Radio Silence - Part 13

It took Joe two full days to realize what was wrong. It wasn’t the fact that Melanie had abandoned him. It wasn’t that the whole country seemed devoid of life besides him. It wasn’t that he was alone, and had started to talk to himself for company. It was the silence. There was no music, no radio to keep him company. Radio had been a staple for so long in his life. It was his job, every day, but it kept him company outside of work. He listened to it while driving everywhere, and even listened to it on his phone when he was walking.

He pulled out his smartphone and pressed the power button. Nothing happened. Thankfully he was smart enough to grab his charger, and when he passed a gas station he went inside. It was empty, well, of the living anyway. He had to step over someone to get behind the counter. He found an outlet and plugged his phone in. Still nothing happened. “What?” Joe pressed the button again. That’s when he noticed that the whole station was dark. Including the row of fridges and freezers along the back of the store. No lights were on. The power was dead. I guess if there’s no one around to pay the electricity bills, it eventually stops. “Well,” Joe said to the current and at the same time former inhabitants of the convenience store. “There’s only one thing to do. Go back to the old-fashioned way.”

It took him twenty minutes to get there, but eventually he came to a Best Buy electronics store. He strode toward the doors and ran face-first into the glass with a loud thud. “What the fuck?” he said, feeling his face gingerly and testing to see if his nose was broken. He took a step forward again toward the doors but nothing happened. The glass remained stationary. He smacked the door with the palm of his hand and still nothing happened. Then he tried to pry the doors apart with his hands and only succeeded in tearing a nail. “Aaahh!” He kicked at the sliding glass door. It remained firmly shut. “Great. Just great. This is the stuff that people just don’t think about,” Joe said. “When the world ends and the power goes out, you can’t even get inside a store!”

Then he remembered his knife again. The one that Charlene had given him, almost as a joke. He flipped it open and stuck the blade between the two doors. After some jiggling and stabbing, twisting and turning the knife the door moved, ever so slightly. He stuck three fingers in the narrow gap and pulled. Slowly the gap widened. He dropped the knife so he could grab it with both hands and yanked on the door as hard as he could. They moved jerkily and then stopped. But there was enough room to squeeze through and that’s all that mattered.

He ran down the stairs and headed straight for the radio section. It took him a few minutes but he eventually found what he was looking for. A small portable radio. Battery powered. He grabbed a package of double A’s and tore them open, putting two in the back of the radio and stuffing the rest in his backpack. He pushed the power button. There was static and then white noise. He scrolled through the stations. Just static. Was he really expecting anything different? He was about to leave with his new acquisition when something occurred to him. Communication. Maybe there was someone else out there? somehow trying to get in touch with someone? He grabbed a high-tech walkie-talkie transistor radio and put more batteries in it. “Testing, testing,” he said, pressing down the button on one of the more common channels. There was no reply of course, but it was better to have than not. He went to the accessories section and grabbed a couple of belt pouches. He stuck the walkie in one long neoprene pouch after attaching it to his belt, and got a shorter, wider one for the radio. He twirled the dial once more across the frequencies on the radio and once more was met with just radio silence. At least he had the somewhat comforting white noise to keep him company. Along with his own thoughts.

~*~

The funny thing about the end of the world isn’t the world ending. It’s all the other little things. It’s the lack of fresh milk and not being able to boil water for tea or coffee. It’s not being able to talk on the phone or get anywhere except by walking, or bicycle or vehicle until you run out of gas. It’s the no more fresh cinnamon buns. And no more coffee, unless you build a fire and somehow make it in a pot of boiling water.

~*~

More unnerving than radio silence, that you've grown used to hearing, the constant radio silence, the soft hiss of static that's almost comforting, is the sudden lack of it. Joe tore the radio from its holster at his side and pressed the speaker button. "Hello? Is anyone there?" There was a bleep noise, a little spike of sound. He pressed the button to talk into it. "Can anyone hear me? is there someone out there?" And then the radio silence filled his ears again, the white noise static, but this time it wasn't comforting, it was just disappointing. And then he thought he heard something. Faint at first but it was there. “I know that none of you will know me,” the voice said, staticky and broken up.

