“Let’s get the heck out of here! Forget about these Piggers,” she urged, leading him to her car.
“Wait a second! I think he knows where Mallory is,” Uli said.
People were collecting on the curb now, staring benignly at the man with blood soaking the front of his shirt.
His two large assistants were still rolling in agony.
“You sure?” she asked, and picking up the large knife that Scarface had dropped, she cut the plastic bands off of Uli’s wrists.
“Yes, come on!”
Together they each lifted under an armpit and dragged the semiconscious leader into the backseat of the blond woman’s car. Uli got in next to him and compressed his chest wound as the woman sped off north.
“I don’t want to be rude, but when I met you before—”
“I was undercover as a man,” she replied.
“How do I know you?”
“I’m your sister, Karen. Remember?” She peered at him intensely in the rearview mirror. In shock, he dropped the rag he was holding against Scarface’s chest. A small fountain of blood shot out. He grabbed it back and continued compressing.
Uli saw the striking similarity—to himself. He instantly remembered that he had a twin.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I found myself stumbling along a street in Queens without any clue of who I was or why I was here, but then I saw your face at that funeral in Brooklyn …”
“I was working undercover. Listen, do you know anything about Vartan?”
“Who?”
“My son!”
“I don’t even know my own name. Maybe I came to rescue you.”
“Not likely,” she replied. “You put me here.”
“I what?”
“About four days ago,” she said, “I had this dream about some white-haired guy giving me instructions to kill Dropt, and I realized it was Newt Underwood. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I saw dogs racing at me and I knew I was connecting with someone, but I didn’t know it was you.”
“You were the one who told me to run,” he said, remembering the mysterious voice in his head.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t until I saw you at Father Berrigan’s funeral in Brooklyn that I knew it was you.”
“Why didn’t you meet me at Rock & Filler Center?”
“Oh, believe me, I tried. There were tons of Piggers in that funeral crowd. One of them heard what I shouted to you and I got delayed. I have an office at 30 Rock & Filler. I’ve been tracking you ever since. I sensed you hanging unconscious in some barnhouse and tried to wake you up. Then I thought they were holding you in the Bronx. While I was there looking for you, I felt this intense burning pain here and here.” She pointed to her chest and lower region.
“I was tortured at Rikers.”
“Here on the reservation, it’s not unusual for twins to have a psychic connection,” she explained as they sped uptown.
“Why did that preacher scream at me in Brooklyn?”
“You tried putting him and his brother away ten years ago.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, and when it was discovered that you had set them up, a jury acquitted them. But after the Manhattan bombing, they got detained here.”
He wondered what kind of a person he really was. How could he send anyone, let alone his own sister, into this hellhole?
Suddenly she slammed on the brakes, screeching to a stop on 16th Street in front of Beth Israel Clinic. Uli helped her as she pulled the severely wounded man out of the backseat. His shirt and pants were soaked in blood. Together they dragged him through the double doors of the emergency room.
The putrid stench hit Uli immediately as he entered the lobby. Just as Ernestina Eric had said, the conditions of the hospital looked completely medieval. The unwashed mix of dried blood and dirt covering the floor was a perfect breeding ground for endless bacteria. Off to one side, near the receptionist’s window, Uli noticed a blood-smudged spool of tickets that patients were supposed to grab upon entering. The rows of benches were packed with the sick and injured. Others were lying on the floor bleeding from assorted wounds and orifices. Some must have been dead.
Ignoring everyone, Karen pulled out a gold badge and explained to the nurse on duty that her patient was top priority.
Within minutes, a man who Uli figured was one of the few real doctors on the reservation came down to the reception area and began treating Scarface’s chest wound. The bullet had punctured his lung and was lodged in his right atrium. With a Crapper gangcop guarding the victim, Karen used the phone at the nurse’s station.
“We have a very tiny window of opportunity here!” Uli heard her shout. “Once the Piggers realize he’s in our custody, they’re going to either move Mallory or kill her!”
As she continued talking, Uli spotted a blood-stained newspaper on the lobby floor. The headlines of the daily screamed, Assassin Assassinated! To his surprise, there was a photo of his missing coworker, Patricia Itt. According to the article, she had shot and killed Daniel Ellsberg while he was being led out of the Astoria police headquarters.
The doctor stuck an IV drip into the patient’s arm, while an aide strapped a mask over his scarred face.
Five minutes later, the Pigger was carried into a small operating room upstairs. A team of Crapper gangcops arrived and further secured the area. Soon, four strange men rushed into the room, pulling on rubber gloves and surgical masks. There was something about them, in their dress and demeanor, quite unlike all others in Rescue City. Two of them were evidently nurses. One took surgical tools from a large plastic box and laid them out on a linen-covered tray. The other injected Scarface with painkillers, attached him to three portable monitors, and jerked his head back to slip a breathing tube down his throat.
“No,” the apparent leader of this medical group stopped him, “you can’t interrogate someone with a tube down his throat.”
Without even cutting the patient’s hair, the leader proceeded to run a small bone saw along the crown of his skull. Uli was about to mention that the bullet was in his chest, not his head, when he realized they weren’t trying to save the man.
