This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Saturdead on 2024-10-26 15:48:20+00:00.
The following Monday, I was called in to have a meeting with the sheriff. I could tell it was a serious conversation; there was very little in the way of jokes and jabs. Instead I was asked, politely, to sit down. I knew there was gonna be trouble. Sheriff Mason leaned back in his chair with a sigh.
“Heard you almost got Nick killed,” he said. “He ain’t happy about it.”
He tapped the answering machine on his desk. Who the hell even has one of those anymore?
“Maybe we ought to deal with the deeper issues first,” I countered. “Like that thing at the school collecting heads.”
“You think we oughta do something about that, huh? Well little miss krispy kreme, there’s a whole lot of sugar goin’ round this town, and I ain’t got enough pac mans to gobble it all.”
He got out of his chair and painstakingly walked around his desk, sitting down next to me. I could smell the beard oil from his walrus mustache.
“You ain’t even scratched the surface yet. But you gotta calm down. And for you to calm down, I gotta pull you off patrol.”
Nick was paired up with a twitchy guy named Reggie. Reggie was in his early 40’s and had the shape of a badly drawn stick figure with a receding hairline. Apparently, he’d been working dispatch for three years, and now I was supposed to take over his position. I was to work on the phones back at the station for the foreseeable future.
I was put at a desk with a slightly newer computer, a headset, and a chatty coworker. The first time I met Charlotte, or Charlie for short, she was handling something I can only dream of understanding. The conversation went a little something like this;
“Sir. Sir! SIR! I don’t care how many arms you’ve found, you put them right back where you find them. And don’t go planting them like trees, that’s disrespectful.”
Charlie was energetic; like a cooped-up parakeet. She had trouble sitting still and wandered back and forth whenever she could afford to stretch her legs. She looked to be no more than 20, maybe 25, but she was closer to 40 and had two kids back home. The only thing that kinda gave it away was her nails. You could tell she used her hands a lot.
She introduced me to a lot of the basic systems. How to see and handle phone queues, what to take down on reports, standard protocols, that kinda stuff. I spent the first few days just watching her do the job and then slowly getting easier calls redirected to me.
Now, while we were officially taking calls for things like tips and wellness checks, we also got calls from the DUC people that the sheriff was working for. We had simple instructions when dealing with them; don’t ask questions. We were to do as we were told, and if we couldn’t, we patched them through to the sheriff.
As March dipped into April, I was getting pretty good at it. I had effectively replaced Reggie, who I could see drop by the station every now and then with Nick following suit. I tried to talk to them a couple of times, but Nick wasn’t having it. Reggie seemed like an eager puppy, just happy to get some attention, so every attempt I made to patch things up with Nick got swallowed up. I brought in donuts? Reggie was happy to talk about it, while Nick silently grabbed one in the background. I refilled the coffee machine? Reggie was happy to grab a cup, while Nick filled up his thermos. Every conversation starter I tried got derailed.
It was one of those times that prompted my first real conversation with Charlie. It was a dull Tuesday afternoon in between calls. Charlie was busy trying to make sense of her kid’s schedule for the week, scratching her head as she scrolled up and down on a second-hand iPad.
“What you doin’ out here anyway?” she asked. “You killed someone?”
“Why’d you ask?”
“Most folks that get here done do some dumb shit they can’t take back.”
“Sorta,” I nodded. “But I ain’t killed anyone.”
“You wanted to?”
“Wanted to what?”
“Kill someone.”
It was a strange question to be asked so casually. I just tilted my head at her, giving her a questioning look.
“Look, all’s I’m sayin’ is that if you gotta get deported to dipshit nowhere, population whatever, you might as well get your money’s worth. Whatever you did oughta get you somethin’, is all.”
I shook my head at her.
“It got me nothing.”
Charlie lit up with a grin, leaning across the room with her knuckles out. I tapped them.
“Fucked if we do, fucked if we don’t.”
Most of the calls I got were completely harmless. Someone locking themselves out of their house. A worried neighbor spotting a dog in a car. I even got the cat stuck in a tree call once.
