The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  But then her mother was really late.

  And then her mother was so late that the receptionist called the only other number on file, which was Sarah’s aunt’s number, because she’d already called Sarah’s house four times and the receptionist had kids of her own, you know, and couldn’t spend the whole night waiting there with Sarah.

  “I wonder what happened to that mother of yours,” her aunt said as they walked hand in hand to the subway. Sarah didn’t mind at the time. She didn’t suspect, in other words, that anything had gone wrong, and plus her mother never let her hold hands this long because it made their hands sweaty and Sarah’s mother didn’t like sweaty hands, so Sarah shrugged and squeezed her aunt’s hand quickly and her aunt squeezed back.

  They picked up pizza on the way to her aunt’s apartment. Her aunt let her watch television while she called around looking for Sarah’s mother. She gave Sarah a bath and gave her a T-shirt to wear as pajamas, too big and wonderfully soft and thin, and then she read to Sarah from A Wrinkle in Time—“One of my favorites when I was a girl”—and then she tucked Sarah into her big, fluffy bed and told her, “In the morning, guess what? You’ll wake up in your own bed!” And as she fell asleep, Sarah thought to herself that she wouldn’t be upset if she didn’t wake up in her own bed, that it would be just fine, thank you very much, to wake up in her aunt’s bed, which felt clean and lovely, but then she woke up and it was the morning and she was still at her aunt’s, and she was surprised by how much this upset her.

  Her aunt took a day off work and took Sarah to school and picked her up again in the afternoon, and the rest of the afternoon and that night, her aunt told Sarah things like, “She’s probably just with some friends in the city and lost track of everything,” and, “You know how your mother can be sometimes, like she’s on a different planet,” which was true, or had been true when her mother had been a younger woman. As a girl and into her teens, Sarah’s mother had the habit of disappearing from the house for a day or two, crashing on the couches of friends in the city or in Brooklyn, or not sleeping at all, sitting in diners or cafés with friends or people she had just met, and then coming home to any number of punishments, which didn’t bother her at all because she hadn’t been a rebellious girl, just forgetful and thoughtless. When she had become pregnant with Sarah—she hadn’t the slightest idea who the father was, or else convincingly pretended she hadn’t—she’d changed, or if nothing else, she had stopped leaving the house and forgetting to come back, at least until now.

  Another night passed, and then it was Saturday and there was no school, and her aunt said, “Hey, do you want to go to Coney Island today?” and Sarah said, “Sure,” even though what she really wanted was to go home and for her mother to come back. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt, who seemed more than upset enough, and she didn’t want to say what was on her own mind, either, as she would only upset herself by saying out loud the thing she wanted to do but couldn’t do. And so, fine, she would go to Coney Island with her aunt, except her aunt stayed home and Sarah went with a friend of her aunt’s who also had kids, three of them, the oldest four years younger than Sarah, and for most of the day, Sarah watched her aunt’s friend yell at her kids or caught her aunt’s friend staring at her with a strange, sad, pitying look in her eye.

  On Sunday, her aunt bought cookies and pizzas and cake and popcorn and closed the blinds and turned her apartment as dark as she could and ran movie after movie after movie, Sarah’s favorites, which weren’t many and which were mostly her favorites because they were the ones she had at home—Labyrinth and Top Gun and Time Bandits. When they ran out of movies, Sarah’s aunt kept the apartment dark and the popcorn popped and they sat and watched whatever was on TV, and then, on Monday, the police came over. After that, a man and a woman from CPS came to her aunt’s house, and after that, Sarah’s aunt took her back to her mom’s apartment, where they packed her clothes and her toys up, and Sarah asked her aunt if they couldn’t just stay there. Sarah’s aunt told her, “Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we’ll come back here and stay until your mother comes back,” but they never did. One day while she was at school, her aunt moved what she could from Sarah’s old apartment and sold the rest and what she didn’t sell was left on the curb. And then time passed and Sarah changed and while she didn’t know it, her mother changed, too, which was why when Sarah was older and she saw her mother week after week, year after year, she never once knew they’d been brought back together.

  19.

  Sarah stood up and pushed by Wendy and then stopped in the doorway.

  She knew she should have kept going, should have barreled down the hall and into that fray, should have put her mechanical arm to the good use it had been designed for, but she didn’t. She stopped instead. Not because she was afraid—she wasn’t—or because she didn’t think she’d do well in the fight—she would have—but because it wasn’t her instinct to barrel into anything.

  She was careful—had always been careful, even and especially as a child, even and especially when situations required bold action. She was a thinker, a planner. She thought through everything, the possibilities, the action and reaction, the cause and effect, the consequences of therefore and but.

