The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (16 page)

Finally, we ran.

And when we chanced a look back over our shoulders at the others still in Laura’s office, looking a bit dumbfounded at what we’d just done, we thought to ourselves, See you folks on the other side, and suddenly, amidst all the confusion, we were free.

Once we broke free of the chaos right outside of Laura’s office, we made our way to the copy room. We figured there’d be a map there—a fire exit map in any case—something, anyway, to help steer us around where we thought the men with guns might be, that might help us plan some strategy to escape unnoticed. Plus, Carl said he’d heard rumor of a secret passage we could find, which none of us believed, and even if it had existed, there was no way it would have been marked on a fire exit map, but we let him think what he was going to think.

The copy room turned out to be kind of a coup on our parts. We were right about that map, which marked out a clear path to the exit with little, uneven dashes, (and, sadly for Carl, no secret passageway) but also someone had left a box of doughnuts there. We did our best, as we passed over the crullers and grabbed for a jelly or a cream-filled, we did our best to try to coddle ourselves with the idea that this stroke of good luck was only the beginning. Or not even the beginning but just one more sign in a long line of good-luck signs, beginning with the fact that we weren’t killed right off, that we shoved our way out of that small office when we had the chance. This was just one more sign, we decided, that things from here on out would be smooth sailing, that, with bellies full of jellies, there was nothing we couldn’t do or survive. It was a foolish thought, but right now all we seemed to have room for were foolish thoughts, since there was no thought more foolish, really, than that we would get out of there at all.

As we left the copy room, we congratulated ourselves on not just our escape but on how in sync we were with each other, and how good our instincts were, how we should’ve been spies or special agents ourselves, and, busy congratulating ourselves, we were surprised when one of the goons grabbed one of us—Carl from accounting—and socked him over the head with the butt of a pistol, and only because Carl was so wide and the hallway so narrow were the rest of us able to keep running despite the two other guys with the guy who brained Carl.

We ran and turned and turned and turned again, hoping that our haphazard movements made it more difficult for anyone to find us or catch up to us, and then, because we weren’t spies or
special agents but were desk jockeys and horribly out of shape, we had to stop, catch our breath.

After that, we decided it wasn’t so much fun. We had lost Carl and the fire map since Carl was the one carrying it when they took him. We thought we’d been heading left for a while. We didn’t know directions, though—east, west, north, south—and mostly our only hope was that we weren’t going to land back at Laura’s office.

There were five of us left and one of us was an intern, so really, there were four of us left, since in these situations the intern was always one of the first to go.

We found ourselves in a wide hallway, maybe near accounting, but we would have to have asked Carl about that but we couldn’t and so we stopped and leaned against the wall and placed our hands on our knees and breathed in as deeply as we could. We stood there and the intern said, joking but not joking, too, “I’m too old for this shit,” and then Frank said, “I only had two days till retirement,” and then the intern said, “Really?” and we said, everyone but the intern, “Shut the fuck up, kid,” and we stood ourselves up straight and we stretched our necks and pushed out our chests to stretch our backs. The intern started stretching out his hamstrings or his quads and we shook our heads at him, and as we stood there, an arm, a mechanical arm, came around the corner at the far end of the hall and began to snake its way past us.

Or didn’t snake.

Snake is not what it did.

It was an unsettling sight, that bodiless monstrosity, half-covered in tattered pieces of skin, coming toward us. Not that
any of us had ever spent considerable time pondering the way an arm might move itself—maybe humping itself forward like some kind of legless caterpillar—but seeing an arm move itself toward us made each of us realize that we probably would have imagined it wrong. Its fingers dug into the floor, gouging out hunks of carpet and the foam padding underneath it and the concrete slab beneath that with each grab, and then it threw itself forward, by what leverage or law of physical motion we didn’t know, but it was oddly reminiscent, to at least one of us, of a cheetah, but without the cheetah attached.

