The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (2 page)

Or it would be, shortly.

In ten minutes, more or less.

Rose wished it would be less.

Less would be, Christ, less would be amazing.

Mostly because Rose was ready to get this thing started, but also because she was sitting quiet on forty well-trained and slightly antsy mercs in full combat gear who were also ready. Ready to storm out of their unmarked gray vans, their fake delivery trucks, their ATM vestibules, ready to invade and then take over this plain, unremarkable office building, ready to force their way a mile belowground and into the heart of the Regional Office and wage their full assault on it. Then, soon after that, if all went according to plan, ready to level the place, make the whole thing shudder to the ground.

Metaphorically speaking, that is, what with the Regional Office already located mostly underground and all.

Rose was ready for it to begin because she was seventeen and
impatient and she was sitting on all of these men who were amped up on testosterone and protein power shakes. Superpowered, highly trained supergirl or not, Rose felt her control over these grunts slipping, ever so slightly.

And she had to pee.

But she had her orders. They couldn’t move until seven forty-five. She didn’t know why, but those were her orders. Hold the men until seven forty-five.

Rose checked her watch. In five minutes, the assault was a go.

She’d been practicing.

Like, in front of her mirror for almost an hour last night, practiced that fucking move. Twirled her hand in the air in that military circle fist-pump thing that she’d seen before plenty of times in movies but had always assumed was made up. Anyway, she was totally ready to do that thing, whatever it was called, and then, Jesus, finally, these assholes could rush out and go and the hired help would be out of her goddamn hands and on their way to the assault and she could get on with her own business, which involved ghosting her way a mile belowground, without an elevator, thank you very much, in search of the director, who, if these grunts did their job the right way, wouldn’t know what the hell was happening until it was too late.

Not that she wasn’t, deep down, feeling some small sense of pride in the fact that she had been given command of the mercenaries and put in charge of starting the entire assault. She was the youngest one on the team—didn’t hit eighteen for another two weeks—and hadn’t been what anyone would have called a model student at Assassin Training Camp or whatever the hell
they wanted to call it. She’d almost quit after just a couple of weeks because she’d been a total spaz, so, sure, what a surprise that she would have risen in the ranks, etc., that this responsibility would have been bestowed, etc., it was an honor and a thrill, etc., etc., but really, if she were going to be totally honest about it, about leading the charge of forty grunts who were actually—no shit—grunting, like, all the time, she’d rather they’d just given her her job to do and not this management position because what a pain in the ass managing people was turning out to be.

She’d already had to separate, like, two of them because they got into a shoving match about a fucking seat in the fucking unmarked gray van, and she’d had to yell at them, like, Are you fucking kidding me, are you goddamned third-graders?, and then shove them both apart, almost knocking them both unconscious.

And she could tell, as she was yelling at these two assholes, she could totally see Colleen covering her mouth to keep herself from laughing, which only confirmed what she’d suspected all along: She’d only been put in charge of these assholes because being put in charge of anything was a shit job.

She checked her watch, again.

One minute. Jesus Christ, one more whole other minute.

Fuck it, she thought. Close enough.

She gave the signal.

When Henry and Emma had first found her, Rose was running from a couple of assholes—Akard and Schroeder—who were in hot pursuit of her on their four-wheelers because they’d walked up on her pouring eye drops into the water bowls of their mangy yellow country dogs.

It was their own fault—Akard’s and Schroeder’s, not the dogs’—for spreading lies about her all over school after Akard cornered her late one night near the courthouse down on the square and told her to suck him off and she told him she’d rather do one of his sorry dogs before she did him, then she kicked him hard in his nut sack. She ran, then, too, pushed forward on adrenaline and an electric kind of fear, her heart
boundboundbound
ing inside her head. She was surprised not at what Akard had done—word was he’d been making the rounds of all the freshman and sophomore girls—but that she’d been able to think of something smart and mean to say in the heat of the moment, which she never had been good at really, and then for kicking Akard in his balls.