  People were screaming—not just people, but coworkers—and hostages were being taken, therefore she should put an end to it all, and the Operatives were missing, therefore she was the strongest and most skilled defender on site, and she should get to work defending, but then what? she thought. She runs down the hall wielding her mechanical arm, disarms and neutralizes three men, or let’s be generous, let’s say five, if you give Sarah the element of surprise, five men, neutralized, or dead, but how many are there in all? And so let’s hope for the best but prepare for the worst and say there are twenty, no, forty men with guns, now down to thirty-five, and now she has lost the element of surprise, and all that’s left to her is brute force, cunning, and speed, which she contains, not just in her mechanical arm, but contains in the all of her, but still, brute force and speed and cunning, set up against thirty-five men with guns and who knows what else. And Jesus—are there magicks involved? There would have to be magicks involved, otherwise how would they have conspired to push past security? How would they have managed to send all the Regional Office’s own defensive team of Operatives off on missions so that not one of them was on campus? So, yeah, sure, let’s throw magicks into the mix, too, and let’s take away complete surprise because they would have to know by now that she was not on board with their offer, with the package that she had found that night in her apartment, that she would be, in fact, lurking somewhere to join in on this fight, so maybe not total surprise. Add to that technological wizardry, because who would plan an attack against an organization equipped with a semi-cyborg (although Sarah didn’t love the word, cyborg, and liked to think of herself more as enhanced) and not come equipped with its own technology to counter? Which mostly takes away her brute force. Takes away brute force and leaves speed and cunning, which don’t come into play as much when running headlong into an uneven fight. Leaving her only one real option: to Die Hard it John McClane–style, but with Wendy working with her, the two of them squeezing through air ducts and lurking in stairwells and plotting in empty offices, picking off these bastards in small guerrilla groups.

  So it was settled.

  She had her plan, not just the only but also the very best plan, contrived in a matter of seconds while she stood there in the doorway.

  Not bad, O’Hara. Not bad at all.

  She turned to pull Wendy along with her, down the hall in the opposite direction to the back stairwell and from there to the upstairs break room, but when she saw Wendy, Wendy had changed.

  Sarah couldn’t tell how. Not right away. Wendy looked at the clock and made a wincing smiling face and said, “They’re a little early.” And then she punched Sarah in the face. “But better early than late, right, boss?” And she punched her again, in the
chest this time, so hard and so fast that Sarah couldn’t react, couldn’t think, could only fly backward, crashing through the glass wall of her office and into the cubicle right outside it—Wendy’s fucking cubicle—and then things went dark and she didn’t get up.

  20.

  “We will give you a mechanical arm, Sarah,” Mr. Niles told her just before the men cut off her real arm.

  “A mechanical arm so perfect,” he said, “that not even your own mother will know which arm is the real arm and which is the mechanical arm.”

  He said, Not even your own mother, even though they both knew that her mother was dead, that she was killed by the very men whom Sarah had sworn to hunt down, with the help of Mr. Niles, and with the assistance of this mechanical arm. He said, Not even your own mother, but Sarah liked to think he meant, Not even the person closest to you, not even the person who might know you better than you know yourself, not even the person who reared you from infancy and has since gazed unflinchingly into the darkest depths of your soul and who, nonetheless, continues to love and admire and watch over you, not even this person will know which arm is the mechanical arm.

  Of course, before he said any of this, before they prepped her for surgery, before she even knew about a potential for prepping for surgery, he sat her down in his office and passed a file folder across his desk. On the folder was a picture of her mother, and inside the folder a detailed account of what had happened to her after she was taken, which included more photos, confusing photos, disturbing photos, disturbing because they were so confusing.

  Her mother with an AK-47. Her mother bent over what looked like a dirty bomb, her face turned to the camera, her eyes wide and full of mirth. Her mother in full camo, lined up with a group of similarly aged men and women also outfitted in camouflage, holding what looked like grenades over their heads, grenades as if they were flutes of champagne. Her mother in an apron leaned over a stockpot at an old white stove, the kind Sarah always pictured when imagining a life out in the country with a mom and a dad and land. Her mother looking in that photo more motherly than Sarah had ever remembered her looking, and to the right of her, a table of bearded men and limp-haired women, one looking at the camera, the others looking at a map or a roll of papers in front of them.

  “A terrorist cell of anarchists working out of Damascus took your mother. They thought your mother had been imbued with gifts,” Mr. Niles said as she flipped through the file folder, “gifted with special abilities, powers, you might say, and maybe she had been, and maybe not, that we cannot say, but that’s why they took her.” He sighed. “Why they brainwashed her, why they trained her.”

  Then he sat back in his chair and let a silence settle into his office as Sarah turned slowly, carefully through all of the pages in the file folder, and not until she looked up at him did he lean forward again and say, “I’d like to offer you the services of this office. I’d like to offer you a deal.”

  21.

  The problem with having a mechanical arm nearly impervious and super fast and super strong, comprised of hyperadvanced nanorobot technology and looking no different than her regular arm, was that people always assumed just because Sarah had the ability to crush metal with her armored grip that, when faced with a situation not to her liking, her first reaction would be to crush something with her mechanical fist.