“I didn’t know you had neurosurgeons here,” whispered Uli.
“We don’t,” Karen replied. “Technically they’re scientists: cleavings, incisions, and amputations.”
Uli grasped that her words formed the acronym CIA. “Where’d you find them?”
“They occasionally send these experiment memos to Pigger and Crapper headquarters. A couple months ago they put out a surgical memo to both gangs that in exchange for testing their latest procedure, they were willing to extract vital information from any hostile witness who is going to die anyway.”
“I guess that’s why they’re not worried about keeping sterile.”
One of the scientists opened what looked like a small wooden cigar box. Inside was an instrument that resembled a stainless steel yarmulke with dozens of long, thin needles pointing downward. Dozens of intricate wires shooting out of the top end were weaved together like a braid that ended in a single complex plug. The scientist secured it into the back of a small black control panel. The steel points were delicately inserted into the ruffled contours of the Pigger’s exposed gray matter.
“Revive the subject,” said the lead scientist to the one controlling the anesthesia and oxygen levels. Within moments, the patient started coming to.
“You can question him now,” the leader said, as if to do so himself would be somehow unethical.
“Where is Mallory? … Where is Mallory,” Karen inquired softly.
“Be more aggressive,” the scientist coached.
“Where the hell is Mallory!”
“Fuck you!” the guinea pig spat back with his eyes still shut tight. “I—Fuck you—She—”
Another scientist standing behind the control panel read a display of vital statistics as he flipped switches and turned dials.
“You�
��re not hurting him, are you?” Uli asked.
The surgeon confidently shook his head no.
Uli watched as another scientist monitored the physical reactions on the dying subject’s gray semiconscious face. Uli saw that the needles were having some kind of effect on the man’s motor neurons, as his arms and legs involuntarily shuddered and twitched.
“Where is Mallory?” Karen asked firmly.
“No fucking way … I … gonna tell you shit—”
One of the other scientists flipped another switch that seemed to take things up a notch. Scarface’s eyelids started fluttering.
“Where is she!”
“No, I’m—” Scarface cringed, shutting his eyes again. “Stinking-fucking-Island! No!”
“Where?”
“No way! The dumps! No fucking … to the dumps. No fucking way … The fucking dumps!”
“What dumps?” Karen asked, as a technician fine-tuned the control panel.
“Stinking-fucking-Island!”
“The city dump?” she asked.
“His vitals are dropping,” the lead scientist warned. Within a matter of seconds, all the portable instruments beeped and flatlined.
“—And he’s gone.”
As the scientists congratulated each other on their success and started packing things up, Karen pulled Uli out of the room. In the hallway, a dozen Crapper gangcops were mulling around.
“What’d you find?” one asked.
“He died before we could get anything.” They all looked dejected.
“Let’s go,” Karen whispered to Uli.
“Shouldn’t we ask those gangcops to help us?” he asked as they headed out to her car.
“No, we have a serious mole infestation. We still have a small chance of getting out there before they move her.”
They jumped in her car and headed south. Moving down Bowery, Karen had the dispatcher put her through to her second-in-command—a Sergeant Schuman in midtown. After asking half a dozen questions about the manpower and carpower of the present shift, she instructed him to assemble an initial crew of twenty gangcops, divided into five squads. Each four-man group would be assigned to new cars with bulletproof armor. Karen verbally compiled a list of supplies that included guns, bullets, walkie-talkies, spears, arrows, machetes, a hundred feet of rope, fifteen sandwiches, five gallons of water, cotton swabs, masking tape, and a box of nose pins.
“We’re also going to need a medic, some new clothes for Mallory, and some basic medical supplies in case she’s injured.”
“Sergeant Jack is just going off-duty with his squad,” her lieutenant informed her through the car’s speaker phone.
“Put him on.”
Within a minute, five more armored cars were added, doubling the motorized armada to ten. They were instructed to meet Karen and Uli at the Manhattan side of the Staten Island Ferry Bridge as soon as possible.
Roughly half an hour later, the line of ten squad cars arrived. Karen parked her own car and they got in the front vehicle, leading the convoy.
He could feel the car sinking and rising as they drove over the wobbly bridge. The awful smell hit them like a bucket of cold water. Uli, Karen, their driver, and the two gangcops with them immediately slipped on their nose pins.
“This stink was the price for establishing order here,” Karen said, peering over the waste water lapping against the sandbags of Manhattan. “The entire place used to be so dangerous you couldn’t go three blocks in any direction without having some gang attack you.”
“I heard that the guy who saved the place was some Indian mystic.”
“That’s a load of shit,” Karen replied. “Jackie Wilson started out a ruthless ganglord. He was the top lieutenant in a small gang in Hell’s Kitchen. When his boss got killed, Jackie took the gang into the desert. Actually, they were hardly a gang—thirteen warriors. They spent forty days in the desert circling the city so that they wouldn’t be caught by other gangs. Then they invaded the area that later became JFK Airport, which at the time was really just a big empty lot. There was nothing out there. Everyone thought he was crazy when he spent six months securing it like a goddamned fortress.
