Death Role

The Call Center

The endless ringing and the auto-connection of the phone line had already begun to drive Rose crazy. She wasn’t cut out for working in a call center and hoped to be leaving the job soon.The one saving grace was the rare conversations she had with bonafide crazy people. Folks who wanted to buy phone lines for their cats, elderly citizens wanting a bit of company to fight back their loneliness, and the dirty perverts who talked about sex in phone terms.

She returned from lunch and donned her headset.

The day had begun like any other, slow and uninteresting. But halfway through her shift the callers had started to change. It was as though all completely insane people never woke up before noon and when they did, they called her.

Almost immediately after signing on, a call came in. Her computer pulled open the related account automatically and Rose did a quick scan of the profile notes for any red flags.

“Thank you for calling Midway Connected, this is Rose. How may I assist you today?” she spewed robotically.

“Rose, a lovely name,” a male caller said.

“Thank you. To whom am I speaking?” The account said Adam Barnum, but training dictated that she ask.

“I thought I was Adam, but I think I’m changing into someone else,” the man said.

Another one on drugs. How do they even find our number? Rose thought. “How may I assist you today?” she asked once more, still politely but with a smidgen of impatience.

The man gave a long, drawn out sigh. Rose watched as the seconds added up on her call time, something they were supposed to keep at a minimum. “Well, Rose,” Adam finally said, “you can start by getting this thing THE FUCK out of me!”

Even though she was certain the caller had said something was inside of him, she stuck to her script. “Sir, if you can give me more information on the issue you are facing, I’d be glad to help.”

“It started in my fingers and I can feel it moving through my body, like a wave. Like a mother fucking wave! I’m losing control of things. Like, I think I just pissed myself.”

“This isn’t emergency services and I can’t transfer you. Please hang up and dial 911, sir,” Rose added the sir for good measure because some of her calls would be recorded for quality monitoring. A hallucinating man wouldn’t cost her this job, no matter how shitty it was.

“I’m going to stay on the line with you because my fingers don’t work anymore so I can’t call anyone else. It’s in my chest now. This feeling. This thing. Please don’t hang up.”

Rose hoped this call was being recorded. It was the strangest one she’d ever had. “Do you need an ambulance? I could have someone send one.”

“No, I just…I need you to stay…on the…” The man’s voice trailed off and Rose heard the phone clatter as, she assumed, it hit the floor.

She ended the call and spun around in her chair. “Is anyone else getting weird calls?” she asked the sea of cubicles behind her. Those that weren’t busy with customers responded in turn.

“A man just witnessed a shooting while I was changing his cell phone plan,” a fellow employee answered.

“A women asked me if I could track her husband’s cell phone inside of their house because she was hiding from him and needed to know if she could escape,” the woman across the row from Rose said. “That’s pretty odd.”

“Why aren’t they calling the police?” Rose wondered aloud.

“An old lady I talked to said the lines were busy. She couldn’t get through,” another co-worker offered.

At that moment Rose’s manager came running into the room. A bloody napkin was wrapped around his right hand and he gripped it tightly. Blood ringed the cuffs of his shirt sleeves.

Rose ran to him. “Russell, what happened?”

He made his way to the unoccupied cubicle next to hers and sat in the chair there. “A man in the parking lot bit me. Can you get the first aid kit from the break room?”

She did as he asked and they wrapped it in gauze and tape, but the wound looked like it needed the help of a doctor and stitches.

“You should go to the hospital,” she said as she closed the kit. Blood had already begun to soak through the thin gauze.

“The blood will clot soon. I’m going to sit here for a bit longer. You can get back on the phone.” Russell leaned forward in the chair, rested his head on the desk and closed his eyes.

Reluctantly, Rose returned to work. She wasn’t too concerned about Russell, but she did think that something was very wrong outside the walls of the call center. It seemed unfair to sit on a phone while others were clearly struggling to survive.

Her phone rang and she picked up the call. Again the customers profile popped up on Rose’s computer screen. The center took calls from all over the state, but the address on file for this phone number was in her city. She gave her usual greeting, but no words were returned from the other end of the line, only sobbing.

Rose was thinking of something to say to comfort the caller, but nothing, not even a scripted response came to mind. Then, a shadow appeared above her. In the screen of her computer she could see Russell’s reflection. He was standing right behind her. Too close to her.

He reached for her clumsily with his pale and bloodied hands. She moved to duck under the desk but the cord of her headset kept her from making any progress. Still the caller weeped in her ears.

“Help me!” she screamed to the room, to the caller.

To her coworkers, her cries were lost amidst the chaos they were hearing in their own headsets.

To the caller, she now was not alone in dying.