The Swing Voter of Staten Island (9 page)

“It’s going to be murder to try to reason with Rafique.”

“Why, who is he?”

“When you were being held in Staten Island, did you smell anything funny?” she asked.

“Yeah, the pig farms.”

“That stink isn’t from pigs. It’s because the river is blocked with sewage. Jackie Wilson did it years ago in order to seize control. It’s a long story, but the sewage makes the borough nearly uninhabitable.”

“What does this have to do with the borough president?”

“A number of years ago, Adolphus Rafique broke off from the Crappers and started this weird anarchist cult in the East Village district. He named it the Verdant League. Its members rejected the newly implemented capitalist model with the food stamp currency that the Piggers had come up with. The VL evenly distributed all food and housing in the Lower East Side among themselves. When the rest of us objected to Rafique, he and his renegade band moved out to Staten Island, becoming the new majority there since it was so underpopulated.”

“How do they deal with the stench?”

“Most of those who joined his cult have had their sinuses cauterized. It knocks out a lot of the taste, but you don’t smell a thing. They call themselves the Burnt Men. Anyway, because of the deadlock between the two Pigger and two Crapper boroughs, Rafique usually becomes the tie-breaker, so he’s now a major player.” Mallory paused. “What could the blond lobbyist have bribed Adolphus with?”

“Bullets,” Uli remembered. “That’s what she said. She gave him a bunch of bullets.”

“Of course. Rafique is constantly under attack from both gangs, and bullets are one of the things that Feedmore doesn’t provide anymore.” Mallory paused again. “You have to help me.”

“Do what?”

“Try to convince Rafique not to throw his vote to the Democrats.”

“Nothing personal, but I already did you a big favor and got poor Oric killed. I’m not even a Crapper.”

“That’s one of the reasons I need you,” she said. When Uli smiled dismally, Mallory explained: “Rafique won’t let any party affiliates into his precious Verdant League headquarters. But more importantly, it’s just a matter of time before the Piggers catch up with you. Help me and I’ll tell you a possible way out of here.”

“What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Rafique may be an anarchist, but he’s also very smart. Just tell him that the blond woman who bribed him works for the Feedmore Corporation. He’s opposed to corporate funding.”

“Can’t you offer him your own bribe?” Uli asked.

“Like what?”

“Give him more ammo?”

“We can’t do that,” she said, “though come to think of it, we did get a huge shipment of water-purification pills, and I know he hates being dependent upon us for water. Offer him unlimited pills.”

“I’ll consider approaching him, provided you get this thing out of my head and help me get out of Rescue City.”

Mallory said she’d do her best to meet his conditions, but that she couldn’t make any promises. She then mentioned that she had made some inquiries about Carnival and his wife. There was no record of either of them from before they arrived. While here, though, Jim had run for a City Council office nine years earlier as a Crapper candidate. “This was back when Manhattan was still bipartisan. After losing several successive elections, he finally stole an election down in East New York. In order to placate the Piggers in his district, he ended up marrying the former Pigger Councilwoman, Mary.”

“It sounded like she was a Pigger,” Uli recalled.

“This was before the Piggers took orders from Feemore.”

“Did you find out anything about Oric?”

“No one ever reported them having children.”

“Oh, they didn’t. Oric reverted to normal when he was dying. He said the Carnivals abducted him and had some scientists turn him into an idiot savant.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. Remember the guy chasing us in the Flatlands? He was Oric’s twin.”

“That explains a lot,” Mallory said. “Twins have a great significance here.”

“What do you mean
here
?”

“I mean out here in the desert. This is a sacred Indian site. It has something to with duality. Twins have certain powers.”

“Are you kidding?”

“It’s not a coincidence that they put us all here.”

“What does that mean?”

“The federal government was able to kill two birds at once—creating a refugee city along with turning this into a research lab for psychic studies.”

“What are these psychic experiments?” he asked.

