Uli 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 Counc
ilpeople. 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.
Uli soon realized the full ramifications of the explosion. Aside from the fact that the upper echelon of the Crapper leadership, including Mallory, had been wiped out, gone too was any possibility of him leaving Rescue City.
He worked feverishly with his team at the northern wall, hoping against hope that they might still find Mallory alive. Each group created a human chain of thirty or so people passing buckets of bricks, two-by-four studs, hunks of broken dry wall, and miles of electrical wiring.
The blast had occurred around 2:30. By 4:30, half an hour after his team had assembled, they located the first cluster of victims—four crushed bodies: the Councilman from Chelsea, his top aide, a clerical worker, and Dropt’s secretary with the unicorn-horn hairdo. By 5:30 Uli had stripped down to his T-shirt and was passing the buckets from a middle-aged man named Lucas to a guy named Marky behind him. Uli learned that both had come to Rescue City to fulfill Alternate Service requirements—instead of going to Vietnam—and had been working with the Crappers on local social programs.
“First we get evacuated due to a terror attack in the old town,” Lucas said. “Now we’re getting it here.”
Over the ensuing hours, as the three became friends, Uli explained that he suffered from acute amnesia and asked, “What exactly happened to the original New York?”
“A terrorist attack,” Luke said with fatigue, handing an empty ten-gallon spackle bucket to Uli.
“A series of around fifty contamination bombs went off in lower Manhattan,” Marky elaborated.
“A missile attack?”
“No,” Marky replied, after cutting through a section of piping with a chainsaw. “Pitchblende, an ore they use in some old fluoroscope machines. About two tablespoons of it was stuffed in small sections of lead foil, using an M-80 as the detonator. Extremely low-tech, but lots of them.”
“How many dead?” Uli asked.
“None immediately,” Luke replied. “The worst part at first was that Manhattan had to be evacuated. A lot of poorer neighborhoods in the outer boroughs were flooded overnight by the newly displaced middle class.”
“Albany was quick to respond,” Marky reminded him with a smirk. “They immediately suspended all rent stabilization and control laws, so that within two years almost all rents skyrocketed.”
“Keep in mind the city was near bankruptcy,” Luke elaborated. “They were terrified of losing their dwindling middle class, even if it meant screwing over their poor.”
“Within a year or two, almost all tenants who had been living in low-income neighborhoods for decades couldn’t afford the rents anymore,” Marky continued. “Illegal evictions were epidemic. The working poor found themselves forced into the streets.”
“You’d see piles of furniture dumped out onto the sidewalk.”
“What did the city do about them?” Uli prodded.
“Initially, they were sheltered in Shea and Yankee stadiums,” Marky said, “but things quickly degenerated. Angry mobs started moving throughout the city, breaking into stores and shops. The National Guard and the city tried to make smaller encampments, turning the city parks into trailer parks—”
“Don’t forget upper Manhattan,” Lucas cut in. “Harlem became a massive tent city.”
“When did the federal government get involved?”
“July of 1971 was incredibly hot,” Marky replied, scooping up a bucket of crumbled plaster board. “When the big blackout first struck, all the poor just went bananas. For three days everyone rioted. They broke into all the new businesses that had finally resettled after the Manhattan attack. Within three days the city was totally trashed all over again.”
“So everyone was just rounded up and brought here?” Uli concluded.
“There was a big class-action lawsuit that was going nowhere in the courts,” Lucas said. “But after the blackout, Lindsay and Rockefeller appealed to Nixon for help. The federal government had a plan, but things got screwy.”
“Many agreed to come here because they were promised that once Manhattan was scrubbed down, they’d be brought right back,” Marky added.
“And all the poor out here were told they would be given priority housing in Manhattan as a kind of restitution.”
“Who initiated this?” Uli asked. It didn’t sound like something Nixon would do.
“The Democrats started it,” Luke recalled, “but then critics kept hitting on things like Kennedy’s War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society and wasting money on the poor … so the Republicans wound up taking the lead—”
A severed foot emerged out of the debris before them. Sifting onward, they soon located a new clump of mangled bodies. For the next twenty minutes the three of them silently pulled out limbs, torsos, two heads, three more feet, and then what appeared to be a very large mouth.
By 7:30 their group had recovered six more bodies. Along with the other three crews, the total came to twenty-eight dead. In the hands of two corpses they found scribbled goodbye notes, indicating that some people had survived the initial explosion only to bleed to death while waiting to be rescued. This compelled everyone to work harder. Floodlights were brought in.
