If I Were an Evil Overlord

GORDIE CULLIGAN VS. DR. LONGBEACH & THE HVAC OF DOOM by J. Steven York

I tell you, when I answered that ad in the back of Popular Mechanics long ago, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Sure, I expected steady work, good pay, excellent benefits, and the respect and admiration of my friends and family. That goes without saying.

But I never expected the intrigue, the danger, the adventure!

My name is Gordie Culligan, and I’m the man from HVAC. That’s Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning to you. God, I love the smell of a fried starter-capacitor in morning!

It was a day like any other day in the Los Angeles basin, but I felt something in the air. Possibly it was the unusual number of ominous, glowing, saucer-shaped clouds moving against the wind, or the swarms of atomic robot bats flapping their way east over Burbank, or the unusual number of electric dirigibles, blue arcs of lighting crackling between their protruding electrodes, that circled over the San Diego freeway. Maybe it was just the greenish tinge to the smog. But I knew something was up.

Now sure, I know if you don’t live in L.A., you’d consider any one of those things cause for alarm, but that’s why you live where you live, and I live in the greatest city in the world.

Sure, it was a little startling at first, but this is L.A., baby! You live here for a while, you see things like this every day, and nothing ever, ever comes of it, you just start to take it for granted. Sure, there are giant robots in Tarzana and giant beetles in Griffith Park, but when you’ve had Conan for a governor, nothing is that strange anymore.

By now, you’re probably saying, “Gordie, this is all very interesting and all, but what about the air-conditioning?” See it all ties in, and until recently, I didn’t know that. You see all those crazy things, and you take it for granted that nothing ever happens. By you know why nothing ever happens?

Because of guys like me, that’s why. HVAC saves the world, baby! That’s what this town is about!

So anyway, it was a routine call, a 318: “unexplained noise from blower.” I checked out the van and picked up Rudy, the apprentice the union had sent over. He was standing on the curb outside the break-room door, two coffee cups in his hands and a bagel bag under his arm.

He hopped in and put the cups in the holders, then pulled out a bagel for me. I looked at it skeptically through the plastic wrap.

Rudy stared at me, eyes wide, a look of concern on his squarish, freckled, face. “Sprouts and cream cheese, like you asked.”

I held it back toward him. “What are those seeds on the bagel, Rudy?”

“They’re seeds,” he said. “All seeds look alike to me, dude.”

“Your seed-blindness is probably why they kicked you out of Fresno, Rudy. Those are sesame seeds. I specifically asked for poppy.”

He kind of cringed back toward the door of the van and looked like a whipped puppy. I immediately felt bad. They hadn’t kicked Rudy out of Fresno, but that was where he was from. I think maybe he literally fell off a turnip truck. But somebody at the union must have felt sorry for him, or more likely, he had a uncle with seniority and a small wad of cash. In any case, he’d been taken in as an HVAC apprentice (service/install) junior grade with the Brotherhood of Subsystem Service Employees, and ended up with me.

Unlike a lot of guys, I don’t mind an apprentice. An extra set of hands comes in useful sometimes, you can send them into those dirty ducts and crawl-spaces, and they give the customer someone to yell at while you sneak off and get the job done uninterrupted. Based on our two weeks together, I’d decided that Rudy wasn’t a bad kid, if a little green. That didn’t keep me from riding his butt though.

I peeled back the plastic, took a bite of the bagel, turned up a Barenaked Ladies CD, and put the van into drive. Rudy seemed to relax, and I had to admit that, despite my black sense of foreboding, I was in a generally good mood too. The dispatch was to Long Beach, and that meant at least forty minutes on the freeway, which, since I was paid from the moment I left the shop, was free money.

The traffic was bad (hey, it’s L.A.!) and it took closer to an hour. Fine by me. I consulted the GPS screen and we threaded our way into an industrial section. As I drove, Rudy’s attention was drawn to something off in the distance. As we got nearer to the blinking red dot on the computer map, Rudy’s head tilted farther and farther back. I was too busy driving to figure out what he was looking at.

Finally, he asked, “Has there always been a volcano down here?”

I blinked in surprise and looked up from the SUV in front of me long enough to see the huge, smoking crater rising above the warehouses to our right, then glanced down at the map. “Nah,” I said, “can’t be.” But it sure looked like our air-conditioning service call was to an active volcano. “This is your lucky day,” I said. “I have the feeling this is going to be some heavy-BTU machinery we’re working on today.”

