“Why couldn’t they just give us subsidies and let us stay in Flushing or Prospect Park?” burst the older woman who had just tried silencing them. “That’s what they did during the San Francisco earthquake! Why the hell did they ship us out to a radioactive desert in the middle of nowhere?”
“You didn’t have to come here,” Kennesy replied, and explained to Uli, “I don’t know about you, but everyone here applied to get in. There’s still a lot of poor people living in old New York.”
“What do you mean a radioactive desert?” Uli asked the older woman.
“There’s no scientific proof of radioactivity,” Kennesy shot back.
“This is where they set off all the A-bombs back in the ’50s,” the lady explained to Uli.
“And in case you don’t remember,” Kennesy countered, “they did try subsidies. They handed out supplies in the streets of New York. Everyone got in line. Do you remember who eventually wound up with the bulk of stock?”
The older woman made a sour face.
“The Mafia, that’s who. No one has ever starved or frozen here. Hell, we even got cars and other basic luxuries.”
“We can’t travel or have children!” the lady barked.
“People were homeless. They couldn’t afford to travel anyway. And why the hell would someone who doesn’t even have a home want to have a homeless baby?”
“So only the rich should reproduce, is that it?”
“Look, you want to blame someone for sticking us out here? How about the terrorists who hit the city!”
Before Uli could intervene, the driver called out, “Eighth Street, Crapper HQ. Last stop.”
Uli and Oric got off with the cute hurricane evacuee, who bid them farewell and headed south down Lafayette Street.
Uli and Oric moved eastward to Astor Place. Suddenly, two hands grabbed Uli’s elbows from behind. A thick arm looped over his head and across his neck. Back-kicking his assailant’s kneecap, Uli grabbed the arm and flung a fat bespectacled kid up over his back and onto the pavement. Just as quickly, a third and fourth pair of beefy hands grabbed at his arms. The fat kid pressed a wet rag against Uli’s face. Another pair of hands grabbed his knees and lifted him. As Uli struggled, he smelled the chloroform compound and held his breath. Twisting his head around, he realized that the person holding the rag to his face was the guy from midtown with the pointy bamboo hat. Uli struggled to free one hand, but he felt his consciousness thinning out.
“Ma! Da! Ma-Da! I miss you!” he heard Oric yell.
Dazed, Uli was now being lifted into a van. The geeky fat boy kept the rag pressed tightly over his mouth. Uli found himself fading to Oric’s screams.
10/29/80
W ake up now! Wake up! GET THE HELL UP! GO!
“What?” The sun was bright in the doorway, so it had to be the next morning. Uli was hanging upside down with his hands bound together.
She’s going to torture you! You’re going to have one chance and that’s it!
“Help me!” Uli shouted back.
Where are you? It was the blond man. Yet the voice was female. How could this be?
“I don’t know,” he said aloud. Looking around, he saw that he was alone and dismissed the interaction as the afterwash of a bizarre dream.
An awful sulfuric stench pulled him to full consciousness. He appeared to be in a barnyard. His lower section was numb with pain. He could still hear Oric’s shrieks nearby.
“How do you know about the blast?” Uli heard a woman’s voice shouting.
During an interlude of silence, Uli figured something sinister was underway. Sure enough, Oric started screaming terribly.
“Talk, you fat fucking retard!”
“Great Neck,” Oric groaned. “Little Neck. Great Neck, Little Neck!”
“What are you talking about? What’s this neck shit?”
“Dark, dark,” Oric heaved. “Then light!”
“You are going to tell me what that Great Neck, Little Neck shit means or you’re going to …”
He recognized the voice. It was Dianne Colder, the Feedmore lobbyist. Uli could hear her engaging in some kind of strenuous activity. Maybe she was punching Oric. It didn’t last long. To the frenzied squeal of pigs across the barn, Oric was shouting, “No, please! Don’t hurt Oric no more!”
Uli mustered all his strength, flexing his waist to catch a glimpse of the knot around his knees. Then he heard a loud thud.
