The Swing Voter of Staten Island (22 page)

“So what happened?” Underwood asked. “What turned you around and made you head down there?”

Uli realized he had to switch course. “After seeing that couple get strung up out in Borough Park and their retarded son eaten alive, only to show up at the Crapper headquarters just as it was blown to bits, do you know how much carnage I’ve seen? I spent hours digging bodies out of that wreck. Then I heard that there was an alternative to living between two warring gangs—a third group that just wanted to be left alone down in Staten Island—so I went down there and discovered that they are a bunch of delusional savages who think they’re Indians and elected a pig as their leader.” He took a deep breath. “You’re all too stupid to realize that you’re captives here, and instead of joining together to escape, you fight each other and you are all going to die here.”

“Pal,” Chain replied sternly, “the reason we don’t leave is because
we
are men of honor. And men of honor honor their contract.”

When Uli rolled his eyes, Underwood let out a big guffaw. Chain did as well.

“This guy’s right,” Chain remarked. “If I could get out of here, I’d have left on day one.”

“Speak for yourself,” Underwood responded. “Reigning in hell is better than serving in heaven. Anyway, people have definitely escaped from here, but no one knows how.”

“Why don’t you just drive out?”

“If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a mountainous desert. There’s no vehicle in this place that could possibly handle the terrain. Driving out of here would be suicide.”

“Can’t you just let me go?” Uli asked, changing the subject and trying to warm up his Piggers captors. “After all, I’m minding my own business just working at P.P.”

“And we’d be content to leave you there,” Underwood said. “The only problem is, we have an informant who claims that you ditched Colder and were trying to bring the retard to Crapper headquarters yourself.”

“That’s completely absurd.” This was the piece of the puzzle Uli feared would come out.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Underwood said. “We’re going to hold you until our informant gets here. If the informant says they’ve never seen you before, we’ll let you go.”

“Fair enough,” Uli replied, unable to imagine who this person could be.

“Before leaving you alone, though, we’re going to need your personal effects so you don’t kill yourself,” Deer said.

“You mean like my deep-fried balls?”

“Your belt,” she said, pulling it off his pants. And staring at his hands cuffed behind his back, she added, “I’ll need that ring as well.”

“Come on, that’s all I have to remind me of my wife,” Uli pleaded, having no true memory of a wife.

“We once had someone in lock-up who choked to death on a ring,” Chain explained.

“I’m not going to kill myself with my wedding band.”

“Look, it’s your choice.” Chain pulled out a bulky pocket knife. “You can hand it over peacefully or we’ll take it ourselves along with your finger.”

Uli slid the ring off with his hands still cuffed together. Deer grabbed it like a shiny new toy. They clipped off his leg restraints and helped him to his feet.

“It’ll be returned after you’ve been vindicated.”

They led Uli out of the interrogation room, down a hallway, and into a dark concrete holding cell. Chain kicked Uli hard behind the knees, sending him to the ground, then locked the large metallic door behind him.

While lying on the cold stone floor, Uli had a strange sense of déjà vu. His memory released another tidbit: He had been incarcerated before.
If they simply wanted to execute me,
he thought,
they would’ve taken me out by now.

With his wrists still cuffed together behind his back, Uli could barely move. The croak was thinning in his system and the pain from the electrocution and other injuries was returning with a vengeance. Once again, he passed out.

He was at some great monument that looked like the Lincoln Memorial, but Lincoln was missing. Another man was sitting in his chair. With an arrow face and highlighted hair, the man looked like Charlton Heston as Moses. Another man was hiding in the shadows of the surrounding pillars, watching Moses, but Uli couldn’t see who it was. Somehow he knew that this man was sad. Heston rose from Lincoln’s marble chair and the real Moses stepped out from Heston’s body, then a third, taller man stepped out from Moses. The person hiding in the shadows turned out to be Richard M. Nixon, but instead of being sad, Nixon was happy; in fact, he was laughing. Uli watched him sit in Lincoln’s marble chair.

He awoke from his dream to see the heavy door swinging open. A short girlish figure stepped forward from behind a wall of lights. He squinted and made out the cute rock-and-roll deejay he had met on the bus—the hurricane evacuee, Kennesy.

