Hostile Takeover

by Shane Kuhn

  On the day that all of this finally went down, Alice went to Leung’s office to return his machine and the machine of “his colleague from China.” You so crafty, Mr. Happy Meal! We would have never guessed you were talking about Zhen, the dark overlord! Amateur. I had made eye contact with Alice thirty minutes prior across a sea of cubicles, so she wasn’t all that surprised when I walked into Leung’s office a few minutes after her. I had with me the currency of Human Resources departments everywhere—paperwork—and I had a strong heel-toe-heel-toe urgency gait as I walked up and rapped my knuckles on the doorframe. I didn’t wait to be invited in. I strode with official purpose into the office and slapped a pile of paperwork down on Leung’s desk. I told him if he didn’t resubmit some of his health insurance claims, his wife’s back surgery (cruise ship chocolate fountain accident) would not be covered and he’d be liable for the $87,000 tab. That got his attention.

  While he looked at the pile of incomprehensible insurance hieroglyphics, Alice looked at me, her mind racing. She knew I was up to something but had no idea what. Trying to kill her in Leung’s office would have been insane, even for me, so her mind scoured itself for alternative explanations. Leung sighed wearily and looked up to me, wishing he could formally behead the messenger.

  “Can I deal with this later?” he asked me. “I really need to get some work done.”

  He opened his laptop and logged in.

  “Of course, Mr. Leung.”

  I began gathering up my papers, but ended up dropping them all over the desk and floor. As I bent down awkwardly to pick them up, I snuck a quick look at Leung’s laptop. Mind you, it was very subtle, but Alice has an eye for detail you wouldn’t believe. Pick a card, any card was what I thought as Alice, in turn, looked at the laptop. I didn’t look again because that would have been a “tell,” and Alice would have called my bluff. I was deliberately looking at other things, which was also a “tell,” but in my favor, as Alice’s viper brain was certain I felt I had made a strategic error by looking at the laptop in the first place and was trying to compensate by not looking again. You think this little mind fuck is complicated, you should have seen what went down when we were married.

  “You know, Mr. Leung, there’s one software upgrade I forgot to add,” she said, improvising. “Let me just run it back to IT for a few minutes.”

  One hook. One pretty mouth. Ace of spades, David Blaine.

  “No. You’ve wasted enough of my time. You can do that later. I have work to do,” Leung protested.

  She had to go big or go home.

  “Okay, can I borrow your pen?” Alice asked as she reached across the desk.

  Leung grunted and lifted his hands from the keyboard to make room for her to reach it. Then she knocked his full cup of coffee into the side of the laptop and all over the keyboard.

  “Shit!” Leung yelled.

  “So sorry,” she said, groveling.

  He stood up, furious.

  “Idiot!” he said to Alice.

  Then he stormed out of the room to clean his pants. It was a race to grab the laptop, but I let Alice win. She snapped the lid shut and I smiled at her.

  “I don’t think he likes you,” I said, smirking.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  Then I kicked the switch on the specially modified surge protector I had swapped and plugged into Leung’s laptop while I was struggling with my papers on the floor. Seventeen hundred volts of electric current—the amount they used to run through “Old Sparky,” the electric chair they used at Sing Sing prison—surged into Alice’s unsuspecting fingers. She fell to her knees, her face twitching and pale from ventricular fibrillation, and went limp on the floor. I checked her pulse and was very pleased to find none whatsoever.

  “No, Alice,” I said quietly. “Fuck you.”

  At that point Leung stormed back into the room with a huge wet spot on his crotch. He saw Alice on the floor and looked like he might faint.

  “She just collapsed!” I blubbered.

  “Go get help!” he screamed.

  I ran out the door as he was picking up the phone to dial 911. I figured Alice had less than two minutes before brain death, and in that part of the city an ambulance can sometimes take an hour to arrive. It didn’t matter. As luck would have it, for Alice anyway, one of the CIS employees on Leung’s floor had been an army corpsman. And, to add insult to injury, management had recently added a defibrillator to the first aid kit in the break room. The guy zapped her sorry ass back to the land of the living in less than forty-five seconds. As they carted her out, I walked with them, futilely looking for ways to finish the job.

