GOING UP?

     The black building pushed its way into clouds, top floors lost to sight. Its facade was slick, shiny. Rain sheeted down its sides, flooding over thousands of translucent squares that cast sparse light into the grayness that was the New York skyline. The never ending wetness cascaded into puddles on the sidewalks where diplomats, roughnecks, traders and schoolchildren on tours stared upward into rain, marveling at this twentieth century icon.

     The thirty nine stories of the Secretariat contained a cross section of the world’s cultural milieu, embodied in its museums, artistry, and patrons. A hundred languages were spoken at once, any time of day, and flowing robes vied with sports jackets and hip huggers in a quirky tide of humanity moving through its vast architecture.

     Into this drizzling New York morning, a man, clad against the weather in an old fashioned raincoat and closing his red umbrella, hurried into the lobby and stopped before the information kiosk. He removed his Snippley Highhat, his personal trademark, and scanned the directory.

     Melvin Limpthorne was on his way up, in more ways than one. As a chief antagonist in the so-called war on shmutz, he had worked mainly in the background, answering to Schmuel Dershkowitz, the Shmutzinista General Manager. Melvin staffed his hole-in-the-wall office in North Bergen with trusted lieutenants and kept tight control on the flow of the popular intoxicant into the general population. He paid the manufacturing lab, hidden in an underground suite at the Outland Research Institute, next to nothing for the product, compared to the fabulous sums he raked in from the distribution on the street. He kept his trusted aides in flashy new cars and unlimited Starbucks two-for-one coupons, and was looking to expand his distribution base out of North Bergen, maybe set up a Vegas office.

     Melvin had just left a meeting with Hanover Klingst, who, having perfected shmutz and the shmutz delivery system, was on to his next clandestine set of experiments, that often-discussed but never-followed-through-on idea of cold fusion, a theoretically self-sustaining reaction that could radically alter the landscape of energy production and consumption worldwide.

     Tagged "Blue Stuff", it was a contained reaction that occurred when shmutz was bombarded with intense cobalt 38 radiation. The result was a pulsing neon blue donut that spun within an electromagnetic containment field, generating enough electrical current to light five thousand homes. The projected half life for the six inch diameter donut was ten thousand years. The easy part of Project Blue Stuff was done, but the research had just begun into how the electromagnetic fields affected living things and existing communication satellite networks.

     Seeping into the Blue Stuff equation was a wrangling of ideas and competing ideologies from Klingst and Limpthorne. That fool Klingst had been rambling about saving the world with his discovery, but Melvin Limpthorne’s ideas were more grandiose and personally fulfilling. He just wanted to control the distribution of Blue Stuff for personal profit. He already had a Caribbean bank lined up, and was getting a little impatient at the slow progress, and the casual way Klingst dismissed his ideas. He especially hated that talking chimp that followed the professor around everywhere. Gave him the creeps.

     The green circle lit, the bell dinged, and Melvin moved with three other people into the elevator. A young couple, hand in hand, oblivious to all but each other, stepped in first. The man wore a tiny sombrero and a skin tight black leather jumpsuit, suede boots, and a long leather pouch hung from his right hip. The woman was pretty, Latin, slim and was obviously enjoying herself. The odd pair elicited no surprise from Melvin. After all, this was the UN, and you could observe odd characters everywhere you looked.

     The man following the couple was tall, red-faced and mumbling. His eyes, black and unfocused, were all that Melvin could remember later about his face. The man’s raincoat and hat were dry, even though he had just come in out of the rain, and he seemed to glide, rather than walking in clearly discernible steps.

     Melvin watched the man, avoiding looking directly at him. Something’s wrong with this guy. Weird. Melvin punched the button for the thirty eighth floor, and looked at the couple, finger poised.

     "Twelfth floor, thank you." Her voice was sweet, lilting. Reminded Melvin of.....well, that was a long time ago. He hit the lit circle for the twelfth floor just as the man in the dry raincoat reached over and poked the button that would stop the elevator at the twenty ninth floor. The hand and finger that extended from the sleeve looked artificial, fake, plastic, like a cheap Halloween prop. The hand disappeared up the sleeve as the man with the black eyes moved to the opposite corner.

     The door started its slow close and was interrupted when another hand and arm caught the door before it shut, automatically reopening it. A white mustached man in a blue suit entered the cubicle and pushed the light for the fourteenth floor, and stood in front of everyone else, near the door, fidgeting with a sheaf of papers.

     The elevator rose, smooth and effortless, a brushed steel cocoon bearing its precious contents hung from a thin steel cable. At the sixth floor and five seconds into the journey, the man with the black eyes coughed, screwed up his face, looked skyward, and farted, a continuous and massive rush of primeval gas that blatted like an E-flat tuba playing the melody to "Deep in the Sea".

