Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

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.

We were lucky and stupid and unpredictable and for a minute, for maybe two minutes, that gave us a fighting chance, gave us hope, but then we turned that first corner and ran into another team, and then one of us was caught in the leg with something painful and sharp. We couldn’t hear anything now, couldn’t hear anything but the roar of panic and adrenaline and fear and pain inside our own heads, and so we didn’t know if we’d been shot or stabbed with a knife, but then one of us fell, and the other one stopped because we weren’t going to be alone in this, couldn’t bear now to be finally alone, and we helped each other up, bolstered each other up even as the bullets whizzed by us and then through us, and then one of us fell again but fell for good, and this time the other one of us, me, the other one of us didn’t.

I mean me.

I mean I.

I didn’t go down.

I didn’t stop.

I kept running.

And then I was the last one left.

I was the last one left and I’d pissed my pants and I had a long gash on my thigh, and there was blood on my hands and my face, but I didn’t know whose because it couldn’t all be mine, it couldn’t all be my blood, and I was shaking, which was funny, because I didn’t even know those guys, but I wasn’t—

I didn’t feel like what I was shaking out of was fear. I wasn’t worried anymore so much about what would happen to me. That wasn’t why I shook. I shook because of what had already happened and because they were gone, all four of them, and I tried to stop thinking about this because it was a dumb thing to think about, a dumb, pointless thing to think about at that moment, when they were after me, I was sure they were still after me, not to mention that I didn’t know where the hell I was or how I would get the fuck out. But my thigh hurt and my body hurt and if I tried to clear my head, there was nothing there but the pain, but if I thought about these things, there were these things, too, at least, and not just the pain.