  “John?” she half whispered.

  “What?”

  “When I was having my out-of-body experience, I noticed you’re getting a little thin on top.”

  “Bullshit,” I said and instinctively touched the top of my head.

  “Made you look, asshole.”

  32

  After my zany joy-buzzer attempted-murder gag, Alice was game for a little intern-on-intern action of her own. She took advantage of the fact that I am a shamelessly materialistic, name-dropping snob, priding myself on my unique and difficult-to-acquire possessions. Near the top of the list was my favorite fountain pen—a Montblanc Bohème Pirouette Lilas. I bought it on our Italian honeymoon, fancying myself some kind of writer after I saw how well received the handbook was among the old recruit class, many of whom barely had an eighth-grade education. So, while I was at lunch, Alice somehow managed to replace the ink cartridge on my precious pen with one of her own, containing a special shade of black.

  Then the dominoes of vengeance began to fall. First, Alice flagged my employment file in the Human Resources database as “eligible for promotion.” She knew I wouldn’t question this because of the high opinion I have of myself and because of the advantages being a paid employee would afford me in terms of greater access at CIS. I received the application packet from a third-party placement firm (invented by Alice—nice touch) due to the conflict of interest that would have existed had I, a member of CIS Human Resources, gone through the screening process in my own department. Yes, this is getting good, isn’t it?

  The promotion packet, assembled by Alice, included several personality inventories, many of which had been designed to help identify someone who might be a potential office threat. Ha! From the Minnesota Multiphasic to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, I spent half my workday busily filling in answer dots and completing story problems. Because I worked in Human Resources, I didn’t question any of it because I had seen it over and over. I felt like a high school kid sweating the SAT.

  Here’s the really good part. Commercial paper is largely made up of bleached wood pulp. The bleach is what makes the paper a nice bright white. Alice replaced my ink cartridge with one that contained highly concentrated ammonia—the same grade they use for pesticide production and sewage treatment. The ammonia was mixed with actual ink and a chemical agent designed to mask its horrifically pungent odor. And the paperwork itself had been treated to an even higher concentration of bleach. Thus, when I started filling it out, the ammonia-laced ink came in contact with the chlorine in the heavily bleached paper and produced highly toxic chloramine gas. You’ve heard of housewives accidentally offing themselves by mixing chlorine (Comet) and ammonia cleaning products (Windex), right? It produces chloramine gas, which, in the right concentration, will cause a severe chemical burn in your lungs that can drown you in your own fluids.

  Wait, it gets better! The elegance of Alice’s poison pen gag was that it was more of a slow burn so I wouldn’t notice what was happening before it was too late. While I spent hours figuring out the color of my parachute, I was exposed to several hundred microbursts of chloramine, which has the unique property of bonding with oxygen atoms in the lungs. So, once it gets in there, it’s very hard to get out. While I worked, I had a bit of a cough, but
nothing that was going to stop me from acing my exams. By the time six o’clock rolled around, so much chloramine gas had built up in my lungs that I went into respiratory arrest and they found me facedown in the break room with a broken coffee mug in my cold, nearly dead hand.

  I was rushed to the hospital, where I spent nearly a week. My lungs had suffered a severe chemical burn, so most of the time I was there I was coughing up blood or sucking down oxygen. But it was a beautiful rub, what Alice pulled. I almost fell back in love with her the more I thought about how she came so damn close to capping me in a way that would have made the Marquis de Sade rethink his whole game.

  Admittedly, I had to take a little credit for it as well. I don’t claim to have ever taught Alice much, but creativity is one thing I helped her cultivate in her work. She just isn’t a creative person in the traditional sense. Her mind doesn’t work that way. It’s more logical and methodical and, well, boring. I was always asking her to imagine how I would do something. WWJD? She thought that was funny as hell at first, but she saw the light when we worked together—albeit briefly—at HR. Like with Dr. Love. It was my idea to use a composite pistol, but it was her idea to load it with a diamond. It was a stroke of genius for Alice, much like the poison pen. And as much as I wanted to gloat about it, I had to face the fact that she literally almost took me out right under my nose.

