The Swing Voter of Staten Island (29 page)

“Why did you push me out of the way?” she asked accusingly.

“I saw that you were going to get your brains blown out. I didn’t know the bullet would hit Rafique.” He gave her a hug, then climbed into the backseat of Mallory’s car next to Karen. While the rest of the Burnt Men stayed with Rafique, Tim squeezed in the front seat of Mallory’s car and the surviving members of the convoy departed up the hill and out of the sandy lacuna. With the sun low in the western sky, they headed south.

Tim navigated the circuitous twists and turns through the barren landscape that was neither wetlands nor pure desert. The terrain eventually rose slightly and then sloped forward, becoming more marshlike.

“So what exactly is this way out?” Uli asked Mallory in the silence of the car.

“That hypodermic needle you found in Colder’s room is something called Mnemosyne,” she said. “They call it the escape drug. It’s one of the experimental CIA pharmaceuticals. The theory is that you inject yourself and then drop into the hole of the sewer pipe.”

“No one has ever confirmed that it works,” Tim spoke up.

“That’s true, but about eight years ago one of our people found some Mnemosyne and our doctor was able to test it on someone. Their heart stopped and they didn’t breathe for a full hour before coming to.”

“The sewer pipe out of here would take a lot longer than an hour.”

“It’s a gamble,” Mallory replied, slightly perturbed. “We don’t know the dosage or potency, but we have reason to suspect that it works.”

“What reason?”

“Shub has dispensed it to countless soldiers and loyal friends to escape from here.”

“How many people has he given it to?” Uli asked.

“We don’t know exactly, but lots.”

“How about the toxicity level of the sewer water—wouldn’t that alone kill anyone who enters it?”

“I remember a study that was done when my husband was mayor. They discovered that the water that made it all the way to the pipe had already been considerably filtered through the rocks. It was much cleaner than the black sludge in the river.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Karen said softly to her brother. “It’s your choice.”

“It’s the wong choice, but he’s going anyway,” said Tim confidently.

“How do you know?” Uli asked.

“Because that explains why I was told to bring this,” Tim answered, removing his football helmet. Another divine gift from the prescient Wovoka, the alleged god and former mayor of Rescue City. When Uli failed to respond, Tim added, “If this is your choice, then this is your destiny.”

After five more minutes of navigation, they came to a place where the brown waters expanded vastly before them, turning the western desert into a huge dung-filled swamp.

Tim suggested they park the vehicles, as the wheels were beginning to get stuck in the wet sand. Pointing to a large basin of still water, he explained, “This is the northern rim of the sewer drains. We can walk to the hole from here.”

They all parked along the swamp’s edge and everyone got out. Four of the older cops agreed to stay with the convoy and the others grabbed some food to eat as they walked.

“If he really is going down the hundreds of miles of piping,” said Sergeant Schuman, “there are a few things I think you should consider.”

“Like what?” Karen asked.

“Well, it might not offer much protection, but I have a sleeping bag in my trunk and a can of grease for the car.”

“Good thinking,” Karen affirmed. “The Mnemosyne might keep you from drowning but the ride is long and that water must still be pretty corrosive.”

Uli thanked Schuman, collecting the sleeping bag and can of grease from him. One of the other gangcops grabbed the rope. Karen took the small oxygen tank from the trunk of her car, and the group proceeded with Tim on their hunt for the elusive hole that Jackie Wilson had dug into the earth years before when trying to repair the damage he had done to the drain.

The group silently hiked fifteen more minutes uphill through a smelly, soggy stretch filled with strange-looking cattails and other leafy foliage able to survive in the toxic desert marsh.

“So how did Rafique know we were in trouble?” Karen asked Tim.

“I told him.”

“How’d
you
know?”

“Wovoka told us.”

“Too bad he didn’t mention that Rafique was going to be murdered,” Uli said solemnly.

“Actually, I told him there was a good chance it would happen.”

“How’d you know that?” Uli asked.

“Because Wovoka reminded us that everything is paid for with sacrifice.”

“Who?” Mallory asked severely.

“Mayor Wilson,” Tim clarified.

“The Jack Wilson I knew and worked with ten years ago wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire,” Mallory replied.

Tim didn’t say anything, he simply looked off into the distance.

