Junction City Stories II
Chapter Seven: Answering the Call
Part I: “Welcome to the Family”
Valori Ambulance Incorporated presented itself like a shrine to patriotic delusion. The building itself squatted on the edge of an industrial park, a concrete monolith lacquered in the hues of an overzealous Fourth of July parade. Red, white, and a very proprietary blue plastered every available surface. Their ambulance fleet gleamed like chrome-encrusted hymnals, each adorned with an American flag large enough to cover a small coup d’état. Eagles, stars, stripes, and slogans were stenciled onto everything that didn’t move quickly enough to escape.
The official motto, embossed on plaques in the lobby and cross-stitched into corporate PowerPoints, was WE’RE FAMILY HERE. Employees had long since translated it into its true semantic value: we reserve the right to infantilize, berate, and emotionally blackmail you with the same dexterity as your parents did. The phrase became talismanic, trotted out whenever someone complained about their hours, their pay, or the suspicious way promotions kept alighting on the shoulders of sycophants.
Georgina arrived on her first morning with new shoes, a sensible notebook, and the kind of idealism that corporations like Valori consume as an amuse-bouche. She had trained as a dispatcher with earnest discipline, memorizing protocols, simulating scenarios, and teaching herself to breathe slowly while strangers hyperventilated through the phone. Her goal was not glory but usefulness – to be that invisible hinge between crisis and salvation.
The dispatch center smelled faintly of burnt coffee and industrial disinfectant, the twin perfumes of municipal necessity. A grid of gray desks bristled with monitors, headsets, and sticky notes, while fluorescent bulbs hummed with bureaucratic discontent overhead. On the far wall, a clock ticked with the erratic confidence of a drunk conductor.
Martin James, Operations Manager, greeted her with a smile as warm as a tax audit. His handshake was dry, precise, and approximately as comforting as a stapler. Beside him, HR representative Brian Hughson grinned in the solicitous manner of a man who had learned to weaponize geniality.
“We’re family here,” Martin intoned, as though reading scripture.
“We take care of each other,” Brian echoed, voice polished like a company email template.
Georgina, still equipped with optimism’s fragile armor, nodded. She believed them. Or, at least, believed that belief was the correct social response.
She was good. Almost indecently good.
Within her first week, she fielded a call from a frantic teenager who found his father collapsed on the bathroom floor. Georgina’s tone was steady, almost hypnotic, as she instructed the boy in compressions. She paced his panic into rhythm, coaxed him into counting aloud until the paramedics arrived. Later, the ER physician called the dispatch office to commend “Whoever the hell was on the line,” crediting her with saving the man’s life.
Another day, a woman hyperventilating from a panic attack dialed 911 convinced she was dying. Georgina talked her back from the brink with a mixture of clinical precision and maternal cadence. When the ambulance arrived, the woman was breathing steadily enough to apologize for the trouble. Georgina didn’t consider it trouble. She considered it her vocation, each voice on the line a filament she could hold and not let break.
Her colleagues noticed. New hires orbited her desk as if she exuded gravity, watching the choreography of her keystrokes, the serene tilt of her head as she listened. Supervisors praised her “calm under pressure.” A lieutenant from the sheriff’s office stopped by to shake her hand. Valori’s internal newsletter printed her photo beside a caption about ‘American Spirit’, reducing her competence into PR fodder.
Georgina, characteristically earnest, was almost embarrassed by the attention. She didn’t want to be a poster child. She wanted to be a quiet engine of good.
But “family,” as defined by Valori Ambulance Inc., resembled less a nurturing household and more a reenactment of Lord of the Flies staged in cubicles. Gossip thrived like mold in the damp corners of the break room. Rumors mutated faster than bacteria on a hospital floor, metastasizing particularly around the subject of promotions.
Supervisors weaponized “coaching sessions” as opportunities for ritualized humiliation. A single typo in a call log could blossom into a fifteen-minute-long monologue about “personal accountability.” Errors were catalogued like heirlooms, passed down in gossip chains, each retelling a little sharper, a little more exaggerated.