But there were a couple of strange calls too. Most of them came from the DUC; the strange men-in-black kinda people that sheriff Mason had called in at the start of the year. One time they called in to check if anyone had reported any strange aerial sightings. Giant birds or insects, stuff like that. When I told them we hadn’t had anything like that, they hung up on me.
I got a few calls like that, most of them harmless or nonsensical. But given the kind of calls we could get from ordinary folks in Tomskog, it wasn’t that unusual.
Things took a pretty drastic turn when I got what seemed like a harmless call. By then, Charlie wasn’t patching them through to me or routing them; we had a 50-50 split on calls. Gave her more time to check her Facebook. I got a call from an older woman that I’d never talked to before. I didn’t recognize the name, but I could see she was registered to a Tomskog address.
“My son got me eight rubber ducks for my bathroom,” she explained. “But when I walked in this morning, there were twelve.”
“I’m sorry, what… there are too many rubber ducks, is that it?”
“Yes, I don’t know where they came from,” she explained. “I think someone broke in.”
“I see.”
I looked over at Charlie. Her ears must’ve perked up at ‘rubber duck’. She mouthed a silent ‘what the hell’ at me, and I just shrugged.
“Ma’am, unless this is some sort of immediate threat, I’ll ask to see if a patrol can stop by to look for damages later today. Please take some time to check the locks on your windows, alright?”
“I’m sorry,” the old woman laughed. “I’m sure it sounds ridiculous. But I’ve checked again and again, and there’s just… there’s too many of them.”
“Alright, I’ll see what we can do. You have a nice day now.”
According to our systems, one of our units was available. Seeing as how there was nothing else to do at the moment, I tagged them on the radio.
“Unit 115, this is dispatch, do you copy?”
“Nick here, whaddaya got?”
I was a bit startled. I hadn’t talked to the guy in weeks.
“Hey Nick,” I continued. “You doing alright?”
“Yeah,” he cut me short. “What’s the sitch?”
I explained the situation to him. He could barely keep himself from laughing, but I guess he figured anything was better than babysitting the Digman’s on yet another stakeout. So I got him and Reggie to check the old woman and her mysterious rubber ducks.
Now, this seemed innocent at the time. Just a fun anecdote. I spent most of that day talking to Charlie about everything ang nothing. She smoked at her desk, but she sat next to a window and was kind enough to tilt her head out when she exhaled. It was a nasty habit, but at least she smoked menthols. She loved the rubber duck story and had all kinds of follow-up questions about it. Her kids would definitely hear about it at family dinner – guaranteed.
Then she got a call. It was probably three, maybe four hours after the rubber duck call. I could tell it was serious; Charlie put out her cigarette and leaned forward, taking notes. She was talking to the DUC – they were the only ones who called in that Charlie never questioned.
As soon as the call ended, she ran up to the front doors and locked them. Then she started to go down the side of the room, checking that every window was closed and secured.
“Check the windows,” she said. “We gotta lock up.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said they’d get back to us. But until they do, we gotta lock up, and nothing gets in.”
We checked every room and made sure it was all locked up. There was no one else around, just me and Charlie. It was that time of day when the sun started to set, freezing an icy sheet over the melting snow outside; giving a crackling noise to every footstep. Temperatures were dipping fast, and even inside the station we had to put on jackets to keep the heat up. The radiators hadn’t worked for months. I decided to power through.
The next call that came through was routed to me. It was one of the DUC folks – you could tell by the extension on their phone. As soon as I clicked that receiver, the voice on the other end came through.
“Did you secure the station?”
“Yes, we… we locked all of it.”
“You need to take inventory,” he said. “Everything larger than a fist. Write it all down. Every single item, even if it is nailed to the wall.”
“That’s gonna take hours.”
“Then it’ll have to take hours!” he snapped back. “And when you’re done, you’re gonna do it again! And if a single thing on that list is out of line, you call me on this number immediately!”
If it …
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