Twelve Minutes to Midnight

The headset hummed against Dana Okafor's ear like a held breath, the way it always did at 11:48, when the city outside the dispatch center thinned to a few stubborn cars and the radio chatter dropped to nothing. She was on her fourth coffee and her ninth hour, watching the wall of monitors throw their cold blue over the empty desks, when the call dropped into her queue with a soft electronic chirp. Nine-one-one, what's your emergency. She'd said it ten thousand times; the words had worn smooth as a stone in a river. But the breathing on the other end snagged her — fast, ragged, climbing toward panic — and underneath it, faint, was the same hum she felt in her own ear, the feedback of a headset pressed too close to a mouth.

"Listen to me," the woman said, and Dana's coffee stopped halfway to her lips. The voice was hers. Not similar, not close — hers, down to the catch she heard on her own recordings, the way she clipped the ends of her words when she was tired. "Dana. Don't talk, just listen, because we don't have time and I already wasted forty seconds I shouldn't have." The room felt suddenly very large and very quiet around her, the other two dispatchers leaning into their own calls forty feet away, oblivious, lit like figures in an aquarium. This is a prank, she thought, the explanation arriving smooth and immediate the way the easy ones do. Someone clipped my voice off the recorded line. But the woman was still talking, and she knew Dana's name, and she knew the coffee.

"You're holding the blue mug, the one with the chip on the handle. You haven't touched the call from the Westbrook overpass yet because the timestamp looks wrong to you. It isn't wrong." Dana set the mug down without deciding to. On her screen, three rows down, a pending call sat flagged from the Westbrook overpass, logged at 11:52 — four minutes in the future. She hadn't noticed it. She was certain she hadn't noticed it, and now she couldn't stop staring at it, the impossible little number glowing patient and serene among the others.

"In twelve minutes," the voice said, and it broke on the word, and hearing herself break did something to Dana that no stranger's terror ever had, "in twelve minutes from when this call connected, something happens here. In this room. I lived it. I'm calling from the other side of it and I am telling you it does not have to go the way it went, but you have to do exactly what I say and you have to start now. Look at the door behind you. Is it propped open?" Dana turned. The heavy security door to the stairwell, which was never, ever supposed to be open, stood propped six inches wide with a folded paper coffee cup, exactly the way she sometimes left it on a slow night so she could slip out for air without badging back in. She had not propped it open tonight. She was sure of that, too, the way she'd been sure about the call.

"Close it," her own voice begged in her ear, dropping to a whisper now, urgent and wet. "Close it and lock it and do not let anyone tell you it's nothing. Eleven minutes. Dana, please — the first thing that goes wrong, you'll think it's a coincidence. It isn't. None of it is. When the lights stutter, that's how you'll know I was telling the truth, and by then—" The line filled with a sound Dana would spend the rest of her life trying to un-hear, and then the overhead fluorescents flickered once, twice, and held.

The pending call from the Westbrook overpass began to ring, and the name on the incoming line was her own.