Set Me Alight

by Leviathan, Bill

  “Christine, I think I’ve made up my mind. Let’s do this. It’s what Paul would have wanted me to do – if I had to guess.”

  “I was hoping you would say that, Pete.”

  I hoped I didn’t end up regretting that decision. Up to that point in my life I had regretted every decision I had ever made. I could only expect the same of this one. Now I had six hundred or so miles to stew on it, and all of the horrible possible outcomes for my future. I hoped that Christine had been thinking of a plan that was more than just the ‘walk in and see where it gets us’ strategy she proposed before. She was the only one between the two of us who had the least bit of knowledge of what Megalomerate was. Now that I had committed to seeing out this plan, I was relying on her for my survival. Well, that was assuming my survival was even going to be at stake. I kept assuming that something dangerous was ahead for us, based on those torture and assassination threats Christine had been talking about. I couldn’t help but think that Megalomerate had something to do with Paul’s, and his brother’s, deaths. Their deaths may have been ‘accidents’, accidents that occurred conveniently right before they were about to make their ‘big’ discoveries. That, more than anything, was what was driving me to do this, aside from Christine’s literal driving. The one thread of honor I had left was being used to tow me to my destiny. Whatever crap destiny that may be.

  I slept for most of the ride to New York, only awakening during the gas stops Christine needed to make. That was at least one thing I could be thankful for – not having to think too much about what was about to happen next. Instead, I had a nice dream about running through a breezy field of grass, before it transformed into a blazing inferno. I was able to escape the hell fire, but only after seeing the half burned bodies of everyone I knew along the way. Jon, Pim, and even that shitstain of a human being Kevin. The only person who seemed oddly missing from my dreams was Paul. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, besides that dream interpretation was pseudo-science bullshit better left to predatory hacks.

  I had never seen New York City before even though I spent most of my miserable life only a few hours’ drive away. It was exactly as I had always imagined it. Run down, decrepit, and with a rat population out numbering the human population. It was a semi-habitable landfill. At least that’s how it was where the people actually lived in the city. Christine had us heading to the Freedom Tower, in the Financial District, where the sheen of old New York was still doing its best to hold on for dear life. The capitalists there made sure to spend just enough to keep the area from being too much of eye sore. They needed the area to maintain appearances for their weekly visits to the office, but no more. They had their beautiful mansions and yachts in the Hamptons to maintain after all, they couldn’t be too concerned with a city they knew nothing of. One benefit of the elite’s growing neglect of the city, was that finding parking downtown on a weekend was as easy as could be. Right in front of the entrance to the tower. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.

  “We’re here, Pete.”

  “Did you come up with a plan, Christine, or are we just going to walk in like we own the place?”

  “For right now, yes. They do tours of the building, so we’re going to sign up for one of those. They’ll be taking us all the way to the top of the building, we’re bound to run across a directory of occupants and then hopefully we can sulk off to see a little bit of Megalomerate’s area while they’re herding about the rest of the tourists.”

  “I want to say I spent that long car ride thinking up an expert plan, but I didn’t. This is the kind of contribution you can expect from me going forward. Let’s do this.”

  The tour was uneventful enough. I don’t think I had ever seen so many overweight people and fanny packs in my life. I guess that was how rich people spent their time, weekend trips to be led around the buildings they worked in. There was no need for them to go out and explore the rest of the city. There were too many smelly poor people that might accidentally talk to them. They couldn’t have that. It was best for them to stay in the area they belonged – a soulless corporate utopia.

  “Pete, I found the corporate directory listing. Megalomerate is located on the top ten floors. Let’s head off away from the group.”

  As the rest of the group headed around the corner in a hall, we slyly stepped back and headed toward the elevator.

  “Pete, look at the floors listed here.”

  “It goes to 93, so?”

  “So, the information pamphlet the tour guide handed out says this building has 104 floors. There’s no access to the Megalomerate floors.”

  “Maybe it’s just this elevator, let’s try another.”

  It didn’t matter which one we tried, no elevator had the Megalomerate floors listed. We even made our way into a few maintenance lifts, and still nothing. We took the elevator to floor 93, and couldn't find any way to the floors above. Even when we took the stairs up, there were no doors to enter floors 94-104. It was floor 93, or straight to the observational deck on the roof. Nothing in between.

  We made our way up to the observation deck and rejoined the rest of the tour, defeated. “Well, what should we do now, Christine?”

  “There’s not many choices left for us. It looks like we’re going to have to do our best action hero impersonations, and try and make our way through the vents.”

  “Are, are you serious?”

  “Yes, yes I am. Enough talk for now, we can figure it all out tomorrow. Let’s enjoy the view while we still can.”

  It really was a breathtaking view, New Jersey and all.

