The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (5 page)

There were three guys waiting for her in her mom’s living room, and they grabbed her and she screamed and one of them clamped his hand over her mouth and she bit, and then he screamed and let go, and she kicked back with her right leg and felt it contact something—his knee, maybe—felt something crunch, heard someone fall. She stomped another’s foot, hard, and then yanked her arm out of his grasp, but the third one grabbed her free arm and pulled her to him by both her wrists and smashed his forehead into her face, and she saw stars, actual stars, little motes of light that swirled around in front of her eyes. And she heard him chuckle and say, “Jesus, guys, this was too easy,” and then she kicked him in the balls and he crumpled and let go of her wrists, and she grabbed him by his shirt, and then fell backward, pulling him forward on top of her, and in one swift hard kick, she threw him over her head so that he landed hard on his partner, knocking them both down.

How she’d done this, she had no fucking clue.

The closest she’d come to a fight was when she’d kicked Akard in his balls.

She scrambled up, looked around, and found Henry leaning
against the door, his lips pursed, his eyes regarding her coolly. He nodded.

“That was pretty good,” he said.

Then he said, “These guys, they weren’t amateurs.”

Then he looked around the room at them and said, “But they did underestimate you, didn’t they?”

Said, “People always underestimate you, Rose. Isn’t that right?”

She didn’t ask him how he’d gotten inside, didn’t ask him what he was doing there, what he wanted, who those guys were, didn’t waste her time screaming, had let go of the hitch in her voice, that or had let it grow into something else, and instead she focused her energy on charging straight at that fucker, and then, as she was charging, then she yelled.

He watched her as she charged him and smiled and said, “But not me,” though that could’ve been her imagination since it didn’t feel like she could hear much of anything.

He stepped to the side and he grabbed her by her arm, pulled her in close like they were ballroom dancers, trapping her strong arm against her side, and then grabbed her by her neck with his other hand, so tight she couldn’t breathe, and then his leg swept her off her feet and she landed hard on her back against the hard, thin carpet that reeked of her mother’s Pall Malls, her free arm suddenly trapped under her own body weight and his weight as he bore down on her, and she could see his eyes, calm, blue eyes, and she could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him, there was too much noise already banging around in her head.

Then, as he choked her, as he tried to choke the life from her, she swung her leg, she didn’t know how, but she swung it high and
hard and kicked Henry in the side of the head, hard enough to throw him off her, hard enough to make him stumble, and she hand-sprung onto her feet and before anything else could happen, anyone else could pop out of the darkness and surprise her, she ran straight to Henry, ran at him as he got himself to his knees, though to her last dying day some part of her will always wonder why she didn’t just run the other way, didn’t just do what any sane person would have done, why she didn’t push her way out and run like hell. She ran at Henry instead and delivered a swift kick to his side, and then another, and then she realized there were more parts to him to be kicked or scratched or punched and she was aiming her next kick for his face, his not-ugly, not-handsome face, when the lights in the house shut off and everything went dark, darker than normal when the lights were shut off, and Rose couldn’t see anything, and a woman’s voice called out, “Enough. That’s quite enough.”

Training. Remember your goddamn training.

So the receptionist isn’t here. So this is a trap. So what? She’s been in traps before.

She jumps up—straight up like fucking Luke Skywalker in
Empire
when Vader tries to freeze his ass in carbonite—and then flips herself around to a) get a good look at the shit gunning—literally gunning—for her and b) push herself off the ceiling, which isn’t that drop-tile bullshit but nice wooden planking, thank God for egotistical directors of demonic organizations and their urgent need for evil-lair trimmings of the fancy, Nate Berkus sort.

What she sees before throwing herself into the fray:

1.
Gun turrets, five of them, already out and targeting her since probably as soon as her hand grabbed the door handle.

2.
Some real
Last Crusade
or
Dr. No
shit, by way of blades, half as tall as she was, spinning vertically and horizontally across the room.

3.
Strange-as-shit whirling-dervish-type miniature robots spinning round and round like some kind of hybrid of the gun turrets and the spinning blades, in that they’re shooting out lasers (pell-mell enough that, in the nanosecond she took to
get her lay of the land, one accidentally took out a gun turret) and have spinning blades spinning out of their tiny torsos and thin robot arms, Maximilian style. (
The Black Hole
, Henry. Please do try to keep up
.
)

And last but not least:

4.
Gas pouring into the room out of secret cubbies.

Jesus Christ, this Niles guy sure is a nervous fuck.