~*~

Joe had one goal. To find Richard. The man who said he wants to start over. He felt the comforting weight of what he was used to. The link to his old life, in the old world. Strange to think there was an old world, and this was now a new world. It still looked exactly the same, Joe thought. It just, well, lacked people, is all. His fingers danced over the buttons of the radio strapped to his waist in his makeshift fanny pack. He turned the dial and listened to the noise of nothingness, of the stars, of the universe. And then scrolled through the frequencies, the channels, to hear other versions, similar but not exactly the same, the chatter of the universe.

Was it naïve of him to think that there would be someone else on the other end? Listening, searching, scanning, just like he was? Like searching for extraterrestrial life in space. It had to be out there somewhere right? There was Melanie and Frank after all. Well, was, in Frank’s case. And maybe that Richard guy he’d heard on a channel. He was so busy thinking about the strangeness that was silence on the radio airwaves that he didn’t even see what was in front of him until it was too late.

And then he was falling. He had never believed what people said in the movies, that when you were falling it felt like you were falling forever, and that it lasted an instant at the same time, not even time enough to blink.

But there he was, falling forever, slowly in darkness so complete he couldn’t tell which way was up. And because of the total lack of light, he had a sudden strange sensation that he was falling upwards, not down. He felt things grabbing at him, pulling and tugging. He pictured they were hands and shivered.

And by the time he realized he had even forgotten to scream, he landed with a thud on the cold, hard, and most decidedly rocky, ground.

And that’s when the screams set in. When he heard his arm cracking even before he actually felt it, and then darkness swallowed him.

~*~

When Joe opened his eyes, he was staring upwards through the darkness and could see the silvery–white light of the perpetually pearl-like sky. His backpack was twisted and tangled around his shoulders and he gingerly removed the pack and riffled through it with the arm that currently wasn’t shooting darts of pain up it, and his fingers wrapped themselves around the small flashlight he’d thrown in almost as an afterthought. He turned it on and blinding light chased away the dark. He was in a hole. There was nothing else to it. It was a giant hole. He shone the light up the side of the shaft. He wasn’t good at estimating anything, but he guessed it was close to twenty feet high. Or was that deep?

Not that any of that really mattered, he thought. He tried to push himself upright and screamed as pain seared through his left arm. “Okay then,” he said, giving himself a pep talk. “Let’s do this.” With his right arm he was able to roll to his knees and then push himself to a standing position. The opening high above looked ever so slightly less high now by about two feet.

“Hello!” He yelled, on the off chance that someone, one of the last few living souls, Melanie perhaps, would happen to be walking by. Then again she’d probably leave him down here to rot away in the hole anyway, he thought miserably. Way to make an enemy of one of the only people left on earth, he berated himself. And now he was trapped down some kind of sinkhole in the middle of a long straight road he hoped was in the direction of Washington again.

He removed the radio from its holster at his hip and pressed the speaker button. “Hello? If anyone’s out there, my name is Joe McCandry and I’m trapped in a hole in the road on the way into Flagstaff. If anyone’s listening, I’m …stuck. I need help. Bring rope or something because it’s a deep hole.”

~*~

DR ALLISON JAMES

Doctor Allison James woke up. Well that’s not good, she thought as she grabbed on to the edge of the long narrow table above her in her lab. A glass beaker had been knocked from the table, obviously when she had collapsed and had smashed into thankfully large pieces nearby. “Not a good place at all to suddenly go for a nap”, she said to herself. She had remembered feeling odd. A bit woozy, and suddenly clammy, like when you break out in a sudden full body sweat when you have a stomach flu or diarrhea. She hauled herself up by the table and stood. Her lab was empty. No, she spied a crumpled form on the floor by the x-ray machine. Sam. She shook her head. Poor, poor Sam. Life was unfair. And, she thought, with a small laugh, she couldn’t help it, so was death.

~*~

Allison James did the first thing she thought of, as a doctor, to make sure everything was all right. Because, after all, waking up on the floor of your hospital lab means everything is not really all right. And the fact that her lab partner was dead increased the not all right exponentially. Her test of well-being was simple. She pressed two fingers against the side of her throat to feel her pulse. She waited a moment, and then her brow furrowed in confusion. She held her fingers more firmly against her neck and waited, holding her breath. Then she looked at her watch, to count the seconds. Maybe that would help. She counted five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. No, there was most definitely no pulse. “Well,” she said to the table of medical equipment in front of her. “That is certainly very interesting, if I may say so.” She opened the door to her lab to go out and tell her other colleagues her sudden finding and found that everyone in the building had suffered the same fate as poor Sam. “Well,” she said again as if that were one of the few words left in her vocabulary. Whenever things happened to her that were a bit too much to handle, she became clinical, robotic Allison. Her way of coping. Her friends jokingly called her the Tin Man. She surveyed the main office and the bodies slumped across desks and keyboards. “Well,” she repeated. “Isn’t this interesting.”

