The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  Oyemi there on the porch, her eyes wild with fire and power, her hair lifted not by wind but by the electromagnetics swirling around her.

  Because she knows.

  It is too late, but she has seen the necessary and pointless five minutes of her future, knows they have come for her, that the prophecy has come for her, that she read it all wrong.

  Windsor falling first, struck by a fireball, incinerated before she hits the ground. Jimmie screaming, her urgent need to leap out of the way rendered inert by fear, by the sudden reality of death and magick and power and the realization that, truly, she has none, or next to none, in the face of Oyemi.

  Emma uncaring. Or caring, but not yet, not now.

  Emma will remember to cower in fear later. The fear will make her temporarily deaf and mute. She will cower and shake just on the other side of the fence from the still-burning compound. She will scream and scream until she is hoarse, but she won’t hear herself over the crackling and violence of the fire, but she won’t hear that, either. She will shiver until her whole body aches, but not yet, not now.

  Now she will spin and drop and roll and lunge and throw her own magicks at Oyemi, borrowed of course, these magicks. A dagger, its blade forged in an interdimensional fire; an amulet stolen from the Regional Office itself, stored within its underground vaults, its powers never tested, unknown. She will weave a spell stolen from one of Oyemi’s own books, filched by Henry when he reported back to Oyemi that Emma was dead.

  She will bring these powers to bear, and these powers will fall short, and Oyemi will deflect them all, turning fire into ice, melting the tip of the blade even as it flies through the air toward her, raising a host of roots from the very earth her house stands on, but despite all of this, she will fall.

  Maybe Jimmie recomposes herself, sets the fire that burns Oyemi’s compound to its foundation, and the flames licking at Oyemi’s heels distract her just enough. Or maybe one of the Oracles, seeing for the first time her own bleak future, the charred bodies of her brethren, tries to save herself from Oyemi’s fate, and this, the sight of her Oracle, struggling to pull herself free from her pool, from the house, from this timeline, distracts Oyemi. Or maybe Emma, maybe Emma is simply that fast, that good, slipping past the roots even as they reach up to grab her, trip her, pull her into the earth and strangle her there. She slips past and cartwheels about and lands, finally, face-to-face with Oyemi, moves too quick for Oyemi to react, twists her head from her neck, and this, maybe this is what catches the world on fire.

  One can imagine. This, any of this, all of this, none of this, but all one knows for sure is:

  Henry made a plan.

  He was a Recruiter, was good at recruiting and training, and so that was where he began.

  Wendy first, whom he quietly installed at the Regional Office as an intern, as a mole. And then Windsor and Jimmie and Colleen and Becka and Rose, finally Rose.

  Emma had strong feelings about Rose but he wasn’t certain, put off recruiting her until it was almost too late, and then he met her, and then he saw what Emma sensed in her, which was a kernel of Emma herself, lodged somewhere deep inside Rose.

  And then he trained them, with Emma at his side, and then he went to work. Figuring out the location of Oyemi’s compound took six months. He did other things, too, in those two years. He recruited more Operatives for the Regional Office. He organized and collected the office donations for the March of Dimes. He hired various teams of mercenaries, paid grunts, and put them under the charge of his team.

  For two years, he planned, and when the day came, he walked away from the Regional Office for good.

  Although, technically he didn’t go into work that day.

  Nor did he go to Oyemi’s compound.

  Burning the compound to the ground, destroying everything within it, had been Windsor and Jimmie’s job.

  Instead, Henry spent part of the day in the city.

  The Met by the Etruscan vases, the small custom-jewelry store where he and Emma almost, as a joke, bought each other matching rings after they’d spent the day walking through Park Slope pretending to be one of those new young couples recently transplanted from Manhattan, on that rooftop where they’d eaten Italian ices together, the roof they’d snuck onto on Mulberry. He went to a toy store. He and Emma had come there only once and only because it had been raining so hard that they’d ducked into the first open store they came upon. They browsed the toys, walked down the aisles while the rain came down outside.

