The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  “Out,” Henry said. “It’s the end of the road, you’re off the team, kid.”

  Sarah stopped; Henry reached for her wrist; she yanked her arm free from Henry’s grip. “What?” she said. “You’re joking. I’m off the team?”

  “Christ, O’Hara,” he said, and then turned and kept walking. “Where’s your sense of humor?” He stopped and turned and said, “Well? You coming or not?”

  “Tell me where we’re going.”

  He shrugged. “My office. Is that acceptable? Can we go? Can you walk a little faster?” And when he turned again, she jogged to catch up.

  Henry’s office looked like the office of a crazy person.

  “This isn’t your office,” Sarah said.

  “And by the way,” Henry said, ignoring her. “You’re not on the team. You’re a client.”

  Henry barely glanced at her as he stepped over and around piles and stacks of papers and files, empty printer boxes, pieces of gray Styrofoam, an old tube TV set with a VCR embedded in the front of it, to get to the only free chair, which might have been behind the desk or on the other side of the desk, Sarah couldn’t tell, because she wasn’t even sure it was a desk.

  “This is the office of a crazy person,” she said.

  “No arguments there.” He reached under his desk and lifted—with some effort—a battered and heavily taped cardboard box labeled “Lamps, Kitchen Supplies, Plunger,” and set it, tilting to the left, on top of the stacks of paper and files and photographs on his desk.

  “Has anyone else seen this office?” Sarah said. “I mean, like, Mr. Niles? He doesn’t mind that this is an office?”

  Henry opened the box and nodded at it. “Well,” he said. “There you go. Have a look, go ahead, take your time.”

  Sarah stood in the doorway, mostly because she didn’t see many places she could go.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, just move shit around,” he said.

  Sarah scanned the area right in front of her but couldn’t see what was movable and what should be left in place.

  “Jesus,” Henry said. Then he shoved his desk forward and there followed a chain reaction of shifting masses that toppled piles left and right, a slip-slide of paper off chairs and the desk. Sarah thought of domino chains cascading down but then reconsidered. Domino chains are exacting and deliberate, are meticulous, which Henry’s office was anything but. Instead, she thought of a mudslide, like the kind that threatened Los Angeles, everything full of sensitive and unpredictable threat.

  Somehow, he cleared a patch of floor in front of his desk and then tipped one of the other chairs—which she hadn’t seen the first time around—back just enough to let the folders and books slide off it, and he dropped that chair in the almost cleared spot, its two back legs wobbly on a half-empty box of Pendaflex folders, and then he patted the seat and said, “There.”

  Then he stood up to better look inside his box and flipped through folders, pulling them out and tossing them into Sarah’s lap once she had sat down.

  “This isn’t all of them, but you don’t need all of them.”

  “What are they?”

  He sighed, stopped, looked up at her. “Don’t ask me questions you can easily answer for yourself. You’re smarter than that.” Then he went back to his box.

  Sarah opened the folder on top and then held it above her lap, since Henry hadn’t stopped tossing new folders onto the pile growing there.

  On the first folder was a name—Jasmine—followed by: “Weaknesses & Threats.”

  46.

  Even with her eyes closed, even pretending to sleep, Sarah could tell it was Wendy by her perfume. Not that she knew what kind of perfume Wendy wore but by the simple fact that there was perfume and that it was so strong.

  “We know you’re awake,” Wendy said in the voice she had once reserved for intern Jacob. “You can stop pretending because we know.”

  Sarah wasn’t surprised it had been Wendy when it turned out to be Wendy.

  Okay, so maybe she had been very surprised, but she shouldn’t have been, and that was just as close, right?

  The thing was, she had liked Wendy.