“Shit! You fat fuck!”
“Brother, brother!” Oric was continuously screaming now.
“Scat! Get out of there!” he heard Dianne shouting over the shrieks. “Serves you right! You should have told me!”
In a moment, her footsteps were marching toward Uli. He dropped his arms back down and laid limp, pretending to be unconscious. The lobbyist paused before him, then poked him hard in the stomach—he didn’t budge. As she crouched low to inspect his lifelessness, Uli sprung his body outward and wrapped his bound wrists over her blown-out, highlighted hair.
“Wait a sec!” she screamed, immediately trying to negotiate. “Ninety-two percent of all Crappers—”
He yanked her head sharply forward, dislocating her vertebral column. With a crunch, she fell into a perfect seated position and just stared straight ahead.
“Oh my god,” she slowly said. “I can’t move—I—”
He had paralyzed her. Only her mouth still worked. Like a broken robot, she manically recited statistics underscoring how Piggers were morally, intellectually, and economically superior to Crappers. She was a true partyist.
Uli twisted on his rope like a large marlin on a hook. Behind him, hanging from a nail, he saw a rusty scythe veiled under years of dusty cobwebs.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
Uli swung backward and caught the wheat cutter in his bound hands. He squeezed the wooden handle up between his knees. Oric’s shrieks were unbearable now.
“I was only trying to scare him.”
“What’d you do?” Uli asked as he frantically rubbed his knotted wrists over the rusty tool.
“He was yelling strange shit! He kept saying, Great Neck, Little Neck.” She paused. “I guess he was talking about my neck!”
“He’s psychic,” Uli explained candidly, since the woman was clearly headed nowhere.
“Well, if he wasn’t so fat, I wouldn’t’ve dropped him in the pig pen,” said the talking blond head. As Uli continued sawing away at his ropes, she added, “The average Pigger is 12.8 pounds lighter than the average Crapper. Did you know that?”
“That’s a lie, so you’ve probably been lying all along,” he replied, cutting through the final strands.
Once free, he began sawing through the cords holding his ankles together. The dried-out rope snapped and Uli fell to the ground, collapsing on top of the paralyzed body of Dianne Colder.
“You are a truly despicable human being!” she shouted painfully.
“Even if that were true,” he countered, “I’d still be a hundred percent better than you.”
A car screeched to a halt outside. Uli grabbed the rusty scythe, hid against the side of the barn, and waited.
“Help! Quick!” Dianne squealed, now lying flat on her back. “He’s in here!”
A large man rushed inside. Uli swung the scythe deep into the front of the guy’s neck, severing his jugular. It was the man in the goofy hat who had been with the fat boy when they kidnapped him at Astor Place. He grabbed his neck wound, dropped to his knees, flipped over, and gurgled slowly to death. Uli removed the scythe and dashed out to the pen.
Four large wild hogs were chewing on the tied-up limbs and torso of Oric’s bloody body. Uli could see their teeth tearing through the poor man’s flesh as though it were raspberry pudding. When he kicked one of the animals away, it tried to bite him. He slashed and stabbed at their fat hairy backs with the rusty weapon. When the biggest one charged him, Uli jabbed it right in the eye. The hog squealed insanely with blood shooting forth, causing the others
to dash off. Uli used the opportunity to heave Oric out over the rails of the bloody pen. Among his many wounds, Oric’s right shoulder was eaten clean to the bone. The hogs had chewed into his belly and bit into his scalp, inadvertently pulling the long t-shaped device out of his skull.
Oric was still slightly conscious. Placing him gently on his back, Uli tried to tie a tourniquet around his gnawed arm, but two of the worst bites on his torso had severed major veins and arteries. The poor man was bleeding to death and there was nothing Uli could do.
“I’m so sorry, Oric,” Uli said sadly.
“It’s okay, friend,” the dying man muttered. “The Carnivals abducted me and had some goddamn scientist shove that thought-cuff into my skull.”
“What … ? Why?”