And then there was Ashton.
Ashton considered himself the alpha wolf of dispatch. His supervisory style combined the subtlety of a jackhammer with the emotional intelligence of a damp rag. When irritated, he favored screaming matches punctuated by punching the back of someone’s chair, a practice he believed demonstrated authority. Employees joked about wearing helmets to meetings, though only half in jest.
Peer support, in Valori’s warped cosmology, was handled by people like Ashton. If you confessed anxiety, burnout, or despair, Ashton might lean back in his chair, smirk, and tell you to “toughen up.” Sometimes he would punctuate the counsel with a cheerful desk-punch, as if to literally beat resilience into the furniture.
Yet management adored him. Martin and Brian spoke glowingly of Ashton’s “passion” and “high standards,” corporate euphemisms for loud, abusive, and too legally risky to fire.
The real obscenity of Valori, however, was not the gossip or the screaming, it was the invoices.
Because Valori had secured a monopoly over the tri-county area (through what one imagines was a mixture of backroom politicking, selective donations, and occult ritual), they charged whatever they pleased. A one-mile jaunt to the hospital – no medical service provided, just the privilege of occupying a stretcher – could cost upward of $1,400.
Meanwhile, the two EMTs performing the chauffeuring earned approximately $28 between them. The company cheerfully itemized every possible “service fee”: “Emergency Apparatus Deployment,” “Community Readiness Surcharge,” “Oxygen Availability Assurance.” In practice, patients paid for a ride in a glorified Uber while EMTs pocketed pennies more than minimum wage.
The disconnect bred a culture of corrosive cynicism. EMTs laughed darkly about “gold-plated mileage.” Dispatchers muttered about “platinum-tier stretchers.” Between calls, employees amused themselves by lampooning patients’ maladies, reciting gallows humor with the zeal of trench poets.
Georgina, whose original intent had been to help, found herself caught between admiration for her craft and disgust at the machinery that surrounded it.
Her complaints began modestly. She raised an eyebrow at Ashton’s theatrics, wrote a tactful email to Brian about “workplace civility.” She mentioned, almost apologetically, that gossip was undermining morale.
The responses were uniformly soporific.
“We’ll look into it.”
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
“We are committed to a healthy workplace.”
Martin and Brian wielded these phrases like amulets, muttering them with the weary cadence of men who had discovered the incantation that kept lawsuits at bay.
Nothing changed.
And slowly, Georgina began to feel the rot seep inward.
Part II: The Edifice Cracks
Work at Valori was a slow-motion exorcism of Georgina’s optimism. Her first months had been buoyed by adrenaline and competence, but competence in this place was like bringing a violin to a slaughterhouse: elegant, but destined to be drowned out by the squeals.
The gossip grew sharper, barbed like fishhooks. One colleague confided, sotto voce, that she’d heard Georgina was “angling for a promotion” by tattling about Ashton. Another swore Georgina had been “crying in the bathroom” and therefore was unstable. The truth was duller – she had merely washed her hands – but gossip required embroidery. Each retelling added color until Georgina, unbeknownst to herself, had become the tragic heroine of a soap opera that played out at every lunch table.
When she confronted Ashton – politely, cautiously – about his habit of pounding chairs, he responded with a smile that could have stripped paint.
“Family roughhousing,” he said, flexing his knuckles against her desk as though to demonstrate his thesis. Her heart beat with the sick rhythm of knowing she had entered a funhouse where violence was reframed as play.
The peer support program was introduced in glossy pamphlets printed on cardstock thick enough to signal gravitas. Confidential help, from colleagues who care, the slogan crooned, adorned with stock images of diverse, toothy smiles.
In practice, peer support was a tribunal staffed by the most toxic employees in the building. Ashton, naturally, was a “representative,” as was Cassie, the reigning queen of dispatch gossip, capable of destroying reputations in fewer syllables than it takes to order coffee.
Georgina, in a moment of desperation, scheduled a meeting. She explained she was experiencing anxiety, trouble sleeping, difficulty shaking off the cruelty of the office. Ashton leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and laughed.