  Sarah wished she hadn’t liked Wendy, who had tried so hard to be Sarah’s friend, had tried to get into her good graces. And maybe Sarah shouldn’t have fallen for this kind of thing, maybe she had let herself believe that Wendy wanted her as a mentor and potentially, long-term speaking, a friend. Maybe Mr. Niles had been less attentive, less present, and maybe Henry had been acting weird since Emma was killed in the field, and maybe Sarah had been tired of being left out by the other girls. Nobody could blame her for being susceptible to the flattery and attentions of a pretty, intelligent, hardworking intern who, sure, maybe wanted a leg up in the hiring process after her internship, but that hadn’t meant she wasn’t also sincere in her desire to be Sarah’s friend.

  And so, yes, maybe Sarah had made efforts to take Wendy “under her wing” so to speak, offered her special attention, commended her on a job well done when it had been a job well done and sometimes even when it had been a job done only so-so, had offered her advice and brown-bag lunch dates in her office, practiced writing her letters of recommendation.

  In hindsight, Sarah felt foolish. Even Sarah, desperate-for-human-contact Sarah, should have seen how naked these machinations were. Making a connection with Wendy had been too easy, way too easy, and Sarah knew herself well enough to know that she didn’t make connections that easily. Even in college, even with other difficult-to-connect-with mathematicians and physicists, she didn’t make connections, and so, connecting as easily as she had with Wendy, Sarah should have realized the wrongness of the connection and should have stopped liking Wendy, stopped offering her praise for her work, stopped thinking of her as a protégé, a future friend.

  Well, Sarah had stopped now.

  Sarah kept her eyes closed. She continued to pretend to be asleep. This infuriated Wendy, Sarah knew it did.

  She could hear it in Wendy’s sigh.

  “I’ll just have someone come in here and cut your eyelids off,” she said, disgusted that it had come to such threats. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, we took your arm off. What’s a pair of eyelids?”

  Sarah threw in a snuffle and a hitching half snore for good measure.

  “Funny,” Wendy said.

  Then she said, “We all thought it was fake, you know.”

  Sarah imagined Wendy’s face as she said this. Imagined her pouty face, which, in Sarah’s mind, wouldn’t be so pouty when it was smashed with her mechanical arm.

  If only she’d had her mechanical arm.

  “Not that the real thing did you any good, I suppose,” she said. “But we had a pool going, did you know that? We all made bets and we all lost.”

  Wendy knocked something hard against the office desk. “It’s heavier than I thought it’d be.”

  Sarah knew she was lying, knew that no matter what, Wendy was a lying bitch who would never, ever, not in a million years, bring the mechanical arm with her to interrogate or harass her.

  Sarah knew this. She’d have been a fool to think otherwise, and Sarah—despite what people might have thought or said—was no fool.

  “Simpler on the inside, once we took off all the skin. Simpler than I imagined it would be.” She rapped it against the desk again. “Whoops,” she said. “Fragile, too.”

  Sarah opened her eyes.

  She was the biggest fool she knew.

  Wendy was holding a broomstick in her hand, rapping it against the desk. She smiled.

  “Made you look,” she said. She laughed at her own joke, despite how sad and lame and unfunny it was.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the joke Wendy was laughing at.

  Then Wendy’s face changed. Like a ripple, the face shifted into a serious, very serious, face, but not pouty serious, which was a kind of face S
arah was accustomed to seeing on Wendy, not that, but something else, a dangerous kind of serious, which was a look Sarah had seen a number of times but never on Wendy. Never on Wendy or Henry or Mr. Niles or the Oracles, either, who were generally blank faced or smiling in their bald, creepy oracular way.

  No. Wendy had a face all of a sudden that she shouldn’t have had.

  She had the face of an Operative, not one of their own Operatives, obviously, but the same kind of very dangerous face of one of the very dangerous Operatives.

  “We gave you a choice,” she said. “We made a reasonable—a more than reasonable—offer to you,” she said. She said this softly and almost as much to herself as to Sarah. She was trying to make it seem like there was something regrettable in what had happened so far, what was about to happen. Sarah couldn’t tell with Wendy what was real and what was an act, not anymore.

