The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Read online

  There was honking and squealing and swerving (left, thank God) and the truck came to a stop on the narrow, rocky shoulder, its front wheel almost tipped into the rain ditch. When the dust had cleared a little, the man driving—if you could call him a man, since he seemed just a few years older than Rose herself—rolled down his window, about to say something, probably along the lines of Are you okay?, but Rose got there first.

  “Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going!” she yelled.

  “Me? You’re yelling at me? What the hell, kid? Why the hell are you running down the middle of the goddamn road?”

  Except by the time he’d finished asking his questions, she’d walked herself to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and slid herself inside. Then she gave him her best smile—which was a good smile, she’d always had a good smile—and said, taking a deep breath, “About that.”

  She told him, briefly, sort of what she’d been doing and why and then she told him how it had been harmless fun and anyway they were assholes and they both got what was coming.

  He pulled the truck back onto the road just about the time Akard and Schroeder came tearing around the bend, and Rose would be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed the look of shock on their faces as they swerved hard to round either side of the truck and then spilled their four-wheelers into the rain ditch.

  She rolled the window down quick and stuck her head out and yelled as loud as she could, “Fuck you, jack-offs.”

  Then she plopped herself back into her seat, smiled her good smile again, and turned to the guy driving, who she realized hadn’t told her his name yet, and she said, “So.”

  He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Why? How old are you?”

  He smiled and shook his head again and said, “Never mind.”

  She looked at him closely then. He wasn’t ugly, exactly, but he wasn’t good-looking, either. His features, when taken individually—his nose, his lips, his eyes, his ears, even—were nice enough, but put together they didn’t seem to match.

  Rose didn’t care. She wasn’t going to marry him. She was just using him for a ride.

  “My name’s Henry,” he said. He waited for her to say her name; she could feel him waiting in the way he paused. Then, when she just looked at him, he said, “So. Where am I taking you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t ready to give her name just yet, but she wasn’t ready to get out of the truck yet either. “Where you going?”

  He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and looked at the dash. “Well, in a second, I’m going to have to get gas, but after that, I’ll take you back home. Sound all right?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, and then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

  3.

  Finally, she gave that signal and the fucking mercs were off, pouring out of their vans like weaponized roaches, and then they were gone, and Colleen, jog-walking right behind the mercs as they charged into the offices of the Morrison World Travel Concern, patted Rose on her ass and gave her a peck on her cheek and told her, “Nice work, kid,” and then waved casually over her shoulder and called out, “See you on the other side” as she ran to catch up with the grunts, leaving Rose standing on the sidewalk feeling like she felt that one summer she agreed to help out with the pre-K kids at church camp, how relieved she’d felt every fucking day when it was recess and all those little shits had run screaming and hitting and shoving out of the multipurpose room and into the play yard and all she’d wanted to do was sit down and revel in the peace and quiet for one goddamn minute.

  She took a deep breath. She let it out. She wanted to take, like, five hundred more, but there wasn’t time. She had a suspicion today would be a day full of deep fucking breaths.

  Rose sprinted into the parking garage where there was supposed to be an elevator that she couldn’t take because where would be the surprise and fun in that? No, she had to find the vent because of course there was a vent. It was always the same with these fucking places: Something as stupid as a vent opened up the entire labyrinth of a place, no matter how secure the rest of the building was. And sure, there were measures set up to protect the vents, lasers and heat sensors and weight sensors and shit like that, but they’d been taken care of from the inside, from their girl on the inside. And sure, Rose knew that no matter how all-powerful and underground your organization was, you had to make it so the people working for you could breathe and shit, but, Jesus, when she was done with this line of work, she planned to find somebody good at making things, like an engineer or someone, and together they’d invent a way to ventilate air into a building without ventilation shafts and she’d make, like, a billion dollars in the secret agency business. Because if you worked hard enough at it, you could bypass laser sensors and shit, but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get down a ventilation shaft that wasn’t there, and that was the goddamned truth.

  Rose climbed into the shaft, hooked her cable to the edge, and taking a deep breath, started counting to five, and then, because she liked surprises and hated waiting, let herself drop at three.

  Rose dropped twenty or thirty feet and then caught hold of the rope, threw her feet against the aluminum of the vent shaft, leaving deep boot marks in it, almost breaking the shaft off its column. She should have been wearing gloves. She hated wearing gloves, though, hated the way they constricted her hands, the way she couldn’t grip things as well as she liked, not even with the grippy kind of gloves, not the way she liked to be able to grip into a thing when she needed to, and anyway, she hardly felt the burn of the rope as it burned in her palms. Still, she couldn’t help but hear Henry’s voice in the back of her head: Where the hell are your gloves, newbie?

  God, though, she was bored. Bored of Henry’s voice in her head. Bored of this assault, which felt to her like nothing more than a glorified training session.

  What was worse was if everything went the way it was supposed to go, she’d be bored the whole time.

  Well. Most of the whole time. Taking care of the director of this outfit might offer its own—albeit brief—distractions.