We zigged and zagged past small factories, warehouses, refineries, and auto-wrecking yards, and the cone just kept getting bigger and bigger.

“Did you ever see that movie,” said Rudy, “with Tommy Lee Jones?”

I nodded. “Volcano, costarring Anne Heche,” I said. I’m kind of a movie buff, but then everyone in L.A. is. “Around 1997 or so. Sucked, but Tommy Lee is terrific in everything. Except Batman Forever, of course.” I saw where he was going though. “Don’t worry, kid. I’ve got the feeling this is a whole different scenario.”

We drove up to the base of the volcano, which on closer inspection seemed to be made out of painted concrete sprayed over chicken wire. A big gas meter inside a chain-link enclosure suggested the source of the pyrotechnics at the top. I spotted a sign marked SERVICE ENTRANCE, with an arrow, and followed it around the base of the volcano to a kind of cave.

We drove inside to find a fairly standard looking loading dock with two roll-up delivery doors and a small man door to the right. I noticed a Lotus Elise, going 120 sitting still, parked incongruously in front of the loading dock. I shook my head. “Doesn’t that fool know this is Long Beach? It’s a wonder that thing isn’t stripped down to the frame already.” I shrugged again and parked the truck.

I sent Rudy up to the man-door on recon, and unloaded our gear from the back of the truck.

Rudy came back a minute later with a pink Post-it note in his hand. It read:

Dear AC People,

Gone to Radio Shack for some diodes. Gave minions the day off. Back in an hour. Please let yourself in through the crater (outside, trail to left).

Dr. Longbeach

I glanced at the work order. Sure enough, Dr. M. D. Longbeach was the customer name.

It looked like a long hike from the truck, so we went loaded for bear: toolbox, filter masks, a tank of R134a refrigerant (ozone friendly, if used as directed), a roll of trim-to-fit filter material, and two rolls of duct tape.

We quickly found the path, which was really more of a series of switchback ramps, disguised from view below by Styrofoam rocks and plastic plants. I work out three times a week, but I was still out of breath by the time we lugged all our gear to the top.

When we reached the lip of the crater we dropped our stuff and took a breather. There was a breeze off the harbor to the west. It had a taint of refinery stink, but it was at least cool. I took the time to size up what was waiting for us below, while Rudy admired the view.

“You can see the Queen Mary from here,” he said. Then he squinted and frowned. “Dude! Is that a giant octopus climbing the smokestacks?”

“Ignore the giant octopus, kid. That’s somebody else’s problem. We’ve got a volcano with a broken AC to fix.”

From this angle, looking past the ring of burners and smoke generators, it was obvious that the volcano was both fake and hollow. A translucent fiberglass roof covered the opening, and a large panel in the center of the roof was rolled back to reveal a huge silo in the middle.

Rudy tore himself away from the view and turned to look down into the open hatchway, which was probably big enough to fly a small helicopter through. Or launch a missile, which, judging from the rounded nose cone visible just below, was more likely its purpose.

Rudy’s eyes widened. “Dude, is that a-”

I nodded. “Yeah, kid, it is.”

“A water heater!”

I cringed. “No, doofus, it is not a water heater. Don’t you know a missile when you see one?”

“Not really.”

“Nor a water heater either, I guess. You’ve got a lot to learn, apprentice.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He stared at the missile with growing concern. “Dude, I was happier when it was a water heater. Should we be worried about this?”

“About what?”

“It’s a missile, dude!”

I looked up. “Is it aimed at you? Looks like it’s aimed at the sky to me. Probably another evil plot to destroy the moon. We had three last year in L.A. County that I know of.”

“The moon? Seriously? What happened?”

I shrugged. “Moon’s still there, isn’t it? Somebody stopped them, I guess.”

“Who?”

I shrugged. “You’re not an apprentice to NASA, Rudy, you’re an apprentice to BOSSE.” I was careful to pronounce it “boss,” the e is silent. Rudy kept calling the union “Bossy,” and the shop stewards didn’t take kindly to that.