  Then the face, that look, was gone and the pouty serious face was back, but Sarah couldn’t get the other face out of her head and she knew that Wendy had just done something, something deliberate to frighten Sarah, and Sarah wished she could tell herself that it hadn’t worked, but it had.

  “Okay,” Wendy said, in a way that might have been the way a head cheerleader said it when her other cheerleaders had been goofing off or talking for too long about boys or had been on a bathroom break and it was time to get back to the hard work of cheerleading again. “Fun time’s over.” Said it in that bright, chipper high school girlish way, and then she closed the office door and lowered the office blinds and she waded into the deep end of Sarah’s despair, waded in there and did her best to make it deeper.

  47.

  Jasmine wore glasses and was only five feet three inches tall, and her right arm was slower than her left and she was dyslexic.

  Corrine suffered from painful and unpredictable and lengthy periods, arbitrary and violent, lasting weeks at a time.

  Joan refused to brush her teeth or visit the staff dentist and chewed gum incessantly.

  Veronica spooned two bites of food into her mouth at every meal before drenching her plate in salt while no one was looking.

  Maddie drank a bottle of whiskey each night after returning home from assignment.

  Erin took pills. Every kind of pill.

  Eden cut herself with whatever sharp piece of metal she could find, literally, carrying in her mouth a tiny blade stripped from a razor or a thumbtack swiped from the office or the coiled jagged spring from a ballpoint pen, worming it deeper and deeper into her cheek, her tongue, the soft tissue connecting her tongue to her jaw.

  These girls, Sarah thought. These poor girls and their powers and what their powers did to them.

  Teri bound herself into her bed. Thick, leather, medical, insane-asylum straps bound.

  Ruby punched her fist through piles of cinder blocks after each assignment, punched until her knuckles bled.

  Rebecca had killed herself.

  Serena and Hazel and the other Rebecca and Camille and Alyssa and Hannah and Anne-Michelle died, died, died, died, were killed in action, were killed in the field long before the Regional Office, before Henry had a chance to figure out what secrets they hid, what instabilities they manifested.

  Henry had given her more files, more folders for her to read, but she stopped. She just stopped.

  48.

  After the pool incident, a final confrontation between her and Jasmine was bound to happen. Sarah knew. She’d seen enough movies, read enough Gossip Girl novels to know that sooner or later, she and Jasmine would lock horns again. And, well, she’d rather have had it happen on her own terms, by her own doing, and would rather have stopped feeling so tense and anxious about when it would happen. So Sarah made it happen on her own.

  She watched Jasmine’s comings and goings, waited for a moment when she would be by herself, and then Sarah jumped her.

  That had been ten minutes ago. Their fight had lasted now for ten full minutes. It wasn’t going well.

  It wasn’t going as badly as anyone who was not Sarah might have expected, considering.

  But it wasn’t going as well as Sarah had hoped it would.

  Sarah pulled her fist back to punch or counterpunch—she’d lost track by then who was punching, who was countering—but Jasmine was too fast, always too fast, and she bobbed under Sarah’s punch and slipped in close and grabbed Sarah with both hands, trapping Sarah’s arms at her sides, and lifted her off her feet, but instead of throwing her or cracking her head into the ceiling tiles, Jasmine pulled her down and held her so they were eye to eye. A thin trickle of blood ran down Jasmine’s temple. Sarah’s breath was huffed and squeezed out of her. Jasmine grimaced and Sarah struggled against Jasmine’s grip, and Jasmine smiled, and Sarah winced her eyes closed, expected the worst. And Jasmine pulled her in for a kiss.

  A deep one.

  It was almost painful, this kiss, full of a force that Sarah couldn’t have said for certain was passion or anger or whether in that moment there was even a difference, but there it was, a kiss, unexpected and not altogether unpleasant but not exactly pleasant, either.

  Then Jasmine broke the kiss and Sarah had a hitch in her chest, had to scramble to get herself breathing.

