The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  And the robot smiled. It stood and turned and smiled, damn it.

  “Well, well,” it said in its non–Stephen Hawking voice. “Look who finally woke up.”

  63.

  Rose came back to her hometown on a whim. It wasn’t like her mother had died, there was a funeral to go to—though her mother had died, a few years before, and no one could find Rose to tell her. Her sister had set herself up in their old house and Rose couldn’t think of anywhere else to go and had grown tired of drifting, drifting, drifting.

  She had assumed that once all the Regional Office stuff ended, she’d get this special kind of life with special kinds of friends. Even after she’d finished her assignment, even after all that had happened in the Regional Office, she thought this.

  She’d taken care of the director—even that euphemism, taken care of, made her stomach turn, the thought of the look of him, cut in two—and she’d busted her way out as unglamorously as she’d busted her way in, and then she’d made her way to the rendezvous, but no one else was there. Not Emma, not Henry, none of the other girls. And sure, Emma and the other girls, they were taking care of their own assignments, could have been running late, but what had happened to Henry? His whole job was to wait at the safe house and keep it, well, safe. Only later did she begin to suspect that he’d never intended to go to the rendezvous, that maybe he and Emma had never really expected there to be anyone to rendezvous with.

  But that suspicion wouldn’t come until much later. At first, rather than assume the others were having more trouble than she’d had, were injured or even dead, she thought back to training, to her unshakable feeling that she was on the outside of that group looking in, and began to wonder if she was still outside of it all, if she had been given different rendezvous instructions than everyone else, and if the others were all at some bar in Brooklyn eating pizza and drinking beer and having a good laugh at poor old Rose. But before this idea could take serious hold, the door crashed open, Colleen stumbled in looking roughed up—a cut across her eyebrow, her wrist held gently in her other hand looking decidedly unwristlike—and she said, “We have to go, we have to go now.”

  “What happened to you?” Rose said, but before Colleen could answer, she said, “What about Henry, what about the others?”

  Colleen shook her head. “Fuck Henry, man. If he’s not here, then we definitely shouldn’t be here either.”

  Rose hesitated. She looked around the hotel suite, looked at the minibar she’d wanted to tear into but hadn’t because she wanted to share it with the others.

  She’d imagined champagne toasts and a late night recounting all the shit that had gone down. She didn’t know where she’d gotten the idea there’d be champagne, but that was what she’d settled on.

  “Come on, Rose,” Colleen said. “There’s a car downstairs. We need to go now.”

  “What about your wrist?” Rose asked, but by then Colleen had already grabbed Rose’s go-bag and thrown it at her and then she was out the door and on her way to the elevator and Rose didn’t have much choice but to follow after her.

  “What about the others?” Rose asked.

  They were stuck on Canal Street waiting to slip into the Holland Tunnel and out of the city.

  “Are we picking up any of the others?” she asked.

  Colleen shook her head, honked at a truck trying to pull out in front of them. “What others?” she said. “As far as I know, you and me are what’s left, and that’s it.” She checked her blind spot before squeezing in behind a yellow cab. “I almost didn’t even go to the hotel.”

  “Wendy?” Rose asked.

  Colleen shook her head.

  “Becka? Windsor, Jimmie?”

  “Look, Rose, what do you want from me? I don’t know, I wasn’t with them.” She let go of the steering wheel and pressed her palms into her eyes even though the car continued to idle forward, listed to the left. Rose reached for the wheel, but Colleen beat her to it. “But Wendy,” she said. “Wendy’s gone, I know that much.”

  And then they stopped talking about it and then they drove to Philadelphia.

  “Why Philadelphia?” Rose asked.

  “Who is going to look for us in Philadelphia?” Colleen answered.

  Rose offered to drive but Colleen wouldn’t let her. She drove them to the airport, then parked in the long-term parking lot. Rose hadn’t asked her where she’d gotten the car. She’d just assumed Colleen had stolen it.

  “Here we go,” Colleen said.

  “What do you mean, here we go? What do we do now?”

  Colleen handed her a thick manila envelope. “Everything you need is in here. Everything you need and half of everything Wendy needed.” She took a shaky breath. “Might as well, right?”

  “But,” Rose said.

  “Whatever you want. That’s what you do now. Just. Not with me.” Then she smiled and gave Rose a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “See you around, okay?”

  “No you won’t,” Rose said, and she wasn’t going to cry, though no one would have blamed her for it—it had been a long day, a long two years—but she was very close to punching Colleen in her face, and Colleen probably wouldn’t have blamed her for that, either.

  Colleen stepped back—maybe she could sense Rose’s body tense up—and laughed and said, “Probably not,” and she turned and started walking. Rose followed after, waiting for Colleen to stop, to turn around, to slap her straight, to tell her to grow up, to tell her to find her own way, to stop following her like some lost little puppy, to go find her own fucking life, but she didn’t. Colleen kept walking, and then, Rose didn’t know how, she lost herself in the crowd.

  64.

