The Radio Signal

It started with posturing and threats, then came the tariffs. Prices escalated out of control. People revolted against food poverty across the world, the lack of amenities, poor housing, and prices continued to rise, but the shepherds didn’t care, they just kept getting richer, while the sheep were getting poorer. Then it went global. Tit for tat tariffs driving prices even higher, countries blamed each other for their economy crashing, then someone pressed that button. “THE BUTTON.” Everything went to shit in an instant.

It had been years since the world had devoured itself. Mara could not put a date on it. Time was irrelevant in this world.

The wind now howled through the broken teeth of the city, whistling past jagged steel and crumbling concrete, a sound so constant it had become the background hum of her desolate world. Mara adjusted the straps of her backpack, the weight of it digging into her shoulders, the weight of everything she had nestled inside, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Not when that signal was still out there, pulsing through the static of her radio like a heartbeat of hope.

"Sanctuary. This is Outpost Seven. If anyone can hear this… we have ample supplies, we have shelter. The coordinates will follow."

The voice had been looping for weeks. A man’s voice was steady and calm, maybe too calm even, for the world as it was now, but that didn’t deter her. Most broadcasts were short, sometimes frantic, or desperate. That was the way of it, batteries were precious, a limited resource. Sometimes the messages were worse, the last ragged breaths of people who didn’t realise they were already dead. However, this one was different. This one sounded like a glimmer of hope, yet she was not sure she believed it.

Mara’s fingers brushed the radio at her hip, the cold metal a reassurance. She’d scavenged it along with two good batteries from a military truck months ago, back when she still thought she might find others. Now, it was the only voice she had left.

The coordinates led her north, past the skeletal remains of old forgotten suburbs, through fields where the earth had gone sour, where crops once stood. She walked for days, sleeping in hollows beneath fallen billboards, ditches, abandoned structures, always waking to the scuttle of rats, mice, or other scavengers of the night, and the distant howls of things she didn’t want to name.

It was on the fifth morning she found the bunker. It was half-buried in the side of a hill. The metal door was rusted yet still intact, the faded stencilled numbers 7 was just visible beneath the years of grime. There were no footprints, nor signs of life. Just the antenna tower on top of the hill, still humming with power.

Mara trembled. It was too quiet. She knocked on the door. She knocked again, but louder. The sound reverberated like striking an empty metal barrel.

But still nothing.

Her fingers curled around the handle, but it was locked. Of course it would be. She collapsed against the metal and exhaled a sigh of frustration. She pulled the crowbar from her pack.

"Wait." The voice came from the radio at her hip, startling her. This was not the recording. It was live, a real human voice, talking to her.

Mara froze as the static hissed, then cleared.

"You shouldn’t be here." Came the same voice. The same calm voice, but now, underneath, there was something brittle, something afraid.

Her fingers trembled as she unclipped the radio. "Who is this?"

A pause. Then, softer: "You are Mara, aren’t you?"

The world tilted. She hadn’t given her name a voice in over a year. Not since—

No.

She pressed the transmit button hard enough to hurt. "How do you know me?"

Silence. Then, a sigh, not through the radio, but from the other side of the door, from inside the bunker. There was someone in there still alive.

The handle turned… The door creaked open. Darkness yawned beyond, thick and suffocating, and from it stepped a man, a pale, far too thin man. His eyes were sunken like he hadn’t seen daylight in years. He looked at her like she was a ghost.

"I’ve been waiting for you," he whispered, as the radio in her hand crackled again, with her own voice.

"Sanctuary. This is Outpost Seven. If anyone can hear this…"

Mara’s blood turned to ice. The man smiled. It was not with relief, but with recognition.

"You’re right on time."

Mara’s fingers went numb. The radio slipped from her fingers, clattering against the concrete step, still spitting out that looping message. Her message, it was her voice, but she had never spoken those words before. So how—?

The man in the doorway swayed slightly, as if standing upright took more effort than he could spare. His lips were dry and cracked, his skin stretched too tight over his bones, but his eyes were sharp, far too aware as they locked onto hers.

"You’re not real," Mara whispered.

The wind hissed through the trees behind her, carrying the scent of smoke and damp earth. The world felt too thin here, unreal, like a veil between what was and what shouldn’t be.

The man let out a dry laugh; the sound scraping his throat like chalk on a board. "Funny. I was going to say the same thing about you."

He stepped back, leaving the door open. A silent invitation, or was it a trap?

Mara’s pulse hammered in her throat. Every instinct screamed at her to run away, but the radio at her feet kept playing, and the voice, her voice, was still calling for help. But how? It didn’t make sense.

She bent slowly, never taking her eyes from him, and picked up the radio. The metal was cold, solid, and oh so Real.

"Explain," she demanded, her voice much steadier than she actually felt.

The man exhaled, it was long and slow, then he turned and walked into the dark.

The decision was on her. Does she follow or flee?

She followed.

The air inside was thick with the smell of dust and something sour, something old and sweet, like stale food. The bunker was smaller than she expected, lit by a single flickering bulb. A bed in one corner, and a desk cluttered with radio equipment in the other. On the walls… Mara’s breath caught. Photographs. Dozens of them, pinned up in careful rows. Faces she didn’t recognise, and some she did.

Her own face stared back at her from a Polaroid near the desk. She was younger in the picture, her hair shorter, her smile unfamiliar. She didn’t remember it ever being taken.

"What the hell is this?" Her voice demanded, loud and insistent.

The man just sat at the desk, his hands resting on an old tape recorder. The same message played on a loop, the spools turning endlessly.

"You died," he said quietly. "Three years ago. Outside Omaha. It was a raider’s bullet."

Mara’s skin shivered. "Bullshit."

He didn’t look at her. "I watched you die. I buried you."

The room tilted. She gripped the edge of the desk to steady herself. "Then what am I now? How am I here?"

He finally turned, and the look in his eyes made her stomach drop. "A signal."

The tape kept playing. Her voice. His voice. The same words, over and over.

“Sanctuary. This is Outpost Seven—"

Mara pressed her palms against her temples, as if she could push the pieces together. "You’re saying I’m, what? I’m a ghost?"

The man shook his head. "No. You are real and you are here, but you weren’t supposed to come back."

He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a journal, its pages yellowed and brittle to the touch. When he opened it, Mara saw her own handwriting.

Day 47. The radio signal is getting stronger. Elias thinks it’s a trap, but I have to know.

Her hands shook as she took it. She didn’t remember writing these words. She didn’t remember him.

"Elias," she said, testing the name. As much a question as a statement.

His jaw tightened. "You really don’t remember, do you?"

A headache pulsed behind her eyes. Fragments flickered, a campfire, a kiss, a gunshot, but they slipped away before she could grasp the moment.

"Why am I here?" she whispered.

Elias looked at the tape recorder. "Because the signal always brings you back."

Outside, the wind had died; the world felt too still, like it was waiting for something.

Mara stood in the doorway, the journal clutched in her hands. She could leave. Walk away from this place, from the man who claimed he’d buried her, from the voice on the radio that shouldn’t exist. But the signal would still play.

And part of her, some deep inside her, some buried thing… remembered.

Elias hadn’t moved from the desk. She could see, he looked exhausted; he was resigned to the seat he sat in.

"You could come with me," she suggested.

He smiled, but just a little. "I can’t."

"Why not?"

"Because I’m the one who’s dead, Mara."

The tape recorder clicked. The loop started again.

“Sanctuary. This is Outpost Seven—"

And this time, she recognised the grief in his voice.