By Jem Morgenstern
Due to the city’s location, the usual 911 emergency number isn’t available to its residents, which led to the establishment of the Emergency Dispatch Hotline. The number for the hotline, 896-2335 with no area code, is less catchy than the more common 911. City officials have commissioned local musicians to create a cheery melody to go with the numbers, which would potentially aid residents in its memorization. After multiple attempts at creating that melody, musicians and city officials gave up on its creation. 896-2335 isn’t an easy combination of numbers to create a melody for. Their plans for a simple mnemonic tune failed, so they went with their backup plan to have the number presented by very memorable voices and fonts. This led to the establishment of Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 7, which consists of three members. Their only responsibilities include using their memorable voices for 896-2335 awareness commercials and using their artistic talents to design 896-2335 awareness billboards. The current Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 7, which is the third Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 7, has failed miserably. Only 78% of the city’s residents are aware of 896-2335 and 23% of the residents who are aware of 896-2335 are unaware of the purpose of 896-2335. The number exists to them as an extra phone number they have memorized, but has no purpose. Because of the failing Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 7, Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 8 was formed to increase the publicity of 896-2335 with other means. The plan was to collect a squad of attractive youth, push them through training, and use them for a new poster campaign advertising the Emergency Dispatch Hotline. The squad wasn’t ever meant to be deployed to handle emergencies. In fact, Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 7 and Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 2 (the squad responsible for answering calls) were more qualified than Emergency Dispatch Hotline Squad 8 for handling emergencies.
Today, with the exception of Emergency Hotline Squad 8, all squads had been deployed shortly after sunrise. Squad 7 had been sent out to handle a house fire and Squad 2 was tasked with handling a car crash. Squad 2 soon received a phone call from an old woman whose words were unclear, but her voice sounded stressed enough for Squad 2 to worry. Squad 2 called Squad 8. Squad 8 deployed for the first time. The old woman lives two miles away from the Emergency Dispatch Hotline Center, but Squad 8 took an extra mile to get there because they didn’t know of a more direct route to her home. This was, however, the quickest way they knew to get to that area, so they were trying their best.
The old woman was sitting on her porch. Her face wore an impatient and worried expression, but her effort to relax wasn’t unnoticeable. Squad 8 approached the porch, ready to lead her through the standard list of questions, but the old woman interrupted their questioning before they could even move their lips.
The old woman had been extremely protective of her home, since the day an intruder snuck in through a window and hung her husband over the clothes line outside to bleed dry. She didn’t have much of a reason to worry though because events like that one were rare in this city. It had been twenty years and one day and not one murder had been carried out or planned since then and just one murder had been carried out in the twenty years prior to the day her husband was murdered, which was uncoincidentally exactly twenty years before. The city was on a twenty-year murder cycle with one gruesome murder every twenty years. The murder forty years and one day ago (the one before this old woman’s husband) took place inside of an orphanage, which left thirty orphaned children traumatized. Ten of those traumatized orphans are currently employed by the Emergency Dispatch Hotline Center. Three of those ten are on Squad 2. The other seven are on Squad 4, the squad reserved for would-be-vigilantes hardened by the struggles of life. The other twenty children went on to various other fields of study and professions. For this reason (her distrust of strangers entering her home), the first words she said to Squad 8 were, “I don’t want you going in my house.”
One member of Squad 8 replied with, “we understand, ma’am, and we’ll keep that in mind. Could you tell us what’s wrong?”
She went on to explain why she didn’t want them going into her home. Of course, this wasn’t the answer to the question they meant to ask, but the story kept them entertained, so they didn’t regret sending her on this tangent. When she finished, they all acknowledged her story, asked her a few more questions about it, and then respectfully brought the conversation where they meant to bring it in the first place with the classic line, “what’s your emergency?”
Her grandson had gone out the morning before to pick up some bread from his favorite bakery. He would come by thrice a week to help her clean her house and do the work that her frail, stuttering movement kept her from doing herself. Each day he would come over, they would cook dinner together. That night, they were keeping it simple: salad, casserole, and leftover pulled pork. Her grandson thought bread would make a nice addition to their peasant meal, so he sent himself off to get some. He still hadn’t come back with the bread.
Squad 8 continued questioning her. They gathered the information they needed and some that they didn’t. His name was John (a very common name in this city), his hair was brown, he worked outside often enough to maintain a decent tan, and his grandmother didn’t know which bakery he would have gone to. He was wearing jeans, a non-descript casual button-up shirt, and brown shoes. His car was black and there was a small scrape on the bumper. His favorite color was blue and he enjoyed listening to the cello. His childhood pet’s name was Annie. Done asking questions, Squad 8 told the old woman not to worry, and they went back to the Emergency Dispatch Hotline Center.
There was nothing about him in their records. There wasn’t a lot about him in the city records. Squad 8 couldn’t find anything that could lead them to his whereabouts. They checked with the morgue, but the only body in there was an unidentifiable heap of stringy flesh and a pair of legs. They knocked on his door. Predictably, nobody answered. It was time to hang posters.
Squad 8 borrowed a few members from other squads to help them go around town stapling posters to telephone poles and taping them to telephone booths (they wanted to get the importance of calling in to report sightings of John across).
Months went by and they hadn’t received any calls. They kept the old woman updated on their search. At first, the discouraging reports would bring a frown to her face, but they came to be expected and the frowns became ingenuine and hollow. More months went by. They stopped visiting the old woman. She stopped expecting him to come back. She grieved. She moved on. Squad 8’s focus had to be put elsewhere. For a while, the missing grandson would float back up in their thoughts, but enough time eventually passed for them to forget about him completely. They picked up new cases involving missing people that were much more hopeful. Those people were found. The positivity and certainty of these cases pulled their attention. The grandson was gone. The pile of tattered flesh was thrown into the cremator with its matching pair of legs, never identified. The grandson was gone.