The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  And no more close-quarters hand-to-hand combat for him, no sir.

  He flipped his wrist and lightning flashed.

  31.

  Rose packed her bag—bag, not bags, despite her loud protests—and packed it quickly. No one was home, but she didn’t care—she didn’t think she cared—about saying good-bye. The Woman in Red and Henry waited for her in the kitchen. The three guys who’d ambushed her were out back smoking. With the Woman in Red in the house, everything looked impossibly dingier and grayer than ever before and all Rose wanted to do was leave.

  After leaving her house, she had half-expected there to be a helicopter waiting for them but was too enthralled with the Woman in Red, with the idea of leaving behind her former self, to be disappointed that what they had waiting for them was, in fact, a rental car, an off-white Ford Taurus. She did her best to be not too disappointed again when where they whisked her off to turned out to be an abandoned office park just outside of Durham, and again when she discovered that not only were there other girls there, girls not much different from herself, but they had been here for months already, six girls, an even bunch, paired up as roommates, as training buddies, except for Rose, odd man out, who had a room all to herself. “Lucky you,” Henry said, as if he meant it.

  There were two of everything in the room—two beds stuck out of opposite walls that could double as uncomfortable-looking couches, two sinks attached to the same wall on opposite sides of the door, two dressers and two closets next to those. In one of the dressers there were clothes for her, all the same black V-neck T-shirts, the same metal-gray cargo pants.

  “Those are for training,” he told her. “You’ll get a uniform soon enough, and then when you’re not training, you can wear whatever you like.”

  She didn’t have much else to wear. The Woman in Red hadn’t given her much time to pack. All she had with her, other than the clothes she’d been wearing when they’d come for her, was a yellow sundress—her favorite, though here, now, it seemed wildly out of place—and a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, her flip-flops, and a pair of wedge sandals.

  Christ, what a spaz.

  She pretended to look around the room. Henry handed her a folder.

  It was strange being alone with him. She had been alone with him for an entire day, practically, and then he’d been truly a stranger, but that hadn’t felt strange at all. That had felt natural, and she wondered if he had been putting on some kind of act or if he had felt that, too. Later he would tell her, Both, and she would believe him. But now that she’d kissed him, and that he’d kissed her back, it seemed that neither of them knew what to do but to stand awkwardly in her small dorm room and talk about anything but what had happened before. He was focused on trying to make her feel special about the fact that she didn’t have a roommate and that she’d come there late, and she was focused on trying to figure out how to say something to him about that kiss, about the spur-of-the-moment quality of it, about the first-time-ever quality of it, and she was trying to figure out how to apologize for having done it but also make it clear that she wasn’t exactly sorry that it had happened and that she wouldn’t be opposed to a second, less spontaneous go-around, and how old was he anyway, and did he make it part of his business to kiss people almost immediately after jumping them and trying to strangle them to death, or was it just her, and sorry, too, about how she’d kicked him in the ribs all those times.

  It was all too much, the things she wanted to say, and while she knew now the jumping and the strangling had all been part of some plan, some kind of test, it had scared the shit out of her and she felt torn between these two feelings—scared shitless by this guy and urgently attracted to him—and she felt that saying something, saying anything, might help even all of this out, but where did she start?

  So. He handed her a folder and she took it and opened it and pretended to read it. Inside was a set of schedules and rules and guidelines. They were straightforward and basic but he went over them anyway, pointed out breakfast and lunch and dinner. Lights out at ten o’clock.

  “Usually,” he said, “everyone’s up by five thirty for a quick five-mile run together, but . . .” He paused, ran his hand through his hair. “Considering how much catching up you’re going to have to do, uh, we’re going to have to skip the run. And the midmorning yoga class.” He said this as if he felt a little sorry for her, as if she were missing out on something, which, she would realize later, she was, missing out. Not on the yoga class. Not on the morning run.

  Missing out on the team, on being a part of the team.

  Then he said, “Well. Okay. That’s the nickel tour.” He said this as if it were time for him to leave her to herself, to organize her room, which didn’t need organizing, or gather her thoughts, which he must have known wouldn’t have been gathered any time soon. But then he didn’t leave. He stood there. She stood there. She rocked herself forward. She remembered to say, “Thanks. For the tour.”

  He rocked himself back, just slightly back. “Training starts tomorrow,” he said. “You might notice people packing things away,” he said. “We’re moving into phase two and we’re shutting down this specific operation, and so we’re all a little distracted,” he said. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “We’re really glad you’re here.” He said this, Rose knew, to make her feel better. She pretended, for his sake and for hers, that it worked.

  She waited. He waited. Then he said, “About before,” and that was all she needed, it seemed, before she rushed into her own, I know, I know, I’m totally, well, not sorry, sorry isn’t, anyway, I’m just, I just wanted you, I didn’t want you to think, and she moved closer, and he moved farther back until he had the door open and had stepped out of the room, had crossed the threshold to the other side, and then he interrupted her.