“You’ve got to toughen up. This isn’t yoga class, this is dispatch. People die if you screw up. Grow thicker skin or get out.”
Cassie nodded, eyes alight with Schadenfreude.
“She’s sensitive,” Cassie later whispered in the break room, turning Georgina’s vulnerability into communal entertainment.
The “support” Georgina received was indistinguishable from mockery. Her earnestness had become a kind of sport.
Still, she believed – naively, stubbornly – that escalation would work. Systems, after all, existed to correct dysfunction.
She wrote detailed emails to Martin and Brian, enumerating incidents with timestamps, witnesses, and transcripts. She described Ashton’s outbursts, the retaliatory gossip, the corrosive mockery. Her prose was meticulous, professional, devoid of theatrics.
Martin replied within the hour, “Thank you for your thoughtful input. We’ll look into this matter promptly.”
Brian chimed in the next morning, “We appreciate your candor. Your well-being is our top priority.”
Weeks passed. Nothing shifted except the calendar. Ashton’s volume increased, as though fueled by her complaints. Cassie sharpened her gossip into daggers, gleefully passing along that “Georgina’s on thin ice.”
Georgina reread the emails at night, as though seeking reassurance in their hollow words. They sounded reasonable; they promised action. It was like clutching a placebo. Sugar pills of corporate language meant to soothe without effect.
Desperation eventually propelled her further up the ladder, to Nick, the Chief Operating Officer, Valori’s crown prince of platitudes. His office, located in the executive wing where carpeting was plush enough to stifle sound, smelled faintly of leather and money.
Nick’s demeanor was practiced benevolence, the sort of calm one cultivates by never personally dialing 911. Georgina sat across from him, back straight, palms damp. She explained everything: the harassment, the punitive gossip, the futility of peer support.
Nick listened with the gravitas of a priest at confession. When she finished, he folded his hands, sighed, and said, “I’m so sorry you’ve experienced this. We take these concerns very seriously. You’ve done the right thing by coming to me. I promise, we’re going to make changes.”
For a moment, Georgina’s chest loosened. Someone in authority had finally acknowledged her suffering.
But promises, like dispatch signals, are only useful if followed by action.
Months later, nothing had changed. Ashton still pounded chairs like war drums. Cassie still spit venom with surgical glee. Martin and Brian still sent their bureaucratic lullabies. Nick, having dispensed his absolution, had evaporated into meetings and boardrooms.
Rick and the CEO were rumored to be descending from Olympus to grace the dispatch center with their benevolent presence. This sparked a flurry of panic not unlike preparing for a papal visit, except instead of holy relics, the relics here were Styrofoam cups, gum wrappers, and enough cigarette butts to construct a nicotine mosaic.
Brian, ever the toady, decided the mess in the flower beds was unacceptable. He could have asked maintenance. He could have organized the overnight shift, who had created the landfill in the first place. But efficiency was not the point, humiliation was. So he singled out Georgina.
“Hey, Georgie,” he said, with the faux camaraderie of a frat boy about to initiate a pledge, “Be a team player and tidy up out front. We’ve got important guests coming, and we want to show them our best side.”
So Georgina, dispatcher and lifesaver, found herself crouching in the dirt, fishing cigarette butts out of mulch, her latex gloves blackened with the oily residue of other people’s addictions. Her headset training had not included this. Her job description had not mentioned “groundskeeping.”
As she knelt among the dandelions, she thought bitterly that this was the Valori family ethos distilled to its purest form: exploit the competent, demean the earnest, and make sure the rot was someone else’s responsibility to clean up.
The human body, when asked to absorb prolonged absurdity, eventually revolts. Georgina’s began its rebellion quietly.
First came the insomnia. She lay awake listening to the ghostly echo of supervisors yelling at her colleagues, replaying their words like a broken reel. Then the nausea, arriving every morning before work, a faithful herald of dread. Her shoulders ached as though clenched in perpetual defense, her stomach clenched at the thought of walking through Valori’s front doors.
