The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

AN INTERLUDE: THE HOSTAGE SITUATION

We were already at a loss — tired and scared and confused — when they grabbed Harrison by the collar, sharp enough we could hear the seams of his shirt rip, and then stood him up and then shot him in the head. They did this and we wilted, the bunch of us, like lilies in high heat. Some of us screamed or sobbed, but the rest of us looked on in silent shock.

Then they shuffled us out of the conference room, where they’d been holding us, and into a smaller office — Laura’s — which made Laura feel better at first, to be in a familiar setting, until one of us reminded her that she’d probably die there, and while a lot of us used to joke about how we spent so much of our time at work we’d probably die at our desks, too, none of us — Laura least of all — liked how this joke was playing out in real life.

All of us were frightened at this point but a lot of us were confused, too. A lot of us still thought that we were nothing more than agents for an exclusive travel concern catering to the ultra-rich and famous and didn’t know that our jobs, our physical bodies, even, were a cover for what really went on here, went on downstairs, nearly a mile below us. When we split into two factions — those who wanted to devise a plan of escape or attack and those of us willing to wait until they let us go or shot us like they shot Harrison, whichever came first — we were also split, though not all of us realized it, by what we knew and what we didn’t know. Those of us who knew the truth about our jobs, about the travel agency and the real agency below us, were willing to wait. Maybe we didn’t know exactly what was in store for us, but we had a good general idea, and for us, knowing what we were up against, there seemed to be little else to do but to wait. While one half of us were thinking about our families, our friends, and what we were going to do when we got out of there, the other half were wondering how long it would be, really, before they shot us all or simply piped some noxious gas into Laura’s office through the vent.

Were thinking, in other words, only of ourselves, and how long we had to be ourselves.

Still. We didn’t do anything to stop those of us who wanted to escape. In fact, we decided, why not just tell them the truth? We would have wanted to know, right, that the men we were fighting against were part of some dark, evil force bent on the total destruction of the planet and all its innocent peoples, that if we were going to die, we were going to die for something important, something bigger than us. Sure, we had been sworn to secrecy, but we decided in the end, What’s the harm?

What’s the harm in telling them? What’s the harm in planning our escape?

We’ll probably be shot anyway. Might as well be shot for planning a foolhardy and imperfect escape as for anything else, right?

We made an announcement. Those who knew, who maybe were still uncertain about the rightness of what we were doing, shuffled uncomfortably, refused to make eye contact. The others, well, they laughed, they clapped their hands together like we’d just made a funny joke, said, “You’re funny. Why didn’t I know how funny you are?” And that was that. Maybe they believed us, maybe they thought we were keeping things light, keeping spirits up. Regardless, we got to work.

We ransacked Laura’s desk and cabinets and collected three boxes of paper clips; a number of dull pencils; two staplers; a gauzy blue-colored rock Laura used as a paperweight; two pair of scissors, one of which we noticed she had stolen from Larry in accounting; and a key-ring pepper-spray canister.

We considered the paper clips and made a joke about chewing gum and MacGyver, but then we were stumped.

Someone picked up the pepper spray and tapped the nozzle, which must have broken after so many years bouncing around inside Laura’s desk, and a wide expanse of pepper water spat out in all directions, and for a moment, we were coughing and wheezing, our eyes were red and blurred by tears, and we swore at whoever used the goddamn pepper spray, but the swearing, our anger, didn’t last. We were too spent to shout or swear or rail for too long.

Too spent from our morning commutes and the drudgery of booking yearly world tours for snarky, overprivileged douchebags who owned yachts big enough to contain every one of the possessions we’d crammed into our shitty apartments in Queens. Too spent from the pain in our lower backs and the false promise of lumbar support, from the soreness in our hands, the carpal tunnel syndrome that made it impossible to open mayonnaise jars, and from, finally, this. This last worst insult. Not just the men in black with their guns and their shoving and pushing, the bullet through Harrison’s skull, the strong urge to piss ourselves, the sore dryness of our throats, the drips of sweat running down our backs to pool at the waistbands of our underwear, the meager tools for our escape, the small chance that we’d make it out of this alive. Too spent from not just all of this but now the pepper spray, too, which had left us winded and undone, and all discussion of escape fell away as we sat in a huddle, gasping and rubbing our eyes.