She surveyed the office. There was no one around to tell the news that she seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, dead.

This was big news. She needed to tell someone. She needed to tell more than someone. She needed to tell the world.

She pulled her cell phone from her purse and dialed her best friend.

~*~

DARA

Dara Deane, the woman in the red trench coat opened her eyes. She was cold and lying on something hard. She stuck a hand out. It was concrete. She sat up and put a hand to her forehead. She felt strange, clammy. She was in front of the MeteoTech building. She felt cold and stiff. How long had she been lying here for?

The next thought that came to her was more sobering. She felt herself, patting her torso as if looking for a lost item. “I’m still alive?” she said out loud to the empty parking lot she was in. “How am I still alive? I had all the symptoms. I should be dead.” She looked across the parking lot, past the small handful of cars that were dotted across the pavement. There was someone on the ground. Someone that looked awfully like she probably just had. She pushed herself up and staggered unsteadily toward the person sprawled on the ground. She moved to crouch down beside them, to shake their shoulder, ask if they were all right. But when she got closer she realized they were most definitely not all right. Their skin was grey and looked hard and brittle, as if touching it would cause the woman to break. And it was a woman, Dara noticed. Someone that looked a lot like her, with long blonde hair, and pale skin. But that woman was dead, and Dara wasn’t. She stood from her half crouch and looked around. It was silent. If there was someone around to drop a pin, which there wasn’t of course, the whole point, you could have heard a pin drop from the other side of the massive parking lot. Her car was still parked in the lot. The station had sent her out in her own car for the report. Everyone else was scared to go outside, So they sent her out with one of the smaller cameras that was almost idiot-proof to set up, showed her how to turn it on and use it with her microphone and all but shoved her out the door and locking it behind her. She turned and looked at the faces staring at her through the window of the tv station. Ghostly faces looked out at her from the glass, clustered in a frightened huddle. She knew what the look meant. ‘You are our last hope. To get the message out to the people. To tell them what they should do. The doomsayer. Johnathan had actually called her that. She shook her head. And now he was dead, probably, like everyone else. Everyone except her. She made her way back to her car on unsteady heels and flopped down inside. She pulled down the visor and stared at herself in the small mirror there. She looked awful. She looked like death warmed up. Well, warm was a bit too strong even.

“I was sick!” she said to her face in the mirror. “I was sick so why didn’t I die!

~*~

Dara had just entered her house and thrown her purse on her kitchen counter when her phone rang.

She looked at the name on the screen and answered it hurriedly. “Allison? What’s wrong?” and then it hit her. “Wait a minute. You’re alive too? I thought I was the only one! Oh my god, I’m so relieved.” Alison felt the burning prickle of hot tears begin in her eyes, with the sudden relief that she wasn’t alone and her good friend Alison was still alive as well.

Down the line Alison laughed. “Funny you should say that,” she said. “I’m glad that you’re still here. That the virus or whatever hasn’t taken you either.”

“Funny I should say what?” Dara said, confused. She slipped out of her red coat and tossed it on the back of the couch.

“Funny you should say that I’m still alive. Can you do me a favour? Wait, you should probably sit down for this, just in case. Are you sitting?”

“No,” Dara said slowly, feeling apprehensive. “You’re scaring me Allie. Why do I need to sit? What’s wrong?”

“Just listen to me. Sit down, please.”

“Uh oh,” Dara thought. This can’t be good. Allison had put on her calming doctor's voice that she used when she had bad news to give. Slowly she made her way to the couch and lowered herself to the plush cushions. “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “I’m sitting. What do you want to tell me.”

“Okay, I don’t want you to freak out-“ Allison began.

“Well saying something like that is making me freak out!” Dara cried. “If you tell someone not to freak out, that just makes them freak out even more!”

“Just calm down. Take a deep breath. Relax. Breathe in,” Allison instructed.

Dara followed her instructions and took a deep breath in.

“And now exhale.”

Dara breathed out. She was an obedient patient.

“Good. Okay, now I want you to take your pulse,” Allison instructed.