  Rose wondered what Colleen was doing. She wondered how the grunts were doing. Rounding up hostages, leading the oblivious fools in the travel agency down to the real offices of the Regional Office. She wondered if the travel agents even knew who they worked for. Probably not. People are idiots. She wondered what Jimmie and Windsor were doing, how they were handling their teams, wondered if they were already done with their assignments. Rose didn’t wonder if anyone had died yet—no one had but someone would soon enough and then others after that—because she hadn’t quite caught up to the idea that people—strangers and people she knew—were going to die. She was only seventeen, after all. So far it all seemed like a game, like an elaborate, somehow less fun game of paintball she was playing with Andrea and Colleen and Windsor back at Assassin Training Camp, but then thinking of Windsor made her think of Henry, which always dropped Rose onto shaky, spazzy ground.

  Henry wasn’t even on the fucking premises. He was monitoring the operation from the rendezvous point, but as far as she knew, that meant watching Point Break on Netflix or some shit like that.

  But at least he wasn’t with Windsor. Tall, gorgeous, white-blond, blue-eyed, smart, funny, age-appropriate Windsor.

  At least there was that.

  At least she didn’t have to waste time or brainpower trying to imagine or not imagine what shenanigans might’ve been going on with him and Windsor while she was stuck here in this shitty ventilation shaft.

  Not that she cared.

  Not that she gave two shits about Henry.

  Not that she gave him another thought.

  She stopped. Fuck. She’d missed her goddamn turn.

  4.

  Rose didn’t know how long
Henry had been driving around, how long she’d had her eyes closed. Not too long, of course. You couldn’t drive around this town for too long before you were driving out of it, but with the windows in his truck rolled down, the hot air blowing across her face, Rose didn’t feel any immediate urge to open her eyes, to see what the hell this stranger was doing or where he was driving her in his truck.

  Then she became bored.

  She opened her eyes just in time to see two girls she knew standing on the side of the road, looking over something dead on the pavement, giving it serious consideration.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Rose said. “Pull over real quick.”

  Then she leaned out of her window. “What the hell are you girls doing?”

  The taller girl, Patty, looked up, squinted, crinkled her nose. “Hey, Rose. We were coming to get you.”

  “What is that?” she said, nodding at the thing dead in the road, pretending like she didn’t notice or care that fucking Patty had given Henry her name.

  “Squirrel,” the shorter, dark-haired girl, Gina, said.

  “What’s so goddamn interesting about a dead squirrel?”

  “It ain’t dead,” Gina said. “Just smashed.”

  “Oh,” Rose said, and then she slipped out of the truck before Henry could stop her. “Let me see.”

  It was a sad sight, that squirrel.

  The back half of it had been flattened into the pavement by someone speeding down the two-lane road, but the front half of it was still moving, had managed to pull itself a good two or three feet. At that moment, it seemed to be taking a break. Then its front paws started moving again, and she tried to imagine it pulling itself across the road. Tried to imagine the pain—did squirrels feel pain?—and the effort. The confusion, maybe, of having just recently had back legs that worked, of once being quick and acrobatic, able to climb trees and jump branch to branch, terrorize blue jays and mockingbirds, taunt cats and dogs.

  And now this.

  Where did it think it was going?

  Gina and Patty were chatting about something behind her and maybe one of them asked who was that driving her around and another one might’ve asked what had happened to her shoes, but she didn’t pay them much attention, or rather, she listened to them just enough to know they were dead interested in who she was with and what she was doing driving around with this strange man, dead interested, in other words, in her, which was part of the point, wasn’t it?

  Making people dead interested?

  The squirrel’s chest beat rapidly, and Rose wondered if the beating was its lungs struggling to take in breath, or its heart struggling to pump blood into parts that were leaking that blood straight out again. Watching how fast its chest was beating, she felt that they should do something.

  Then she heard the truck door open and slam and she turned to see Henry walking toward them. He was carrying a small hammer in his left hand. He nodded at Gina and Patty, and Patty smiled back because that’s how Patty was and Gina took a slight step back because that’s how Gina was. Henry got up close to the squirrel and said, more to the squirrel or to himself than to the girls, “What have we got here, buddy?” He dropped down into a squat. He pressed the hammer to the squirrel’s head and Rose, suddenly sure of what was about to happen, sure and unhappy about it, said, “Hey, wait,” but before she could say anything else, he drew the hammer back and tapped it sharply on the squirrel’s forehead—if squirrels even have foreheads, Rose thought. The tap wasn’t too hard, just hard enough that the squirrel collapsed and the rapid movement of its chest slowed and then stopped. Someone, Gina or Patty, gasped behind her, and she imagined the two of them flinching, turning their heads into their shoulders.

  Pussies, she thought.

  Henry gave a small smile, more of a grimace, and said, “There you go.”

  “How in the fuck,” Rose said.