“They knew I had some basic psychic gifts. And by retarding me they could enhance those abilities.”
“Oh my god.”
“You’re the only one who figured it out. He was using my predictions to change the outcomes of—” Oric was losing it. “That was my twin brother in Flatlands trying to rescue me … I’ll be joining him now.”
“I didn’t know.”
Oric was gasping for breath and consciousness. “You … you have … too!”
“Have what?”
Oric moved his mouth, but nothing came out.
“DO I HAVE A CROSS IN MY HEAD?”
Oric stared at him.
“A TWIN, DO I HAVE TWIN?”
Oric just kept staring. It took Uli a moment to realize he was dead. He heaved the man over his shoulder and walked out to the front yard. There he saw an old sports car with only two seats. The keys were still in the ignition.
“No, wait, please don’t leave me here!” Dianne cried out faintly as Uli checked Oric’s pulse for the last time. He was about to drive off and just abandon the paralyzed lobbyist, but then remembered that she was the only person he had met here who mentioned routinely leaving the place. She had to know some way off the reservation. Racing back inside the barn, he scooped up Colder’s limp body and carried her out.
“Thank you. Bless your soul.”
“We have to get you to a hospital right away,” he said, hauling her up on the roof of the old car so that she was lying belly-down with her head facing forward.
“There aren’t any good hospitals here,” she blurted. “These animals can barely handle basic bruises.”
“We have to get you and Oric out of here. He’s going to die.”
“The retard’s already dead. Help me and I’ll get you a million dollars!”
Uli glanced around and spotted an old burlap sack slung over a laundry line running from a wooden post to the end of the barn. He pulled the cord down and grabbed the sack, which he slid under the corporate shill’s skinny body. He tied the line tightly around Dianne’s left wrist, strung it through the windows, and knotted it to her other wrist so that she was pressed flat against the roof of the car.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Underwood sent you to kill us,” he answered while securing her legs.
Letting out a deep sigh, she said, “You got it all wrong—he works for me. The only reason I’m here is to protect the company’s interest—” She cut herself off, realizing that in her muted agony she had imparted too much information.
“How are you protecting its interest?”
“Just making sure that everything is running smoothly,” she said simply.
“I’ll give you one chance,” he reasoned. “If I think you’re lying, I’m feeding you to the pigs. Now tell me what’s really going on.”
“Oh, what the hell. I was sent in to sway the election.”
“The mayoral election?”
“Fuck no, the presidential election. It’s tightly split along party lines. I’m here to tilt it right.”
“Just how do you hope to do that?” She didn’t respond. “Your only chance of survival is by talking quickly.”
“The five boroughs work almost like the electoral college. Each borough gets a single vote. Three out of five boroughs throw a single electoral college vote from Rescue City, Nevada to the presidential election.”
“Are the boroughs divided?”
“Queens and the Bronx are Pigger. They customarily vote for the Democratic Party. Brooklyn and Manhattan are Crapper. They go with the Republicans. Staten Island is the wild card. They went Democratic in the last election, but the Staten Island borough president has the power to ratify or veto the vote of his constituents at his own whim.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and the only reason I was sent here was to make sure Staten Island swings the vote to the Democrats.”
“So you’re a Democrat?”
“I’m whatever they tell me to be!”
“How exactly did you hope to alter the vote?”
“I already did it—with a large quantity of bullets. Look, if this really matters to you—”
“It doesn’t. These people can all kill each other for all I care. I just want out.”
“Then undo my ropes and within thirty minutes I’ll have you sitting in a Jacuzzi in a Vegas hotel with two underage girls.”
That was the best offer he’d had since he found himself sleepwalking near the airport two days ago.
“Where do we go?”
“Take me to the corner of 4th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan,” she commanded. “Let’s get the fuck out of Staten Island!”
Before untying the cord, he propped up Oric’s dead body in the passenger seat. He had rescued Uli yesterday from the geriatric mob at the funeral in Sunset Park, and now this blond bitch had brutally killed him.