  “What do you think about kids?” he’d asked.

  “Oh, I hate them,” she said, her eyes wide and her mouth just slightly open.

  He smiled and nodded and said, “Me too.”

  And they smiled and then they kissed.

  “I do like toys, though,” she said.

  And he said, “Me too!” exaggerating for effect because they’d gotten into the habit of exaggerating in a way that characters sometimes do in romantic comedies or sitcoms because to think of this thing that was happening between them, whatever this thing was or would become, as anything more serious than a romantic comedy made them both nervous.

  They spent an hour browsing through the toy store, stayed long past the end of the rainstorm, holding hands and looking at the toys of their youth, and then separated when she became involved with the kaleidoscope selection, began reminiscing about the kaleidoscope her father had bought for her to take as a present for a birthday party, but then her parents were killed a few days before the party and so she’d kept it, kept it for eight or nine years and through a series of foster homes, kept it until she was fourteen, when one of the boys she was living with, when she wouldn’t give him a kiss, smashed it with his boot, so she smashed his jaw with her fist, and after that started sneaking out of the house, and after that started shoplifting, and then auto-thefting, and so on, so forth.

  “Maybe things would’ve been different,” she said, “if I’d never lost that kaleidoscope.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  He said this even though he knew better, knew that the Oracles would have plucked her out of a mansion dream house just as easily as they would have picked her out of juvenile detention—it had happened before—just that more often than not the places the Oracles plucked these girls from were of the detention or psych-ward type, though you couldn’t blame the girls for this. They’d been imbued with unchecked mystical strength and intelligence, and it seemed nitpicky to complain when that sometimes also led to deviant, violent, often troublesome behavior.

  He had admired Oyemi for this ability to seek out these young women, troubled perhaps the way she had been troubled before she’d discovered her own powers. He admired her ability to take what everyone else saw as weaknesses, as difficulties, and transform them into cold, hard, sharp strengths. When it came right down to it, aside from the fact that she had asked him to kill the one woman he’d come to love, he had liked Oyemi.

  Though, liked was maybe too strong a word.

  After a while, he’d tired of each new kaleidoscope she picked up and gazed into and so drifted away to the models and toy engineering sets and there found a ridiculous piece of crap that he couldn’t help but fall in love with.

  It was a building kit and on the cover of the box was a Tyrannosaurus rex made from winches and girders and struts and, where there should have been clawed feet, tank treads. He pulled the box down from the shelf and looked at it. He pictured its pieces spread out over the light-gray rug in his cold, sterile living room, and for a second, he considered buying it, and then Emma came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the box in his hand and laughed and said, “Boys and their dinosaurs.”

  “Damn right,” he said, and looked at her and asked, “Find a dolly or something?”

  She smiled and sheepishly, but not really, held up a twirling baton. “Guilty,” she said. He laughed and she laughed and sai
d, “No, but wait,” and then she spun it and twirled it and threw it and spun herself and caught it.

  “I used to be good at this,” she said. “You know,” she said. “Before.”

  She ran her small routine again. He wanted to clap but smiled instead.

  “We should get these,” she said, gripping it like a cop with his baton and then swinging it forcefully down over her head, “but, like, for all of the girls. We could put together a routine—I’d choreograph it of course—and the monsters, they’d see the bunch of us with these batons about to bash their skulls in—the fucking monsters wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”

  She twirled it in her fingers lazily and smiled shyly, but he caught a hint of real shyness in that shy smile this time, and she said, “Right?”

  “Definitely,” he said, and he bought her the baton, and now, since he couldn’t find here what he’d really hoped to find here, what he hoped to find everywhere he looked, he wanted to buy himself that damn Tyrannosaurus rex, but the store had changed. It was still a toy store, if you could call it that, but full of European toys, promising education and not a whit of fun.

  He picked up yet another blocky, handmade wooden toy car and placed it back in disgust and then left.

  He had a plane to catch.