  Jasmine butted her in the head and threw her backward and Sarah landed hard on her ass.

  And then Jasmine was laughing, but Sarah couldn’t tell if it was real laughter, and she said, “Hey, okay, all right, okay, I get it, I get it, and maybe if you weren’t a robot, maybe something, maybe we could have had something here, but it can’t be. I’m sorry. It just can’t.” She turned and started walking away. “I mean, a girl and a robot who might also be a girl?” She turned down another hall but Sarah could still hear her. “Nobody would accept us, we’d have to live alone together in the woods, it would be too hard, just. Too. Damn. Hard.” And then either she stopped with her joke or she had finally walked far enough away that Sarah couldn’t hear her anymore.

  But after that, Jasmine and the rest of them just kind of ignored her. They didn’t accept her, but they left her alone, and that was something, right?

  49.

  Sarah had lost hope. After the assault, after her arm, after the hostages, after Wendy. What else could she do but let go of hope?

  It was one thing to hold on to hope in the face of great danger and an uncertain future, but in the face of great danger and a fairly certain future? A fairly certain future and an already painful present?

  In the face of all that, hope slipped away.

  She wasn’t proud of herself, but she didn’t hold it against herself, either.

  Her shoulders slumped, insofar as they could slump, the ropes having been tied around her pretty tightly so that even slumping seemed a restricted activity.

  Her sigh was a resigned-to-her-fate kind of sigh.

  She had lost. The Regional Office had lost. If Mr. Niles wasn’t yet dead, if Oyemi wasn’t found and murdered, she knew that they soon would be and that there was nothing she could do for any of them or about any of it.

  It was sad, the thought. Sad that it took them less than a day, less than half a day, to break her down, but break her down they had, and kudos to them for knowing exactly how.

  She would never rescue Mr. Niles from the clutches of evil.

  She would never sit at his desk, handed control of the Regional Office, once he stepped down as director.

  She would wait here in this chair, bound by these ropes, and that was about the end of that.

  A small voice in her head yelled out one last gasping, I will get free from these ropes, you motherfuckers, but she tamped that voice down, shushed it, quieted it, gently stroked its forehead until it became calm and compliant, because she’d been beaten, and having been beaten, now all she wanted was for it to end, for all of it to end.

  She was tired and weepy and afraid.

  And then things went black. She
wasn’t sure what it meant, but things going black seemed to implicate an end to things.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “About time,” she said.

  Except everything went black. Not just the office. She could see through the blinds and the cracks at the top of the blinds that the whole floor, maybe the entire building, had gone black, too.

  It’s a trick, she thought.

  Then the screaming. Then the screaming began.

  But actually, there had been shouts before, shouts when the lights had shut off, when the power had gone down, but she had figured those shouts had been part of the game, part of the trick. One more way of fucking with poor one-armed Sarah! She tried to convince herself the same about the screaming, but the screaming seemed different.

  The screaming sounded urgent and fearful and full of pain.

  Fake, she thought. Fake fear. Fake urgency. Fake pain.

  But the sound of pain, and Sarah could attest to this in a firsthand kind of way, the sound of pain was a sound that was difficult to adequately fake.

  And for a second, Sarah considered maybe there was a chance, a small chance, a very small chance that something was happening. That whoever (Mr. Niles?) had been maneuvering through the building in a deadly and secret way had finally made his way to the real action, had dispensed with enough teams to make a play for a full-out rescue.

  “I know this is a trick,” she yelled. She was beyond pretending that they weren’t getting to her.

  “I know you fucking assholes are just trying to fucking trick me,” she yelled. “Stop trying to trick me,” she said, quieter now. Under her breath. The only one who could hear her over the shouts and gunshots and the screams and small explosions was her.

  What was going on out there? she wondered.

  50.

  “How was it for you growing up?” Mr. Niles asked. He said this as offhandedly as he could, as if he were asking her if she’d pass him some salt or the ketchup please, but she could tell he was tense, was listening intently for her answer.