Call Mitch, Tom had said. Call Mitch when you get to the shelter.
She looked again at the four little doors set into the wall. Telephone, computer, radio, telegraph. How did a telegraph work, didn’t it need to be cabled into something? What was she supposed to do? She looked back at the binders she had arrayed, but did not want to revisit any of them. The last reading, the revelation of all that had been and all that yet must be, had nearly been more for her than she could bear.
She turned back to the four doors. The phone was dead with nothing to connect to. She resisted powering up the computer. If it worked, and it likely did, she would have access to Word and Excel, any unprinted files Tom had written, and digital family photographs. Far too many photographs, and she could not yet steel herself to have them there so near to her fingers’ touch, one click away from seeing all the loved ones who now were lost to her.
Of course there would be no Internet, no Skype. Not ever again. The computer was a tomb, and she refused to violate it.
But there was still the radio, and there was the telegraph. Which would be easier?
She stretched, then bent to look at the binders once again. Her limbs were stiff and a latent fire burned in toes and fingertips where her nerve endings had been. But now that she was moving once again, the pain was turning from liquid fire into a stiff mobility as the lactic acid crystals in her stretching muscles began to break apart.
One of the binders was entitled (t)ELEGRAPH / (m)ORSE / (e)LECTROMAGNETIC COILS. She lifted it, sifted through its schematics and was instantly overwhelmed. No. Instead, she decided on (r)ADIO / (c)ODE LISTS / (i)DAHO. Still waking from the dream, hoping that Tom had personalized something that she could connect with before she would be forced to learn the radio’s labyrinthine controls, Sophie began to read the second binder from the back.
Tom had written few notes for this particular sheaf of printouts. Apparently there were survivalist militia groups based in Idaho, Lightfoots and Border Corps and Constitutionalists, hard and competent men who were intractable in their own beliefs. Men who Tom did not seem to trust. But apparently, from his few notations on some of the printouts summarizing these groups and their facility locations, Tom must have believed that some of them might be the only viable barter and trade partners in a world where sex and food and shelter would become currencies, where women would be fought over, where warlords and migratory clans of…
This isn’t helping.
She flipped to the front and began to read how to operate the Grundig radio instead. If anyone was out there, she was going to find them.
All right. Sophie put down her Thermos and blew warm air between her fingers. I can do this.
She opened the shortwave radio’s aluminum faraday cage and pulled it out. The shield panel read “RADIO /// TRANSCEIV” in the same spray-painted stencils that Tom had used on the steel barrels which were situated outside the snow-closure gate of the waterfall canyon.
She pulled the Grundig out of its spring-sockets, and readied a new pair of lithium-ion batteries in case the current batteries were dead. If the contacts were corroded or if the batteries had ruptured, she would clean and replace them. She believed she had learned how.
Okay.
She flipped a switch, and a glaring white LED light came on. Wrong one. But it was good to know, the radio had an emergency flashlight embedded in its side. She flipped it off and hit a switch on the other edge. The radio came on. The redline in the power indicator whirred right up to three-quarters strength, batteries still operational.
Yes!
There was no sound coming out yet. She flipped the next page in the open binder and checked the radio’s speakers and connectors, all were solid. Turning the unit, she saw what the problem was and she felt a little ashamed at its obviousness: the volume was fine, the headphones were plugged in. She unplugged them, and a shrill, piercing cascade of white noise and static assailed her already-bloodied ears.
Cursing, she turned the volume down from 7.7 to 2.0. Static screams, pulses of electronic thunder and sibilant hisses, never-ending. Such was become the voice of the burning world.
She flipped the band selector, then looked again at Tom’s tape with the many arrow marks pasted carefully adjacent to the radio’s primary dial array — he had the default set to the citizens’ band at twenty-seven megahertz. But there would not be anything out there.
Taking in a deep breath and holding it, Sophie pulled out the notebook and the single pen she had found, then plugged the headphones back in and placed the foam ear-pad cushions over her still-ringing ears.
It was too quiet. She pushed the volume up to 2.5 then 3.0, and the low static murmur of nothing out there seemed to growl its approval.
So, then. It was time to start hunting for survivors.
She was still holding her breath. She couldn’t help it. She referred to the binder again, flipping to Tom’s list of resident National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Radio stations. If anyone from the government was still alive and somehow had the power and infrastructure remaining to broadcast, they would be out there on NOAA. Those stations were the country’s network of FCC Emergency Alert System broadcasters in case of any catastrophe. Hopefully, the radio dish and antenna above the waterfall were still intact. The alternatives, if the nuclear blasts’ shockwaves had rebounded down into the canyon and destroyed the array, did not bear thinking about.
Okay. You can’t help them, they can’t help you. You can figure out the microphone later if you find someone you need or want to talk to. Focus, Sophie. She breathed again into her trembling hands, then put her fingers back to the controls. She upped the volume to 3.5 and was good to go. Just listen. Take notes. Listen.
There were twenty-seven Colorado transmitting stations listed in Tom’s printout, starting at frequency 162.400. With power set to 300, it was time to go searching.