For a short time after, she mistook herself for the kind of girl who could take any shit dished out, and she sure as hell wasn’t the kind of girl who’d let an asswipe like Akard go besmirching her good name, but just now, as Akard and Schroeder caught her eye-
dropping their dogs and started coming for her, Rose had seen in their eyes a serious and unsettling look of anger, and worse, a kind of glee at the prospects of what they might do to her. This got her to running, fast and hard but not as fast or hard as she could’ve because her feet were hitting the pavement weird because of how, even in late September, it still felt like summer, and the pavement was hot and she had lost her flip-flops and the roads in her shitty town were, well, shitty and full of rocks and divots and cracks.

Not that running in the grass would’ve been better since there wasn’t much grass, just more rocks and dirt, and the little grass that was there was sick with stickers and fire-ant hills.

She’d slowed Akard and Schroeder down with a couple of rolled trash cans and then by cutting through the Hunts’ backyard, but she could hear them behind her and now she was heading out of the neighborhood and around the next bend into open country—baseball fields, mostly—where she was pretty sure they’d have no problem catching up to her.

As she rounded the bend, she looked over her shoulder to see if she could see them yet, and turned her head back around just in time to see a pickup truck headed right for her.

If she’d had more time, she would have screamed, something along the lines of “Holy shit,” or “Jesus fuck,” but she didn’t have time and so she dove to the right hoping the truck, if it swerved, would swerve to the left.

There was honking and squealing and swerving (left, thank God) and the truck came to a stop on the narrow, rocky shoulder, its front wheel almost tipped into the rain ditch. When the dust had cleared a little, the man driving—if you could call him a
man, since he seemed just a few years older than Rose herself—rolled down his window, about to say something, probably along the lines of Are you okay?, but Rose got there first.

“Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going!” she yelled.

“Me? You’re yelling at me? What the hell, kid? Why the hell are you running down the middle of the goddamn road?”

Except by the time he’d finished asking his questions, she’d walked herself to the passenger side of the truck, opened the door, and slid herself inside. Then she gave him her best smile—which was a good smile, she’d always had a good smile—and said, taking a deep breath, “About that.”

She told him, briefly, sort of what she’d been doing and why and then she told him how it had been harmless fun and anyway they were assholes and they both got what was coming.

He pulled the truck back onto the road just about the time Akard and Schroeder came tearing around the bend, and Rose would be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed the look of shock on their faces as they swerved hard to round either side of the truck and then spilled their four-wheelers into the rain ditch.

She rolled the window down quick and stuck her head out and yelled as loud as she could, “Fuck you, jack-offs.”

Then she plopped herself back into her seat, smiled her good smile again, and turned to the guy driving, who she realized hadn’t told her his name yet, and she said, “So.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Why? How old are you?”

He smiled and shook his head again and said, “Never mind.”

She looked at him closely then. He wasn’t ugly, exactly, but he wasn’t good-looking, either. His features, when taken individually—his nose, his lips, his eyes, his ears, even—were nice enough, but put together they didn’t seem to match.

Rose didn’t care. She wasn’t going to marry him. She was just using him for a ride.

“My name’s Henry,” he said. He waited for her to say her name; she could feel him waiting in the way he paused. Then, when she just looked at him, he said, “So. Where am I taking you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t ready to give her name just yet, but she wasn’t ready to get out of the truck yet either. “Where you going?”

He lifted his hand off the steering wheel and looked at the dash. “Well, in a second, I’m going to have to get gas, but after that, I’ll take you back home. Sound all right?”

She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, and then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

Finally, she gave that signal and the fucking mercs were off, pouring out of their vans like weaponized roaches, and then they were gone, and Colleen, jog-walking right behind the mercs as they charged into the offices of the Morrison World Travel Concern, patted Rose on her ass and gave her a peck on her cheek and told her, “Nice work, kid,” and then waved casually over her shoulder and called out, “See you on the other side” as she ran to catch up with the grunts, leaving Rose standing on the sidewalk feeling like she felt that one summer she agreed to help out with the pre-K kids at church camp, how relieved she’d felt every fucking day when it was recess and all those little shits had run screaming and hitting and shoving out of the multipurpose room and into the play yard and all she’d wanted to do was sit down and revel in the peace and quiet for one goddamn minute.