We stood there quiet and still as the arm came up even with us and Frank moved to touch it or grab it, none of us were sure why, but the intern touched Frank lightly on the shoulder and shook his head and said quietly, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

We weren’t sure if Frank’s moving or the intern’s speaking or neither of those made that arm stop, but it stopped, and the hand swiveled around on the wrist, but not the way a hand should swivel, and it turned to look at us, as if the hand were the thing’s head, the fingers some kind of antennae or feelers. We flinched back, thinking maybe the tips of the fingers would be electronic eyes or something worse, but the tips were just tips, with bits of carpet sloughing free and dusting the floor.

And then it turned back and resumed its strange, gouging push forward, and then it was gone, and for a moment, we looked at each other, unsure what to say about what the hell had just happened, and this was too much, too patently absurd, and the only response to the patently absurd is hysterical laughter, which lasted maybe five full minutes. Our faces were sore from the strain of
laughing and the grime on our faces was cut through by tear streaks. And then the laughter petered out and we moved onward, ever onward, one of us chuckling on occasion, the bunch of us thinking to ourselves, What strange and thrilling times we live in. Thinking: How amazing that we are alive and part of such a unique world. A world you felt, at one point, might be full of nothing more than reality singing competitions and Donald Trumps and Kardashians and Angelina Jolie’s cute ethnic kids, and Carson Daly, a world that hardly seemed worth saving, worth all of this effort, and then, and then.

“That was fucking incredible,” Frank said.

And then we turned the corner and found five men dressed all in black, all of them dead. Their rifles broken into pieces, their necks snapped, their eyes gouged out, one with his tongue torn from his mouth.

We stood there over the dead for less than a minute, remarking on the number of bullet holes in the walls and the floor and the ceiling, making note of how fucking lucky we were just now, lucky that the hand didn’t murder us, too, when a second team of men arrived, turning around the opposite corner, catching sight of their dead comrades and the five of us standing over their dead comrades but not registering exactly what had happened, and then one of the guys straightened up and looked at us and said, Holy fuck, which made the others stop and take stock of this tableau, and then there were rifles, maybe seven of them, pointed at us.

There was a pause. We could see it in their faces, the disbelief and the confusion. The scene seemed to point in one direction—that our motley crew had dispatched these soldiers—while the
look of us seemed to point in the exact opposite direction, and our first instinct was to throw our hands up and surrender ourselves, to assure them that we had had no hand in any of this (ha, ha), that we had once been hostages, that he was on the sales team and that one, too, and that one over there was a project manager or something, and this one, this one right here, with the cheap haircut and the ill-fitting pleated khakis, was an intern, a fucking intern for Christ’s sake. Of course, there was no way we could have done any of this. Except that before we could even raise our hands or open our mouths, the intern dove for one of the bodies, dove more quickly, more fluidly, than any of us would have expected possible, and came back up with the dead guy’s rifle in his hands and managed to squeeze off a couple of rounds.

Which would have been amazing, if he hadn’t missed. If he hadn’t severely missed. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t just missed those guys but the walls behind those guys, too, was how badly he missed. He was a goddamn intern.

Then they recovered and then they started to shoot, and they—they did not miss.

We lost Larry, who might have been just shot or who might’ve been shot dead, but who wasn’t, regardless, following after us as we ran away. We felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to stop. And we abandoned the intern. Fuck that guy, we thought. And fuck whoever was in charge of hiring the fucking interns, we thought.

We found an open utility closet and hid ourselves there. We took stock. We had been shot, in the calf and in the shoulder, and one of us, nicked in the ear, the earlobe sheared off and smelling
of cordite, which we made a point of saying out loud because we hoped the naming of the things that were tearing us apart might make those things less frightening. We huffed and bent over in pain and tried our damnedest not to collapse into a blubbering mess, but it was hard. It was very hard, and then we decided it was too hard, and one by one, we crumpled into ourselves and sobbed and cried out for our mothers, our wives, but quietly, because they might’ve been close enough to hear us, and that’s how we waited it out. We rode out the mess of our meltdowns and waited until we’d completely disintegrated, hoping that once that had happened, we could pull ourselves back together again because we were men, and being men, it was what was expected of us.