  Though by all accounts, he missed that plane, checked in, obtained an electronic boarding pass, but never boarded, and perhaps he purchased two tickets, boarded under an alias, but it is also easy enough to imagine a slightly different scenario.

  Easy enough to imagine him stealing a car instead. Taking this car up the Hudson and across the George Washington Bridge and out of Manhattan and north.

  Maybe he drove north, through Paramus and past Mahwah, north along the Hudson River. Maybe he took I-87 for nearly two hours north and then turned off toward Hunter but didn’t stop in Hunter, but turned onto an unmarked, little-used road and followed it for another twenty minutes, and turned off it onto a private driveway that wound for another two miles, but even before he wound his way up the drive, maybe he felt, even if he couldn’t see, the smoke in the air, thick plumes of it billowing up and out, black enough that the presence of it was palpable even against the black, moonless night, and when he arrived, maybe he wasn’t surprised to find the compound ablaze, and if there was one piece of it not on fire, he could not tell by looking at what was in front of him.

  And once there, maybe he waited. Waited for the fire to jump through the tall metal gate and catch hold of the woods surrounding the compound. Or waited for something else. Perhaps he sat in his car and watched the flames burn hot for as long as he could, until the smoke became too much for the car’s filter. And while there, he hoped, what? To see some sign of Emma, perhaps. Some sign from her? She was dead (or if not dead, if her death was faked, they had already established their rendezvous plans). But still. Maybe this is where he had come, why he missed his first flight out of the city.

  And maybe he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A movement, a shadow cast by the flames, he was sure, but for a second, maybe he thought it was Emma. He could picture her stepping out of the woods, mystically untouched by the flames that raged only on the other side of the gate, stepping out and rapping her knuckles on the passenger window to get him to unlock the door.

  He would have liked to have had her with him then. If she were around to console him in this moment, he wouldn’t need consoling in the first place. But still. Maybe he wanted to be there with someone. He wanted to have someone there to hear him say, What happened to it all? He wanted someone to hear him say, There was something special here. We had something real. The Regional Office was something real. Say, What went wrong? He wanted someone there to acknowledge that something great and singular and brilliant and wonderful was going away, had already gone, in fact. Even now, as he watched Oyemi’s compound burn, he wanted there to be at least one other person watching with him who knew what was happening, one other person to be sad about it with him, to regret, not the fact that he was instrumental in its demise, but that the Regional Office had become a place where demise, where violent upheaval and near-total annihilation, seemed inevitable. Seemed the only option left.

  He would have sighed. The smoke and heat would finally have been too much. He would have thrown his car in reverse, turned the thing around. He’d have checked his rearview mirror, the sky lit by the false sunset of Oyemi’s compound burning out of existence, and he’d have wondered at how quiet it was, at how the road in front of him was nothing but peace and quiet and calm. Even as he drove, he would have thought about Emma, looked for her out in the woods on either side of the road. He would have wished she were there beside him, and at once, the idea that she had slipped into the trunk of his car while he was distracted by the flames would have become for a second so real that he pulled over, stepped out of the car, and opened the trunk, but, of course, she wouldn’t have been there.

  Maybe, then, he looked around, took a deep breath. And maybe, then, he got back into his car and kept driving, drove back into the city, back to the airport, where he should have gone to begin with.

  But whatever the case: He missed his flight, and he scheduled another.

  At the airport, he clutched his boarding pass and placed his shoes and his coat on the conveyor belt and walked through the detector. Something about this simple act released a tension that had been building inside of him since he left a dead Emma in a burning house, since he left the Regional Office.

  It had been so long since he’d flown out of any airport but the Regional Office airport, so long since he’d had to stand in line, wait for a ticket, pass through security, wait for the boarding call, that he felt suddenly like a boy again, as if he were on some grand and mysterious adventure.

  Feeling adventurous and boyish, he walked into a place called the Fuel Bar and found a seat and ordered a cocktail—a peach concoction called the High Dive—and then he leaned back in his chair and smiled.