  Or if crushing weren’t possible, smashing.

  The elevator control panel, for instance. People seemed to always be waiting for that moment when, impatient with the often glitchy elevator, she would throw her fist into the elevator control panel, or the glass wall of her office, or through one of the interns.

  A number of people seemed to be waiting for her to throw her fist through an intern.

  Jacob, perhaps.

  Not many people in the office would have blamed her for throwing her fist through intern Jacob.

  All of which was only made more frustrating and disappointing when you woke up one day to find all that potential squandered by time and inaction and an inability to risk losing what you loved to gain something more.

  In other words: When Sarah woke up, she woke up and her arm was gone.

  Her mechanical arm, that is, and not gone, not entirely gone, just no longer attached to her. It had been a day full of strange uncertainties, but if anything was for absolute certain, it was that her mechanical arm was no longer attached to her. Instead, it was on a metal gurney not more than five feet in front of her.

  Sarah was tied up in a chair and her other arm burned with not a small amount of burning pain, and when she finally got the chance to look at her other arm, which wouldn’t be until they pulled her out of that chair and carried her to where the other hostages were being kept, she would see the three-inch gash, down to what she’d think might be bone, and would think happily to herself, They couldn’t tell which was which, either.

  Would think, Mr. Niles will be so pleased.

  But at the moment she wasn’t thinking of her normal arm and hardly noticed the burning pain and was only barely aware of the idea of thinking of Mr. Niles or the Regional Office or what was going to happen to her next.

  All she could think of was what was right in front of her. How she had wasted what was right in front of her and how all she could do now was simply sit and stare at it and let it all continue to go to waste.

  Hell no.

  She took a deep breath and jumped or did whatever that thing was when you were tied tight in an office chair to try to scooch it across the floor.

  The back legs tilted but not by much and she didn’t feel the front legs do anything at all.

  Leverage. She had the wrong kind of leverage.

  If she had her arm, boy, these ropes and this chair and this office wall and even the concrete floor below her, boy, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and then the men outside, however many of them, the men scattered throughout the whole Regional Office, they’d get what was coming to them, too.

  The real problem with having a mechanical arm that was etc., etc., ad infinitum, was that she never did: throw her metal fist through Jacob, the elevator panel, the glass wall of her office. It was her job, she thought, not just her job but her position, her responsibility, her role in the Regional Office, not to throw her fist around willy-nilly, mechanical or not, though now she understood that she had misunderstood her role in the organization, her value to Mr. Niles, and that she had held herself in check, had pulled everything back, had stilled herself—not just her mechanical arm but her regular arm, too, and not just that but everything—had stilled herself to the point of stillness by mistake and for the wrong reasons, and now the problem was she was going to be killed, was going to die at the office, not ever once having fully let herself go.

  22.

  When Sarah woke up from the operation, she woke up standing in the middle of a wrecked lab and operating room, fairly unconcerned about her arm, about either of her arms.

  She was breathing hard. Her chest heaved. Her hands were clenched into fists. A red light was pulsing and a small series of sparks lit up the heart-rate machine to her left and then the machine collapsed into a heap.

  For a few seconds, Sarah didn’t know where she was, what had happened, how she had gotten there.

  Faintly, Sarah remembered lying down on the operating table. She remembered a mask being placed over her mouth and nose. She remembered counting down from one hundred. She remembered becoming stuck on ninety-three. And that was all she remembered.

  A heap of something in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

  The doctor. A heap of the doctor in the corner of the operating room moaned and shifted.

  Then she heard Mr. Niles speaking to her, but his voice crunched and crackled, and it was too loud, everything was too loud, and she stuck her fingers into her ears, but carefully, she remembered, because one of the fingers might have been mechanical. She remembered that,
she was beginning to remember that.

  She looked around the operating room for Mr. Niles, but he wasn’t there, and then she realized he was speaking to her over an intercom.

  “What?” she said. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “We’re opening the door, Sarah,” Mr. Niles said. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’re opening the door. Nothing’s going to happen. Try not to hit anything or anyone.”

  Someone else in the intercom room with Mr. Niles said, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up, “Anyone else, you mean.”

  “What?” Sarah asked.

  “Just rest your arm, okay? Just rest everything.” Mr. Niles paused. “I’m coming inside now.”

  A hiss escaped the door and she realized she hadn’t known she’d been locked inside, that the doctor had been locked inside with her. The door pushed open and there was Mr. Niles. She had expected him to be dressed in scrubs or in a hazmat suit, or, judging by the state of the room, full body armor, but he was wearing his normal office clothes, minus the jacket, his sleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose.

  He smiled. “Well. That was unexpected.”

  Two paramedics stepped cautiously into the room behind him and then crept over to the doctor heaped into the corner.