They had taken away our cell phones, our watches, too, and shot the crap out of Laura’s computer, and for an excruciating eternity, none of us knew what time it was. Then Milo remembered his pedometer, which was surreptitiously clipped to the inside of his belt, and which doubled as a watch. What was more surprising than the fact that Milo’s pedometer was overlooked was that Milo, a truly fat fuck, had a pedometer at all, the poor thing clipped inside his pants — who knew he could have fit anything inside his pants? — and he was proud of it, we could tell, even though we made him explain what it was a couple of times and why he had it. We asked him, What time is it? and Milo looked at the pedometer and then he shook it and he pressed a couple of buttons and we figured he’d never really used the thing, figured it had been giving him false readings this whole time because he hadn’t set it up, had just clipped it to himself and figured that was that, but then he let out this deep, heavy sigh.

It’s five till, Milo said, and, groaning, we demanded, Five till what, asshole? and he sighed again and said, Ten, and we were dumbfounded.

Hours had passed, we had thought. Many, many hours must have passed. We knew this, were certain of this. Our stomachs growled because we’d missed not just lunch but that break in the middle of the afternoon that we all looked forward to when we sent Jenny across the street to pick up some coffees and bags of chips. It had to have been late afternoon, at least. We were sleepy and worn out because the day was coming to a close, and we’d been thinking to ourselves, What will our families think, what will our friends around the city think when we don’t show up at home, at that great little bar in Red Hook, at our dinner date; we had been thinking, When will demands be made, what will the nightly news cover about us, when will our loved ones receive the phone calls asking for the interesting details of our lives, for recent photos?

But no. It had only been forty-five minutes and already we’d grown restless and irritable, and it would be hours and hours still before anyone missed us, before anyone even noticed we were gone.

Holly suggested we play a game, to pass the time better. The rest of us ignored her or made faces behind her back. We considered the idea of escape again, and with nothing better to do, no recourse, no e-mail or Internet or smartphones to pass the time with, with only each other and nothing much in common — how many more times would we have to listen to Carl go on about the square-dancing class he’d started taking in Bushwick, really? — even those of us who had been against planning an escape were on board now, and with the earnest resolve of the truly desperate.

William took charge because he was that guy, the guy who took charge but to whom no one paid the slightest attention.

He snapped his fingers at Laura and demanded a legal pad and pencil, even though they were right there on the desk in front of him. He drew a map of the office and stared at it. He said things like, So what we need to do first is, and Okay, okay, this is good, this is great because, and, I wonder if maybe instead we should. He obviously had no fucking clue what to do next but was trying to make it sound like he was unknotting some thorny but brilliant plan. We let him at it with the sad understanding that this delusional activity was all the glue holding poor William together.

In the meantime, Jackson, who played shortstop in our softball league, and whose batting average was consistently in the high.300s, and who, it was once rumored, could have gone pro, and whom some of us called Action Jackson, though never right to his face because we didn’t want to come on too strong, huddled a group of us together and said, stage-whispering, So, what do you think? How about we tell them that one of us is sick and when one of the guards comes in to investigate we smash him over the head with that blue paperweight Laura’s got on her desk? Take his gun, go from there?

We looked at each other and then at Laura’s paperweight and then back at Action Jackson and then nodded and said, Sure, why not?

The thing was this: We all knew the plan was doomed to fail. Most of us didn’t think it would work even so far as to get someone to come into Laura’s office to investigate. It was such an obvious ploy. The men in black outside Laura’s office, if they were even within earshot, would know exactly what we were up to. If they had seen any kind of hostage-situation movie clip made in the past thirty years, they would ignore us once Jackson started yelling through the door.

But still. We tried it anyway. Michael was on the floor doing a decent job, we thought, of having a heart attack, and some of us wondered — what with all the double-bacon cheeseburgers he ate for lunch — if he’d had some experience in this role.

Jackson, too, good old Action Jackson, was a surprisingly good actor. There was a timbre of real fear and anxiety and concern in his voice. His eyes showed the fear, too, which spoke to a true devotion to this role since no one but us saw his eyes as he was standing on this side of the door with Laura’s blue paperweight hefted over his head.