Take a deep, deep, deep breath and hold it.

Don’t think about what kind of mess is waiting for you in his actual office if this is what he has lined up for anyone who dares approach his receptionist.

Don’t think at all.

Pivot.

Shove.

Handspring.

Land.

In between handspring and land, of course, grab one of the whirligig ones by the top of its whirligiggly head and throw it slicing into one of the big spinning slicers, the side-to-sider, not the up-and-downer, to cut the dervish clean in two, but which won’t quite stop the whirling, which will keep the laser-gunning head going long enough to knock out another gun turret (that’s two, three more to go) and the bottom going just long enough to mangle one of the other dervishes.

She doesn’t see this, not in real life, anyway, can only picture it in her head before she leaps.

Land.

Throw.

Double back handspring.

Super jump with a backflip.

Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number, stop it cold, and turn it vertical to act like a shield against two of the gun turrets on her weak side.

Another kick to knock it off its spinny hinge-arm doohickey.

Henry would know the name of this shit. Hell, so would everyone else, but she could never bring herself to give a fuck.

Knock it off its hinge, catch it by its center before it sinks into the floor, and discus that bitch at two more gun turrets.

Round-off.

Spin-kick the head free from the last whirling-dervish bot and into the last gun turret and the body into the glass partition separating the hallway outside from the receptionist’s office inside, cracking it open enough, anyway, for Rose to stick her head through and let a breath out and take one more big gulp of nontoxic air before twirling herself in and out and about and around the last three spinning slicers, which aren’t so much to tackle once there aren’t any more guns or spinning robots targeting you, and then she’s at the door.

Shove yourself through, and there he is.

The director himself.

Mr. Niles.

And he’s all alone and there are no whirligigs swarming around him in some sort of protective shell, and he’s standing back against his desk, and there’s a look in his eyes, a look that for a moment
she mistakes for the kind of look you give when you’re done, when you’re finished with all of this, when you’re ready to go home, or to cross over to the last frontier or whatever the fuck you want to call it. But then he grins and pulls around his left hand and it’s covered in something she can’t make out at first but that looks, well, his hand looks like it’s covered in another hand, not a glove but a different kind of hand, and his grin grows wider and wider, and then Rose realizes, no, it’s that he’s coming closer and closer, and almost but not quite too late, she realizes he’s coming right at her.

The lights came back on, brighter somehow, and there was a woman sitting on Rose’s mother’s couch, a woman dressed all in red, sitting there not bored exactly but like she wasn’t as interested as she actually was.

Then she stood up.

She stood up and up and seemed just so damn tall, beautiful and tall.

Rose didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her name, and only later would she learn about her connection to the Regional Office or what the Regional Office was, and about the personal war she was about to wage against it.

But that would be later.

At that moment, Rose only knew that here was this woman, stunning and calm and powerful, and that simply looking at her made that hitch in her voice come back.

The Woman in Red stepped up close to Rose and touched her finger gently to Rose’s forehead, where there would be a nasty bruise soon enough, and in that touch Rose felt some living, pulsing, twitching memory shiver under her own skin, a thing that started at the touch, coursed through her down to her feet and into the earth, and then rose up from the ground all over again, up her
legs and through her whole body to rush tingling up the back of her neck—she could feel it, could trace the shiver’s path—up her neck and over and through her skull, where it landed, finally, on that spot, touched her the way she’d been desperate to be touched, and her body went limp. After everything that had happened that day, her body decided now was the time to give out, and she felt herself start to fall, and she hoped—deeply hoped—that the Woman in Red would reach out and grab hold of her, but she didn’t.

Henry—where he’d come from she didn’t know—Henry caught her, instead, and she looked up at his not-unhandsome face, and the feeling continued to move through her and seemed to grow out of her, seemed to want to envelop him, too.

She didn’t push him away or struggle out of his grasp. She let him hold her and despite everything, she moved in, instead, for a kiss.

Her first.

Despite what she’d told Patty and Gina, despite all the things assholes like Akard and Schroeder said about her, her very first kiss.

