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.
More reading, quickly. The microphone would have to wait, too much time was going by.
Everyone, dying out there. Now. Now. No time.
But she knew how to transmit garbled Morse code now through the Grundig without even resorting to the telegraph. She couldn’t yet send a clear and understandable message out to Mitch, but she could let him know — If he’s still alive — that she was out there.
“Okay. Okay.”
She sat back at the table with the newfound pen that had been taped on a string to the side of the bulletin board, and opened to a new page in her notebook. She still didn’t know how much time had passed since the nuclear blast and the sealing of the shelter, but those were trivial matters now. She might just know how to call Mitch. Immediately.
She spun the radio’s broad seek dial, then fine-tuned to Mitch’s frequency. He was shown as preferring to lurk on the amateur low band. She flipped the Morse transmitter key plate open and poised her finger over the key, ready to send a random blur of dots and dashes if Mitch really was out there. Tom’s brother had taken the codename “Itchy,” which had made Sophie smile. That was what Lacie used to call him before she could form her m’s with any constancy. Itchy-one-one.
She flicked to his call sign frequency. Static and nothing. She turned the volume up even higher.
Come on. She began to cry. Please. Drawing in a ragged breath, she propped her elbows on the table, rested her hands on the metal surface and rested her forehead between her arms.
No.
A minute of static. Still, the signal was lifeless. Then suddenly, a very loud click-click in her headphones, and:
“Soph oh my God you made it, is Tom, he, oh thank, thank the… is he…”
Sophie almost fell off the stool. Her head jerked up and she cried out, “Mitch!”
Of course Mitch could not hear her.
She slipped off the stool, standing on one leg and her hip went pop and she tumbled over. The headphones came with her, the Grundig was dragged to the edge of the table and the headphone jack popped out. Mitch’s voice blurted out of the speakers, but the static caused by the ripped-out jack overtook whatever he was saying.
“No!”
Sophie rose and her right leg buckled. She clutched at the stool’s chrome-plated leg and pulled herself up standing, slamming the headphone jack back into the receiver. The speakers went dead as the earphones took over. Another burst of static, wasp-like and coruscating.
Mitch’s voice was very far away now, each word definable only by its frantic length in syllables. Static roars were taking over Mitch’s voice and he was fading away with every second.
Sobbing, Sophie started pounding away at the Morse key. She could hear her own transmission as narrow beeps between pulses of silence. She turned down her volume, the keening beeps were hurting her ears and Mitch’s words were not decipherable any longer. She stopped the frantic pounding and started keying “S. O. S.,” “… — — —…,” which she had learned from a History Channel special played during the Titanic centenary. Such little pieces of trivia, lifelines into nothingness.