  33

  Speaking of which, I think my most creative—and insane—hit came when I was nineteen. Bob was mad at me about something, said I was getting soft or some nonsense, so he put me on what he thought was a cupcake job. I was supposed to snuff some ex-hippie politico who had faked his way into a job at an oil company with the intention of blowing it up and sabotaging all of its offshore oil rigs. And if that wasn’t enough, he intended to burn the CEO at the stake outside the UN and pass out marshmallows. Actually, I was a little bummed out I had to whack him. He was kind of a modern-day corporate anarchist.

  Anyway, even though it was a cupcake, it was also a political can of worms. Turned out the guy was the CEO’s nephew, and the CEO was the one who had him greenlit. Nice, right? Because we were dealing with the backstabbing Family Robinson, we had to think of an execution scenario that would not arouse suspicion with the nephew’s parents, upon whom the wicked CEO had to rely for money and political favors. It wasn’t like I was jumping into the jaws of danger, but the situation was definitely a clusterfuck of T-shirt slogan proportions. MY PARENTS WENT TO GSTAAD AND ALL I GOT WAS A LOUSY BULLET IN THE HEAD.

  That’s where creativity came in. You can’t always simply analyze your way to victory. Like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, sometimes you just got to say “What the fuck. Make your move.” Since hippie boy wasn’t likely to try to whack me back, that’s exactly what I did.

  It was basically a two-stage execution scenario. Stage one was the loss-of-all-credibility phase. After the guy was gone, office drones needed to be round the watercooler discussing how they saw it coming or were surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. This was mainly for the benefit of his parents. They were über wealthy and powerful and needed to be embarrassed into keeping the cops or feds out of it. Stage two was the kill itself. Self-inflicted was our first choice, but I know firsthand that there are Grand Canyon–size pitfalls in that approach. So, we needed to create more of an “assisted suicide” hybrid scenario to ensure our kill and put the right spin on things for mumsy and dada.

  Even though I dug his politics, I hated him the second I came in contact with him and immediately nicknamed him Yoko. He was a self-righteous know-it-all who had the breath of a dung beetle, a gray ponytail he barely pulled together from the bozo ring of hair clinging to his balding, freckled dome, and loved to drink, of all things, tea. Usually it was some sickly sweet-smelling herbal crap that was made in the hippie wasteland of Boulder, Colorado. The box was festooned with the image of a happy, dancing bear in a field of multicolored flowers and the tea had some idiotic name like Tai Chai. After work one evening, I snatched the box of tea bags from the break room and changed the recipe. I wasn’t really worried that any other employees would use one of the tea bags because NO ONE DRINKS FUCKING TEA AT WORK, especially not the totally useless, noncaffeinated fairy tears reserved for old maids to sip while they watch Murder, She Wrote in bed with their legion of cats.

  The day I initiated Stage 1, I posted up in an empty cube near the break room. Like clockwork, Yoko walked in and boiled hot water in the electric kettle while he whistled “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Then, per his habit—well documented by me of course—he dropped in the tea bag and let it steep while holding it under his nose. He loved to breathe in the steam coming off the dancing bear’s nuts like some Z-list actorbator in a Lipton commercial. And that’s where the fun began. As soon as the tea bag hit the water, it activated my special ingredient mixed with the tea leaves, and the steam emitted from the cup contained massive doses of BZ, a super hallucinogen the U.S. Army developed as a chemical warfare agent in the 1960s. The theory was that they could use BZ to control the minds of the Vietcong, but the reality was that all BZ did was make someone a balls-tripping-to-the-wall adult baby on the verge of a complete psychotic break.

  Effects of this little gem known as “Buzz” are hyperrealistic, multisensory hallucinations, hysterical confusion, drunken stupor–like affect, and total removal of inhibition, often resulting in base, primitive behaviors. I know what you’re thinking. Government-grade fun powder is enough to blow his mind but isn’t going to blow him up. You’re right. What I gave him was not lethal but it was enough to completely fry his brain, create that total humiliation scenario I described earlier, and put him in harm’s way . . . mine. From there I planned to implement Stage 2, but the best-laid plans of mice and men . . .