I spotted a roof stair and a line of heavy-duty compressor units twenty yards around the crater to our right. “Come on, we’ve got a noisy blower to fix.” We reached the stairs and I tried the knob. I’d been secretly hoping it was locked, as we’d then have to wait, with the meter running, for the customer to return. But it turned freely, and as I opened the door, I noticed that, strangely enough, the lock had been neatly melted out of the middle. “Something’s not quite right here, kid. Keep an eye open.”

He looked at me. “Dude, we’re going into a fake volcano with a missile in the middle, and you say it’s not quite right? Are you like having a Homer moment or something?”

“Homer moment?”

“You know: D’oh!”

I frowned at him as I headed down the stairwell. “Do not ever say ‘D’oh’ to your designated union journeyperson. There’s almost certainly a regulation against it, and if not, I just made one up.”

I turned my attention to a series of heavily insulated coolant pipes running down the wall from the compressors above. Following them would lead us to the evaporator coils and the blower. We went down three floors to find a giant octopus of another kind, a huge central air-conditioning unit from which large metal ducts snaked off in all directions. As we stepped closer, we could hear the fan rumbling with an unhealthy, scraping noise just audible under the rumble.

I located the access hatch on the side, but found it padlocked. I held the lock in my hand and sighed. Unlike a locked roof door, this was no real excuse on this kind of system. “We’ll go in through the ducts,” I said.

Rudy looked surprised. “Dude?”

I nodded up toward the metal tentacles spreading out in all directions. “The ducts. Look at the size of them. We’ll find a grate, climb in, and walk back to the central unit. Look at the size of those things! We’ll hardly have to duck.”

By now, it was becoming clear to me that we were in some kind of lair. Though I hadn’t done much myself, mechanicals guys-HVAC, plumbing, electricians-they love lair work. Lots of mechanicals on a big scale, and price is usually no object. Where these guys get their money, I’ll never know, but they aren’t afraid to spend it. And for HVAC guys, a special treat: big ducts. Really big ducts. With great big registers over every secret filing cabinet, master strategy table, supercomputer, and self-destruct console.

Or so I’m told. Me, mostly I do industrial parks, big-box retail, and office buildings, so this was kind of new to me. Mostly I was going on union-picnic shop talk and secondhand info. But I couldn’t let on to the apprentice. I kept my chin up and acted like I did this every day.

We walked down a stark corridor lined with numbered doors. Maybe it was an evil lair of some kind, but except for some roof support girders and other architectural details seemingly borrowed from Forbidden Planet (1965, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and pre-Naked Gun Leslie Neilsen) it could have been a ministorage based on appearances.

Never mind that. I quickly found what I was looking for-a large, conveniently accessible air register. I hooked my fingers around the edge, and it easily popped open without the need to remove any screws. From what I’d heard around the union hall, conveniently opening registers were popular lair-specific features. I tossed my tools inside and climbed up, noticing as I did that it was far easier to see out through the register than in from the outside.

Rudy climbed in behind me, dragging the heavy tank of refrigerant, and closed the register after us.

I considered unclipping the flashlight that I carried on my belt, but it was surprisingly well lit inside the ducts. I stuck my index finger in my mouth to wet it, and held it up into the air flow. “This way,” I said, heading “upstream.” I noticed, as we walked, that these were top-quality ducts, heavy metal. We were able to move silently. None of that thin, galvanized sheet metal that thumps like a kid’s tin drum every time you shift your weight. “Quality all the way,” I said.

We followed a series of twists and turns past many other registers. Occasionally I would stop to look out into empty control rooms bristling with blinking lights, workshops equipped with menacing looking industrial robots, labs filled with colorful, bubbling beakers, and a room with the biggest damned hot tub I’ve ever seen (and when you’re from L.A., that’s saying something).

“Dude!” Rudy was really impressed with the hot tub.

Finally the rumbling of the blower started to get louder, and it felt as though we were walking into a stiff wind. Ahead, I could see the filter housing. We were quite close to the condenser coils and the blower, but we needed to get past the filter first.

I found the latches and opened the housing. As I did, a number of oddly shaped white objects clattered out onto the heavy metal floor of the duct.

Rudy bent down and picked up what looked to be a long, white bone. He grinned and waved it above his head. “Did you see that space-monkey movie?”