“What?” Dara began.

“Just do it. take two fingers and hold them against the side of your neck, below your jaw. You know how.”

Dara did, and did so, pressing her fingers to the side of her neck. “What do you-“ she began, impatient for an answer. Then she stopped. Well that’s weird, she thought. She pressed her fingers harder, and then moved them up higher. Maybe she was pressing the wrong spot? She moved her fingers lower.

“Dara?” It was Allison, filling in the silence on the phone.

“I-“ Dara began. “You’ll think I’m a total idiot if I say this.”

“I think I know what you’re going to say, and no, I won’t. You’re going to tell me you can’t find a pulse, right?”

“How did you-?” Dara was stunned.

“Because that’s why I’m calling you. I’m not calling you as a friend, well, I am of course, because I am your friend and I’m glad to see that you’re still….” There was a long pause before she continued. “Alive. But I’m calling because I need your help as a reporter.”

Dara shook her head. She was shaken up by the fact she couldn’t feel her pulse, and was confused why Allison was needing her help as a TV news reporter.

“How do you know I don’t have a pulse, Allison? I’m …I’m confused.”

“I know you are honey, I know. I am too, kind of. I just had a hunch. Well, if you were alive that is. I thought you might be the same. I thought you might be the same as me. I don’t have a pulse either. I just found that out after just waking up in the lab.”

“Hey!” Dara cried. “I just woke up too. I don’t remember falling asleep or anything, but I woke up outside, on the ground, in front of Meteotech just about half an hour ago. There wasn’t really anyone else there, and everyone who was, in the parking lot was…um…dead. I just got home. I didn’t know what else to do. Where else to go. I tried calling the station but there was no answer. I’m thinking they’re all…you know…” she trailed off again.

“I know what you’re saying,” Allison said, in her calming, soothing doctor's voice again.

“Wait a minute.” Dara said suddenly. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood up and made her shiver. “What does it mean that we don’t have a pulse? Doesn’t that mean…” she paused, searching and struggling to find the right words, words that weren’t the ones that she realized she was going to have to say because there were no other ones. “Doesn’t having no pulse mean that we’re…” she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say the last word. No matter how much she tried, it didn’t want to leave her mouth.

“Dead?” Allison spoke it for her.

Dara nodded even though she knew Allison couldn’t see her, but it was the only thing she could manage to do.

“Yes. I think it does. I mean, that’s the only thing that I can think of. I know it doesn’t make sense but…” Allison stopped and Dara could almost see her shrugging.

“It’s the only explanation I have.”

“And you’re a doctor,” Dara said, with the finality that being a doctor accounted someone.

Allison laughed. “And yes, I am a doctor.”

“But wait, how is that possible? Is that even possible?” Dara said, her eyes wide. She felt her neck again, thinking maybe somehow it was a fluke and that she still had a pulse, but there was nothing. “That can’t be…how can we…” the words tumbled from her mouth without thought.

“I don’t know, Dara,” Allison said. “I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t have a pulse and you don’t have a pulse but we are still alive.”

“Dead Alive,” Dara corrected.

“Technically, I guess, yes. Dead Alive,” Allison acquiesced to the term. “And that’s why I need your help. I need to let other people know. Maybe there are other survivors and maybe they are just like us too. Somehow we didn’t die. I mean, as completely as mostly everyone else. We’re still breathing, we’re still moving, still thinking.”

Robotically Dara stood up from the couch and stiffly made her way to the large mirror in the hallway that stretched the height of the wall. “I don’t feel any different,” she said as she watched her reflection feel her face as she talked. “Except.” Her fingers prodded her face, and then moved to her chest exposed by her v-neck cut top. Then her hand went to the arm holding the phone and felt there. “Except I feel colder than normal.”

“Well that would make sense. If we don’t have a pulse, that means that technically our hearts are no longer pumping blood which is what heats our bodies, our skin. That’s why…that’s why dead people feel cold after they die. Because their blood has stopped moving.”

“Okay,” Dara’s reflection nodded dumbly at her. “Okay, I think I get it. Well, kind of. So you want me to broadcast to everyone that …what, that anyone who is still alive might actually be dead, and to see if they have a pulse?” Dara’s reflection shook her head in disbelief at what she was going to do.

“Exactly.” Was the answer on the phone.

~~~~~~

Check out part 14 below to continue the story! (or part 1 if you need to start from the beginning!)