  The envelope had money in it—cash, prepaid credit cards, securities set up in her name, or, rather, her fake name. A couple of burner phones, a new set of identification, a slip of paper with different contacts encoded on it—Mexican, European, South Asian, Australian. A few amulets and crystals—that would’ve been Windsor, who was all about protective amulets and shit—and a small jeweler’s pouch with a plastic spider ring inside it and a note attached with “Decoder Ring” written on it in Henry’s handwriting.

  She slipped the spider ring on her finger just in case it had been magicked or imbued with some kind of power, but no. Just one of Henry’s jokes.

  Hardy-fucking-har-har, Henry.

  The idea of buying a plane ticket, of locking herself in a large metal tube as it hurtled across the country in the nighttime sky, made her queasy, so she took a bus instead from the airport to a Greyhound station. She bought a ticket to Chicago from there but stepped off the bus in Cleveland, and there boarded another bus headed to Houston, where she stole a car and drove it down to Brownsville, and then, early the next morning, among all the abuelitas walking across the river into work, she crossed the border into Matamoros and there slipped quietly out of sight.

  A month later, she made contact with a guy in Monterrey and took a freelance gig rooting out narcoterrorists but she and the guy who’d hired her had irreconcilable differences that resulted in her fist connecting with his nut sack, and she left right after that for Cuba, where she heard a rumor of some supernatural flimflammery going on. This turned out to be a pack of werewolves, one of whom had been some kind of geneticist before and who was hard at work on not any kind of cure but a means for making the change permanent and maintaining his manly intelligence while wolfed out. But a couple of women from the new and improved Regional Office got there just as she did and Rose spent a week hiding out in an abandoned grocery store until they’d packed up and left.

  Every once in a while she went hunting for anyone else from training camp and the assault, but they were either all dead or just plain better at low-profiling it than she was.

  She took shit job after shit job working for some real assholes, not because she needed the money but because she didn’t know what to do with h
erself.

  Twice she filled out college applications, and once she even went as far as to mail them off but had moved—three times, in fact—before the acceptances could find her.

  Then she took a job with this guy Jonathan, a straightforward heist of some mystical artifacts, she didn’t know what they did or who they were stealing them for, and didn’t care, frankly. She was smarter, stronger, faster, and more powerful than Jonathan, but also she wanted to sleep with him, mostly because his girlfriend—who was running technical and mystical backup on the job—didn’t trust her, assumed she was some kind of physical and sexual threat, which made Rose want to be those things if only so she could shove it back in her face and tell her, Self-fulfilling prophecy, bitch. Anyway, the job was simple. Break in, grab the shit, break out again, and sure, it was a high-security place, but wasn’t she the one who broke into the Fortress of Living Flame, which, before she’d shown up, had been protected by eternal, magical flames for a millennium, if not longer? She could handle the security for a simple breaking-and-entering, except she’d been distracted, had overlooked a mystical rune or two, had walked right through a mystical barrier that dropped her into the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and she had just enough time to think to herself, Oh, shit, what a fucking loser way to fucking die, except really she got only so far as, O, before blacking out, and when she woke up, it was to the face and voice of the girlfriend, who dabbed her forehead gently with a warm, wet cloth, and who, when she saw Rose open her eyes, said, “I could have left you there, I just want you to remember that. I thought about it. I thought about leaving your ass down there. Don’t forget that,” and Rose didn’t.

  In fact, that job was what drew the line for Rose, what broke the camel’s back, what eventually sent her back home.

  After that job, the trajectory of her life weighed heavily on her.

  After that little drop in the Mariana, after that little talk from Jonathan’s whiny girlfriend, Rose thought long and hard about her life choices before, during, and after her little (and unsatisfying) romp with Jonathan. She thought about it on the plane back to the States, and then on the bus from Dallas to her shitty little hometown. She thought about it every time she thought about killing her sister, who was putting her up for a little while until she found her own place, figured out the rest of her life, but who was fucking driving her insane every minute of every day. She thought about it whenever she ran into some yokel from her past who couldn’t think of her as anything more than Margaret’s youngest, the pretty one itching for trouble. She thought about it when she put the money down on this storefront and the inventory to stock it. She thought about it all the fucking time, if you really must know, and figured that thinking about it was enough, that thinking about it equaled change.

  Her hope had been to compress her life to make it seem like it had been one straight line from childhood to this moment in her late twenties, that there might arrive a day when she could step out of her yarn and bead shoppe and look at the small downtown square of her small Texas town and believe, deep inside herself, that everything else—Emma, the training camp, Henry, all the other girls, the assault on Regional, what she’d done in Spain and Morocco, all the things she had done—must have happened to somebody else, and maybe this hadn’t quite worked out as well as she’d hoped it would, but she’d been trying, damn it. She’d been trying really fucking hard. She hadn’t fucked Gina’s husband, had she? And she could have. Gina was as tight-assed as she had been when they were kids and she could tell that dude was itching for a good fuck, or, hell, any kind of fuck. But Rose didn’t, did she? And when the quilting shop on the other side of town kept stealing customers from her, undercutting her prices, offering knitting and quilting classes—that had been her fucking idea—she hadn’t burned that place to the fucking ground, had she? These were choices she made. Hard choices made deliberately. And look at how things were going with Jason. As much as it hurt her pride to think on it, she was in a fucking relationship with a guy who wanted to be called Jace.

