Chapter Text
The phone is ringing.
Josh stares at it as if there’s a bomb hidden away under all that plastic and metal, as if a single touch could detonate it and send shrapnel flying through the air. Its low, monotonous trilling sounds like a death toll. But after a few seconds, its ringing starts to bleed into the background as the same sound is replicated around him, all through the room.
The only difference is, he’s the only one not picking up.
“Hey, uh, Joshua.” The young man in front of him turns around and nods toward the telephone sitting on his desk. (Josh assumes that he read his name from the shitty sticker on his jacket that read hello, my name is… in a messy scrawl.) Not even a flicker of a smile is present on his face. In fact, he looks as if he hasn’t smiled in years. “I’d pick that up if I were you. Someone’s life is on the other line, you know.”
They both know that this is true, but not in the way that Josh had hoped.
He had joined the Mandela County Police Department in hopes of making the world a better place. However, he didn’t know that his literal job was going to be taking alternate reports and sitting back as people screamed for his help over the phone.
The badly-formatted website he had visited months ago had said MCPD is hiring; serve your community in bold. What a fucking lie.
Josh glances back at the ringing phone, then looks around at the rest of the room. Every person he sees is occupied with a call, and not one of them seems fazed by what they’re doing. Their faces look expressionless, stone, months of taking encounter reports etched into every stress-induced wrinkle on their faces. Josh looks away.
And then, without thinking (as he forces himself not to), he picks up the phone.
The metal is greasy and smells of sweat when he holds it to his ear, and a light static can be heard. It seems to shake as Josh breathes in slowly through his nose and opens his mouth.
“Hello, you’ve reached the Mandela County Police Department,” he says, his voice wavering slightly. “If you are not reporting an alternate encounter, please call our main number at-”
“Yes, hello?” He’s suddenly cut off as whoever’s on the other line starts to speak. The voice is deep, a little nasally, and laced with fear, uncertainty, and another thing that Josh can’t quite place.
“It’s in my house- help,” the person whispers, and then Josh knows exactly what it is. Hope. Hope that this phone call could save a life.
I’m so sorry, he thinks. I can’t rescue you.
But I have to pretend that I can.
Josh remembers what the manager of his station, Debby, had told him yesterday.
“Make conversation with them. Try to distract them in some way. Their death will be inevitable, but tell them that help is on the way and make sure you keep them on the phone for as long as you can.”
And then…
“Only hang up once their screams subside.”
It sends icy fear coursing through him to know that, in the next few minutes, someone will die talking to him (if there really is an alternate in their home). But he tries to disregard that, for the person’s terrified gasps of air are still coming through from the other line.
“Okay, help is on the way…” he pauses, feeling his heart shatter into a million pieces as he spits lies into the speaker. “We’ll get someone on it right away. I’m Josh - what’s your name?”
“Mark,” the man replies after a few seconds. Josh can hear him cracking his knuckles nervously from over the phone. “Eshleman. There’s an alternate in my house- I think it saw me- I don’t know what to do, so I…”
“Okay,” Josh answers firmly, trying to comfort this poor man as much as he can before he has to hang up. “You’re doing great, Mark. First, I’m gonna need you to remember the T.H.I.N.K principle. Can you do that for me?”
Josh is following a script - ask for their name, ask about T.H.I.N.K, tell them they’re okay - but he tries to make his words sound as consoling as possible. Debby told him to not bother being kind, because they’re just gonna die anyway, but Josh thinks that’s a horrible thing to say.
“Yeah,” Mark answers nearly immediately. Josh can hear his voice becoming more and more frantic. “Tell, hinder, identify, neutralise and.. know. But why are you asking me this?” Mark’s voice morphs into sudden hostility. Josh knows this is what people do when anxiety has a vice grip on them - he’s experienced it.
“Mark, please try to follow the principle as best as you can. That way, you can hide effectively until— help arrives,” Josh says back, trying and failing to keep his voice level. “W-where did you see the alternate at first?”
“Stop asking me shit,” Mark spits out, the speakers crackling as he raises his voice. “I need help. It followed me home, Josh.”
He feels horrible. Everything he says sends another knife through his gut. He can’t believe how easy it is for his other colleagues to just lie to someone’s face like this.
Mark’s voice suddenly drops to a whisper once again as a low, muffled knocking is heard through the phone. “Please.” Josh can hear him crying. He can’t believe that he has to just sit there and listen to this man die. Surely there’s a way to save them, surely…
“Please remain calm,” he says, even though he himself is nothing of the sort. “You will be okay.”
Shit, why did he have to ask for his name at the start of the call?? Now he’s going to feel even worse.
Suddenly, there’s a loud clatter, as if the telephone was dropped. Josh holds his breath as he tries to make sense of what he’s hearing next. A door opening, maybe, and is that Mark’s voice? No, it can’t be. Whatever that is sounds horribly distorted, and-
Fuck no. Terror pierces through him as he hears the alternate whisper to Mark.
“You’re dead. But how could you sleep at a time like this?”
Mark screams then, a choked scream, not the type you hear in horror movies. A scream that says “nobody came for me.” A scream that is so horrendously tragic to hear that Josh nearly hangs up. But then he remembers his orders.
He sits there, eyes wide, as a man named Mark Eshleman whom he’s only known for two minutes repeats that same choked scream over and over like a broken record.
And then, like a switch flipping, it stops.
Josh shakes.
Josh shakes, and gasps,
and hangs up.