“Late one night, after he finally locked it up tight, he went into Brooklyn and hijacked a bunch of trucks. He filled them with as many logs and rocks and bags of concrete as they could carry and dumped everything on the big drain below Staten Island—trucks and all. That’s where we’re heading now. Then he blasted the retaining walls along lower Staten Island that held the sewage water back, immediately flooding the borough. Within a week, the airfield there, which was the only functioning airfield in Rescue City, was under five feet of sewage. Roughly two weeks later, Feedmore switched from piloted planes to the first unpiloted drones, which began landing at JFK—just as Wilson knew they would. Suddenly he was in charge of all the food and supplies for the entire city. Some gangs tried invading, but he was ready for them. He had his hand around the throat of this place. To his credit, he was fair, he treated everyone equal. People basically liked him. But if you wanted supplies, you had to do things his way.”
“Who created the political parties?”
“Two of Wilson’s lieutenants started rival factions, but he unified the city by establishing laws and the two-party system, along with elections. Wilson became the first official mayor here.”
“Why didn’t he fix the drain after taking control?” Uli asked, looking out over the putrid waters of Staten Island.
“Oh, he tried. He spent a year or so employing an army of people to pull out all the debris and build back the retaining walls, attempting to make things like they were before. They erected this beautiful coffer dam to divert the water around the blocked sewage tube while trying to unplug it. Then they tried to bore a new hole through the debris and into the old drain. Between tunneling explosions and strange diseases, a lot of people died, yet they were never able to reconnect with the original tube.”
After passing the rows of sunken and uninhabitable houses, the pavement below them narrowed into a particularly pitted stretch of Hyman Boulevard. Uli saw large gashes in the blacktop and the twisted remains of strange rusty vehicles.
“Those were the personnel carriers from when the army was still here bringing in supplies,” Karen explained. “People started attacking them, blowing them up on route from the airport.”
“Where did they get the explosives?”
“Old artillery depots had been left behind, and ammonium nitrate was being shipped in to make bombs.”
“Why were people attacking them?”
“Everything started to go wrong. Electrical blackouts, food shortages. People didn’t like their housing assignments. Then, when the government discovered that some terrorists had been inadvertently swept here, they turned off phone service. When people began killing soldiers, the army withdrew all its troops.”
“Was this when that reproductive disease struck?”
“The EGGS epidemic? No,” she replied. “That set in after Wilson flooded Staten Island.”
When the highway forked off in several directions, the convoy stayed to the east with the river to their immediate left. Roughly halfway down the length of Staten Island, during one long descent, the bilious brown water curved west, completely washing out the torn and twisted road. At the point where the river was at its widest and shallowest, they were able to carefully drive across. With windows up, the entourage of cars slushed through dark waves of toxic water that came up to the doors, almost flooding the engines. Then they sped along the rising edge of the lumpy brown river until they came to a fork of five roads. Unsure of where he was going, the driver stopped.
“That way,” directed one of the two gangcops in the backseat, pointing to the narrowest path.
“What the hell’s over there?” the driver responded.
The gangcop had worked for the Council’s Department of Sanitation and explained that this was the way to the city dump, the southernmost point of Rescue City.
/> “You’re sure?” Karen asked him.
“I drove down here every day for five years,” the cop replied.
The caravan soon came to what looked like an endless sprawl of smoldering garbage dunes. It was here that most of the nonbiodegradable trash from the city was deposited. Along a wide, damp field of filth, a number of tire fires sent up ribbons of thick black smoke. Robust little animals darted around. Inspecting them closely, Uli identified them by their beautiful coats and large ears—they were chinchillas.
That morning’s squad of garbage trucks was parked off to the side with teams of sanitation workers still unloading them. Two small tractors shoveled the trash about. Karen and the two gangcops stopped and rounded up a dozen or so workers. Swarms of black flies buzzed everywhere.
“Have you seen anyone out of the ordinary around here in the past day?” she asked them, as gangcops from other vehicles scoured the area for any signs of their missing leader.
“Two cars I didn’t recognize sped down this road not ten minutes ago,” said an older supervisor. Others confirmed this.
“Is there anything down there?” Karen asked.
“A couple of old abandoned buildings.”
A stray dog began barking at a large rattlesnake slithering away from a nearby garbage pile.
In another moment they were all back in the cars heading down the barely identifiable path. A few more dogs appeared from nowhere and started barking at the convoy. The vehicles followed the road downhill. Several minutes beyond was a small, neglected cemetery with broken wooden crosses and a few toppled headstones.
As the cars rose up a steep hill, they came across a pair of old wooden buildings sagging sideways. They looked like they had been erected long before Rescue City was built. Five cars came to a halt in front of the smaller structure, while the other five stopped at the larger one.
Two gangcops kicked in the door of the first building. A moment later, Uli heard someone shout, “Shit!”
He followed Karen inside. A lukewarm glass of tea and the thick aroma of choke indicated it had only just been evacuated.
Suddenly, a burst of gunfire erupted from the second building. Karen and Uli exited the smaller structure to find that a gangcop had been shot through the head as he was trying to climb into a second-story window. The gunman had raced downstairs quickly enough to shoot a second cop, then had retreated back upstairs.
The Swing Voter of Staten Island Page 23