After we pulled ourselves together, we didn’t talk about what had just happened between the three of us. None of us mentioned the sad truth of the matter: that we were surely going to die there, if not there in that utility closet, then there, somewhere there at the Regional Office.

We didn’t say anything about the long hours we had devoted to this organization, to the fact that it was maybe our first real job, our first job that hadn’t been a temp job or a job our fathers had gotten for us or a college work-study job or a job as someone’s assistant, that while we were here we’d felt close to something great and powerful and mysterious, and now that it was falling down around our ears, we didn’t say anything like, I should have worked for H&R Block, or, I should have left the city years ago. We didn’t talk about our families, nor did we talk about the fact that we might not have had families yet, that we were still young enough to not have families on the radar yet, but that there had
been a girl we’d seen walking by us the other day, a girl with shoulder-length brown hair, deep-brown, chestnut-brown hair, and how she’d been wearing a light blue blouse and a dark blue skirt, and how she’d smiled at us, how she seemed to have been smiling at everyone, but she had smiled at us, which was a thing that had never happened to us, had never happened to us in this city, in any case, and so we turned, couldn’t help but turn around, or how we’d watched the movement of her hips and ass underneath the skirt fabric and that we’d also watched the way her arms swung as she walked, and had noticed the way she smiled at people and that they smiled back at her, and they did, they all smiled back at her, and we couldn’t stop thinking about her smile, about her face when she smiled, that we’d watched her until she’d been lost in the crowd, and how we’d stopped and looked around and for the first time, maybe, we saw the city, we actually saw the city we were living in and working in and for the first time saw ourselves making a real life here, saw ourselves one day building a family here.

None of us mentioned that. None of us mentioned this or anything like this. We didn’t bemoan the fact that we had tickets to see a movie tonight or a table at Peter Luger’s we’d been waiting on for almost a month.

We didn’t bother confessing to the fact that we had all, secretly, long harbored a deep and unsettling love for Jessica, and that the thought of her, shot through the head maybe, was more than we could bear.

Instead, we debated among the three of us whether to stay in the utility closet or to risk going back out there again. Which was what we were engaged in—a heated argument about being killed
in this utility closet or being killed out in the hallways and under the fluorescent lights—when the door yanked open and Frank was dragged out by the collar by what looked to us at first like the disembodied arm, and so we all screamed, Frank maybe the loudest, but then another arm shifted into the frame, this one holding a gun pointed at Frank’s head, which was subsequently fired, which made a mess of the utility closet and us and Frank’s head, and we all screamed again, except not Frank, not this time, and then, panicked, we shoved Frank, poor Frank, we shoved his dead body into the guy who’d made him dead, and then we tried to run.

Sometimes a person who is very experienced at a thing—tennis, bowling, poker, killing—will be undone by a person who has no experience at a thing at all because the inexperienced guy will do things that no experienced guy would do, or would expect anyone with even half a brain to do, which is the only explanation we could offer for how we managed to get not just out of the utility closet but past the three guys standing in front of the utility closet waiting to do to us what they’d just done to Frank.

We ran in opposite directions, which they maybe suspected we would do, and then we realized we’d done this and then each turned to run in the direction of the other, which was maybe unexpected, and then ran into each other, knocked each other down, which was certainly unexpected, which would certainly have been considered far from best business practice when trying to flee a scene of imminent execution, but knocking each other down saved the two of us since both of us were shot at by one of the guys trying to shoot at us, but we fell just in time and he shot one of his coworkers in the shoulder, or that was how it looked
anyway as we scrambled to our feet and shoved our way past the guy who’d just shot his buddy and who was more than a little surprised by that and by the fact that we were up and still moving and weren’t quite dead yet.