Along the trail, Uli felt as though they had walked back in time to the Mesozoic era. In the primordial sludge, Karen pointed out percolating bubbles of carbolic acid produced by decomposing bodies. Eviscerated rib cages, like driftwood, were caught up against mossy rocks and had fused into a vast disintegrating organic mass.

“Were you really going to give my Mnemosyne ticket to Mallory’s kidnapper?” Uli asked his sister.

“Sorry,” she replied, “but the guy could’ve killed Mallory. And she is our mayor-elect. That means a new era for the next four years. I just couldn’t betray him after that.”

“For the record,” Mallory said, “I’m hoping that you will try to win our freedom on the outside and come back here to tell us if there is any way out of this godforsaken place.”

“Of course I will,” he said. “And by the way, I worked with that woman who was arrested for killing Ellsberg. Her name is Patricia Itt and she’s mentally incapable of pulling off that crime.”

“I’ll look into it,” Mallory replied with exhaustion.

As Tim led them along, Uli could see through the tall weeds across the river to a pulverized and crumbling wall that was overgrown with strange vegetation.

“There!” Tim called out. “That’s the monument that brought us from the brink of anarchy to this miserable joke of a democracy.” It was the site where Jackie Wilson had dynamited the vast wall and dikes that held back the river.

As Tim brought the group around the reservoir of fetid waters, the sun slipped further down the western sky, lighting the distant dunes a fiery orange.

Uli glanced back at a cluster of low-level buildings emerging behind the sandy foreground. Though from this vantage it resembled a Middle Eastern city from ancient times, it was just southwestern Brooklyn, Nevada.

Tim led them onward to higher ground. Three menacing dogs appeared and started barking and growling at them. Tim shot one of them dead with an arrow and the other two dashed away. Ten minutes uphill, beyond the basin and the massive sealed grate, they came to a group of rising rocks.

After a sweaty duration of carefully footing and clawing up the rocks, the group came to the clump of large, jagged boulders that Uli had seen at a distance with Bea. It wasn’t until he felt the cool wind rise in the midst of the hot desert that Uli realized they were close. One of the only indications that other human beings had ever been there was faded spray paint on a large boulder that read,
The Hol’-in-da Tunle
—another dumb play on a New York landmark. Between the rocks, a narrow crevice yielded a steady cool breeze.

The circular crack in the earth didn’t look much more than three feet in diameter. Someone had crawled down and carefully chiseled through the thick rock, leaving a serrated hole. Staring into the bottomless abyss, Uli could hear a faint gurgling. Some water was apparently still escaping into the great drain.

Uli unrolled the sleeping bag.

“You have to cover your entire body in grease,” his sister instructed.

As Uli stripped down, it was clear that his eagerness to escape eclipsed all modesty. Naked, he opened the small bucket of grease and proceeded to rub gobs of it over his face, neck, chest, arms, legs, and backside. When he smoothed the gel over his seared groin, he felt a degree of relief.

One of the gangcops knotted the ends of two ropes around the top flaps of the sleeping bag and rubbed grease along the outer side of it so it wouldn’t get stuck during the rocky insertion.

Karen reminded Uli that he had a small oxygen tank with roughly ten minutes of air. Once he awoke from his chemical slumber, he would have to turn the dial, put the tube in his mouth, and breathe, exhaling through his nose. With masking tape, Karen secured the tank around his back. Uli could see the word
Charon
printed on it—presumably a brand name.

“Listen, if you start hallucinating when you wake up,” Tim said softly to Uli, “there are two syringes between the cushions of this helmet. Inject them into one of your veins if you want to have
any
chance of surviving.”

“I’ll consider it,” Uli replied.

Tim started moving around in a tight jerky hop, chanting. Uli realized the odd man was performing one of his ghost dances.

“This is it,” Mallory said, as she took out the Mnemosyne-filled syringe and tried to straighten out the bent needle.

Uli gave his sister a final hug. “Sorry for putting you and whoever else into this hellhole. Once I’m free, I really will try to get all of you out.” He embraced Mallory as well.

Uli held up his bare forearm, squeezed out a vein, and Karen injected him. As he climbed into the sleeping bag and laid down, he immediately felt woozy. It was a strangely peaceful sensation as his breathing grew shallow. After a lifetime largely unremembered and a frantic week of chaos in Rescue City, the tranquility was truly glorious.

