Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

The week before all of that happened, she’d won a trip to Costa Rica for having the best monthly sales record three months running. She never claimed it.

What had poor Kelly done to deserve any of this? What, other than stand out as a brilliant sales associate? Kind and generous and glowing? Nothing. Nothing that we could see. Some of us speculated — she had made some cruel joke at Sarah’s expense (a lot of us had, but we couldn’t remember hearing anything of the sort from Kelly), or she had discovered the real agency below the fake agency (though she never let on anything of the sort), or she had e-mailed Sarah one too many times asking for a new order of Post-it notes or copier toner or a new mouse pad — but really, none of this made sense, and in the end, most of us decided it was all arbitrary, that Kelly was offered up as a sacrifice, an example to remind us how replaceable we all were, how powerful Sarah was, how unnerved we should be around her.

And we were. Unnerved. But the real reason, or maybe the other reason, some of us — not all of us, but those of us who knew something about what really went on there — had once been very, very afraid of her was because of a rumored mechanical arm, one she could use, the rumors went, with fearsome and deadly force.

Which seemed to us now both less of a rumor and less of an arm, having been indelicately removed.

She pulled herself up enough to push herself across the carpet and to the wall. She sat there, her knees against her chest, her arm draped over her knees, her head, sobbing and weeping, cradled in the crook of the only elbow she had left to her. We were at a loss. Even William, who never missed an opportunity to unsuccessfully try to comfort someone. Even Karen, who believed her faith could heal all wounds. None of us knew what to say or do in a situation in which we were tasked with comforting a woman we hated about her superpowerful mechanical arm, which had been torn from her body.

We were surprised, then, when Laura took the lead in this. She moved past us and we caught a strange and unsettling look in her eye. This whole time, she’d hardly been there at all. But now she was back, mentally back among us, and had come back with a strange, some of us would say ferocious, look in her eye. She beelined for Sarah and who knew what she would have said or done, but she didn’t make it there before Sarah’s sobs came to a halt. She then whipped her head up to look at the closed door and then back to us — her long ponytail swinging all the way around so that stray hairs batted against her nose and lips. She then stood in one fluid and dangerous motion. She took a quick look at Jackson on the floor. Then she gave the lot of us another once-over and was clearly disappointed in what she saw. She recovered and resigned herself to us.

Wiring of some kind hung loose and useless from where her arm should have been.

Laura was about to say something, maybe William and Karen, too, but she stopped them with a look.

Then she said, “No time for chitchat.” Then she pulled a gun — a handgun, maybe a Beretta, maybe something else because we weren’t well versed on handguns — pulled this gun out of nowhere. She didn’t smile. She didn’t grimace. She didn’t look down at where her arm used to be. Her face was smooth and unburdened and, suddenly, quite lovely.

Then she said, “I’ve got a plan.”

We all agreed it was a shitty plan but we also all agreed that we couldn’t say as much to the woman with the gun and the one arm and the entrails of another (mechanical) arm hanging from her shoulder socket. We couldn’t tell her how it was just like Action Jackson’s plan and look at what had happened to him, think of what might happen to us. She told us the plan and how we would charge out of here, overwhelming the big, strong, heartless men with guns by the sheer number of us pouring out of the office, and William, God bless him, asked her, “What about Action Jackson?” and then flinched when she said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” because who wouldn’t have flinched? But then, because William was William and William didn’t know when or how to stop himself, he pointed to Jackson on the floor and said, “Sorry, I meant Jackson. I meant him. What about him?”

She looked at Jackson on the floor and then said, with disgust and with the implication that he must have been some kind of idiot to be on the floor broken the way he was, said in a way that made us all hope that Jackson was dead or, at the very least, unconscious and unable to hear any of this: “What? The dead guy? We fucking leave the dead guy. That’s pretty standard, friend.”

Maybe we should have pulled together, let bygones be bygones, become a stronger unit in the face of outside adversity, but Sarah was just so mean and angry, and maybe she had the right to be angry, what with her whole life coming under assault and her mechanical arm stripped from her body, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it, couldn’t bring ourselves to play along. And so when Michael — poor Michael — called out to the guard that we needed help, that the one-armed woman they’d brought in here was having some kind of fit, and the guard opened the door, opened it but didn’t step inside, we did not rush him, did not overwhelm him with our underwhelming numbers. We stood there and, we’re ashamed to admit, a couple of us nodded with our eyes at Sarah standing with her gun on the other side of the door. It wasn’t unlikely that we saw the guard roll his eyes at us, at the situation, at the foolishness of this foolish plan, and he swiveled around the open door, his body inconceivably lowered and small, out of range of the gun she was aiming where his head should’ve been but wasn’t, swiveled around the door and up close to and behind her, grabbing her with his larger, strong hand in the shoulder socket where once there had been an arm, and he squeezed.

When she screamed, we felt maybe the worst about what we’d done, or not done.

We were impressed, though, by her ability, amidst all this pain and what we assumed must be deep-rooted sorrow, her ability to break the guard’s knee with a swift kick, and then his nose with a balled, backhanded fist. We also felt like dummies for not helping her out because, judging by her skilled performance, by how quickly she dispatched the one guard who knew where she was and what she was waiting to do, we might have stood some chance of escaping if we’d helped. And sure, those of us who were just travel-agency schmucks, we didn’t know what to make of her “plan,” but those of us from the Regional Office, we should have known, did know that she was supposedly some fearsome fighting dynamo, but we’d never seen her in action and had always chalked her reputation up to the mechanical arm, which we weren’t entirely sure even existed, and if it had once existed, it certainly wasn’t a part of her anymore. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late, as three more men streamed into Laura’s office, batons swinging at Sarah, poor, one-armed Sarah, who did not give up, who was not the kind to give up, even as they dragged her away and hit her. She screamed and bit and flailed, and three men weren’t enough, but then two more swept in, and, for what it was worth, five, five men was what it took to carry Sarah out of the office, and two more men to help the first man, who was covered in blood and seemed to be in serious pain, and then, at the last minute, at the last possible minute, not all of us, but a few of us ran.

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.