The Swing Voter of Staten Island (27 page)

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.

“This guy’s alone, he doesn’t have Mallory!” Karen shouted to some of the others. “Come on!” Sprinting back to the car, she got behind the steering wheel herself. As others stayed back to shoot it out with the lone Pigger barricaded in the top floor, Uli and two others jumped in with her. Karen sped about a quarter-mile before the road slumped down into a small lacuna where the dirt turned into soft sand, marking the beginning of the true desert.

Uli stared out over the dunes to their left and thought he saw a small cloud of sand. “What’s that?”

Karen swerved the car up over the first dune and they immediately saw it. An older model solarcar was stuck in the desert about five hundred feet out. Its wheels spun uselessly, sending up a thick geyser of dust. Uli could make out two men trying to push its rear bumper as a third steered. But glancing back, he realized that besides Karen and the two gangcops, they were alone.

“We’re not going to have a big element of surprise,” Karen said, checking the bullets in her pistol. She drove halfway to the vehicle before their own car got stuck in the sand. She threw open the door and ran ahead until the taller of the two men pushing the vehicle turned and spotted them. He slipped back into the car, while the other Pigger pulled out a pistol and started blasting. The two gangcops with Uli and Karen immediately returned fire, hitting the man repeatedly.

Within seconds, one of the two remaining Piggers pulled a dazed but conscious Mallory out of the backseat and jammed a gun to the side of her head, which had been shaved bald. “Relax!” he screamed.

“Just back the fuck up!” yelled the other Pigger as he climbed out of the driver’s seat holding a bottle. With wild eyes, a scraggly beard, and sweating profusely, he appeared to be some kind of addict.

“We can talk this out,” Karen called back to them.

The bearded man poured his bottle of clear liquid over Mallory and held open a Zippo lighter. “Back up or she goes up like a dry Christmas tree!”

“Can we just—”

“Back your fucking ass up!!”

In one swift motion, Karen pulled out her pistol and fired a shot, hitting the man in his neck.

“Kill her!” the bearded man coughed out to the thin Pigger holding the gun.

“Do it and you’re dead,” Karen warned, seeing that the young man was trembling.

The wounded man struck his lighter and dropped it onto Mallory, whose dress erupted in flames. As fire spread across her body, Mallory dove face-forward into the sand as though it were water.

“Holy shit!” cried the thin gunman.

Mallory had vanished into the ground. The bearded man crawled over and grabbed the gun out of the other man’s hands and shot twice into the mound of sand in front of them. Before he could fire a third bullet, Karen shot him four more times, dropping him to the ground for good. As the thin man grabbed the gun, Mallory’s head suddenly popped out of the sand gasping for air.

“Back up!” the Pigger yelled shakily. He reached down and pulled Mallory up, smoke still streaming from her.

“Look,” Karen reasoned, “I know you don’t want to kill anyone. You’re young, and you have a choice. You can spend the rest of your days in unbelievable agony or you can have a privileged life.”

“That’s far enough!” the man spat back at Karen, who was inching closer.

“Fine.” She stopped and held up her hands. “I can help you.”

“No you can’t!” shouted the kidnapper, holding one arm over Mallory’s neck. His other hand held the gun to her skull. “I let her go, they’re going to torture the shit out of me and you know it!”

“We can get you out of here!”

“No way!”

“I got Mnemosyne!” Karen barked.

“Bullshit!”