——————————————————
“I take it your first day on phone duty went well?” Debby inquires nonchalantly as Josh packs up after his shift. At this point he’d taken four more encounter calls after Mark’s one, and still he remembers all their names. It chills him right to the bone.
It’s late, they’ve just transferred the keys to the officers working night shift, and a thin beam of moonlight shines on Debby’s features as she faces Josh in the dimly-lit foyer. A badge on her jacket reads Director — Delineation of Encounter Reports, and Josh eyes it nervously as he opens his mouth to respond. Careful, this is your boss you’re talking to.
“It was…” Absolutely shit. Horrible. How do you people live like this? He flails uselessly, trying to come up with a good lie, but Debby seems to notice his struggle because her eyes flick upward to his and her face softens slightly.
“I know,” she says, voice quiet. “First days are usually the hardest. Heck, all days are hard.” For a few seconds, she’s nothing like the formidable, reticent Debby Josh had met a few months ago, on his first trial. Here, after their shifts and illuminated by the moon’s glow, he watches her resilient demeanor slip away.
Seeing Josh’s surprised expression, she closes her mouth. Her features slide back into their normal state: reserved and cold. And just like that, she’s gone from being Debby, Josh’s friend, to being Director – Delineation of Encounter Reports once again.
“But… we push through it.” She hoists her duffel over her shoulder and claps Josh on the back lightly. “Don’t we?”
She turns to face him once more as she walks out of the station, her voice dropping in volume. “Stay safe, Josh. Remember, every day gets brighter.”
The double doors swing shut then, leaving Josh alone in the foyer. He grabs his stuff and follows suit, not wanting to be engulfed by the eerie darkness of the room. It’s a childish thing, to be afraid of the dark - but then again, you can’t be too careful when you live in Mandela.
After flinging his bag onto the back seat and starting his car, he grips the steering wheel and slowly lowers his head on to it, breathing loudly and deeply. From his position he can see right onto the floor of the footwell, and it’s flecked with dirt and crumbs. He makes a mental note to clean his car before the contents of his day come crashing into his head like a solid tidal wave, swallowing the rest of his brain.
All he can think about is the fact that today, he listened to five human beings die talking to him, in real time, over the phone.
And because he’d bothered to learn their names, it makes it all even worse.
Josh remembers all of them.
There was Mark (Eshleman, he remembers) who was his first report ever, who died in his own bedroom screaming as an alternate of himself slowly drove him insane. Then there was Eli, this poor kid who’d called the station in hopes of saving his sister, only for her alternate to get to him first. After that he didn’t receive any calls for a couple of hours until he got a report from someone named Pete, who was babbling something about a man’s face appearing on his television before the line cut out after only a few seconds. Immediately following Pete’s call he picked the phone up and talked to a girl named Jade who had managed to last a good twenty minutes until her line was cut off with a scream, too.
The last caller of the day was certainly his most terrifying. His name was Daniel Howell and Josh had held his breath, clutching his desk with both of his hands as a distorted voice had spoken to him through the phone.
The alternate’s voice was too twisted and horrible to make out any English, but it had turned the waves of terror that were already lapping at Josh’s insides into full-blown tsunamis, freezing him in place for a solid ten minutes.
Josh discovers that he’s gripping the steering wheel way too tight as this memory re-enters his thought process. His knuckles are white, small hills of bone threatening to burst out of his hand completely.
Get a fucking grip, he mutters inwardly. It didn’t see your face. That means it can’t find you.
Plus, alternates only go after the people they’ve mimicked, or people that have a strong connection to that person.
“Fuck you,” he says to nobody in particular, and bangs his head against the steering wheel.
—————————————————-
When he gets back to his apartment the first thing he does is turn on his computer (the newest and safest model, with a huge MandelaTECH approved sticker on its base) and smash out all of his questions into the Google search bar:
can an alternate find me through a phone
how do I make myself feel better about listening to people die
is there an mcpd trauma counsellor
how to stop feeling emotion
can alternates show up on computers
am I gay quiz
But he has no luck. Even though he spends two hours re-phrasing his questions and trying to beat the system, nearly all of his searches result in the same image - a big, fat THIS CONTENT HAS BEEN BLOCKED FOR YOUR SAFETY notice with an MCPD logo below it that seems to laugh mockingly at Josh as he slams his lid down in frustration.
“Fuck you,” he mutters to himself for the second time in half an hour.
The only way to get answers now, it seems, is to ask someone in person and pray they provide him with what he’s looking for. Josh quickly scribbles ask debby - alternates and shit on a sticky note and presses it to his wall, hoping he sees it the next morning and is reminded of what he has to do.
His ancient bed creaks in protest as he climbs on to the mattress, pulls the covers up to his chin and rolls his head to the right to look out his window.
The world outside is silent. Josh would surely hear the faraway static of a TV somewhere if they hadn’t been banned about two months ago. Now, the lights are off in every house he can see and the only sound he can hear is the soft ticking of a clock downstairs. The silence used to upset him, but now it’s become normal.
He turns over and stares at the jacket hanging from a hook on his door. It still has his nametag on it. Hello, my name is Joshua. And below that is his MCPD badge, glinting tauntingly in the moon’s glow. Tomorrow, he’d have to return to the same small desk and take even more calls. He’s only been on the job for one day - how could he do this for the rest of his life?
Josh sighs and tries to staunch the heavy flow of anxiety that’s coursing through him.
There is no hope for a good night’s sleep.