Tales of the Intermezzo - Night Call A Transformers Universe Story copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen based on properties owned by Hasbro =========================================================================== "intermezzo - n. A brief entertainment between two acts of a play." - American Heritage Dictionary "I remember when, I remember I remember when I lost my mind..." the cellphone sang, somewhat tinnily, breaking through the rustling sound of the maple leaves that were starting to fall. "Yo, Ellie here," the phone's owner said as she thumbed "talk". It was about time to change the ringtone...Gnarls Barkley was getting played to death lately. For a moment there was nothing, and Ellie was about to write it off as butt dialing, but then there was a faint, "...hello?" "Yes? Who...wait..." she trailed off. The voice sounded familiar. Impossibly familiar. The dead place where she'd buried her hopes sparked to life. She stopped walking. "...El...?" the faint voice asked, and she pressed the phone against her hear to try to block out the suddenly way-too-loud sounds of Maine in the autumn. "Bri? Is that you?" she asked desperately, but all she heard was the distinct change in background hiss that indicated the connection had dropped. * * * * "Ellie, I know you want to believe he survived the crash," Maggie shook her head, "but they found his DNA in what little the fire didn't get. Brian's been dead for almost two years now, you need to move on!" "Yeah, yeah..." Ellie sighed, staring at her phone as if her will alone could make it ring again. November 4, 2004...the worst day of her life. It had been raining, Brian was driving at night, his car went through a guiderail and down a steep hill, hitting the propane storage tank of someone's vacation cabin. Whole place burned down despite the rain. Not even enough left to bury, an empty casket at a funeral that took place at the church where they'd planned to get married once Brian finished his degree. "I remember wh...." Ellie fumbled the phone open. "Brian?" "...no," a woman's voice replied. "Is this a bad time?" "Er, no, ma. It's just been a weird day." "You've got to change that ringtone!" Maggie whispered, and Ellie rolled her eyes. * * * * "If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forg..." Ellie finished digging the phone out of her too-tight pants pocket and opened it. "Ellie here." "El...they...did...me..." Brian's voice rasped, the words disjointed. "Who? Did what? Who is this?" Ellie demanded, her voice rising until she was practically screaming at the phone, heedless of the stares she was drawing from the other people in the coffee shop. She glared at the phone, the caller ID was 000-000-0000, which was her phone's way of saying it couldn't figure out the ID. While she glared at it, the caller hung up. * * * * "El, I'm not supposed to do this without a warrant," Rod protested. "And right now, it's just a few prank calls. Really TASTELESS prank calls, but the ones you copied to voice mail didn't sound threatening. Just... creepy." "Rod, Brian was your friend. Hell, he told me you were his first pick for Best Man. If this is a prank, you owe it to his memory to find out who's doing this and stop it. But if..." she paused, a lump suddenly blocking the words from coming out. "But if it's really him, we really need to find him," Rod nodded. "El, I pushed every contact I have in the FBI...which ain't much, I'll admit...to see if there was any way that wasn't him. For a while I even thought he'd been stuck in witness protection for some reason, but I'm pretty sure the reason I never found anything was that there wasn't anything to find. Car accidents happen. Sometimes they're as spectacular as you see in the movies, but Brian didn't have a stunt double." Ellie put a hand on Rod's shoulder. "I know, I know...I'm sorry I have to rip open all your emotional scars too, but even if this is just some sick bastard playing games with me, we need to find out where the calls are coming from. And you have the tools for the job, even if it's bending the rules a little." Rod snorted. "More than a little. This isn't 'go to jail' level, but it could still cost me...ah, hell. Okay. I'll set it up. Just promise me you won't trigger the trace on anyone BUT our mystery caller, okay?" "Promise." * * * * Rod and Ellie got out of the car and stared up at the cell tower standing back from the highway. "Is this it?" Ellie asked. Rod shrugged. "I still can't find an active number on the call, but all six of the calls you captured came from this tower's cell. And it's weird, there's really no permanent residents around here, this is just one of those towers they put in a couple years ago to make sure you wouldn't lose signal while on I-95. I mean, I can see calling from the road to be harder to trace, but why do it from the same stretch of road