     This was followed immediately by another longer and higher pitched belch of unconscionable putridity. The man committing this advanced social faux paux appeared to be in ecstacy, eyes rolled back, fake hand raised in a hitlerian salute. Seconds later, the brown-tinged now-visible ether that had been loosed into the cramped space moved, roiling and swirling, toward the couple, expanding and coalescing into a dense particulate-filled cloud. The jumpsuited man, staring at the cloud in disbelief, reached momentarily toward his pouch, then grabbed his wife and crowded into the mustached man near the door. No use. The cloud enveloped the entire elevator and its occupants, filling the two hundred eighty eight cubic feet nearly instantaneously. The nausea that swept over the unsuspecting victims was real and immediate. Melvin vomited, and crumpled into a heap on the floor, bleeding from the nose.

     "God damn, man!...Shit!" The white mustached man yelled at the top of his lungs and reached for the red emergency button and pushed it. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nope. The gas-filled elevator continued its upward climb.

     The man with the black eyes grinned, a vile and perverse smirk, yellowed teeth bared. The veins on his temples pulsed visibly as he grimaced, tensed his body, raised his fake hand ever higher, and let loose with the mother of all flatulence, a resounding bray of fury accompanied by a visible green cloud reminiscent of a ripe Central Valley manure pond.

     The woman dropped to the carpet, trying to wriggle closer to the door, but there was no escape. Her naturally curly hair straightened and her olfactory system simply shut down. She lay flat on her stomach, legs splayed, tears wetting her face. Her boyfriend, gagging and coughing, took a step toward the flatulent man and reached back for his pouch. His eyes were burning, and he could hardly see in the cloudy dim elevator. The gas was thick with brown specks, whipped by an unseen wind, blotting out the fluorescent lighting and bathing the cubicle in an unearthly green illumination.

     The man with the black eyes spoke.

     "Don’t do it, and you’ll live."

     The jumpsuited man hesitated, then the mustached man hoisted himself weakly and tried the emergency stop. Nothing again.

     "It doesn’t work, Mr. Bolton. And, oh yes,...Mr. El Pinche, so sorry. You and your sweet wife were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Mr. Limpthorne, well, let’s just say...you’re highly expendable. Nothing personal, you understand."

     "How did you...?"

     "Never mind, I know lots of things." His voice was muffled, he towered over them, the toxic fog swirling around him.

     By now, the steel surface of the elevator’s interior was coated with a dripping brown gel that bubbled, each bursting bubble released a yellow cloud into the elevator.

     El Pinche lay down alongside Lesmerelda. They clutched at each other, hardly daring to breathe, while the toxic world around them closed in. He had never in his lifetime felt this helpless, the gaseous vapor overrode all, dulling his senses.

     John Bolton was on unsteady knees, clutching his chest and gasping. The elevator had risen to the twenty-ninth floor, and lurched to a stop. The doors opened, releasing the huge poisonous cloud out into the hallway, where it began to expand outward in all directions. The man with the black eyes shrieked with demonic glee, icy laughter that froze in El Pinche’s gut. The Revenger X in his pouch was useless. He would have to rely on his inborn wits to find safety for him and Lesmerelda. They would fight another day.

     Seconds after the door opened, El Pinche forced his weakened body to struggle upright, picked up Lesmerelda, and staggered into the hall and out the emergency exit, heading down the stairwell.

     John Bolton lay on the floor of the septic sarcophagus, spittle on his chin, eyes frightened as the aneurysm hidden in his chest finally burst.

     The Gaslight Grill, the eatery on the twenty-ninth floor was jammed with a late breakfast crowd whose conversations turned to bedlam when the rapidly spreading methane laden mist reached the first lit candle. The explosion ripped the deli doors off and a giant fireball floated through the hall, igniting everything it touched. The sprinkler system did not activate.

     Panicky patrons ran for the back door and the emergency exit. Fed by the gas, the fire continued to expand. Before the NYPD could respond or the building security people react, the burning fireball floated up, scorching as it went, igniting the top ten stories of the Secretariat and sending the workers on those floors running, falling over one another, screaming into cellphones, praying out loud.

     B.L. straightened his tie and brushed the soot from his coat and hat. He stepped gingerly over the dead body of John Bolton and stood looking down at the unconscious figure of Melvin Limpthorne. A wisp of gray smoke drifted from B.L.’s head. A draft of cool fresh air surged through the elevator and the image of B.L. winked out, leaving only the smoke and the smell of charred wood behind.