  He shrugged. “Just a matter of where you hit it,” he said. “Find the right spot,” he said, “squirrels, birds, dogs, cats.” He shrugged again, as if this were common knowledge, that there would be one spot on the skull just vulnerable enough that knocking that spot with a ball-peen hammer would do a thing in. “People, even,” he said.

  “Where?” she asked, standing up again. “On a person. Where would you have to tap a person like that?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well.” Henry smiled at her. “Everybody’s different, you know.”

  She knew where, though, knew exactly where you’d have to tap a person on the head in order to send him on his way. Or where you’d have to tap her, in any case. There’d been a spot on her own head that had been itching to be touched, deeply touched. She could feel where it might be with her fingertips but the spot that urgently needed pressing against was too deep inside her, covered by layers of skin and bone and whatever else it was that was held inside her head. She’d been feeling this for the past couple of days and had tried pressing hard against her head with the palm of her hand, and when that didn’t work, had pressed her head against the warm glass pane of her bedroom window, and then the sharp corner of the headboard of her bed, and against her bedroom wall. She’d pressed the eraser points of pencils and the blunt end of a pair of scissors there, too, all to no avail.

  She’d never considered the dull tip of a hammer, though.

  “Right here?” she asked, pointing to that spot on her head, just at her hairline, straight up from the bridge of her nose.

  He barely looked at her, where she was pointing, and then, flustered, focused his attention on the squirrel flattened on the road, and said, with a bit of a hitch in his throat, or maybe that was Rose’s imagination, “Maybe, I guess, I don’t know.”

  Then he said, “It’s dead now, anyway.”

  Looking at Gina and Patty behind her, he said, “You want me to leave you here with them, then?”

  Rose looked at the squirrel and then at Patty and Gina and then at the truck and Henry. She knew the right thing to say to the strange man who’d picked her up on the side of the road and had just killed a squirrel with a hammer. Yes, go on ahead, I’m fine now. But she was drawn. She wasn’t sure what she was being drawn to but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than what she’d be left with if she let him go.

  Gina, who’d been studying Rose out of the corner of her eye, spoke up. “She’s fine with us,” she said. “Right, Rose?”

  But Rose shook her head. “Actually, you mind running me to the store? I told my momma I’d pick something up for her and I lost my flip-flops back there and don’t want to walk barefooted.” She said this and didn’t look back at Gina or Patty, sure she knew what kind of look she’d see on their faces, Gina’s anyway.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. And then as they pulled away, Rose looked back at Gina and Patty still standing next to that dead squirrel, Patty waving limply until Gina noticed this and grabbed her arm and shook her head, and then the truck turned a corner and Rose couldn’t see them anymore.

  5.

  Rose had gone too far down the shaft. She didn’t know how far too far, but too far, she could sense it.

  Should’ve taken that left back at Albuquerque—that was her dad’s saying, although Christ if she knew what the hell he was ever talking about. Whatever, though. It was Henry’s fault, somehow, his fault for distracting her and maybe her fault just a little for being so easily distracted.

  She pulled herself up, hand over hand, ten feet, fifteen, twenty. She was beginning to wonder when she’d get back to her turnoff, just how far below it she’d lowered herself, when she came to it, the opening—if it had been a snake, it’d have bit you, which was another one from dear old Dad—and Christ, how could she have missed it?

  She swung herself to it, close enough to grab hold of the ledge with one hand. She was going to let go of the rope with her other hand, climb into the new shaft branching off to the left, and be on her merry way, b
ut she stopped. She couldn’t say exactly why she stopped, but she did.

  Something felt . . . off. Told her, Hold on, now, what’s wrong with this picture?

  But then something else told her, Nah, this is it, go, go, you’ve got shit to do.

  Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.

  She let go of the ledge, held on to the rope, pushed herself off the wall into a gentle bit of pendulumming. She closed her eyes and went deep, went real fucking deep inside herself.

  And here’s what she saw:

  A map, in her head, a detailed motherfucker of a map, not just of the ventilation shaft but of the whole ordeal: travel agency, director’s office, training rooms, employee break rooms. Each girl had this same map stuck inside her head. Hell, if she wanted, she could pull up the secret compound in upstate New York, too. So.

  Where was she?

  A pinprick of light glowing hotly in the ventilation shaft.

  Okay. Where was she supposed to be?

  Same fucking light.

  Good. All good, except, it wasn’t right. She could feel it. Something was still wrong, with her or her map or the fucking shaft.

  She felt this overwhelming urge to open her eyes, to just look around and see, Hey, there’s the opening I need, but she wouldn’t let herself. Whatever it was that was wrong, her eyes were in on it, she was sure. Her body—fingers, legs—in on it, too.

  Devil’s advocate: Security had been fixed by their woman on the inside, or that’s what she had told Henry and Emma, had told all of them, and Rose had made it this far—the others, too—without sounding off any alarms, so the intel seemed good enough. The opening was dead-to-rights right in front of her. She’d been on this rope for ages and was on a strict schedule. So what was her hesitation?