“They’re probably part of the arms race with the Soviets. Apparently, the Russians poured millions of rubles into trying to develop telepathic communications with their cosmonauts.”

Suddenly the door flew open and a secretary with a strange unicorn-horn hairdo led a group of men into the room.

“Where is he?” someone called out.

“No, wait!” Mallory shouted.

In quick glances through the arms and shoulders of bodyguards, Uli recognized the tall lean man from posters all around town.

It felt as if something sleeping inside of him had sprung to life. Before he knew what he was doing, he had hurled himself through the four guards and pushed himself up to James Dropt. All he could think was,
Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17, take it to the East Village in Manhattan …

His hand, which was already in his pocket, pulled out the single-chambered pistol and pointed it at Dropt’s head. He squeezed the trigger and blacked out.

U
li awoke to find himself on the floor in the conference room with his wrists cuffed and a squad of bodyguards standing over him.

“What the hell … ?”

“I had this damn room screened!” Mallory was shouting to the captain of security. “Goddamnit, I informed them downstairs that he was a risk, and no one, certainly not Dropt, was supposed to come in!”

“Help!” Uli called out with his face pressed against the floor.

“He didn’t,” the captain stated.

Another security guard came in and tossed an amateurish Dropt mask on the desk.

“He heard that your buddy got Underwood’s Manchurian Candidate experiment, and since the subject was carrying no detectable weapon, Dropt wanted us to test him in case he ever wanted to do his own experimenting.”

“You could’ve told me,” Mallory replied angrily.

“What did I do?” Uli asked.

“You went into a fugue state,” one of the guards politely explained. “Your eyes glossed over and you tried to kill Dropt with this.” He held up the soft-edged oblong piece of rubbery plastic. “We initially thought it was some kind of explosive, but after doing some quick tests, we determined that it was what is commonly referred to as a
marital aide
. Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, in Dianne Colder’s bed,” he recalled.

The door swung open again and a team of armed guards rushed in. Uli, still in handcuffs, watched as the real James Dropt entered. The candidate looked at Uli for an instant, testing to see if he’d revert back into his altered state. Whatever demonic possession had him a moment ago, he was free of it now.

“So,” Dropt spoke directly to Uli, “we hear you were jumped, and the seer was killed.”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry about it,” he said earnestly.

“Did Mallory inform you that we suspect the Piggers have a secret seer of their own?”

“She did.”

“Any idea why you were interred in Rescue City?”

“Not a clue.”

“You were probably part of the antiwar movement incarcerated for indefinite detention. Despite my service in Vietnam, that’s how I got here.”

“I was going to take him downstairs to see Dr. Adele, to find out if Underwood really did put a bug in his head,” Mallory said.

“Oh, Adele is out sick today,” Dropt informed her.

“Then you’ll have to come back tomorrow,” Mallory told Uli.

He thanked her and wished Dropt good luck with the upcoming election. Mallory escorted him out into the hall, where the guards uncuffed him.

“I’m sorry about all that,” she said. “I honestly had no idea they were going to do that.”

“No harm done. And if you still need my help, I’ll try to get Rafique to consider throwing his vote to the Republicans. But only if you show me a way out of this place.”

“Let me clarify that my offer is not a hundred percent. What I have in mind … no one has ever come back to say it works.”

“If there’s any chance at all, I’ll take it,” Uli replied, as they passed the security detail and exited the building.

“Your mission, then, is right behind you. About a hundred yards down is the southbound M3 bus. It goes directly down Bowery, then along Water Street, and right over the Staten Island Ferry Bridge. You’re going to ride down to the very bottom of Staten Island. The Verdant League headquarters is the last stop.”

“Wait a second. If you’re trying to reason with him, why don’t you just call him on the phone yourself?”

“Well, even if he takes the call, which I highly doubt since he refuses to interact with anyone affiliated with either party, a face-to-face appeal is much more persuasive.”

