Free The Swing Voter of Staten Island by Arthur Nersesian

the ringing in his ears had subsided, Uli limped through the smoke to the edge of a small crater. Smoldering body parts from at least a dozen victims were strewn about the twisted frame of a destroyed minitruck. Gasping for breath, he heard others screaming in shock, and realized that he must’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing, since his heart hadn’t so much as skipped a beat.
    With the Flatlands pursuer dead, Uli resumed his search for the blond stranger. Rock & Filler Center had two paved walkways on either side of a raised stone garden that ended at a drop-off. Walking to the edge, still gasping for breath, Uli found himself standing on the precipice of a large empty ditch. It was roughly thirty feet deep by thirty feet wide, with a muddy puddle at the bottom. At the far side of the hole, a man was taking a piss on a pile of white stones.
    “What the hell happened over there?” the urinator called out to him.
    “A truck bomb.”
    “Pigger faggots!”
    “Yeah,” Uli replied tiredly. Behind the urinator was a narrow four-story office building that looked nothing like the surrounding structures.
    “Do you know what that building is?” Uli asked.
    “Yeah. Number 30.”
    As Uli walked over, he saw that the front of the building looked like it had been chiseled down. Inside the lobby, two men in dark-blue blazers were checking people’s IDs and whatever bags they carried. A sign read, Manhattan Municipal Government Offices —hence the bomb blast?
    Uli headed back to Fifth Avenue where arriving EMS workers triaged the injured as a growing crowd watched. Uli wondered if perhaps the goateed man had killed his nameless blond friend before being blown up. How else would the Flatlander know I’m here? he pondered. I should’ve gotten off the bus after that cemetery in Brooklyn. When the first gangcops finally arrived and started rounding up witnesses, Uli decided to leave before he could be detained.
    He found Oric back at the church, rubbing the wall frantically, while other worshipers stared at him.
    “What are you doing?” Uli asked, trying to pull him away.
    “I saw him! He’s with them.”
    “Who is?”
    “My brother, but he said … he said they ain’t mine, so …” Oric looked confused and then distressed.
    “I think maybe you had a bad dream.”
    “No dreams. My brother, he just came here, see, and … he said you take me to him.”
    Uli gently led Oric outside the church and across the street. As Oric continued with his nonsense, more emergency vehicles came to take care of the wounded. Uli led him to the bus stop at the corner of 51st. Glancing eastward, he could see a row of towers across the slim waterway separating Manhattan from Queens. There was something odd about them. It was as though a Hollywood producer had shot a big-budget film there and left this elaborate set behind.
    “What exactly are those?” Uli asked a tall man wearing a pointy bamboo hat who was also waiting for the bus.
    “Just backdrops,” the guy replied. “They’re nicer than the ones across from Wall Street.”
    A southbound bus eventually pulled up. With his mission to meet the blond man a failure, Uli’s next move was to drop Oric off at the Crapper headquarters.
    Uli paid their fares and watched as a balding gangcop waved all traffic past the explosion site. Oric started whimpering again, and then murmurred, “See you soon.”
    The buildings down Fifth Avenue, though occasionally singed and almost all run down, looked occupied. Small-business owners had loaded piles of merchandise onto the cramped sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the street.
    Growing impatient, the driver angled the bus along the far right side of the street. Straddling one tire on the edge of the curb and the other in the gutter, she drove down a new lane of her own creation.
    At 42nd Street, Uli saw a big sandy mound where he had expected the stately New York Public Library. It seemed that not all of the city’s landmarks, or their