She found herself weeping in her car before shifts, pressing tissues into her eyes until they looked passably normal. She ate little, finding food repulsive, as if sustenance were incompatible with her deteriorating psyche.
On one particularly bleak night, she contemplated the inventory of her kitchen with a dangerous curiosity. The pills, the knives, the gas stove. The thought terrified her. She dialed urgent care the next day.
The urgent care clinician, a weary woman with kind eyes and the posture of someone who had delivered too many bad-news scripts, asked Georgina a sequence of administrative questions.
“Would you say this is work-related?”
Georgina, honest to a fault, nodded. Of course it was work-related. Her symptoms bloomed only in relation to Valori.
The clinician’s expression shifted, a flicker of pity crossing her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If it’s work-related, your employer’s insurance doesn’t cover it. You’d need to pursue it as a workplace injury claim.”
Georgina blinked, uncomprehending. “You mean…because my job made me suicidal, I don’t qualify for treatment under my insurance?”
“That’s correct,” the clinician said, her voice tightening with practiced regret.
It was an obscene arithmetic. Suffer because of work, be denied care by work, spiral further because of work. A Möbius strip of despair, signed and notarized by bureaucracy.
Martin and Brian, perhaps sensing her unraveling, attempted a solution that was equal parts cynical and insulting. They offered her a promotion: Quality Control Supervisor. A modest pay bump, an upgraded cubicle, the poisoned chalice of responsibility without power.
The offer was presented as benevolence, framed as recognition of her “leadership qualities.” In reality, it was an attempt to absorb her complaints into complicity. Supervisors did not question the system, they enforced it.
Georgina smiled faintly, shook her head, and declined. “No, thank you.”
Her refusal was quiet, but in its quietness there was rebellion. She would not become Ashton. She would not inherit Martin’s vacancy or Brian’s oily cheer. She wanted change, not a shinier seat at the same rotten table.
The look on their faces – confusion bordering on affront – was almost satisfying.
But satisfaction is not salvation.
Her mental state deteriorated with terrifying velocity. She stopped answering personal texts. She canceled plans with friends, claiming fatigue. She stared at walls for long stretches, mind an echo chamber of exhaustion.
At work, she performed with mechanical precision, still saving lives on the line while hers slipped through her fingers. Her colleagues noted she was “quiet lately,” speculating whether she was being “phased out.” The gossip mill churned, oblivious to her private collapse.
Georgina drafted resignation letters she never sent. She toyed with the idea of filing a lawsuit, then dismissed it as futile. What chance did one dispatcher have against a corporate leviathan that billed $1,400 for glorified taxi rides?
Late at night, she returned to the dangerous inventory of her kitchen. The pills, the knives, the stove. Each item whispered a form of escape.
Valori Ambulance treated HIPAA with the same reverence most people reserve for spam emails. Patient confidentiality was less a law than a suggestion, one that could be waved away whenever convenient – especially if the police were involved.
Cops called dispatch constantly, fishing for details. Who overdosed at which address? Who called about domestic violence? Wasn’t there a heart attack at that trailer park last night? Officially, Georgina was supposed to deny these inquiries. Unofficially, the culture was clear: help the boys in blue.
Supervisors encouraged it. “We’re all on the same team,” Martin liked to say, his voice syrupy with false solidarity. “They’re just trying to keep the community safe.”
So information flowed freely. Names, addresses, medical histories – all parceled out like gossip at a church picnic. HIPAA violations were baked into the workflow, normalized into routine.
Georgina felt a twinge each time she relayed private details, as though complicit in a small betrayal. The irony was bitter: she was forbidden from seeking care for her own work-related trauma, but she was required to violate federal law to aid local law enforcement.
At Valori, legality was flexible, morality negotiable, and patient privacy just another cigarette butt in the flower bed. Someone else’s problem to pick up, when the right eyes were watching.
Part III: The Cost of Caring
Suicide rarely announces itself with brass fanfare. It arrives instead like a slow leak, invisible until the floor buckles. Georgina’s descent was incremental, but by now she was fluent in despair.