  “Look, Rose,” he said. “I just needed to tell you. I’m kind of in charge here. I mean, Emma and I. We’re in charge here. In charge of you and the others and your training and it’s not like we’re back in your hometown, right? Driving around checking out dead squirrels, right? It’s not like that here. So, about before, that’s not how it’s like here, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Oh,” Rose said, feeling less and less sorry for all those kicks. “Sure. I get it.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I got it,” she said. “I just said how I got it.”

  “Good.”

  “Better than good,” she said. “Great. Perfect.”

  “It’ll just make things easier.”

  “I like easier,” she said, and then she closed the door on his face.

  32.

  Rose hid herself away behind a fallen log, some overhanging trees. If she squinted, she could barely make out Wendy’s boots hanging from a tree branch in the distance. She listened for the sound of Colleen finding Wendy, though she knew Colleen wouldn’t make such a blatant mistake unless she was trying to trick Rose somehow. Rose had left three trails behind her. An obvious trail that Colleen would know was not the real trail but was a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a second, much less obvious, almost invisible trail that Colleen would assume was the real trail, but which was also a dummy trail with a booby trap set along some part of it, and a third untraceable trail, Rose was sure of it, that, just for shits and giggles, had a booby trap set along some part of it, too. The funny thing about that invisible trail was that if Colleen were to find and follow it, which she couldn’t, she would be able to follow it to a spot in the woods that was just out of view of the booby-trapped spots of the other two trails but where Rose could wait and watch for Colleen to come down one path or the other.

  Rose hoped that Colleen would come down the obviously false trail, not because she didn’t think Colleen would be smart enough to know it was obviously false, but because she might outthink herself and decide the obviously fake trail was made obviously fake because it wasn’t fake
at all, but also because the booby trap at the end of that trail wasn’t quite as harsh as the booby trap down the other, almost invisible fake trail she’d left, and she liked Colleen, who was maybe a bit too type A but who meant well and who had, a couple of weeks ago, tried to keep Rose from failing out of superpowered-assassin school.

  After nearly a month, the training had not been going well. The martial arts instructor—not, to her disappointment, Henry—spent hour after hour sweeping her feet out from under her and throwing her over his shoulder and trying to explain to her poses and moves and countermoves that she didn’t understand at all and whose names she couldn’t remember. Lost Monkey, Wooden Monkey, the Broken Faucet. None of those meant the first goddamn thing to her.

  She was a disaster at languages and couldn’t master even the simple phrases she was asked to learn—Where is the gun hidden, How do I get to the basement level of this building—and she was fairly confident that if she were dropped into the wilds of Alaska or some other equally feral place with nothing but a rope and a hunting knife, she could survive there for a sum total of five minutes for all that she’d learned in survival training. The one thing she could do, thanks more to her cousins and uncles who were minor-league pyromaniacs and owned more empty land than was good for them, was, in the parlance of her demolitions instructor, blow shit up, if only basic shit and in the crudest and most elemental of ways.

  She trained all day, before breakfast and through lunch and then again after dinner, but she wasn’t making progress, wasn’t making any progress at all, it seemed, but not because she couldn’t learn this shit. She was good at learning but generally didn’t care enough about the shit she was supposed to learn in school—diagramming a sentence, proving geometrical shapes that had long ago been proved (of course it was a triangle, why in the fuck did she need to prove to anyone, let alone herself, that that was a triangle)—but here she was faced with truly interesting shit to learn and she’d hit a wall.

  She told herself she didn’t know why, but she knew why.

  She was lonely, and she didn’t like it here.

  She’d met the other girls, if briefly. They nodded at her and smiled at her and shook her hand, firmly, too firmly, and welcomed her aboard, and maybe they gave each other looks, We do not have time for this bitch looks, or maybe that was her imagination. All of this happened a week after she arrived and in the five minutes in between when they had to leave for another extended field exercise and she had to leave for another unsuccessful martial arts training session, and after that, she saw them in passing, sometimes in the bathrooms, or in the hallway, usually as a group that seemed to have no room for one more. They were beautiful and older than her and looked very much like a unit, like a complete whole that functioned perfectly, thank you very much, without her.

  Once, she ran into one of them on her own, the girl named Colleen, who often wore pink shorts and a yellow tank top and had a boyish haircut that made her look French, who, when she had first seen her, Rose had pegged as potential arch-nemesis material. Rose imagined her, Mean Girls–style, at the head of the posse of other girls, terrorizing and torturing and humiliating newcomers, who would have them all throw their worst at Rose, only for Rose to stand strong against their onslaught, to show first through her unwillingness to back down and then through her unfathomable skill that she was a natural leader, that she was the star of this moment, but Colleen hadn’t yet paid a lick of attention to her.