“I haven’t seen my big brother in nearly ten years,” Karen said with tears in her eyes. “And now after just a day, he’s gone again.”

One of gangcops put his finger on Uli’s jugular and said, “I don’t feel a pulse.”

“Either you’re dead or it’s working,” Mallory muttered serenely.

Uli wanted to tell her he was fine, but he couldn’t so much as bat an eyelash. It was over. Although he didn’t feel panicky, it was very strange not being able to breathe. He could still feel his sister preparing him—taping his nose, ears, and lips with grease-covered swabs of cotton. He tried to lift his arms and help Mallory as she fit a pair of goggles tightly over his eyes, but in another moment he couldn’t feel much of anything at all.

Mallory slipped the oxygen tube near his mouth and Tim’s New York Jets football helmet over his head, fastening the chin guard to secure it.

Uli heard a muffled voice say,
“Okay, he’s ready.”
Darkness spread inside him as several gangcops lifted the bag upright. They loosely tied the top of the bag with a piece of the rope, then lowered Uli down through the rocky fissure and deep into the windy chasm. A few times he got stuck sideways and they had to re-lift and re-lower him. He never actually felt water, simply a dark rushing force that bent his body sideways.

Suddenly, the rope was cut and he felt like a kite blown high in the air. The current swirled him around and he was utterly joyous. Experiencing a strange sensation without breath or light, he found himself focusing on the pigeon, then on his sister’s face. His body seemed to be shaping the direction it was moving, with the pipes forming around it.
He
was the force around himself.

From this unbelievable velocity, a single fugitive memory broke loose, and from it, backwards through vast convolutions of reasoning, an awesome deduction occurred:
She set up the Pigger ambush! She’s the one who planned the attempt on my life and blew up the truck in midtown!
Building on his reasoning, Uli thought,
I must’ve been sent here to arrest her
.

The memory producing this was his and his alone. With his body bending, slipping, shooting, looping through the vast underworld of massive pipes, he knew now that ten years before, the person who had detonated the dirty bombs throughout lower Manhattan was none other than his own sister—Karen.

The more he remembered, the greater the rush of thoughts both devoured and propelled him through the blackness of words and voices: “
dkadhja akdala dand a kdncka then slaughter of and New York no longer … missile attacks … New York State World’s Fair … Times Square … fucking hippies …… Armenians forced out of their homelands and into …… I . I . I . I . I … I. Have. To. To. To. Go. Back … To! Get! Back! Up! …… To! Warn!! Mallory?? … New York’s gonna get hit again ………… after ten years it’s nearly scrubbed down …………… that’s why you were on that drone ……… Did Hanoi slip weapons-grade plutonium into New York? … The fluoroscope machines! ……………… They were connected with the first gang …… Who? … . The bastards that hit New York in 1970 …………… that was when you found the old man ……………… the one who hated his goddamn brother …………………… . when the senile old bastard mentioned Karen ……… his sister and the plan ………… Robert Moses … Paul Moses!!”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction embellishing certain historical events and figures. Of course, Nixon didn’t finish his second term, nor did Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1976. (However, if Nixon hadn’t been forced to resign due to Watergate, Reagan might’ve been in the White House four years earlier.) Although I don’t know of a military simulation city in Nevada, German Village—designed for rehearsal of the bombing of Berlin—does exist out in Utah. Jack Wilson was supposedly a Paiute mystic—later renamed Wovoka—and is accredited with having created ghost dancing. Dates and events have been revised to serve the story. Anyone who is interested in the actual historical events embellished in these pages—and I genuinely hope you are—should go to a library or bookstore, anywhere but here.

Further adventures to be announced
11/6/08
www.akashicbooks.com

Thanks to:

Johnny Temple

Kara Gilmour

Arthur Jackson Temple

Johanna Ingalls

Ibrahim Ahmad

Aaron Petrovich

Sohrab Habibion

Dan Mandel

Joseph Burke

Kim Kowalski

Patrick Nersesian

Burke Nersesian

Delphi Basilicato

David Platt

Chris Leung

Hrag Vartanian

Sylvia Rascon

Alexis Fleisig

Rick Froberg