The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (25 page)

She couldn’t help but think that the whole robot thing just seemed so dated.

The whole fucking enterprise just seemed so dated to her now. Coldhearted revenge, a comeuppance for crimes she’d committed in her past, etc., and so on.

Not that the robot looked dated. It looked sleek and ultramodern, and kind of feminine. Kind of like a girl.

Although every robot that wasn’t sheathed in some kind of humanlike skin—and this one wasn’t—reminded her of Robocop. Even the sleek, newer-looking ones. Maybe that was the new thing with robot design, though, some hipster kind of return to the retro. No more hiding the robot bits underneath synthetic skin and wigs and clothes. Less T-1000 from
Terminator
and more Maximilian from
The Black Hole,
or B-9 from
Lost in Space
. It was sad, really, she thought. This whole fucking thing would have been easier to swallow if Rutger Hauer were on the other end of this battle to the death.

Jesus. Rutger Hauer? Where the fuck was her head?

She couldn’t focus on one line of pop-cultural references, much less concentrate on not being smashed by a robotic fist.

Still. It was weird to think, wasn’t it, that there could be
Rutger Hauer; bad sci-fi movies like
Lost in Space;
small, quaint bead and yarn shoppes in small, quaint Texas towns; and still be towering robots hell-bent on death and destruction. Or, rather, the other way around. The robot first and still all those other normal things. She’d spent these past few years caught in a limbo between constantly thinking about and completely forgetting about all that had happened to her, but had finally begun to edge, ever so slightly, in favor of forgetting, and now this fucking robot beast showed up.

It wouldn’t stop swinging at her, or throwing shit at her, or grabbing her by the shoulder or ankle or wrist and slamming her into things, for one. Then, to make matters worse, the fucking thing wouldn’t shut up. It just kept talking, and in a strange voice, strange for a robot, anyway. Not the kind of voice she’d have expected a robot to have. Rose would have expected something like the robot voice of Stephen Hawking, but this was just like a person, or not even just a person but maybe like a girl’s voice, and for a second, Rose wondered if the robot was a girl robot, and then if there was such a thing—a girl robot with girl robot parts—but then it wouldn’t shut up or stop swinging at her and whatever it was, it was just like anybody else, just as nonstop, just as goddamn annoying.

It kept saying things like, “Leave it to them to train you just enough to get you into trouble,” as it wrenched a bank of cabinets out of the floor and then hefted them over its head, finishing with, “but not enough to get you out,” as it heaved the whole thing at Rose, who saw this coming, but then the robot must have seen Rose see it coming and calibrated its throw in such a way that,
even though Rose jumped out of the way, it clipped her hard in the shoulder and spun her in midair like a spinning coin.

And it said things like, “Was it worth it?” while holding up a skein of yarn. “All of this?” it asked. “Is all of this worth the things you did, the lives you ruined, the people you destroyed, the work you unraveled? For this?” Said that or something just like it before shoving the cabinet of alpaca yarn (Go Alpaca, You’ll Never Go Backa!) toppling to the floor. “This shitty little yarn shop in the middle of this shitty little town?”

It was a high-quality yarn shoppe, thank you very much, in a, yes, admittedly, shitty little town, but even still. That wasn’t her whole life. She had a dog, a big gray, lazy Great Dane named Birdie. And a boyfriend.

I have a boyfriend, now, too, Rose wanted to say, almost said, clamped her mouth shut just before saying.

Not that the fucking robot would want to know or care, but his name was Jason, thank you very much, and they’d begun dating just after her roof started leaking and she’d hired him to fix the leak, and sure, he kept trying to get people to call him Jace, despite all the times she told him to stop doing that, that he was making a fool of himself but also of her just by association, which she was beginning to suspect only made him want to try even harder. And sure, just this past weekend, right as shit started getting hot and heavy across the bench seat of his pickup, he’d screeched things to a halt by asking her, So, what is this, am I your boyfriend now, or what?, and she’d curbed her serious desire to head-butt him and instead told him, Christ, grow a pair, would you? Not to mention: She’d known him way back in middle school when he’d had a total crush on
her then, and, God, now that she was thinking about it, could he be more pathetic?

Jesus, if she got out of this mess with the robot (
when,
she corrected herself,
when
she got out of this mess with the robot), the first thing she would do would be to break up with Jason. That was the goddamn truth.

Except he was funny and really cute and a good fuck and, what’s worse, so Patty told her after she’d come back, he once cornered Akard after school—after Rose’d pulled her disappearing act—and beat the shit out of him when he heard Akard saying something the likes of how Rose had to skip town since she’d whored herself out to every man who’d take her in this town. And when it came right down to it, she couldn’t get enough of that boy, even just sitting together on his couch watching DIY shit on the TV and scarfing down fucking lime-chili Cheetos, or going at it like horny fucking teenagers every chance they got, and every minute of every day she worried he’d find out who or what she was (which was what, exactly?) and when he did, he’d be the one to leave her, and, God, she thought, what if he came over now?

What if he chose now to surprise her with lunch or cookies or just to say hi?

No, no, no, no, no.

The robot swung its fucking robot arm. Rose didn’t duck, didn’t leap, didn’t sway. She grabbed the thing and rolled back, absorbing its momentum, using it against itself, and pivoted at the last possible second, throwing it, the arm and the robot, head over ass, back into the wall.

Because fuck if this robot was going to ruin the one good thing she had.

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.”

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.

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 herself.

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.