When she’s older, when she’s back in this small town, when she’s drunk and half-asleep in her car, having pulled herself over because even in this state she knows she shouldn’t be on the road, and before the police pull up behind her with their bright flashing lights, and before she mouths off to them, before she tells them to go fuck themselves because for Christ’s sake she’s doing the right thing and not driving back home shit-faced unlike most people she knows, and before she resists arrest and struggles so strongly against the handcuffs that for the next week her wrists will be red
and swollen, before she head-butts the window of the police car and cracks the window, and then tries but fails to smash the foot of one of the officers with her booted heel, before any of this happens, she’ll be thinking about this kiss, which wasn’t a great kiss, by no means was it a great or sexy or even sensual kiss, but it was her first real kiss, which made it memorable in and of itself, but also because of how she likes to joke with herself about that kiss and how fireworks lit the sky, right as they kissed, likes to joke with herself about how all hell broke loose with that kiss.

Which, in a way, it did.

Then the kiss broke and the room and her momma’s house and the people in it and the Woman in Red all came back into focus.

Judging by the look on Henry’s face and the sound of the woman’s laughter, the kiss was unexpected. Henry stood her up.

“Are you all right?” the Woman in Red asked.

Before Rose could answer, Henry shook his head. “Nothing that won’t heal.”

The Woman in Red smiled. “That wasn’t what I meant.” Then she looked at Rose and then back to Henry. “Well? Your assessment.”

Henry shook his head again. “You saw it all for yourself,” he said. He paused and pressed his palm gingerly to his side. “She’s strong.” He looked at Rose. “Angry,” he said. He didn’t touch his fingertips to his lips but Rose will always imagine that he did when he said, “Passionate.”

The woman smiled again, the look on her face so genuine and welcoming that Rose couldn’t help but smile back and feel, for whatever reason, relief.

“Still,” Henry said, and the smile on the woman’s face wavered.

“Yes?” the Woman in Red asked.

“I think she’s too young.”

Rose thought she saw the Woman in Red roll her eyes. Then she took Rose by the hand and squeezed Rose’s fingers slightly, playfully, and said, “She’s ready.” Then, to Rose, she asked, “Are you ready?”

“Ready?” Rose asked, surprised to find her voice there, just waiting for her but sounding not like herself at all. “Ready for what?”

She pulled Rose closer to her, close enough that Rose could smell what she thought was a light, citrusy perfume, but what she would later come to find was just the woman’s natural smell, and the Woman in Red said, “Come with me.”

She smiled her smile again and said, “I’m going to tell you a story.”

From
The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

In order to grasp the full consequence of both the rise and fall of the Regional Office, in order to better understand where these women—both the Operatives of the Regional Office and their attackers—came from, what wellspring delivered them their mystical properties, how Oyemi and her partner, Mr. Niles, sought them out when these mystical properties manifested, why Oyemi focused her energies only on these women, in order to understand what had been lost when the Regional Office lost its way, one must know one’s history.

When it comes to the history—the complete and accurate history—of the Regional Office, one might begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi met, back in the third grade, back before their names were Mr. Niles and Oyemi, even. Or one might move farther along in time to the day Mr. Niles devised and drew up the plans for the Black Box, which was instrumental in guiding both Oyemi’s mystical properties and the focus of the Oracles when seeking out new Recruits and which brought them Jasmine, one of their most successful early Operatives. Others endeavor to begin with the day Mr. Niles and
Oyemi “recruited” the first Oracle, a young woman named Nell, whose recruitment sent ripples, far-reaching ripples, into the fate of the Regional Office. Some scholars focus their attentions almost entirely on the Golden Age of the Regional Office, on the exploits of the likes of Jasmine (for obvious and sophomoric reasons, her battle against Mud Slug never fails to find its way into almost every scholarly study of the Regional Office); and, before her, Gemini and her long-running battles against Harold Raines; on the missions conducted by Emma, on Emma’s mysterious death, and so on, these authors favoring the flashier (but shallower) accounts of the Battle of Blanton Hill; on the capture of the interdimensional terrorist Regency; but ever failing to delve into the deeper history of the organization and the ramifications of choices made by the less visible operators.

This paper, hoping to offer a more nuanced and complete consideration of the Regional Office, will assign the beginning of the Regional Office to the accident that should have killed Oyemi but didn’t. The accident that didn’t kill her, but in fact imbued her with mystical properties. The accident that happened on a Tuesday, at or near IKEA.

Oyemi was shopping at IKEA, not because she needed anything but because she was bored. Mr. Niles had left town for a week and she had few other people—i.e., no other people—she called friends, and walking through IKEA killed more time than anything else she could think
of to do. Not to mention, it was heated and she couldn’t afford to run the heat in her own apartment.