“Then when I come back here tomorrow, I can see this Dr. Adele?” Uli asked.

“Absolutely, and afterwards I’ll give you detailed instructions about a possible way out through the desert.”

“Fine.”

“Lucky you,” she said, pointing up Third Avenue. “There’s your bus.”

He said goodbye and hurried toward the bus stop as she returned inside.

As the M3 pulled up, a loud grinding of engines compelled him to look back. A convoy of large trucks with
Feedmore Road Repair
stenciled on their doors was pulling up next to the Crapper headquarters.

Uli paid his fare and squeezed between an overweight woman with purple hair and a bony elderly guy.

The first blast shattered the windows of the bus, sprinkling the passengers with fragments of glass. Two other explosions quickly followed. The final and most powerful one lifted the bus in the air and knocked it onto its side.

An incredible weight slammed into Uli’s chest. For a moment he blacked out. When he came to, gasping for breath, he realized that three or four people were piled on top of him, including the large purple-haired lady. Beneath him, bent backwards over a seat, was the thin older man, who appeared crushed to death. Those who were still conscious were moaning and writhing in pain. Uli wormed around bodies until he was able to climb up the side of the bus to an emergency window, which he pushed open.

One by one he started pulling people out. When the driver, some of the sturdier passengers, and a man on the street began pitching in, Uli climbed off the bus and sprinted over to the demolished Crapper headquarters.

Approaching the smoldering rubble, he could hear sections of the building collapsing internally. Uli searched for the original entrance, but couldn’t locate it. Yesterday’s midtown bombing looked like child’s play by comparison. From one spot in the wreckage he heard a faint banging and muffled cries for help. Immediately, he started grabbing stones and debris and heaving them into the street.

“Over here!” he yelled. “There’s a person trapped down here! Someone help me!”

Several nearby men and women joined in, pulling wood and stone from around the pulverized site. After fifteen minutes, tunneling roughly ten feet into the wreckage, they unearthed a pair of squirming legs. Uli was able to carefully free the upper torso of a shaggy-headed man.

“My buddy’s trapped right there.” The guy pointed into the hole he had just been pulled out from.

Uli peered in and through the dusty darkness could make out the bottom half of another man twisting in pain. After twenty more minutes of excavating, Uli and the others were finally able to pull the second man free.

“My name is Bernstein,” said the first rescuee, shaken and dusty.

“I’m Woodward,” coughed the second man upon catching his breath. Someone handed him a bottle of water which he gulped down. Patting the chalky dust off his clothes, he added, “Those bastards at Rikers did this.”

“Did you see Mallory?” Uli asked frantically, surveying the destruction around them.

“No, we were doing research in the records room on the third floor,” Bernstein said. “Next thing we know, the floor is dropping below us.”

Uli excused himself and walked around the smoldering block-long, block-wide mountain of rubble. Though a couple of other people had been pulled out, the vast majority were still trapped inside. Hard as he listened, Uli could hear no other muted cries or dull sounds.

Over the next hour or so, firefighters arrived from Brooklyn and Manhattan, as did gangcops, to make sure the Piggers didn’t try to exploit the chaos.

Soon, the gangcops and a few Council officers had to hold back the screaming family members of those buried inside. For fear of further collapse, the Manhattan Crapper fire chief, who had taken charge of the situation, waited for an engineer to arrive before trying to put together a comprehensive excavation plan.

Gas mains and electricity were shut off. At the engineer’s recommendation, four teams were set up to start digging into the disaster from all sides at once. Someone improvised a crude diagram detailing the main Crapper offices. Uli volunteered to work with the northern crew, which was focusing on Dropt’s office, where he was supposed to be holding a meeting at the time with eight of the borough’s twelve Councilpeople. Uli believed that was where Mallory had been heading when she left him. Two rescue dogs were called in. The engineer deemed it too soon for heavier equipment, so a small crane and tractor were brought over.