In any case, none of us, not even Jackson, thought there was more than a slim chance that one of the goons would come through Laura’s office door, so it was a bit of a shock when the door opened, that it opened as fast as it did, as if the guys were just waiting for us to pull some kind of stunt like this. And it was more of a shock — to all of us but to Jackson especially — when the guard caught Jackson’s arm midswing, how cleanly and quickly the guard broke Jackson’s wrist, and then pulled him — him, the strongest and most athletic of all of us — into a tight hug as if he were some kind of rag doll and then snapped him, snapped Jackson like he was that cookie part of a Twix in a Twix commercial. Jackson’s eyes widened when this happened but that was all. It happened so fast that there wasn’t any pain to speak of, not in his eyes, anyway. Not in his face. No grimace, no groan. Maybe he was dead or maybe he was simply paralyzed, but when the guard let go of him, he landed on the ground like a cardboard box would, or not like a cardboard box but like a side of beef would, or not that either. He wasn’t a side of beef. He was Jackson. He was Action Jackson. He landed the way Action Jackson would have if Action Jackson were possibly dead.

Michael scrambled to his knees and stumbled against the desk and pulled himself shakily to his feet and the guard, finished with Jackson, pulled his gun and aimed it at Michael’s head. We held our breath. We didn’t even look at Jackson, crumpled on the floor. We wanted to rush to him, to throw ourselves prostrate over him, to sob uncontrollably, but the gun pointed at Michael shut us all up, made us keep perfectly still.

Then the guard smiled and then the guard left and we didn’t understand what had just happened and we didn’t know what was going to happen next and we had no fucking clue as to what we should do.

A long time passed and we didn’t move. We didn’t rush to Jackson’s side, didn’t sob over his prone form, didn’t do much but stare at the door, at the space where the guard had stood and aimed his gun at one of us after having ruined another of us. Michael was breathing hard and Laura — poor Laura — whimpered to herself. Jenny sat heavily into Laura’s office chair. But otherwise, we were quiet and still. Even William, who normally might have taken this opportunity to make some sort of speech — a disappointed-in-our-poor-efforts speech or a stern but encouraging father-figure speech or a rallying-the-troops speech — even William was quiet.

He was the first to move. He dropped to his knees and then lowered his ear to Jackson’s face. Jackson’s eyes were open and wide still, as if his face, his expression, had become stuck. We couldn’t see any up-and-down movement in his chest. His body didn’t look comfortable lying as it was. William was there for some time, his ear pressed to Jackson’s chest and then to his face and then back to his chest.

Then he looked up and shook his head, which was the wrong thing to do considering what he said, which was, I don’t know how, but he’s still breathing.

We were so relieved by this we didn’t even bother to tell William that the sad and wistful headshake wasn’t proper head-movement protocol for when someone you thought was dead turned out to be alive. Instead, we rushed to Jackson’s side, where we quibbled immediately: lift him, leave him, set his head at an incline, cover him with a jacket, don’t let him fall asleep, no, if he wants to sleep, let him sleep? What we agreed on though was the need for a doctor.

And also, to be honest, there were those of us who wished, secretly, that he was dead outright.

We weren’t cruel. We understood he was in some way better off not being dead, but how much better off?

We thought about his wife and his son, who was eight and who would bat-boy for us at games. We thought about the change waiting for them when we got out of this. Their once strong and handsome husband and father now irrevocably broken. Doctor’s bills. Physical therapy, wheelchairs, feeding tubes, an elaborate blinking system with which to communicate. She would cheat on him, or would leave him entirely. We’d met her enough times to suspect she was that kind of woman. The son would grow up weak and servile, or a bully. Jackson would become a burden they would come to despise and one day he’d wish that he’d just died and would regret that his condition, which prevented him from living life, also made suicide a near impossibility. We considered his life laid out for him and shook our heads at the travesty of it and wondered at the thin line between being dead now and the life waiting for him in the future.

But mostly, those of us who wished he’d died did so because we dreaded the idea of spending the next few hours in here with Action Jackson — God, what a stupid name — incapacitated and possibly dying, but certainly not being helped by lack of proper medical administration. We imagined good odds on his dying before all this ended. And if he didn’t die, if he regained consciousness, we imagined his making demands we couldn’t fulfill. Or even if he were to lie there stoic and strong, how depressing would that be, the constant reminder of him? How bad for team morale? And while we didn’t have a good plan for what to do next, whatever plan we came up with would surely involve leaving him behind, and wouldn’t that be easier, we thought to ourselves, with him already dead?

We kept this to ourselves, though. We touched him gently on the shoulder or the cheek, careful not to move him or make him worse.

Then we moved away from him and by unspoken consent, we stayed as far away from that part of the room as we could for the rest of the time we were trapped there.

Then we heard loud laughter coming from the other side of the door.

