Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

She smiled up at him, sweetly, innocently, then leaned in real close, and he leaned in close and draped his arms over her shoulders, and she could picture him at a school dance, homecoming or prom, maybe, his heavy arms weighing her down, his splotchy face too close to her eyes, and then she shook her head and almost laughed as she stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

She’d been practicing this.

She’d seen something like it in a movie but was surprised she’d had an opportunity to actually try it out. She almost said, “How’s this for your troubles, loverboy?” But she changed her mind and backed off instead.

Just in case.

“That,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

He threw the cigarettes on the counter without asking which ones she wanted. She thought she’d heard him say something when he pulled the wallet out of his back pocket, slid the five dollars inside it. Tease, maybe. Or cock-tease . But she couldn’t see his lips when he said it, and it could have been her imagination.

She ignored him, anyway. “Thanks, Ian,” she said, singsongy and sweet again.

He looked at her and then back at Henry, waiting in the truck now, tapping his hands to some song playing on his stereo. Then he looked back at Rose and said, “Better be careful the kind of folk you run around with, Rosie.” He leered at her. “Strange man like that might look at a little girl like you and try to take advantage.”

She rolled her eyes. She backed herself into the door and pushed it open with her backside and said, “Fuck off, Honsinger,” and then did her best to flounce herself to Henry’s truck, and when she saw Ian was still staring at her, or at the truck, or at Henry, even though he couldn’t see Henry through her, she rolled her window down and flipped him off, and then they were gone.

At least she wasn’t just hanging there anymore, hanging in the middle of a ventilation shaft, pointless and bored.

There was that.

At least there was that.

Rose hip-checked the side of the shaft, tumbled ass over head and into the other side of the shaft. She scrambled to grab hold of the rope but had kicked it swinging and she couldn’t find it in the near dark. Her headlamp swung the light hither and yon, but she was still too high up to see any semblance of a bottom.

Assuming, of course, there was a bottom. Colleen had jokingly told her to be careful down that ventilation shaft, that she’d heard the woman who’d founded the Regional Office had magicks enough to have conjured a bottomless pit that enemies of the Regional Office were thrown into. What better place to hide a bottomless pit than in a ventilation shaft, right?

Hardy-fucking-har-har, Colleen.

Fucking fuck.

The impact. Assuming there would be an impact, she was worried about the impact, but only because it would hurt like a motherfucker. But besides that, she’d survive the fall, and whatever parts of her didn’t immediately survive would start to stitch themselves back together soon enough.

Getting out. She was worried about what would happen after she was dropped at the bottom of a shaft that was well over a mile belowground, but not so worried about this, either, because, well, she’d find some way out, by stealth or by force. She knew she would.

But the mission. God, those assholes had drilled it into her good. The fucking mission, she was worried about that, about missing out. That’s what had her scrambling so hard to find the rope.

She closed her eyes and reached out blindly and grabbed hold of air and then grabbed hold of air again, and thought maybe she should just give up this plan, and then something glanced against her wrist, and she grabbed again and caught hold of the rope and held tight, for a second, for less than, jerked to a bounding halt, before her shoulder gave out as it jarred up against gravity, and she let go again, but flung herself this time, whipped herself with some small deliberation so she could land hard against the side of the shaft, so she might slide down it, maybe catch hold of a different ledge, first with her forehead and her chin and then, when that slipped off, her elbow, which didn’t hold on much better, until finally her knee and calf and shin and ankle and then her boot caught, thank God for that fucking boot with its zippers and straps, its nooks and crannies, and then she held, for long enough, anyway, to pull herself up and in, and once she was in, she collapsed.

Now what, newbie? Henry, fucking Henry, pestering her inside her head.

You don’t know where you are or how to get to the director’s office, so, now what?

She’d figure it out, okay? Jesus.

But now what? Henry asked again, smug asshole. He knew the answer, of course, always knew the answer. Why else would he ask the fucking questions?

Just give a girl one goddamn minute, okay, a fucking minute to pull herself together, to take a fucking break, Christ.

She took a breath. She closed her eyes. Then she passed out, was out cold for at least fifteen minutes.

Back in Henry’s truck, she offered him a cigarette, which he took even though she could tell by the way he held it that he didn’t smoke.

The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Rose took it and pressed her cigarette into it and then took a deep drag from it and then held the lighter out for him. He had been holding the cigarette in his left hand and took the lighter in his right, trying to manage some rigmarole with his elbows on the steering wheel so he could light his cigarette, but the road began to twist and bump, and he startled, swerved a bit, and managed to drop the cigarette into his lap and the lighter onto the floor.

“Christ in a basket,” he said, glancing down and up and down and up, one-handing the steering wheel while he scrambled, hunched over, for the lighter.

“No wonder you almost hit me,” Rose said. Then she said, “Here, relax.” She placed her hand high up on his thigh and bent down, her body twisting just enough to give her scrunching room below the gearshift on the steering column. She could feel her tank top riding up her back and wondered at the peep show she was giving Henry, and hung down there a second longer than she needed to, and then she sat back up, the lighter held in front of her as if it were a diamond or some other gem she’d just pulled out of the earth. Then she said, “Here, gimme that,” and she reached into his lap and grabbed the cigarette, which had fallen in between his legs. She brushed the zipper of his jeans lightly and he jumped in his seat, sending the truck to the left before pulling it hard back to the right.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Jesus, Henry,” she said, laughing. “Settle down, will you?”

Then she tipped the cigarette between her lips and lit it and then she took a drag off it, her own still lit in her left hand. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and then leaned over and said, “Open,” and then put it in his mouth, where he held it for a moment, not smoking, but breathing out of his nose and the side of his mouth, until he remembered his hands on the steering wheel, one of which he freed to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and hold out the open window.

“So. Which store am I taking you to?” he asked.

“I lied,” she said. “I don’t need to go to the store.”

Then she took a breath and looked at him and said, “It’s been kind of a weird day.”

“Where are we going, then?” he said.

“I don’t know. Home, I guess?”

He looked at her. He’d dropped the cigarette out of the window. “So, weird, huh?”

“A little, yeah.” She didn’t know why but she felt her voice hitch. Voice hitching wasn’t a normal thing for her. Her sister, sure. That girl’s voice hitched at the drop of a pin. At the first sign of trouble — the house was out of milk, their mother’s cat had been sleeping on the kitchen table, Rose had borrowed her favorite sweater — you could count on that one for a tremble of the lip, a hitch of the voice. But Rose liked to think she was made of stronger stuff than her sister, and sure, she’d seen some strange look in Tyler Akard’s eyes when he came chasing after her, and sure, the sight of that squirrel might’ve troubled her a touch, and maybe almost getting hit by a truck earlier in the day, etc., but Jesus Christ.