My
phone is always set to vibrate. Two things I do each night before I
head to bed are: A) Make sure the thing's plugged in to charge, and B)
Make sure the volume's set to zero, just in case someone from work tries
to call me. I couldn't even tell you what my ringtone sounds like. I
might have heard it once when I left my sound on by mistake.
So you can imagine my surprise when the loud buzz of the emergency alert system pierced the veil of sleep around 4:30 in the morning. It's a frightening sound by design, and I struggled to ignore it. We get an Amber Alert every year or so, but they're always so far from home I've never heard of the towns listed in them.
Nothing interesting like that ever happens in Summerdown Grove, so you grow to forget them if you can.
Fast forward a couple hours and I'm crawling out of bed to the sound of my neighbor pounding on my front door. He asked me if I got the message. He said everybody else on our block got it too, and nobody could get a straight answer from the cops. He was gathering people in the bomb shelter beneath his basement, as he put it, "just in case."
I slammed the door in his face and stumbled back to bed, picking up my phone on the way. The screen flipped on without a lock, my stormy wallpaper replaced with a black screen and a white text box labeled "PRESIDENTIAL ALERT."
It read:
"SMMRDWN GRV AREA: TAKE SHELTR IN BSMENT, DO NT OPN DOORS R ANSWR PHNE, TRST N ONE"
I don't have a basement, so I'm cowering under my bed and tapping this out on my shitty phone keyboard. It's hailing now and the power's out, but I can't hear anything else unusual. The neighbor called a couple times, but I just don't know what to think.
Especially since the alert was dated for tomorrow night...
So you can imagine my surprise when the loud buzz of the emergency alert system pierced the veil of sleep around 4:30 in the morning. It's a frightening sound by design, and I struggled to ignore it. We get an Amber Alert every year or so, but they're always so far from home I've never heard of the towns listed in them.
Nothing interesting like that ever happens in Summerdown Grove, so you grow to forget them if you can.
Fast forward a couple hours and I'm crawling out of bed to the sound of my neighbor pounding on my front door. He asked me if I got the message. He said everybody else on our block got it too, and nobody could get a straight answer from the cops. He was gathering people in the bomb shelter beneath his basement, as he put it, "just in case."
I slammed the door in his face and stumbled back to bed, picking up my phone on the way. The screen flipped on without a lock, my stormy wallpaper replaced with a black screen and a white text box labeled "PRESIDENTIAL ALERT."
It read:
"SMMRDWN GRV AREA: TAKE SHELTR IN BSMENT, DO NT OPN DOORS R ANSWR PHNE, TRST N ONE"
I don't have a basement, so I'm cowering under my bed and tapping this out on my shitty phone keyboard. It's hailing now and the power's out, but I can't hear anything else unusual. The neighbor called a couple times, but I just don't know what to think.
Especially since the alert was dated for tomorrow night...
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