This unnerved us, made us feel uncertain and more frightened than before. It was the kind of laughter you heard at a party or a bar or a reunion.

We couldn’t imagine, in other words, what had made them laugh so hard. Or maybe we could but would rather not have. And maybe this was what made Karen — quiet, unassuming, prudish Karen — say, Guess they found Richard’s monkey video. And this. This made us laugh, laugh so hard. Maybe because it was Karen who brought it up after making such a fuss over the video in the first place. Or maybe it was the idea of those goons huddled around one of the computers in the cubicles watching that video on YouTube. Or maybe it was just the stress of our situation, the urgent need for some kind of release. Whatever the reason, Richard’s monkey video had never been as funny to us as it was then. The video showed a chimp, a trained chimp, taunting a baby, first with a bottle and then with a squeaky giraffe and then the baby’s blankie, coaxing the baby to it each time with this thing or that, only to snatch the item away at the last second just before thumping the baby hard on the forehead. The baby fell for it every time and then wailed and screamed and cried this big openmouthed, toothless cry after the chimp thumped him on the forehead. It was a cruel but really, really funny video. Karen, who’d just had a baby four months ago, and was maybe a bit bitter coming back to work so soon, made a number of complaints about the video. She complained enough and to enough of the right people that we had to attend a seminar. Control software was installed onto our computers. Every minute of every workday was tracked. No more social networking. No more personal e-mail. No more porn. Was it surprising that none of us really liked Karen all that much? She knew that we didn’t like her much, but she thought it was because of what she did, when really, and it is a nuanced argument, we admit, but we already hadn’t liked her because we’d already decided that she would turn out to be the kind of person who would do what she did.

So her joke here, in the middle of all of this, surprised us, made us reconsider her and our dislike of her, though the more honest of us knew that if we all got out of this alive, or even if only some of us did, including Karen, it wouldn’t be long before we shifted back into our established and familiar office roles.

But still. In that small, brief moment, each of us loved Karen.

Then the door opened and we shut up, afraid they were coming in there to make us shut up.

Hostages, we figured, weren’t supposed to break out in spontaneous, raucous laughter.

But they weren’t there for us. They were there to add to our numbers. Two men marched into the office holding a woman between them and then they threw her into the lot of us and left, shutting the door behind them.

William moved to help her up but stopped. He looked back at us, his face white. She’d been beaten up badly, we could all see that, but we couldn’t see what had freaked William out until he stepped back and then we saw what was utterly, horribly wrong with her, which wasn’t that she was black-eyed and bloody-browed, wasn’t even the long, thick gash down her arm that extended from her shoulder almost to her elbow, but rather that her other arm was missing entirely. Her blouse had been ripped off at the shoulder of the missing arm. We could see the seams and the jagged edge of the material. We couldn’t see what was underneath the material, but it was in the shape of a shoulder, a truncated shoulder.

Then we got a glimpse of her, got a look at her face, and we realized who she was.

Sarah O’Hara.

We knew her, but the way she looked now, her eyes downcast, her face bruised, her shoulders slumped, jerking with silent sobs, we couldn’t believe how afraid of her we’d been, and we were once very, very afraid of her.

For one, she was generally very mean. She arrived out of the blue on occasion, stormed through our offices, yelled at our various managers, and stood haughtily over our shoulders as we made our calls, as we coaxed our clients into ever-bigger vacation packages, as we tried to up-sell the sixth Sherpa since no one, not since the Krakauer book, attempted Everest with fewer than six Sherpas. No matter what we said or how much we sold, we could never seem to do enough for Sarah O’Hara.