  Chapter 11

  Things began to escalate quickly. Christine wasn’t exaggerating when she said this was going to require our best action hero impersonations. First, we had to look up the public building records of the Freedom Tower to help us navigate our crawl through the vents to get down into the Megalomerate HQ, then we looked up how to incapacitate someone with your bare hands by choking them out, and finally we looked up how to make our own explosives in case there was a pesky wall that got in our way, or if we needed a distraction. It’s amazing what kind of information you can discover in the public library. They should really restrict access to those places. They pose a serious threat to the rest of society. Fortunate for society, the only reason people go to the public library these days is for a quick porn fix. The internet killed print pornography, the failed economy killed public access to the internet, and now the last bastions of knowledge and learning were used for smut. Look how far we’ve come as a species.

  The plan was to get in the tower after midnight. The regular elevators would be out of service, but we should would be able to access the maintenance elevators. There was only one issue, those elevators would be locked off. We would need to find some hapless maintenance employee, corner him, and then, I don’t know, beat him over the head until he gave us the key or something. Or maybe we would just politely ask for it and see if they handed it over. Based on the way Christine had been talking about the plan, I felt like she wasn’t going to give anyone the chance to hand something over peacefully. She seemed to be taking a certain pleasure from the thought of busting in with guns blazing and asking questions after the bodies hit the floor. Too bad for her we didn’t have any guns. Just our wit and intuition, which had resulted in nothing but failure for me in the past. Maybe she would be my lady luck. I wasn’t about to bet my life savings on it, though.

  We started our stake out for the breakin. Outside of the Freedom Tower, there wasn’t much activity to observe. We didn’t see much of anything in the lobby either.

  “What’s next in the plan, Christine?”

  “Everything in the building beyond the lobby is locked down. We’ll just have to wait out here until someone from the maintenance crew passes through. They’re here throughout the night. Our best bet is one the rear exits, where they dump off the trash.”

  We made our way into the Freedom Tower. Being an office building with a giant open lobby, there weren�
�t many good places to hide and stake someone out. We were going to have to be blunt and quick about it. Christine and I moved to the back of the lobby, near some of the exits to the building. We stood on either side of a maintenance elevator door, and waited for someone to exit. I hoped it happened sooner rather than later. I don’t think my nerves were up for a long wait.

  ‘Ding,’ went the elevator. It was time to put the plan into action. Before I was able to get a good look at the guy, Christine grabbed him by the right arm and yanked it behind his back. I was almost certain I heard something snap, but I wasn’t in a position to investigate. Christine was able to place her hand over his mouth before he was able to let out a sound.

  “Do as I ask, and you won’t be left with a broken arm, tied up, and stuffed into a dumpster. Now, when I remove my hand, you’re going to remain silent until I speak to you, got it?”

  The man nodded in acknowledgment. Christine slowly removed her hand from his mouth. The fear in the man was palpable, his lip quivered uncontrollably. His forehead was beading with sweat. Any further threats from Christine and he was likely to piss himself.

  “Now, with your free hand, reach into your pocket, grab your work keys, and hand them over to my nice friend over there. Not too fast now, we don’t want to cause any accidents.”

  With no sudden movement, the man did exactly as Christine asked. As soon as I had the keys in my hand, she let go of his arm. A brief moment of relief entered his face before Christine wailed him over the back of the head. He went out cold in an instant. His face thumped against the ground. Based on the blood gushing from his face, he must have broken his nose in the fall.

  “What the hell was that for, Christine? He gave us what we wanted!”

  “Calm down, Pet. We can’t take any chances with him. As soon as we let him go he was going to report it to the police or Megalomerate or God knows who else. Now, that rope you brought, give me some and help me tie his hands and feet. Put some duct tape over his mouth. We can drag him into the bathroom and leave him there. Most of the other maintenance workers here must be men, so let’s take him into the women’s bathroom. We don’t want him to be found any time soon.”

  We left him tied around a stall toilet, his face nearly submerged in the bowl. Can’t say I haven’t awoken in less dignified positions before. With his keys, we were able to access the maintenance elevator. The plan was to head to the observation deck, enter the vents there, and hope we could find our way to the Megalomerate floors. Christine claimed to have found floor plans of the tower while using the library computer. I never saw the floor plans myself, again I trusted my survival in Christine. There was no one was around in the observation deck when we got to the top floor.

  “Which ventilation system do we have to enter?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Pete. Everything is centralized. Once we get in, we should be able to make our way down one floor, and then we’re in.”

  “Sounds a little too easy. Let’s hope today isn’t the day I find out I’m claustrophobic.”