In six months, she and Mr. Niles would graduate from Rutgers University. In two months, her great-uncle would die—aneurysm—and would, much to everyone’s surprise, leave Oyemi the bulk of his sizable fortune. A surprise both because he and Oyemi had only met once, and because no one knew he’d amassed any kind of fortune, much less a sizable one.

People can be funny that way.

But at that moment, she was broke, barely paying her rent, arguing with financial aid to wrangle more money out of them her last few months of college. She could take the bus to IKEA for free with her student ID, could walk around for free, could bring a book and sit in a living room or a bedroom diorama and pretend she was home, although it felt perhaps more like she was in some strange zoo or amusement park, an exhibit for future generations to see:
Poor College Student (Circa 1993).

After a while she left the store.

It is possible she was asked to leave.

Feeling restless and unwilling to wait for the next bus, she decided to walk home.

Here is where most accounts differ, despite the fact that all accounts from this time are Oyemi’s, namely because she was by herself when everything that happened happened.

Either in the parking lot or half a mile or three-quarters of a mile down the road, something happened: Oyemi was irradiated by an unseen alien force, or she was struck and subsequently irradiated by a small meteorite, or she was irradiated by an eighteen-wheeler that lost control of its cargo, jackknifed off the turnpike, and crashed, sending its oil drum of irradiated liquids spinning right at her and bursting open just before crashing over her, but no matter which story she told, each one ended with Oyemi irradiated, and, somehow, discovered in a small park near Rutgers University, twenty-three miles away from the IKEA.

A couple found her, naked and faintly glowing. They found her near a picnic table. The man called 911 while the woman looked for Oyemi’s clothes or a blanket or anything to cover her with, but finding nothing, the woman walked quickly back to her car, where she kept a blanket for picnics, and draped this over the girl (if that’s what this glowing, naked thing was)—only for the blanket to begin smoldering before catching fire and then burning to ash, which it did even before the woman could yell out to her husband, who was still on the phone with emergency services. This was also when the woman noticed that Oyemi, in a fetal position, lay in the center of a widening circle of bare earth, the grass and weeds on the outer edge of this circle shriveling into black tendrils and then to ash as the woman stood staring at them. Which was also when Oyemi woke up, opened one eye, an eye that glowed hotly,
or no, not that, an eye that seemed a window, rather, like the window to an old furnace, so that the eye itself wasn’t glowing hotly, but that the inside of Oyemi glowed hotly. Seeing this, the woman screamed and ran and grabbed her husband, made him drop his phone and run too, before whatever had happened to their blanket, whatever had happened to the grass and weeds and ground, before any of that could happen to them.

Nobody, not even Oyemi, could explain how she made it back home, how she managed not to set all of New Brunswick ablaze, although until just recently, if one knew what signs to look for, one could trace the path she took from the park back to her apartment—a melted metal pole, a tree trunk singed in the shape of a woman’s handprint, a path of footprints where the earth had been burned to dirt that refused to grow back to grass for nearly twenty years—small markings of her passing that day.

Regardless of how she made it home, by the time she made it home, enough of the radiation had burned itself out of her that she could pick up the phone and call Mr. Niles and tell him to come back to New Jersey sooner rather than later before the handset melted around the pads of her fingertips.

Of course, a faction of scholars has formed under the shared belief that none of this happened, a faction that has, over the years, gained members and support and influence, which is why this piece of the history of the Regional Office often goes unmentioned, unexplained. And
only recently, the faction itself has split into two separate groups:

Those who believe this never happened and that Oyemi always possessed the powers she possessed, who believe that she used this story as a way to reveal and contextualize these powers; and,

Those who believe she never possessed any mystical properties at all, possessed only the power to fool the powerful into following her lead.

If one chooses, one can seek out these theories on one’s own, though the authors of this paper assure one that they offer little but speculation, biased and unfounded.

Regardless, while Oyemi waited for Mr. Niles to return, she fashioned a plan. This plan became the foundation for an idea of what she could do now that she had changed. The possibilities opened up inside her even as her mind and the mystical properties of her expanded, even as she began to sense and see the power of the girls and women she would seek out and train to be her Oracles and her Operatives. The Oracles would find the Operatives. The Operatives would do what, she didn’t know, not at first. But while she waited and cooled, she began to think thoughts that became ideas that grew into what she and Mr. Niles would come to call the Regional Office.