.”
    â€œ Will you shut the hell up!” another nearly shouted, and there was a murmur from stirring chickens. Chase saw the three silhouettes take careful strides through the mass of chickens toward the center feeding trays.
    â€œ Smells like somebody poured ammonia on dog turds.”
    â€œ Breath in an out yer mouth, dumbass.”
    â€œ Feels like it’s burning the nose off my face.” Chase could see the lead man hike his shirt out of his pants to use as a filter mask as they squished across the thick layer of chicken shit.
    The man with the cooler dumped some of the lethal contents into the steel tray and they slowly retreated as birds began to feed. One house done, they slipped back out and proceeded to poison the other three coops in an easy and terrible crime.
    With every fiber of his being, Chase wanted to yell out from the moment he saw the first poison being poured, but there was more to this assignment than covering a story. His job was to take control of an event, to work under the cover of a journalist while producing results as a spy.
    Their mission accomplished, three black-clad figures ran from the last chicken house toward their truck, one tripping over a garden rake and falling headfirst.
    Reaching into his pocket, Chase pulled out a thick black marker and looked for a flat surface to write.
    ***
    The slaughter of thirty-seven thousand chickens made newspaper headlines and was the lead story on both local TV news stations. You didn’t mess with chickens on Delmarva.
    But it wasn’t the poultry industry that had Chase feeling as though he no longer possessed a soul when he returned to the scene of the crime later that morning on a spot news assignment. He spent two miserable hours wandering among lifeless white lumps, shooting a few frames of old Abraham Greenberg comforting his wife. He was careful with his exposure inside the chicken house, where hours earlier he’d used a thick marker to rob credit from the WAWAs. He’d drawn three large Ks over the door frame and matching crosses on each side.
    According to Tooman, the Klan was nervous about accepting responsibility for the massacre even though it had been Jew chickens.
    â€œ They were talking about wanting to turn in who done it,” Tooman told Chase on the loading dock after his rounds later in the week. “None of the boys are ready fess up and for good reason. Ain’t nobody supposed to be killin’ chickens. Kill somebody’s momma and a family wants revenge. Kill chickens and the whole Eastern Shore grabs the hangin’ rope.”
    Chase was called into Mack’s glass-walled office and sat next to a man who introduced himself as an FBI agent.
    â€œ Seems we have a hornets’ nest stirred up.” The agent, in a gray suit with tan work boots, had tracked little rectangles of chicken shit into the small office. Chase could smell it.
    â€œ We know the poison belonged to a group of boys up in Delaware,” said the agent. “But somebody used a Klan autograph on