  The vents were small, cramped, and hot. It was summer, God dammit, shouldn’t they be running A/C? Or did we have the good fortune of picking an exhaust vent to climb down? Even with my narrow womanly shoulders I could barely fit through the ducting. I’m not sure how this was ever portrayed as ‘sneaky’ in the movies. Every little movement resulted in a loud metallic bang from the vents bending under my weight. If anyone was in the building, they were surely aware of our presence. Our only luck would be if there was an infestation of rats of unusually large size. That’s how they should plan these breakins in movies. The action hero would send in a battalion of rats before they climbed through the vents, so that way no nosy security guards would bother with the scurrying sounds in the walls. ‘It’s those filthy pests again!’ they’d say, being correct only for the wrong reason. I thought one thing I could enjoy during the descent through rectangular metallic hell would be the view of my glorious leader Christine’s ass, but we weren’t crawling on our hands and knees, we were slithering around on our stomachs. The only view I had was of the bottom of her shoes. I’m sure there were thousands of guys out there furiously beating off to a fantasy of that exact scenario, but it just wasn’t doing it for me. The feeling of thin aluminum pressing against my flesh, sticky with sweat making it even harder to shimmy down the ducts, was starting to drive me mad. I thought this was how it was going to end for me, I could feel it. The vents kept getting smaller and smaller, I swear, and eventually we were going to get stuck. We wouldn’t be able to move forward, or retreat back, and we would only be discovered when the smell of our rotting bodies started invading the office air.

  “Pete, right up ahead, I see the vent we’re supposed to go down.”

  “What the hell have we doing so far?”

  “We’ve just been moving horizontally Pete. Now we have to move vertically. It will be about a ten foot drop straight down.”

  Praise be to the heavens, right above the drop was also about three feet of space above the vent, which allowed for us to at least get our feet beneath us instead of tumbling down the vent head first. Christine climbed up, grabbed the grate above her, pulled her feet out of the horizontal vent, and then was able to gracefully maneuver one hand to grip the edge of the horizontal vent she just got her feet out of. She let go of the grate with the other hand, swung it down to the ledge, and hung from there. With her feet only three feet off the bottom of the horizontal vent below her, she pressed herself against either side of the vent, and made it down the rest of the way in one gentle, smooth sliding motion. Now it was my turn. I shimmied my way to the opening, and was able to reach up and grab the above grate easy enough. Now to get my feet out and down into the vertical vent. My wide, bulky, inflexible hips were difficult to maneuver out of the vent. It was much more difficult than Christine made it look. I couldn’t get my knees past the opening of the vent, and I didn’t have enough room to bend my legs.

  “Pull yourself up towards the grate, Pete.”

  Somehow I didn’t think of that. Yeah, sure, pull myself up and I would have more vertical room to move my legs about. God dammit Paul, why couldn’t you have made me do pull-ups during my ‘training’? My frail upper body was going to be the end of me. With enough twisting and turning, and making a hell of a racket while doing it, I was able to get my feet out underneath me. It was time to work my way down. Christine was able to reach down and grab the ledge of the horizontal vent I just came out of, and this was my turn at it. The reach was longer than I had anticipated. I could just barely get my fingertips on the ledge. My best bet was to hope I could catch myself on the ledge. I counted down to three, and let go.

  In free fall, my hands flailed toward the ledge. My right hand smacked against it with numbing pain, and then bounced off uselessly. I was just able to catch the ledge with my left hand. With only my fingertips to hold me, the rest of my fat useless body began to fall. My meager grip failed, and I began to fall down the vent. Falling may not be the best term for what happened. My body smacked against the side of the vent, causing me to bounce off and smack my face against the other side. The vent was so narrow that I must have bounced off the side of the vent seven times in the mere ten feet or so that I fell. It slowed down my descent somewhat, but I must have been going too fast for the shoddy vent to handle. When I hit the bottom, the below horizontal vent gave way. It creaked, bowed, and then snapped away from the vertical vent above. The only thing below the vent were the Styrofoam tiles of the drop ceiling. I crashed through it all. There was so much broken crap falling down with me that I didn’t see the ground until it hit me square in the face.

  Christine seemed to fare a bit better than me. She still came crashing through the ceiling with me, but at least she had the wherewithal to land on her feet and roll to safety. I tried to pick myself up with as much dignity as I could, but with no success. Christine walked to me and helped me brush off the dust and whatever else crap was covering me.

  “Well,
Pete, I guess that entrance works as well as any.”

  “Just trying to bring a sense of style to this operation. Something to augment the bleak post-modern cynicism of your new-wave action hero entrance.”

  “This should be the top floor of the Megalomerate headquarters. The high level execs should all be on this floor. If we can get into one of their offices, we might be able to find what we’re looking for.”

  “Ok, is that all we’re going to be doing? Trying to breakin to some office and hope we can first log into their computer, and then find files to incriminate them?”

  “If we’re lucky, they may just have paper documents lying about that we can use.”

  “You’re awfully optimistic about how careless these people are with this information, Christine.”

  “It’s our only real hope for success, Pete. Ok, now there are going to be about a dozen offices for us to go through. Let’s split up and look on our own. I’ll head down this way, you head that way. The hallway you’re going down should lead to the CEO’s office. I’d start there. I’m heading towards the CFO’s office. Not sure why their offices are at opposite ends of each other. I guess they aren’t too particularly friendly.

  “Who need’s friends when you’re swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck?”