  He looked at the time.

  He tried to think of what he’d be doing right now if he were at the office. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d put on his calendar for the day. Meetings, meetings, a lunch meeting, and then meetings. In between all of that? Filing something, probably, or training a Recruit. But then he thought about what had actually happened at the Regional Office after he left, what might be happening still. Now that he had left in such a spectacular fashion.

  How mad would Sarah be?

  If she were still alive, that was.

  He had let them know that he would prefer it if she didn’t die, but he also let them know that ultimately it was up to them how they handled Sarah if she didn’t accept their offer, their way out, their way forward.

  If they hadn’t killed her, then, how mad would she be?

  He took a sip of his High Dive. It came in a heavy and fluted glass. It was too sweet and he should have ordered a beer or ordered nothing at all, but he didn’t care.

  Today was a good day.

  Today was the first good day, the first good day he’d had.

  Today was the first of many good, good days.

  The last good day had been some time ago.

  Had been the time Emma stayed with him for two weeks in his apartment. Somehow she had fooled the Oracles, fooled Sarah and Mr. Niles, had made it seem like she was on assignment in Rio when in fact she was hiding out in his apartment, reading his books, listening to his records, eating his food, and sleeping in his bed. Sleeping in his bed with him.

  Since that day. Well. He could argue there had been other productive days, days where he felt he’d done some good if the days themselves hadn’t been good.

  The day he’d tapped into the Oracle’s network—a surprisingly simple task that, in its simplicity, made Henry wonder just how complacent Oyemi and her people had become—and then, shortly after, when he’d tracked down Wendy, who’d bee
n living in Minneapolis.

  He had felt good about all of that, or not good.

  Good wasn’t what he’d felt.

  Proud, perhaps.

  Or not even proud.

  As if he had accomplished a thing he needed to even if it was a thing he didn’t relish or really want to do. That was how he’d felt. How he’d been feeling the past few days. The past few years.

  In ten years, of course, they’ll find him—Henry. They’ll come for him while he is getting a shave.

  He will be leaned back in the chair with a hot, steamed towel wrapped around his face, will be breathing in the slight, medicinal, clean, soapy smell of the towel, waiting to be lathered up, will be thinking of little more than what he should do for dinner after the shave when they, or rather she, will come up to him and lift the towel off his face, drop it in his lap, and say, “Hello, stranger.”

  At first, he won’t recognize her.

  His first thought, seeing her, will be, Why did they send a robot?

  His second thought will be, When did they start using robots?

  But it won’t be a robot. It’ll be Sarah, who will, by that time, only look like a robot.

  By this time, he won’t have seen Emma in ten years. She will have missed their rendezvous point. He will have gone searching for her in the rubble of Oyemi’s compound. He won’t have found her or any sign of her, or Oyemi or any sign of Oyemi. He will have placed cryptic ads in the Missed Connections sections of hundreds of weeklies across the country, will have looked for her abroad and at home. He will have come home every day expecting to find her in his apartment the same way he’d found her all those years ago, wearing one of his shirts, reading one of his books, listening to one of his records, but he never will have. In all this time, he will never have once suspected that she is dead. And then he will see Sarah, and then he’ll know, or think he knows.

  As soon as he figures out that Sarah herself has come for him, that she has probably already found all the others (perhaps even Emma), he will hide his feelings, or do his best to hide them, and will focus on the fact that she is part—or mostly—robot. He will glance at her arm, her left arm, which has always been the arm he’s suspected is the mechanical arm, and he will think to himself, Aha! I was right! Because there it will be, her mechanical arm, naked and metallic and exposed and full of a strange, almost organic beauty, but then he will look at her other arm, her right arm, and it will be the same, almost exactly the same, and so he won’t be able to say which one was the original mechanical arm. For some reason, the fact that he will continue to live his life holding on to this mystery—even if not for very much longer—will sadden him even more than the fact that he has been found out, has been caught by surprise, and that his uncertain future now seems certain to come to a short and violent end.