Dillon transmitter, 162.400-300, WFO Boulder. Nothing.
She used the fine tuning knob to crawl across the sub-decimal frequencies as slowly as she could, making certain that no opportunity for contact would be missed.
Durango, 162.425-300, WFO Grand Junction. Too far across the mountains, perhaps? She still did not quite understand the limitations of the shortwave radio’s range. And nothing.
Franktown, 162.450-300, WFO Boulder once again. Nothing.
Was she doing this right? She sighed and flipped through the binder, keeping her bandaged index finger marking the NOAA call sign page. There was too much information about linked repeaters, radio scanners, transceiver settings, short-wave propagation, QSL cards, VHF transmissions, Skywave propagation…
“Just tell me how the fuck to operate this thing,” she muttered. She gave up on the binder and crawled the frequencies a little further.
Mead-Longmont, 162.475-300. She gasped.
Was that a voice? A voice made of screams and static?
Her finger, still moving, sifted the fine tuner up and onward, over to 162.500. The human-like cries of static from Mead-Longmont went away.
“Damn it.”
She turned the volume up to 3.5, tuned back down to 162.475 to listen again. Nothing.
She waited. Turn the volume up. Louder. She held her breath.
Still nothing, only that inhuman cascade of static and silence. No cries for help, or anything else resembling a human voice.
Furious with herself, she wrote down the figures in the notebook. The pen’s ink was red, and the pen itself so old that the fill tube had yet to scratch more than a trace of red out across the page. She licked an unbandaged finger and touched it to the tip of the ballpoint, as if that would do any good. She was scratching at the paper more than she was writing, but the impression left on the page was still readable in the light.
Still nothing on 162.475. She would try there again later, when she had a better understanding of what the hell she was doing.
Next station on the list. She checked Tom’s table, saw that it would be 162.525-300 Fort Morgan, halfway to Colorado’s borders with Kansas and Nebraska. Fort Morgan was well out in truckers’ paradise, out there in what Sophie always thought of as the middle of nowhere. Too far, perhaps, to even try. What did it matter? She turned the dial —
“—eet Jesus, can anyone hear us? Help us, if you, if you are anywhere near us! God help us, please, we have at least six hundred wounded here and rad sickness triage, so many dying, children, babies, a woman just gave birth and now she’s gone, we don’t, we…”
A burst of static. And seconds later:
“—egging you, anyone, we’ve got, we’ve got one doctor and three nurses and seven emerg—”
Sophie pulled off the headphones, her mouth gaping open in a silent scream of disbelief.
“Oh God.” That was her own voice, in tears. Her breath was frantic. “Oh, oh God. No. Oh, no.”
She couldn’t do this. She was trying. But…
Okay, I can. But not all at once. Please.
“They’re all dying,” she was saying to herself, arguing with her fear. “Give them the honor of being there, even if they don’t know you’re there. Listen to them. If not now, when? When, Sophie?”
They were out there, dying horribly. Innocent people, mothers, children. And what could she do about it?
Okay. I’m trying. Trying.
She needed to calm down. She would write down 162.525 for later, when she had the microphone operational and when she had decided if she should make contact with someone. But what could she say to such a person? There was no help that she could give. Six hundred people, all dying in one place? She looked around the shelter, its air vents, its water tanks and electricity, and felt once again ashamed.
All for me alone.
When she put the headphones back on, she had deliberately switched from the fine tuner to the broad tuner and flipped the frequency, Coward, weak, well beyond the screams on 162.525.
God help them.
She wrote down the Fort Morgan information for later, when she could steel herself to listen to more. Halfway through the first word, the ballpoint pen gave out.
Gritting her teeth, yanking the headphones off and twisting her way up from the stool, Sophie looked around the shelter and its many shelves. She knew there would be more pens in the back, if she could only find the courage to go back there. But she still believed, in the unreasoning and primal underflow of her mind, that she was a ghost and her dead body was in the shower, or in the unopened freezer. Dead Sophie was waiting somewhere for ghost-Sophie to find her, to drag her down in horror and make her one with the rotting flesh, forever and ever. And daddy, daddy might be back there…
“Stop it.”
The Valium. She really could not do this.
Where could she find another pen? How long would it take to find one? She got up, remembering the bulletin board that had fallen off the wall during the initial blast. She looked for it and realized that she had propped it up by the hose, sometime between regaining consciousness and crawling into the shower.
Finding it, she angrily chastised herself again. The board had slid down while she had been asleep, and was lying face-down half under the work table in a pool of water.
She lifted it up, flipped it over, and little leaves of soggy paper went everywhere. She scrambled to keep them out of the puddle. There went a contractor’s business card, a to-do list written in Tom’s hand, a picture of Lacie aged three with chocolate pudding smeared all around her smile.
Oh, my baby.
She slid the picture of Lacie up to the table with one hand and gathered damp leaves of paper with the other. And there, on a blue sheet of crinkled and smoothed-out paper with a piece of electrical tape on its side, was the name “MITCH,” a frequency number, and a call sign.