She marked her days by how little she ate, how much she wept in secret, how frequently she considered the sheer convenience of no longer existing. It wasn’t melodrama, it was mathematics. A calculation performed again and again, until the equation resolved itself into inevitability.
She declined the promotion. She declined further conversations with Martin and Brian. She declined, in the truest sense of the word.
On a Tuesday night, after another twelve-hour shift of fielding panicked voices while Ashton punched chairs in the background, Georgina went home, locked the door, and made a choice.
The next morning, Georgina did not arrive for her shift. Her absence was noted not with concern but with speculation.
“She probably got fired,” Cassie said between bites of vending-machine pretzels.
“I heard she just stopped showing up,” offered another dispatcher, eager to feed the mill.
“Figures. She couldn’t hack it. Sensitive type.”
Her death was not announced internally. Valori Ambulance did not issue a statement, did not drape a black ribbon over her desk, did not even acknowledge her existence. Silence was cheaper than flowers.
When news trickled in from the outside – someone’s cousin had seen an obituary, someone else muttered about suicide – the staff reacted with a cocktail of disbelief and pettiness.
“Are you sure? Maybe it was someone else with the same name.”
“If she did, it’s because she couldn’t handle the job. Weakness kills.”
The gossip moved on within a week.
Martin and Brian, coached by HR, offered a sanitized narrative to anyone who asked: Georgina had “moved on to other opportunities.”
Nick, the COO, made a point of telling the board that turnover in dispatch was “within industry norms.”
Her personnel file was quietly archived. Her name was never spoken aloud in meetings. The machinery churned on, lubricated by silence and denial.
Meanwhile, Valori expanded its fleet, slapping fresh vinyl decals of American flags across new ambulances. A banner in the lobby proclaimed VALORI: WHERE FAMILY MEANS EVERYTHING.
No one mentioned that family, in this case, had eaten one of its own.
Outside Valori’s walls, Georgina’s absence rippled through quieter channels. Friends left unanswered voicemails, their voices tight with confusion. Her parents, bewildered by the lack of any employer acknowledgement, called the office only to be told she “wasn’t with the company anymore.”
Her apartment sat still, a shrine to interrupted life. On her desk lay drafts of resignation letters, unsent. On her fridge, takeout menus she never used. The ordinary detritus of survival, rendered tragic by incompletion.
No plaque, no ceremony, no candlelight vigil. Just absence. Absolute, unglamorous, irrevocable.
At dispatch, new hires filled Georgina’s chair. They learned the ropes quickly: save lives over the phone, endure Ashton’s tantrums, smile when Cassie dissected their reputations. They, too, were told they were “family.”
If Georgina’s ghost lingered at all, it was not in solemn memory but in offhand comments.
“Remember that one girl who quit? Georgina? Didn’t last long.”
“Oh, yeah. Too much empathy. Couldn’t take the heat.”
Her name became shorthand for fragility, a cautionary tale twisted into company folklore.
Meanwhile, ambulances continued ferrying patients one mile for $1,400, EMTs splitting scraps of pay, dispatchers numbing themselves with gallows humor. The machinery of exploitation roared on, fueled by lives both inside and outside its walls.
If one were to drive past Valori Ambulance Inc. on a clear afternoon, the parking lot would gleam with SUVs adorned with patriotic decals. The flag would snap crisply in the wind, visible from the highway. To the casual observer, it would look like a beacon of civic virtue, a place where ordinary heroes saved lives.
No passerby would guess that within those walls, a young woman once tried to save others, only to be consumed by the very family she had joined.
The building would keep standing, indifferent and banal, a mausoleum disguised as an office. And Georgina – bright, competent, idealistic Georgina – would remain absent, her nonexistence unacknowledged, her story buried under paperwork and pretense.
Part IV: Heroes Wanted: Apply Within
Two months after Georgina’s quiet vanishing, Valori Ambulance hosted a recruitment event in the local civic center. A banner hung over the folding tables: “JOIN THE VALORI FAMILY: ANSWER THE CALL TO HEROISM.”
