The Last Call

Eli Navarro is the calmest voice on the overnight floor of a Phoenix emergency communications centre, and since a call he could not save last July he has barely slept. Then line nine rings: an old trunk that has been dead for fifteen years. The man on it is trapped in a fire that has not started yet. Every night after that, one call comes through from someone living their last minutes tomorrow, and Eli has twenty-four hours to be there before it happens. He learns the rules the hard way: one call a night, nobody else can hear it, and the recordings come back silent. A retired dispatcher tells him to stop answering before it calls his own. Then, at 3:40 one morning, the voice on line nine is his wife Nora, the engineer he has been separated from for four months, trapped in a flooding tunnel under the building where the line began. This is a work of fiction. The emergency centre, the telephone company, the stormwater authority and every person in it are invented. The series contains deaths by accident, crime and natural disaster, always off-mic and non-graphic. If you ever have an emergency, call your local emergency number.