I frowned at him. “Planet of the Apes was a ‘space-monkey’ movie. You’re thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I liked Dr. Strangelove better.” I frowned again, and leaned closer to examine the bone, nearly getting my head conked in the process. “I think that’s a human femur,” I said.

Rudy went white as the bone, and dropped it like it had suddenly burned his hand. “Dude!”

I bent down and picked up the bone. The surface was bleached white and slightly pitted, but it didn’t look old. “I’ve seen this before,” I said. “Back in ’99, some guy in North Hollywood tried to soup up his window AC, and accidentally turned it into a death ray.”

“Dude, a death ray?”

“There are some things non-union man was not meant to meddle with.”

“So, you’re saying this air conditioner is a death ray?” The implications suddenly hit him, and he quickly backed away from the filter housing.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Just that a death ray could be involved.” I kneeled down and examined the other bones: scattered vertebra, a shoulder blade, several ribs, a disarticulated jaw, and a wristwatch. I reached down and picked it up. Rolex. Top of the line.

As I examined it, I accidentally pressed a stud on the side of the case and a needle-fine red beam shot out and heated a spot on the metal wall to incandescence before I could turn it off.

Seeing the beam, Rudy screamed like a school-girl and threw himself into a wall so hard that I thought he’d knock himself unconscious.

“Calm down,” I said. “Don’t you know the difference between a death ray and a laser?”

Rudy blinked in confusion. “No.”

“Well, this watch has some kind of cutting laser in it. I think this is what melted the lock outside.” I thought of the abandoned Lotus downstairs, and it all started to make some kind of sense. I opened the filter housing all the way, and the rest of the skeleton appeared to be there, stuck in the fuzzy filter material.

Rudy stared at the bones, panic growing in his eyes. “Dude, there’s a dead guy in the HEPA filter! We should get out of here!”

“Technically,” I said, “this isn’t a HEPA filter at all.” I was starting to feel intrigued. “Anyway, I want to find out what happened here, and we’ve still got a blower to fix.” I pulled out the filter frame to reveal a plenum chamber behind. Ahead, I could see the condenser coils, curled like intestines, dripping condensation.

I started to climb through the opening. I looked to see Rudy just standing there, shivering, but from fear or proximity to the condenser, I couldn’t be sure. “Buck up! This is what you signed up for. Be a man!”

Rudy looked at me and nodded weakly. Slowly, he climbed through after me, still lugging the tank. We slipped past the condenser coils and I could see the huge fan spinning ahead. The scraping noise was very loud now. On the wall of the chamber to our right, I could see an electrical box with a handle on the side. I pulled it down.

There was a loud clack of relays opening, and the motor fell silent, the fan spinning down, and with it, the scraping noise quieted. The big fan slowed until the cruciform shape of the individual blades resolved out of the shimmering disk, and it slowed to a halt. I stepped up and examined one of the blades, its sharp, leading edge buried in the top of a skull.

With some effort, I pulled the skull free of the blade and held it up to Rudy. He was turning white again.

“Well,” I said, “there’s our noise.”

“Good,” said Rudy. “Dude, can we go back to the shop now?”

I looked past the fan, where a long return air duct stretched off into the distance. “Not yet,” I said. “I want to know what happened here.”

“Do we have to?”

“Dude,” I said, “we do.”

I stepped carefully past the blades of the fan and into the duct beyond. In doing so, I must have triggered some kind of motion detector. The air in front of me shimmered and glowed, forming the life-size translucent image of a short, slope-shouldered, bald man with a goatee and sci-fi looking wraparound sunglasses. The glowing image began to speak.

“Greetings, my British friend. I’m sure you think yourself quite clever, sneaking in this way, but I’ve prepared for any eventuality. You are about to become the first test subject for my-” He paused for dramatic effect, a bit too long in my opinion. “-death ray!”

Then he began to laugh maniacally. As he did, I saw a panel in the side of the duct begin to slide up. Something inside began to move.

I dropped my toolbox and reached back to snatch the tank from Rudy. I pulled out the filler hose and twisted the valve just as the ugly black muzzle of the death ray began to emerge from its hidden recess behind the door. Clouds of refrigerant shot out, enveloping the sinister device.

I kept the stream concentrated on the muzzle as it locked into position and began to swivel toward us. The flow sputtered and died as the tank emptied.