As it grew late, Marky, Luke, and the others on Uli’s line were gradually replaced. Only Uli remained from the original group. He was intent on staying until they had located Mallory. By 11 p.m. he started dropping his buckets and seeing double. His coworkers finally ordered him to get some sleep.
It was an unusually hot night for the Nevada desert. A series of food tables were unfolded on 7th Street between Second and Bowery. Outdoor showers and portable toilets were unloaded on 6th Street, as were a row of shower stalls. For volunteers who lived too far away to commute home, cots were brought in and lined up under the stars down 6th Street.
Uli dropped exhausted onto a hard cot, barely able to kick off his shoes.
10/30/80
Flashing lights, shouts, and various engines revved up. Uli awoke to the news that the dead body of mayoral candidate James Dropt had just been located. The bright lights of the Crapper TV crew shone down on the catastrophe. Uli wandered over to Bowery just as the recovery team wheeled the gurney with Dropt’s mangled body past. All four crews stopped working and quietly lined the sidewalk to catch a glimpse of their fallen leader. With Dropt’s corpse found, the last vestiges of hope had vanished. Even Uli felt it—not so much sadness as a general despair from those all around. The possibility of the first Crapper victory since Mallory’s husband had been shot was blown asunder.
Dropt’s body was slid into the back of an ambulance, which departed slowly under a single police escort. Most of the crew workers either went back to work or returned to their narrow outdoor cots. As Uli thought about the leader he had only briefly met, he could hear men in the neighboring cots weeping. Following a shallow sleep, he arose with the first rays of the sun.
Sitting elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee with others at a community table over a bowl of flavorless cereal, Uli learned both good and bad news. Just an hour earlier they had discovered four people still alive, buried in the basement. Unfortunately, they had also unearthed twenty-two more crushed bodies, which included the last of the Councilpeople. They had accounted for all but two people, and one of those was Mallory.
Passing by the makeshift morgue set up near the rear of the headquarters, Uli spotted something that made him cringe. It was the crushed body of the baby kangaroo that Mallory had taken such pains to rescue. Seeing the little marsupial’s body, Uli knew in his heart of hearts that she was dead.
In the early afternoon, Uli saw a crowd gathering around a small TV. The Honorable Horace Shub, Jr. was in the middle of a speech denouncing the bombing and begging for reconciliation between the various gangs. Apparently, vengeful Crapper gangs from northern Brooklyn had ventured into weaker Pigger neighborh
oods in Queens the night before and burned stores and slaughtered over twenty Piggers before order was restored.
“James Dropt was a greatly good man,” Shub said in his weirdly earnest way. “He believed in a peaceable resolution to our manifold problems. I am calling upon the Councilpeople of New York, both the Created Equalers and the We the People Party, to put an end to the anger and join me in working together and bringing peace to our greatly good, God-fearing municipality …”
Uli didn’t stick around to see how the mayor’s speech was going to end. As he walked down Bowery, his thoughts reverted to Mallory. He decided that as a tribute to her, he was going to do what he had initially set out to do for personal gain: He would venture down to Staten Island, locate the borough president, and try to convince Adolphus Rafique to cast his decisive vote in favor of the former matinee idol Ronald Reagan.
Over the next fifteen minutes or so, exhausted young volunteers for the Crapper recovery effort gathered with Uli at the M3 bus stop. A number of them were still coughing and hawking up dust particles.
“How long is it to the very last stop?” Uli asked the driver when the bus finally arrived.
“A little over two hours, but I better warn you that Shub ordered a curfew because of the rioting, so there’s only one more bus going down there. Then they’re canceling service for the night.”
“What time is the last bus leaving there to head back this way?”
“Six o’clock sharp.”
Uli thanked the driver and took a seat, hoping to catch some shut-eye. Tired as he was, though, he couldn’t stop looking at the strange revisionist city passing around him.
He was able to remember more of the places from old New York that were missing here. Little Italy, SoHo, and Chinatown had all been consolidated into one tiny neighborhood—LittleHoTown. TriBeCa and Wall Street, on the other hand, were gone without a trace.
As they ascended the wooden bridge over the sandbagged wall protecting the Battery, foul odors began to rise.
The Swing Voter of Staten Island Page 9