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

or her map or the fucking shaft.
    She felt this overwhelming urge to open her eyes, to just look around and see, Hey, there’s the opening I need, but she wouldn’t let herself. Whatever it was that was wrong, her eyes were in on it, she was sure. Her body—fingers, legs—in on it, too.
    Devil’s advocate: Security had been fixed by their woman onthe inside, or that’s what she had told Henry and Emma, had told all of them, and Rose had made it this far—the others, too—without sounding off any alarms, so the intel seemed good enough. The opening was dead-to-rights right in front of her. She’d been on this rope for ages and was on a strict schedule. So what was her hesitation?
    Counterargument: That she was hesitating at all was her goddamn hesitation. She’d never been one for thoughtful consideration of action and consequence, had been a headfirst, why-the-hell-not kind of a girl, and if anything made her pause even a little, well, fuck, that seemed suddenly enough to make her pause a lot.
    Time ticked by.
    She opened her eyes. The rope dropped out of sight and into the darkness below her. It stretched out of sight above her. She’d stopped swinging ages ago. Everything was pointless. She closed her eyes again, frustrated.
    She had to do something. She couldn’t just hang there.
    Okay, just playing devil’s advocate one more time: What if the whole thing is a setup? What if the whole point of this is to stop me in my fucking tracks? What if it all only feels wrong just to make me hang here, immobile and useless, until it’s too late and the whole shebang is finished and I’ve fucked up the whole operation?
    Counterargument: Fine. Fuck it.
    She opened her eyes. The opening looked as real as it ever had. She swung her legs back and forth to get some momentum and then grabbed, finally, hold of the ledge. It felt as real as it had just five minutes ago. So far so good. She let go of the rope with herother hand and grabbed fully on to the ledge. And then everything she was looking at, everything she was holding on to, flickered like a hinky picture on a shitty cell phone, and then it was gone and she was holding on to the smooth, purchaseless side of the ventilation shaft, or, rather, not holding on to it, not holding on to anything, and she fell.

6.
    The wind from the truck window caught hold of Rose’s hair, pulling it out of Henry’s truck. Henry wasn’t doing much talking and she didn’t feel like talking much, either. She watched the landscape pass by, familiar and dull, and only half listened to whatever was on the radio in the background.
    “Those your friends?” Henry asked.
    She had been biding her time, she realized. The last few weeks of summer, these first few weeks of school, sure, but even before that. These past few years. Maybe her whole life. Biding her time. She understood that now, and that here, even in Henry’s truck, she was still biding her time.
    “Not really, no,” she said.
    How was what she had been doing different from what Gina and Patty had been doing with their lives? she wondered.
    They were biding their time, too. They just didn’t know it. That was what was different. They would finish out high school, Gina still a virgin, Rose was sure of it, and then each go off to college, with maybe a stop-off at the junior college for a couple of years first, and then, degrees in hand or not, they would wind their way back to this dump of a town, their eyes set on Randall Thomas (Gina) or Clem Buchanan (Patty), or boys of their ilk,inheritors of their daddies’ body repair shops or small-town construction firms. They might work for a couple of years, teaching kindergarten or managing one of the antique shops on the square, and then quit working once it was time to start pushing kids out of their nethers. It was an oppressive and frightening thought, picturing the two of them not much different from their bitter, hard-smoking mothers. But it was a thought she kept close to the