The apprentice yelped in fear.

I quickly hoisted the tank over my head and slammed it down on the death ray. The super cooled metal shattered like glass.

I dropped the empty tank and turned back to Rudy, a smug smile on my lips. “You see! If you learn nothing else today, learn this: This is a central air-conditioning system. We are HVAC men! This is our turf, and we have advantage here. You shouldn’t be afraid. Doctor what’s-his-face should be afraid of us! Fear our skills!”

Rudy slowly drew himself up straight, the fear draining from his features.

I patted him on the shoulder. “We can do this!”

Rudy nodded. “Yeah. We can do this.” Then a moment of doubt. “Uh, what is it we’re doing?”

“Whatever Mr. Rolex back in the filer was looking for, it’s at the end of this return duct. I say we go check it out.”

More hesitation. “But-why?”

I gestured at the shattered death ray. “Look at this! It’s an unauthorized modification. This Longbeach character, he’s voided his warranty, and that’s not something we take sitting down. Are you with me?”

Rudy nodded weakly. “But what if there are more death traps?”

I grinned, drunk on my own adrenaline. “Oh,” I said, “there will be!”

I was right, too. We’d traveled maybe twenty yards when I spotted a small vent inside of the duct (looking out onto nothing) and a bunch of dead cockroaches littering the floor. “Breather masks,” I said with alarm, grabbing my mask from the pouch on my belt even as I heard a hissing sound.

I slid the mask over my face, pulled the straps tight to form a seal, and then helped Rudy, who was still fumbling with his.

I had just pulled the last strap tight when the air before us shimmered. The phantom doctor grinned at an empty spot in space to my left, confirming what I’d already suspected, that the holograms were recorded. “Well, my British friend, you’ve cheated death once, but you won’t a second time! Is it getting hard to breathe? Well, by now, you’ve already sucked in a fatal dose of my-” Again with the pregnant pause. “-nerve mist! Now you can spend your last moments contemplating your failure to stop my world-destroying missile from launching!” More maniacal laughter.

“Man,” I said, my voice muffled by my mask, “that gets old quick.” I signaled Rudy to follow me. After we’d traveled a few yards, there was a relay click somewhere behind us, and the big fan began to spin again, sucking away the clouds of poison mist.

I turned to watch them go. “Probably a good thing he gave the minions the day off,” I said, “or he’d be gassing them right about now.” I pulled off my mask and gave Rudy a knowing look. “Just goes to show, you shouldn’t tamper with things you don’t understand.”

I turned and looked up the duct. It dead-ended twenty yards ahead at a single, man-size air register. That, undoubtedly, was our goal. “Destroying the world,” I said, “is bad for business. We’ve got to stop this guy’s plan, and oh, yes, we are going to bill him for the time!”

I stepped boldly forward, but as I did, I noticed yet another grating in the duct wall, from which, even over the sound of the fan, an ominous buzzing could be heard.

Hesitating not at all, I reached for the roll of filter material and slapped it over the grating, holding it in place with my outspread hands. The buzzing within grew loud and angry, and I heard the thumping of something hitting the back of the filter material, like popcorn in a popper.

There was a glow just visible at the corner of my eye, and I knew our holographic friend was back. “Well, my friend, I’m very impressed, but now taste the bitter sting of my-”

I growled. “Oh, get the hell on with it, will ya?”

“-mutant killer bees!”

I looked at the filter material just in front of my face, and saw many small somethings poking through. It took me a moment to realize that I was seeing hundreds of stingers poking through the material.

“Duct tape,” I yelled to Rudy. “Give me duct tape! It’s the only thing that can save us now!”

It was in that moment that Rudy seemed to come into his own. All fear, all hesitation vanished from his face. He pulled a roll of duct tape free of his belt and pulled out a long strip in the same motion, ripping it off with his teeth.

He slapped the strip along the top of the filter material, then went back for more tape.

Behind the filter, the bees were buzzing, but it was Dr. Longbeach who droned on. “As you writhe in venom-induced agony, eyes swollen shut, airway tightening down until you choke, know that you’ve failed, and that my missile will soon disperse its cloud of self-replicating nanobots, converting the entire crust of the planet into-”

Rudy slapped more tape across the bottom of the filter. I was able to pull my hands free and reach for my own roll of tape. But I took a moment to glare at the hologram. “Get on with it!”