Once, she hung up Kelly’s phone, Kelly who shortly thereafter succumbed to a nervous breakdown and quit. Hung up Kelly’s phone in the middle of a sales call with one of her biggest clients. No one knew why. Not Kelly, not our manager, Benjamin, also no longer with the agency. None of us could figure it out. The call was going well. Before that hang-up, Kelly was our best salesperson. She had convinced her client that there really was nothing more spectacular than to travel with one’s own hot-air balloon and hot-air balloon crew. You never know, she was in the middle of saying, You never know when you might want to go up in a hot-air balloon. Say you are casting about in the Antarctic waters south of Argentina and you want to take a hot-air balloon over the Perito Moreno Glacier. Unless you bring your own, she continued, and that was when Sarah O’Hara pressed her index finger down on the phone and hung up the call. Then she looked at Kelly, who had turned abruptly around to see what the fuck had just happened, and she waited. She waited to see if Kelly would say or do anything, waited for an outburst or tears, or something. With Sarah O’Hara, no one ever knew. Kelly turned back to the phone, not a word or a look, and redialed the number, which none of the rest of us would have had the balls to do, not with Sarah O’Hara standing right behind us. She redialed and then, with a smile on her face, she apologized, a mechanical issue, she had moved to another phone, wouldn’t happen again, and what did they decide about that balloon? And sure, credit where credit is due, she made the sale, but those of us who knew her best could hear the slight hitch in her voice. Just a tremor. A blip. Nothing at all. Sarah O’Hara made a note on her clipboard and then walked away. We consoled Kelly. Patted her gamely on the shoulder. She smiled and shook her head and gave out a long, relieved sigh. And then the next day the tremor had become a trill, and then a shake, and soon enough, she couldn’t talk on the phone without stammering or stuttering. She lost her clients. Had her breakdown. Quit and moved back to Kansas to live with her folks.

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.

Once we broke free of the chaos right outside of Laura’s office, we made our way to the copy room. We figured there’d be a map there — a fire exit map in any case — something, anyway, to help steer us around where we thought the men with guns might be, that might help us plan some strategy to escape unnoticed. Plus, Carl said he’d heard rumor of a secret passage we could find, which none of us believed, and even if it had existed, there was no way it would have been marked on a fire exit map, but we let him think what he was going to think.

The copy room turned out to be kind of a coup on our parts. We were right about that map, which marked out a clear path to the exit with little, uneven dashes, (and, sadly for Carl, no secret passageway) but also someone had left a box of doughnuts there. We did our best, as we passed over the crullers and grabbed for a jelly or a cream-filled, we did our best to try to coddle ourselves with the idea that this stroke of good luck was only the beginning. Or not even the beginning but just one more sign in a long line of good-luck signs, beginning with the fact that we weren’t killed right off, that we shoved our way out of that small office when we had the chance. This was just one more sign, we decided, that things from here on out would be smooth sailing, that, with bellies full of jellies, there was nothing we couldn’t do or survive. It was a foolish thought, but right now all we seemed to have room for were foolish thoughts, since there was no thought more foolish, really, than that we would get out of there at all.

As we left the copy room, we congratulated ourselves on not just our escape but on how in sync we were with each other, and how good our instincts were, how we should’ve been spies or special agents ourselves, and, busy congratulating ourselves, we were surprised when one of the goons grabbed one of us — Carl from accounting — and socked him over the head with the butt of a pistol, and only because Carl was so wide and the hallway so narrow were the rest of us able to keep running despite the two other guys with the guy who brained Carl.

We ran and turned and turned and turned again, hoping that our haphazard movements made it more difficult for anyone to find us or catch up to us, and then, because we weren’t spies or special agents but were desk jockeys and horribly out of shape, we had to stop, catch our breath.

After that, we decided it wasn’t so much fun. We had lost Carl and the fire map since Carl was the one carrying it when they took him. We thought we’d been heading left for a while. We didn’t know directions, though — east, west, north, south — and mostly our only hope was that we weren’t going to land back at Laura’s office.

There were five of us left and one of us was an intern, so really, there were four of us left, since in these situations the intern was always one of the first to go.

We found ourselves in a wide hallway, maybe near accounting, but we would have to have asked Carl about that but we couldn’t and so we stopped and leaned against the wall and placed our hands on our knees and breathed in as deeply as we could. We stood there and the intern said, joking but not joking, too, “I’m too old for this shit,” and then Frank said, “I only had two days till retirement,” and then the intern said, “Really?” and we said, everyone but the intern, “Shut the fuck up, kid,” and we stood ourselves up straight and we stretched our necks and pushed out our chests to stretch our backs. The intern started stretching out his hamstrings or his quads and we shook our heads at him, and as we stood there, an arm, a mechanical arm, came around the corner at the far end of the hall and began to snake its way past us.

Or didn’t snake.

Snake is not what it did.

It was an unsettling sight, that bodiless monstrosity, half-covered in tattered pieces of skin, coming toward us. Not that any of us had ever spent considerable time pondering the way an arm might move itself — maybe humping itself forward like some kind of legless caterpillar — but seeing an arm move itself toward us made each of us realize that we probably would have imagined it wrong. Its fingers dug into the floor, gouging out hunks of carpet and the foam padding underneath it and the concrete slab beneath that with each grab, and then it threw itself forward, by what leverage or law of physical motion we didn’t know, but it was oddly reminiscent, to at least one of us, of a cheetah, but without the cheetah attached.