The tablecloths were red, white, and blue. Plastic bowls of Tootsie Rolls sweated in the fluorescent light. A looping slideshow played on a projector: stock photos of smiling EMTs hoisting anonymous patients, interspersed with slogans like SERVE WITH PRIDE and BE THE DIFFERENCE.
Nick, the COO, gave a keynote speech that could have been repurposed from a car dealership launch. “We’re not just a company. We’re a family. We support one another. We serve our community with unmatched dedication. At Valori, you’re more than an employee, you’re a hero.”
No mention of Georgina, of course. She had been metabolized into silence, her absence the only unspoken word in the room.
Applicants filled out forms, dazzled by the rhetoric, oblivious to the attrition rate. When asked why they wanted to join, many said what Georgina once had: to help people.
The veterans behind the tables exchanged knowing glances. They had heard this script before.
After Georgina’s departure, HR announced a “revamped” peer support initiative. Ashton was not removed, he was promoted to Lead Peer Advocate. Cassie was tapped as Wellness Coordinator.
Their training consisted of a two-hour webinar on “active listening” that neither attended fully. The following week, they rolled out their first workshop: Resilience in the Workplace.
Ashton opened the session by slamming a chair into the wall. “Lesson one,” he barked, “Life’s tough. You gotta be tougher.”
Cassie handed out worksheets titled Gratitude Journals, encouraging staff to write down three things they loved about working at Valori. Those who submitted unsatisfactory pages were quietly noted as “negative” in HR files.
The program was hailed as a success in the quarterly newsletter: “Valori Prioritizes Employee Mental Health.”
A county inspector appeared one spring morning, clipboard in hand, eyes sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. Rumors flew that an anonymous complaint had been filed.
The inspector asked about long hours, harassment, and pay discrepancies. Martin and Brian escorted him around with choreographed cheer, offering coffee and bromide. Ashton kept his fists holstered for the day. Cassie smiled so sweetly she could have been auditioning for a toothpaste ad.
The inspector noted minor violations – an unplugged coffee pot, a missing Wet Floor sign – but seemed blind to the rot humming beneath. He checked boxes, nodded gravely, and left with the words: “Overall, compliance appears satisfactory.”
The building exhaled a collective sigh of relief. The farce had passed inspection.
A month later, the local paper ran a glowing feature on Valori Ambulance: “Everyday Heroes Keep Community Safe.” The article praised the company’s rapid response times, quoted Nick’s bland platitudes, and printed a large photo of an ambulance draped in patriotic decals.
There was no mention of predatory billing, no hint of dispatch gossip, no whisper of the employee who had once sat at the console and slowly withered.
Georgina had been successfully erased from the public record, her existence overwritten by propaganda.
In dispatch, the consoles never cooled. Calls streamed in, punctuated by Cassie’s acid whispers and Ashton’s thuds. New hires came and went, their faces bright, then dimmed, then replaced.
The gossip wheel spun eternally. Now it was some other new girl under scrutiny, her lunch choices dissected, her supposed ambitions speculated upon. Georgina’s name surfaced only occasionally, half-remembered.
“Didn’t we used to have someone named…Gina? Georgina?”
“Oh yeah. She quit. Couldn’t hack it.”
And with that, she was gone again.
On the wall of the dispatch center hung a motivational poster, newly installed. It showed a silhouetted figure standing on a mountain peak at sunrise, with the caption: “THE STRENGTH TO ENDURE ANYTHING.”
Below it, a dispatcher stifled a laugh, muttering under their breath, “Anything but this place.”
The phones rang on. The gossip buzzed. The chairs rattled under Ashton’s fists. Valori Ambulance Inc. marched forward, unbothered by the human cost, its flag snapping brightly in the wind as though in triumph.
And somewhere, in the silence left behind, Georgina remained – absent, erased, yet irrefutably real to anyone who had ever wondered what “family” truly meant.