“-peanut butter! Oh, yes! All shall know the deadly, sticky-sweet touch of-”

I kept slapping tap over the filter, entombing the deadly insects. “Dr. Scholl’s? Dr. Pepper? Dr. Spock?”

“-Dr. Longbeach!”

“Never would have guessed.” I slapped the last strip of tape in place, and ran for the vent, Rudy hot on my heels.

I popped open the grate and stepped into a glass-walled control room overlooking the missile silo. Far below us, clouds of rocket propellant vented from its tanks, eerily like the refrigerant I’d used earlier. Above us, a fluorescent light flickered and buzzed, adding a disturbing surreality to the scene.

I looked quickly around the room. There were the usual consoles, covered with banks of unmarked, ever-flashing, and incomprehensible lights. But in the center of it all, there was one thing that I could understand, a big, red digital readout counting down toward zero.

59… 58… 57…

And it was then, in one moment of horrible realization, I understood the gravity of our situation. Like Alice Through the Looking Glass (the 1974 TV version, with Phyllis Diller as the White Queen and Mr. T as the voice of the Jabberwock, was surreal even by the standards of Wonderland) we had stepped out of the ductwork. We were out of our element, and suddenly I felt lost.

“We’ve got to stop it,” said Rudy.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Do something!”

“Do what? I don’t know anything about rocket control systems.”

44… 43… 42… 41…

Rudy stepped toward the console, his hands hovering over the timer mechanism. Impulsively he reached down and pried open a panel below it, exposing a rat’s nest of colored wire. He stared at it desperately. “Do something.”

“I can’t,” I answered miserably. “I don’t know how.”

31… 30… 29…

Rudy gazed at the wires. “Look, just-Just think of it as a big thermostat! A thermostat that counts seconds instead of degrees!”

I looked a him, incredulous. “That’s stupid!”

“So to stop the furnace-the rocket-from going off, we need to make the temperature go down instead of up!”

“You’re saying we need to reverse time?”

Rudy frowned. “That doesn’t work, does it?”

“We’re doomed.”

23… 22… 21…

“Look,” he said, “what do they do in the movies?”

I reached for my tool belt and took out a pair of diagonal cutters. “They cut a wire. But which wire?” I sighed, thinking of all the countless red, digital timers I had seen in various movies. “It’s usually the red wire or the blue wire.”

“Unless,” said Rudy, “it’s the white wire or the black wire.”

I groaned. He was right. The timer-readout was always standard, but the wires were always different.

15… 14… 13…

Behind me, I heard a door creak open, but there was no time to wonder who it was.

“Just cut one,” begged Rudy, “any one!”

The timer flashed. Sweat ran down into my eyes. That flickering light made my head hurt.

Cut a wire! But which one?

4… 3… 2…

I felt someone lean over my shoulder.

A hand sheathed in a black rubber glove slipped past me, holding something.

A knife blade glittered in the flickering light.

The blade slipped into the nest of wires and smoothly plucked one out, pulling it tight and cutting it with a snap…

1…

1…

1…

I sagged against the console, the diagonal cutters slipping from my cramped fingers.

Rudy jumped into the air, letting out a victory whoop. “Dudes!”

Dudes? I turned to look at our mysterious rescuer.

He stood, a titan in gray coveralls and a baseball cap. He hoisted up his tool belt, sniffed, and rubbed his bushy mustache with his index finger.

“Who,” I said, “are you?”

He folded his pocketknife and slipped it back into a holster on his belt. “I’m the electrician,” he said. “Somebody called about a busted fluorescent.”

Dr. Longbeach appeared at the door, a black plastic Radio Shack bag clutched in his hand, and surveyed the scene. “Oh, thank God you’re here. I was afraid this time I was actually going to get away with it.” He shuddered. “Peanut butter. Eeew.”

Okay, so the men from HVAC didn’t save the world.

Not that time, anyway.

But we helped.

“Dude,” said Rudy, looking at the electrician in admiration.

“Hey,” I said to the kid, “you’re my apprentice!” I turned to address the stranger as an equal. “You have skills, my friend, as do we. We should team up.”

And that, as you’ve surely guessed by now, is how the Justice League of Contractors was born.