  When I saw Yoko casually returning to his desk, I was more than a little bit perplexed. He should have been on his hands and knees begging Satan to stop playing the drums so loud. So, I did what every stupid nineteen-year-old would do. Without thinking first, I sniffed the tea bag when he left the break room. I thought maybe he had had Earl Grey today instead and sideswiped my whole plan. And, of course, I dosed myself. When I went looking for him, he wasn’t at his desk. So, I went to the bathroom and found him standing in front of the mirror, touching it and speaking in tongues.

  “Yoko,” I said as I stood behind him.

  He whipped around quickly to look at me, thus sloshing the blood in his brain around in the same direction. I could tell the Buzz was beginning its long, merciless peak, making his heart thump like a jackhammer, immediately intensifying the hallucinogenic component. I knew this mostly because I was experiencing the same thing.

  “Are you feeling okay, Yoko?”

  He flinched as if I had just thrown battery acid in his face.

  “Why are you yelling at me?” he asked.

  When the words came out of his mouth, it sounded like a super-amplified scream wrapped in a pink noise blast. Then the entire scene turned into a garish, color-dripping Kabuki theater in which everything moved at a maddeningly glacial pace. I have done many drugs in my day and I immediately knew I had just saddled up on the Seattle Slew of hallucinogens. I was hyperaware of everything around me as stimuli attacked from all sides. Because my brain was being unrelentingly assaulted, my body was releasing so much epinephrine that I could feel my heart pounding in my eyeballs and I could barely keep from grinding my teeth down to nubs. My diaphragm was so constricted I felt like I’d been swallowed whole by an anaconda and was forced to take what seemed like hundreds of shallow, painful breaths. But I had to keep it together and finish the job or Bob would have me killed in one of the gruesomely fantastical ways that kept flashing onto the IMAX screen in my head.

  I had one lucid thought in the moment and that was to escape the bathroom and find a way to even out. Yoko and I were both in the same boat, but at least I knew what kind of wind was hitting my sails. I just needed to gather my mind up like pickup sticks
and get to work before I had an uncontrollable urge to crank Phish and do a ribbon dance in the parking garage. I knew one of the admins was a convicted sex offender taking a court-ordered Benperidol—a powerful antipsychotic drug used to curb hyper sexual behavior—so I raided his desk and dry-swallowed a few tablets. After what seemed like several decades, but was actually only a few minutes, I floated back down to earth. The Buzz had been relegated to a low machine hum in the back of my mind and I was ready to get on with Stage 2. I just needed to find Yoko, who I figured by now might be trying to dive for pearls in the handicap stall.

  When I turned to get out of my chair, he was standing at the entrance of my cube like a zombie who had come to suck out my brains.

  “You’re going to die,” he said, and held his hand up like one of those saint statuettes you buy off a blanket peddler on St. Mark’s Place.

  34

  Next thing I knew one of our lonely heart cube mates was standing there, smiling. He was wearing a T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse glove hand pointing to his face that said I AM STUPID.

  “Hey, you guys want to hit Taco Tuesday?” he asked jovially.

  I looked at Yoko. He was admiring one of those desk tchotchkes of a little bird that perpetually tips down to drink from a nonexistent water source. He turned and regarded Stupid for an uncomfortably long time.

  “So sweet of you to ask,” he said, and proceeded to kiss the poor dumb bastard square on the lips.

  Stupid recoiled in horror, which I appreciated, because then I knew I wasn’t hallucinating the whole thing.

  “Gaaaaahhhhh,” he groaned, shaking his head like a wet dog, spitting and wiping off his tongue and lips.

  His face turned crimson and he looked like he might pop like a boil, but instead he did an about-face and went off to have tacos with some other members of the office who would soon find out about Yoko’s psychotic behavior. That was when I realized Stage 1 was right on track and nearly broke my arm patting myself on the back. But it didn’t end there. Yoko went on a tear, skipping through the office and making strange bird sounds. He stripped off his shirt and crouched on top of someone’s desk, scooping candy from a jar and shoving it in his mouth, wrappers and all. By the time he was finished, he had an orange Starburst goatee and his mouth was actually foaming from having eaten too many bags of Pop Rocks.