The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Read Online Free

her head, just at her hairline, straight up from the bridge of her nose.
    He barely looked at her, where she was pointing, and then, flustered, focused his attention on the squirrel flattened on the road, and said, with a bit of a hitch in his throat, or maybe that was Rose’s imagination, “Maybe, I guess, I don’t know.”
    Then he said, “It’s dead now, anyway.”
    Looking at Gina and Patty behind her, he said, “You want me to leave you here with them, then?”
    Rose looked at the squirrel and then at Patty and Gina and then at the truck and Henry. She knew the right thing to say to the strange man who’d picked her up on the side of the road and had just killed a squirrel with a hammer. Yes, go on ahead, I’m fine now. But she was drawn. She wasn’t sure what she was being drawn to but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than what she’d be left with if she let him go.
    Gina, who’d been studying Rose out of the corner of her eye, spoke up. “She’s fine with us,” she said. “Right, Rose?”
    But Rose shook her head. “Actually, you mind running me to the store? I told my momma I’d pick something up for her and I lost my flip-flops back there and don’t want to walk barefooted.” She said this and didn’t look back at Gina or Patty, sure she knew what kind of look she’d see on their faces, Gina’s anyway.
    “Let’s go, then,” he said. And then as they pulled away, Rose looked back at Gina and Patty still standing next to that dead squirrel, Patty waving limply until Gina noticed this and grabbed her arm and shook her head, and then the truck turned a corner and Rose couldn’t see them anymore.

5.
    Rose had gone too far down the shaft. She didn’t know how far too far, but too far, she could sense it.
    Should’ve taken that left back at Albuquerque—that was her dad’s saying, although Christ if she knew what the hell he was ever talking about. Whatever, though. It was Henry’s fault, somehow, his fault for distracting her and maybe her fault just a little for being so easily distracted.
    She pulled herself up, hand over hand, ten feet, fifteen, twenty. She was beginning to wonder when she’d get back to her turnoff, just how far below it she’d lowered herself, when she came to it, the opening—if it had been a snake, it’d have bit you, which was another one from dear old Dad—and Christ, how could she have missed it?
    She swung herself to it, close enough to grab hold of the ledge with one hand. She was going to let go of the rope with her other hand, climb into the new shaft branching off to the left, and be on her merry way, but she stopped. She couldn’t say exactly why she stopped, but she did.
    Something felt . . . off. Told her, Hold on, now, what’s wrong with this picture?
    But then something else told her, Nah, this is it, go, go, you’ve got shit to do.
    Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.
    She let go of the ledge, held on to the rope, pushed herself off the wall into a gentle bit of pendulumming. She closed her eyes and went deep, went real fucking deep inside herself.
    And here’s what she saw:
    A map, in her head, a detailed motherfucker of a map, not just of the ventilation shaft but of the whole ordeal: travel agency, director’s office, training rooms, employee break rooms. Each girl had this same map stuck inside her head. Hell, if she wanted, she could pull up the secret compound in upstate New York, too. So.
    Where was she?
    A pinprick of light glowing hotly in the ventilation shaft.
    Okay. Where was she supposed to be?
    Same fucking light.
    Good. All good, except, it wasn’t right. She could feel it. Something was still wrong, with her