every time?" "Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend..." Ellie's ringtone could barely be heard over the noise of passing cars, and she started walking into the cleared right of way between the road and the tower as she answered. "Hello?" she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. She just had a feeling that this wasn't mom, or Maggie, or anyone alive. "...almost...there..." Brian's voice stumbled over the words. "I'm here," it added. Ellie reeled, staggering towards the tower. "Where are you?" "Buried..." was the whispered reply. * * * * I-95 was blocked off in both directions as Federal and state law enforcement set about investigating what had been revealed to be a crime scene. The foundations of a cell phone transmission tower were being broken up, after ground-penetrating radar had confirmed a human-shaped anomaly in the concrete. The highway patrol men turning cars back didn't pay any special notice to the weatherbeaten yellow and black Camaro that was part of the slow parade of diverted vehicles, which was exactly how that Camaro preferred it. He'd gotten close enough to see what he needed to. Bumblebee supposed that once he'd figured out the significance of the strange activity on that late spring night about one and a half planetary orbits ago, there were simpler ways to alert the authorities covertly. But this way had been...amusing. And informative. Perhaps a little cruel, he was starting to realize, given that the natives didn't really believe in spark/body duality. Humans did not survive the destruction of their bodies, in keeping with most organic lifeforms, but he'd been misled by their media into thinking that such survival was perfectly normal, if rare. Maybe it was an ability they'd lost since the ancient reports of it in their texts? Something Ratchet would certainly be interested in researching further. The dead human, Brian, had been dumped into the foundations of the communications tower while he still had his "cellphone" on his person. It had been trivially easy for Bumblebee to break into its still-functioning processors and copy all the information before the device inevitably broke down under the heat and pressure of the concrete. It was quite some time before Bumblebee recognized the significance of what had been done to Brian and ascertained that no one had removed the decaying body from its stony tomb. Simple enough to fake a message from Brian's spark to the most commonly contacted person listed in his cellphone's memory, although stringing together the right words was sometimes challenging. His own audio vocalizer was still horribly damaged, but there was nothing wrong with his radio transmitters, and it was really Ellie's phone doing the talking, using samples of Brian's voice. He was glad that he'd been able to help, if only in a small way. His main goal on Earth, the AllSpark, remained resolutely out of reach. But he'd learned enough about the strange organic saponts of this planet to know that they valued something they called closure, and knowing the status of the bodies of their dead seemed to help with that. Satisfied from his long distance scans that the human equipment had successfully located Brian's remains, Bumblebee headed for the indicated detour route. He needed to get to California now, there had been some suspicious signals that could be masked AllSpark energy.... ============================================================================= Author's Notes: This started as pondering how the "modern ghost story" about getting phone calls from a telephone wire that had fallen across a grave might be updated for the cellular phone era. A friend suggested making it into a Tale of the Intermezzo, and I mulled over ways that could work...at one point I considered having a vital fragment of Hot Spot landing against a cell tower after he blew up in the G2 comic, but decided it wasn't creepy enough. I forget all the steps in the chain, but I ended up realizing it could work as something done by Bumblebee during his time on Earth before meeting Sam Witwicky in the 2007 movie. All the ringtone songs were on the Billboard top ten during the fall of 2006 (when this story is set), and the human characters are named after people from the Twilight Zone episode "Night Call" that adapted the original "phone wire on a grave" story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Call And yes, there's a lot of unanswered questions in the story: who killed Brian, why did they kill him and go to such lengths to hide the body and then make it look like an accident, why was there a span of several months between the "accident" and the body being dumped, why did Brian get to keep his cellphone during that time, were the people who faked his death different from the ones who killed him, etc? They will remain unanswered, at least for now, MUAHAHAHA!