“They got you too?”

“No, silly,
I
got
you
.” She closed the door and walked off before he could struggle to his feet.

Ten minutes later, he heard the bolt slide to one side and the heavy door swung open once again. Chain, Newton Underwood, and three other goons were there to collect him.

“Good news, your appeal just came through.” Underwood held a form in one hand and his little dog in the other. “You’re going back to New York.”

Chain, who now had a large pistol in a holster, reached down, grabbed Uli by his cuffed elbows, and lifted him to his feet. As they led him upstairs, every muscle and bone in his body ached. He could barely walk.

“Can I get more of that painkiller?”

“You’re going to get the ultimate painkiller soon,” Chain replied.

Once he got outside, though, Uli felt heartened just seeing the sun. It was difficult to believe that there was only one sun and that this exact same fiery ball was shining upon the real New York City.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Uli asked, squinting. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Well, Officer Who-wee, life is just too intelligently designed for me to believe that this is all,” Underwood waxed philosophically. “I like to think that the great engineer in the sky finally brings us home for a much greater purpose.”

“Or, if you prefer,” Chain added softly, “you’re the great-grandson of a chimp and you’re about to go from being to nothingness.” One of the other goons chuckled.

The narrow bands of the plastic cuff dug into Uli’s wrists, cutting off his circulation, as they walked him to a nearby car. Chain and his giant assistant got in the back and Underwood sat in the driver’s seat, setting his little dog in his lap. Uli was deposited next to them, with his hands still cuffed tightly behind him.

To relieve his pain he kept jerking forward in his seat. While they sped along, he noticed something flickering in the distance. It was a relatively thin building that couldn’t’ve been more than four stories high, but it was strangely shimmering and had a sharp point at the top. A portrait of a tall armless man in a diaper adorned the front of the structure.

“What the hell?” Uli whispered as if seeing something divine.

“The Jesus Chrystler Building,” Chain said. “Loosely based on the old Chrysler Building.”

“How’d they get Jesus on it?” Uli asked, referring to the image. The savior looked elegantly deco.

“They can put Jesus on anything nowadays.”

“Shouldn’t that building be in Manhattan?”

“Yeah, but they already had this pointy little thing out here,” Underwood said, almost kindly. “It was actually a radio tower that was partially destroyed during a gang fight, so some Christian developer took it over.”

“Oh god, looky!” Underwood observed, despite the fact that he was driving, “The little red light bulb on Cirrus’s collar just flipped on—”

A heavy, older-model truck cut them off, forcing their vehicle off the road. Chain pulled a huge pistol out of his holster. As Underwood fumbled to get the car started again, the first arrow shattered through the side window, just missing Underwood’s thick neck.

“Shit! We’re under attack!”

Chain and his assistant popped open their doors. A three-pronged frog spear was immediately thrust into the younger gangcop’s face. He seized the weapon, but before he could turn it back on his attacker, Chain accidentally squeezed the trigger of his pistol and blew off the back of the young cop’s skull.

“Shit!” Chain groaned.

“Back in the car!” Underwood shouted, finally getting his vehicle into reverse.

Pulling his door shut, Chain accidentally squeezed off a second round. It tore through the seat in front of him, lodging firmly into the former City Council president’s back.

“You … moron!” Underwood gurgled out, grabbing his chest.

“Shit!” Chain groaned again. He opened the driver’s door and tugged Underwood out of his seat, dropping him to the ground.

Uli took a deep gulp of air and swung his legs over the stick shift. As Chain flopped himself into the driver’s seat, Uli kicked the man right in his telescopic eye. The cyberhorn cracked off, and Chain fell to the ground onto Underwood. Before the gangcop leader could rise, a shaggy-haired assassin stabbed him in the back, then again in the side. Chain tried to crawl away on all fours, but the assassin continued jabbing the knife into him.

“WAIT! Don’t kill him!” Uli shouted. “He knows where they’re holding Mallory!”

