Ashen Winter

We used six-foot lengths of copper pipe as grounds, driving them into the earth by pounding on them with heavy rocks. The ends of the soft copper pipes belled out, and we couldn’t get them driven more than a few feet into the frozen ground. It was as good as the rest of the hap-hazard setup, I guessed.

Raising a thirty-four-foot ante

By evening, we were ready to try it. Ken, Ben, and I crowded into the tent while Dad and some prefects kept watch outside. Ken slowly turned the dial on the transceiver, listening to static and squeals with the silent intensity of a priest at prayer.

He’d been at it fifteen or twenty minutes when something occurred to me. “Why don’t you call out? Maybe someone’s listening but not transmitting.”

“Transmitting takes more than twenty times the juice as listening. We’ve only got the two batteries, right? Which do you want? Four hours of transmitting, or eighty of listening?”

“Oh.” That made sense.

More than an hour passed before Ken gave up sca

Cutting the copper wire without proper tools was a pain. I had to get the end of the ante

Ken spent another hour sca

“Peace with the Lord, for the hour of judgment is upon you.”

A huge grin cracked Ken’s face wide open. “Damn, can’t believe this spitwad setup actually works.” He picked up the mic. “CQ, CQ this is station KJØB, Maquoketa.”

“Welcome to our newest listeners!” the voice crackled back. “Sit back, relax, and hear the words of the Lord. Please keep the frequency clear of transmissions out of courtesy to our other listeners.”

Ken started to lift the mic back to his mouth, but Ben took it from him and laid it on top of the radio. The voice continued, “Welcome, listeners, to our 127th broadcast of the Hour of Judgment, the radio program with all the answers you need for surviving purgatory, so you, too, can be called up to sit by His side when Jesus returns. I’m your host, Pastor Ma

“This guy’s a lid,” Ken said. “He hasn’t even given his call sign.”

I had no idea what he meant by a lid, but it didn’t seem important. I picked up the mic.

“He said to keep the cha

“Whatever.” I mashed down the push-to-talk switch on the mic and said, “Come in Pastor Ma

Pastor Ma

“He can’t hear you when he’s transmitting,” Ken said.

“Oh.” That presented a bit of a problem. Pastor Ma

I pushed in the switch again. “Pastor Ma

“You’re acting like a lid, too,” Ken said. I ignored him.

The static ceased “Another new listener? How wonderful. Please keep the cha

“This is urgent. I need to contact someone in the government. Maybe FEMA.”

“Put not your trust in princes.’”

“This is urgent. People are disappearing.”

“Son, I asked you nicely to keep the frequency clear.”

“Do you even have any other listeners? Why aren’t they transmitting?”

“Of course I do. They’re far more courteous than you.”

“How do you know? That anyone else is listening if they never talk?”

“I prayed on it, of course. Ah, here’s the next reading, Revelations, chapter thirteen.”

He read breathlessly for another ten minutes. He was an excellent reader—hollering and whispering, changing his voice to suit the words. I might have been impressed if I weren’t so pissed off.

The next time he stopped, I broke in immediately. “Please, Pastor Ma

“‘The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things come in and choke the Word, making it unfruitful.’”

I slammed my free hand down on the tent floor. “I’m going to transmit right over your program unless you try to help me. People will hear a babble of both our voices and tune out.” I wasn’t sure it would really work that way, but when I looked at Ken, he was both nodding and glaring at me, so I figured my guess was right.

“You would dare thwart the will of the Lord?”

“I would and I will if you don’t help us.”

“Blasphemer!”

“Whatever. You want me off your frequency, I want some help.”

The radio crackled with static for a moment. When Pastor Ma

“Perfect. Thank you.”

“Now will you keep my frequency clear?”

“Sure. Sorry,” I said, although I felt anything but. Would it have killed him to tell me about the government transmissions right away?

Ken, Ben, and I fiddled with the radio for a few more hours that night. We found several other stations broadcasting. Most were in other languages: two that might have been Spanish, one that sounded vaguely Germanic, and another that Ken said was Russian. One station broadcast nothing but a woman reading numbers, which struck me as highly bizarre.

I talked to a guy for a while who called his station “Radio Free City.” But when it became clear that we couldn’t help him with food or “taking the fight to the fascist FEMA pigs,” he lost interest and signed off.

I would have liked some news. I knew in Worthington they were monitoring their radios and posting anything they heard on the town’s bulletin board. We tuned the radio to AM for a while but didn’t pick up anything useful, so we shut down the transceiver to save the batteries and went to bed.

The next day, we trimmed the ante

About the middle of the afternoon, the seventeen-meter band changed. Suddenly there were dozens of transmissions. Most of them were high-pitched static—I thought maybe someone was sending in code, but Ken said it was probably just data.