Uli jumped into the sports car, turned the key, and hit the gas. In his rearview as he left the compound, he saw a sign that read, CALYPSO PIG FARM. Dianne Colder began screaming from the roof of the car like a human siren: “Treason! Treason!”
After twenty minutes of bouncing over the dunes of Staten Island, following rusty signs directing him to Manhattan, crisscrossing streams of waste water along Hyman Boulevard, he had to clamp his nose due to the stench. Driving past the rows of gorgeously designed buildings he had heard about, situated along the banks of the borough, he saw that they were indeed uninhabitable. Some were still submerged up to their roofs, just as Mallory had said. These flooded structures were evidence of how high the sewage water had risen.
He soon reached a two-lane ramp marked Staten Island Ferry Bridge. The wooden bridge swayed as he drove from submerged foundation to submerged foundation. The guard rail was a string of rotten two-by-fours. Fearing he would skid right off the aging planks into the toxic waters, Uli slowed to a crawl. To the southeast, he spotted a short, arching red bridge connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn. Nearer to his right, a dark angle of land narrowed to a point, then turned into a tall, reinforced concrete wall. The liquid sewage reached almost to the top of it. Below him, the black muck oozed south from the western side of Manhattan. At the other side of the dam were cleaner waters streaming northward up around Brooklyn.
As he approached Manhattan, Uli saw up close what he had spotted from the Brooklyn Bridge the day before. A tight wall of sandbags around four feet high and ten feet wide had been constructed next to the concrete dam wall running along the southeastern edge of Manhattan. The bags moved westerly around the Battery and up the west side of the borough. Conical orange sentry booths, like giant traffic cones, lined the bagged wall.
Uli sped through lower Manhattan, ignoring the passing motorists who gawked at the screaming blonde roped like a deer to his rooftop. He made his way onto Houston, turned left on First Avenue, and screeched to a halt at the corner of 4th Street, in front of a building with a shingle that read, CLASS-A LADY HOTEL.
“Is this where you live?” he asked, getting out of the sports car with Oric’s motionless body still slumped forward in the passenger seat.
“You’ve performed … high crimes … and misdemeanors … against the Feedmore … Corporation.” Dian
ne attempted to spit bugs out of her mouth as she spoke.
“Exactly how much are you getting paid to destroy American democracy?”
“You think I’m evil because I work for a corporation … but let me set you straight, mister!” she said with baited breath. “Everything great and powerful about this nation was made … not in the halls of Congress, but by the laissezfaire system … Corporate interests are American interests!”
“Just tell me what to do to get the hell out of here.”
“Upstairs in my hotel room, on my bedside table, is a piece of paper with Newt Underwood’s phone number. Call him, tell him where I am, and I’ll have you out of here tonight.”
“What’s your room number?”
She glared at him uncertainly. “I smell a Crapper. Untie me and carry me up there.”
“That’s absurd.”
At that moment, a large man in a City Council Police Department uniform turned the corner and walked toward them.
“HELP! Pol—” Dianne started to scream.
Uli kissed her hard on her bright red lips. The officer walked past without even noticing that the woman was strapped to the roof of the car, or that a dead man was slumped in the passenger seat.
“So what room are we in?” he asked again, as he frisked her for her room key, finding nothing.
“I’m not telling you shit, asshole!”
For the first time, Uli noticed a strange bump on the front of Dianne’s neck. He tapped it gently.
“What do you think you’re—”
“How come I didn’t see this before?”
“See what?”
“You have an Adam’s apple.”
“What are you talking about?”
Uli reached around behind her legs, lifted up her skirt, and pulled her panties aside, revealing a set of small pink testicles. He didn’t know how he could have missed it before. The lobbyist was a transvestite.
“High crimes, high crimes!” Her voice had been growing deeper since her injury.
Uli pulled the burlap sack out from under her and shoved the end of it in her mouth, slipping the rest of it over her head and torso. Ignoring her muffled cries, he entered the lobby of her grungy hotel.
The Swing Voter of Staten Island Page 7