She took a deep breath. She let it out. She wanted to take, like, five hundred more, but there wasn’t time. She had a suspicion today would be a day full of deep fucking breaths.

Rose sprinted into the parking garage where there was supposed to be an elevator that she couldn’t take because where would be the surprise and fun in that? No, she had to find the vent because of course there was a vent. It was always the same with
these fucking places: Something as stupid as a vent opened up the entire labyrinth of a place, no matter how secure the rest of the building was. And sure, there were measures set up to protect the vents, lasers and heat sensors and weight sensors and shit like that, but they’d been taken care of from the inside, from their girl on the inside. And sure, Rose knew that no matter how all-powerful and underground your organization was, you had to make it so the people working for you could breathe and shit, but, Jesus, when she was done with this line of work, she planned to find somebody good at making things, like an engineer or someone, and together they’d invent a way to ventilate air into a building without ventilation shafts and she’d make, like, a billion dollars in the secret agency business. Because if you worked hard enough at it, you could bypass laser sensors and shit, but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get down a ventilation shaft that wasn’t there, and that was the goddamned truth.

Rose climbed into the shaft, hooked her cable to the edge, and taking a deep breath, started counting to five, and then, because she liked surprises and hated waiting, let herself drop at three.

Rose dropped twenty or thirty feet and then caught hold of the rope, threw her feet against the aluminum of the vent shaft, leaving deep boot marks in it, almost breaking the shaft off its column. She should have been wearing gloves. She hated wearing gloves, though, hated the way they constricted her hands, the way she couldn’t grip things as well as she liked, not even with the grippy kind of gloves, not the way she liked to be able to grip into a thing when she needed to, and anyway, she hardly felt the burn of the rope as it burned in her palms. Still, she couldn’t help
but hear Henry’s voice in the back of her head: Where the hell are your gloves, newbie?

God, though, she was bored. Bored of Henry’s voice in her head. Bored of this assault, which felt to her like nothing more than a glorified training session.

What was worse was if everything went the way it was supposed to go, she’d be bored the whole time.

Well. Most of the whole time. Taking care of the director of this outfit might offer its own—albeit brief—distractions.

Rose wondered what Colleen was doing. She wondered how the grunts were doing. Rounding up hostages, leading the oblivious fools in the travel agency down to the real offices of the Regional Office. She wondered if the travel agents even knew who they worked for. Probably not. People are idiots. She wondered what Jimmie and Windsor were doing, how they were handling their teams, wondered if they were already done with their assignments. Rose didn’t wonder if anyone had died yet—no one had but someone would soon enough and then others after that—because she hadn’t quite caught up to the idea that people—strangers and people she knew—were going to die. She was only seventeen, after all. So far it all seemed like a game, like an elaborate, somehow less fun game of paintball she was playing with Andrea and Colleen and Windsor back at Assassin Training Camp, but then thinking of Windsor made her think of Henry, which always dropped Rose onto shaky, spazzy ground.

Henry wasn’t even on the fucking premises. He was monitoring the operation from the rendezvous point, but as far as she knew, that meant watching
Point Break
on Netflix or some shit like that.

But at least he wasn’t with Windsor. Tall, gorgeous, white-blond, blue-eyed, smart, funny, age-appropriate Windsor.

At least there was that.

At least she didn’t have to waste time or brainpower trying to imagine or not imagine what shenanigans might’ve been going on with him and Windsor while she was stuck here in this shitty ventilation shaft.

Not that she cared.

Not that she gave two shits about Henry.

Not that she gave him another thought.

She stopped. Fuck. She’d missed her goddamn turn.