Underwood’s little dog huddled next to his dead master, cowering in fear. The assassin placed his bloody blade against Uli’s throat and was joined by a second man, at which point Uli recognized who they were. It was Bernstein and Woodward, the two men he had pulled from the wreckage of the Manhattan Crapper headquarters.

“Hold on!” he begged. “I was the one who rescued you guys.”

“Let’s see the hands.”

“I can’t!” Uli bent forward.

“He’s handcuffed,” Woodward confirmed.

“What the hell are you doing with these Domination monsters?” Woodward asked.

“They kidnapped me. They were going to kill me.”

Bernstein pulled out a knife and cut off Uli’s plastic handcuffs.

“My heart!” Chain screamed, rolling around in a growing pool of blood. He grabbed his chest, which, ironically, seemed to be the only part of his body not stabbed.

“Where are they holding Mallory?” Uli asked him. No response.

Bernstein grabbed the long sharpened chain dangling around the gangcop’s neck and wrapped it twice about his thick throat. Then, flipping the sadist onto his belly, Woodward yanked the chain around his knees and ankles.

“She’s … in Manhattan.” He gasped for breath as the chain dug into the soft turkey gobbler of his neck. “Please, let me go—”

“Where in Manhattan?” Woodward demanded.

“Evil! Evil—” He gagged and soon throttled himself with his own chain.

The three men jumped into the old truck and pulled away. Bernstein explained, “Someone in Rikers informed us that they were holding an important Crapper prisoner. We were hoping it might be Mallory.”

“Who told you that?”

“We don’t reveal our sources,” Woodward said, slipping on a visored hat so that he looked like an employee of a trucking company.

Wincing in agony from his recent torture, Uli asked if either of them had any painkillers.

“Actually, I just got a great bag of choke,” Bernstein said, pulling out a cellophane baggie. He also produced a small pipe, and soon Uli was deeply inhaling as much of the narcotic as he could. Within minutes, the pain became manageable.

As they drove through the clean streets of Queens, there was no sign of warfare. They could’ve been in Queens, New York.

“It’s difficult to believe a place like this exists in America,” Uli blurted.

“It started out as a wonderful thing, truly compassionate, with the very best of intentions, and then …” Woodward reasoned.

“So Nixon did this?”

“When things started going sour here, he supposedly said that he didn’t know why the people weren’t grateful. And you can’t really blame him. Hell, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all violated civil rights in their day believing they were saving our great republic.”

“Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested judges and other government members just for their dissenting views,” Bernstein added.

“Don’t forget Woodrow Wilson, who arrested Eugene Debs and countless others for speaking out against America’s involvement in World War I, which we entered without any provocation.”

“Or Roosevelt, who interred thousands of Japanese-Americans for absolutely no reason,” Bernstein countered.

“Not to forget the systematic genocide of the American Indians,” Woodward shot back.

“Screw the Indians, how about the slaves?” Bernstein said, clearly winning the round.

“How did you two end up here?” Uli asked, trying to get his mind off his stinging genitals.

“Back in ’72 we were covering a hot story,” Woodward explained. “A burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington. Some of the criminals had ties to the CIA.”

Uli thought he remembered the incident.

“It wasn’t until we started reporting on an unnamed source inside the White House that we got in trouble. Attorney General John Mitchell wanted a name,” Bernstein said.

“Did Mitchell threaten to arrest you?” Uli had this strange sense that he had met this attorney general. In fact, he felt he had known the man quite well.

“No. In fact, he invited us to dinner with Martha. We consulted our editor and publisher, who backed us a hundred percent,” Woodward said. “We thought we were safe cause Edgar Hoover had just died.”

“But in the middle of the night we were awakened by knocks on our doors.”

“Then what?”

“We were told that we were going to be questioned. They gave us some coffee, and the next thing I know I’m passing out,” Woodward said.

“Me too,” added his partner. “We woke up on one of those goddamned supply drones landing here. That was eight years ago.”

“Why didn’t you just stay on the plane?”

“They don’t take off until they’re empty. Besides, we had no idea what was going on. This entire country is in a state of denial,” concluded Bernstein sadly. “To this day, I still wonder if my wife knows what happened. I have this awful fear that she thinks I ran off with another woman.”