  That was growth. That was change.

  So, yeah, this shitty life was the life she felt she deserved, a comeuppance of sorts, an off-her-high-horse sort of life, but it was life, still. She’d had plenty of opportunity to choose otherwise, but she had chosen shitty life over no life a long time ago, and damned if she was going to let some Robocop-looking robot take that away from her.

  65.

  Except she couldn’t figure this robot out.

  The robot, she decided, was fucking with her. Playing games with her. Hurting her, sure, beating the shit out of her, well, not quite, not yet.

  But still.

  It was a goddamn megarobot or whatever, so why wasn’t it beating the shit out of her? Why wasn’t it going in for the kill? It pained her to think this, but she thought it might have even been pulling its punches, giving it to her easy.

  Rose had gotten in her shots, too. The antique, heavy register smashed down on its head. The knitting needle shoved into its ankle gear that, for a second, had made the robot limp, but then the needle was shoved out somehow, hard enough to stick into the wall, and the thing repaired itself right in front of her.

  It was fast and it was smart and it was strong but she was learning, moment by moment, catching on to its rhythms, picking up on its tells. But. Rose had a sinking feeling that all of this was a game to the robot, that every punch she landed, every small bit of damage she inflicted on that thing, only made it stronger, as if whatever fueled it fed on the kinetic energy of each impact.

  She stood up. The robot held bunches of yarn in its robot fists. It was saying something, she could tell by the movement of its nonrobot lips, but there was a ringing in her ear and she couldn’t hear much above that.

  Maybe it was testing her.

  God, she thought. This better not be another fucking test.

  Her nose was bleeding. Her left eye was swelling up and soon she wouldn’t be able to see out of it, not well enough to fight, anyway.

  If this is another test . . . , she thought, and for a second, at the idea of someone else throwing some unbeatable monster at her as a way to test her, she wanted to give up.

  She was so done with being tested.

  Henry and Emma and Jonathan and that guy for that job in Spain.

  It would go like this: She would figure out some way to beat this robot or get past it, or there would be some kind of switch or mechanism and if she found that and threw it or clipped it or punched it, this robot would come to a shuddering halt and then some asshole in an expensive suit that on him would look incredibly cheap would step out from the shadows, slow-clapping or maybe not. Maybe instead of the slow clap of grudging respect, she’d get a snarky bit of, “I was beginning to worry you might not ever figure that one out.” But either way, there would be some dangerous job, some exorbitant payoff, some promises made. Promises, promises, promises. And her entire yarn and bead shoppe would have been crushed all to hell because some asshole with an outsized checkbook and a desire to rescue his dead wife from the bowels of hell, or who had called forth some demon horde and had lost control of them, wanted to a) test his toy out and b) make sure she was still up to the work.

  Except she wasn’t. Any yahoo in the shadows watching this fight go down would be able to see pretty easily that she was not up to the test, much less the job, whatever it turned out to be. She’d been fighting, what, fifteen minutes and already she was tired. Tired and out of practice. She’d become a creature of habit. Her life had become easy and predictable—work all day in her yarn and bead shoppe, dinner with Jason, back to his house for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer, where they’d watch some trash on the Learning Channel or the Food Network with her dog, and then she’d drift off to sleep on the couch and he’d wake her with a soft kiss on her lips and then down her neck and then they’d move things to the bedroom, or else he’d fall asleep, too—and that was how she liked it, had been
what she looked forward to, the regularity of this, the simplicity of this, seven days a week.

  And now she had to muster herself up for this?

  66.

  And then the robot had her by the neck.

  “Says here you offer classes,” the robot said, loud enough she could hear it over the ringing in her ear.

  It held her pressed up against the corkboard wall near the bathroom in the back. It pulled the flyer off the corkboard. Rose had been trying to get people to take her knitting classes for a year now, but all the people who would have been interested in knitting already knew how to knit, or else they signed up for classes at that quilting shop on the other side of town. “What do you think?” it said in its voice that was still not a robot voice. Then the robot held its free hand in front of Rose’s face, wiggled its thick, shiny robot fingers at her. “Are these knitting hands?”

  The humor, too.

  Rose didn’t quite understand the humor, wouldn’t have expected that from a robot. Yet here it was, making a joke, maybe making fun of her, even.

  The grip around her neck was loose enough that she could say something if she wanted, and she had the uncanny sense that the robot was expecting her to say something. As if the robot had made a joke and she was supposed to look fear and death in the eye and say, Fuck it, and offer her own witty remark in return. She’d never been any good at that sort of thing, and she didn’t know what to say to the robot wiggling its fingers in her face, and so all she could resort to was what she knew.

  “I have a number of different-sized knitting needles,” Rose told it. “I’m sure we can find something that would work.”

  For a second, it looked like the robot was about to smile, and then it thrust her up with such force that she cracked her head against and then through the crappy drop-down ceiling tiles and she thought, not for the first time, about the original wood-beamed ceiling, and how she’d always wanted to tear away the tiles to expose those beams, and this reminded her of the director’s office and the nice beaming going on there.