We stood there quiet and still as the arm came up even with us and Frank moved to touch it or grab it, none of us were sure why, but the intern touched Frank lightly on the shoulder and shook his head and said quietly, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

We weren’t sure if Frank’s moving or the intern’s speaking or neither of those made that arm stop, but it stopped, and the hand swiveled around on the wrist, but not the way a hand should swivel, and it turned to look at us, as if the hand were the thing’s head, the fingers some kind of antennae or feelers. We flinched back, thinking maybe the tips of the fingers would be electronic eyes or something worse, but the tips were just tips, with bits of carpet sloughing free and dusting the floor.

And then it turned back and resumed its strange, gouging push forward, and then it was gone, and for a moment, we looked at each other, unsure what to say about what the hell had just happened, and this was too much, too patently absurd, and the only response to the patently absurd is hysterical laughter, which lasted maybe five full minutes. Our faces were sore from the strain of laughing and the grime on our faces was cut through by tear streaks. And then the laughter petered out and we moved onward, ever onward, one of us chuckling on occasion, the bunch of us thinking to ourselves, What strange and thrilling times we live in. Thinking: How amazing that we are alive and part of such a unique world. A world you felt, at one point, might be full of nothing more than reality singing competitions and Donald Trumps and Kardashians and Angelina Jolie’s cute ethnic kids, and Carson Daly, a world that hardly seemed worth saving, worth all of this effort, and then, and then.

“That was fucking incredible,” Frank said.

And then we turned the corner and found five men dressed all in black, all of them dead. Their rifles broken into pieces, their necks snapped, their eyes gouged out, one with his tongue torn from his mouth.

We stood there over the dead for less than a minute, remarking on the number of bullet holes in the walls and the floor and the ceiling, making note of how fucking lucky we were just now, lucky that the hand didn’t murder us, too, when a second team of men arrived, turning around the opposite corner, catching sight of their dead comrades and the five of us standing over their dead comrades but not registering exactly what had happened, and then one of the guys straightened up and looked at us and said, Holy fuck, which made the others stop and take stock of this tableau, and then there were rifles, maybe seven of them, pointed at us.

There was a pause. We could see it in their faces, the disbelief and the confusion. The scene seemed to point in one direction — that our motley crew had dispatched these soldiers — while the look of us seemed to point in the exact opposite direction, and our first instinct was to throw our hands up and surrender ourselves, to assure them that we had had no hand in any of this (ha, ha), that we had once been hostages, that he was on the sales team and that one, too, and that one over there was a project manager or something, and this one, this one right here, with the cheap haircut and the ill-fitting pleated khakis, was an intern, a fucking intern for Christ’s sake. Of course, there was no way we could have done any of this. Except that before we could even raise our hands or open our mouths, the intern dove for one of the bodies, dove more quickly, more fluidly, than any of us would have expected possible, and came back up with the dead guy’s rifle in his hands and managed to squeeze off a couple of rounds.

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.

I stumbled into an office that I thought was going to be a door to a stairwell or something, and then heard sounds of men talking and searching, but I didn’t know where they were coming from, and I said, Fuck it, and burst out of the office at a screaming charge, though how I charged anywhere with that gash in my leg, I couldn’t have said, but there was no one there and I stumbled down the next hallway.

I could hear them behind me. I could hear their voices and their footsteps behind me. Closer and closer. I was just so tired, though. I just wanted to stop and say, Okay, guys, you got me. I wanted to stop with my hands up over my head if only so I could take a minute or two to not move any piece of me anymore. Just when I was about to do that, when I had stopped running and was simply walking quickly and then not so quickly, had slowed myself down like you sometimes will at the end of a long run, and was waiting for them to catch up to me, I turned one final corner and there I saw a door, an emergency exit door, and I shoved myself through it because at that moment I could not think of anything I would have described as an emergency moment more than that moment right then. And through the door was an elevator, and in that elevator was one button, just one, and the door closed, and I sank to the floor, and the elevator didn’t seem to move, and I waited, and then the doors opened, and on the other side there could have been a huddle of them, masked and armed and waiting for me, but it wasn’t them. It was the outside world, and it had never looked so fucking beautiful as it did right then, and then I ran and I didn’t look back.

I never looked back.