  Rose ran into her in the weapons training module. Her weapons instructor had set up extra training time for her because she couldn’t shoot for shit, which made no sense, none at all. Rose had grown up around hunting rifles, and the occasional crossbow (her uncle Artie), and while she’d never taken to hunting herself, she’d always been a decent shot and had never shied away from guns. But every time she held a sidearm, a rifle, a shotgun, a semiautomatic in front of her weapons instructor, she choked. She just, she didn’t know, flinched, pulled left, thought too much about what she was doing. And out of the corner of her eye she could see the weapons specialist roll his eyes. She could sense him mentally counting down the seconds until lunch.

  It was her time in the module but Colleen was in there already, shooting away. Colleen didn’t seem to have noticed her coming in, didn’t look like she would finish any time soon, but Rose didn’t care, not really, and she was going to offer to let Colleen work with her, if she wanted, because it would have been nice to have the company, nice to talk to someone who wasn’t yelling at her for forgetting the Chinese character for “dead in the bathroom stall,” but as soon as Colleen saw Rose waiting outside, she shut her module down and packed her things and left, with barely a nod as she walked by.

  The short of it was this: Rose was lonely, and it was affecting her work, and soon they were going to kick her out of assassin school, she knew it, and it was completely fucking stupid of her.

  So she didn’t have friends. So she hadn’t seen the Woman in Red since the day she was brought here. So Henry turned and walked the other way whenever she saw him. So what? So what if the story the Woman in Red had told her had prepared Rose for something very different from all of this, had included words like leader and hero and saving the world and fighting the Good Fight?

  She was a silly little girl, she told herself. She was a silly little girl and she should just toughen up. She should toughen up and stop thinking about home and her momma and daddy and sister, mean old Gina and dumb old Patty. She should stop missing the way she had thought of herself when the Woman in Red first pulled her aside, first told her all about what she could become.

  She should stop all of this, but she couldn’t.

  33.

  Rose was sitting on her bed thinking about this—again—when someone knocked on the door of her room. The entire time she’d been at this school, this place, no one had knocked on her door.

  “Who is it?” Rose asked, hopeful and suspicious all at once. She didn’t honestly care who it was, except in the back of her mind she did worry it might be someone come to make her go back home.

  Colleen opened the door and poked her head inside and said, “Decent?”

  “I guess,” Rose said, and then, feeling a little put off by this girl, who had not only opened her door but who was now standing inside the room without an invitation, she said, “I guess they don’t teach you to knock first in assassin school.”

  “I did knock,” Colleen said.

  “Well, I guess they don’t teach you to wait for the hostess to invite you in at, oh, fuck it,” Rose said. “What do you want?” She didn’t mean to sound this way, pissy and upset and on the verge of tears, real fucking tears, but she couldn’t help herself. Someone had come to see her in her room for the first time in nearly five weeks and she was fucking the whole thing sideways, she could tell, and she couldn’t stop herself. “I thought I locked the door. What, did you just break into my dorm room?”

  “The doors don’t lock,” Colleen said. “House rules.”

  “My bad. I must have misplaced my assassin school handbook.”

  “That’s not what this is, you know.”

  “Whatever. They’re going to kick me out anyway. Tomorrow maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Colleen said. “It’s possible. You wouldn’t be the first.” Rose, who had been looking at the dirt under her fingernails, looked up. “There were twenty to start,” Colleen said when she knew she had Rose’s attention. “In fact, it’s kind of amazing that they brought you here at all. As far along as we are, that is.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a fucking blast. I’m sure they’re as happy about it as I am.”

  “Well. Maybe,” Colleen said. “Look. I know we’re not friends and you probably don’t care what I think, but you’re overthinking it. I’ve been watching you. You’re trying too hard. You’ve got natural ability, or they wouldn’t have brought you here. You’ve got it inside you but you’re not letting it out an
d soon, you’re right, soon they’re going to send you home. If they don’t think you can cut it, they’re going to send you back. Soon, like, maybe tomorrow.”

  Rose turned to look away. Colleen opened the door again. Rose stood up and sighed and said, “You’re right.” Then she said, “We’re not friends and I don’t care what you think. So, thanks.”

  Colleen smiled. “Stick around and we will be friends. Trust me.”

  And then she left before Rose could say, “Doubt it,” so she yelled it as loud as she could at the closed door.

  Rose decided she’d be long gone before either of those could happen. Becoming friends with Colleen or being kicked out.

  She knew, she could tell by the way they looked at her—her instructors, everyone—that maybe she’d been holding on by a thread but that that thread had snapped and any minute someone—that fucker Henry—was going to show up at her door and tell her to pack her things and then take her back home. So. That night, she packed her backpack and left her room. She’d never tried to leave her room after lights-out before, which was weird since she’d been sneaking out of her momma’s house every night for the past three years, her mom’s Pall Malls stuffed into her shorts, the whole shitty town her playground, though mostly she just walked around the quiet, gaslit downtown and smoked cigarettes and kicked rocks and enjoyed not being at home.