Kent Kelly - The Cage

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.

Save me. Please save me.

Mitch went silent. Sophie stopped keying.

She buried her face within her hands.

“No…”

But Mitch was alive. What of Lacie, her daughter? Was she there, sitting in Mitch’s lap? What was the place?

Mitch, where? Where?

Then a series of beeps short and long was chirping in her ears, a slow and measured pulse of dots and dashes.

A code. Morse code.

She did not have time to turn the binder page over to the Morse code alphabet, and no experience with deciphering it in the moment. She grasped the string-pen and started writing out the dots and dashes, short beeps and long, as best she could.

She had about two hundred periods and hyphens written in the notebook then, but she had only begun to discern the different lengths of time between letters and words halfway through Mitch’s transmission. And she had only received half of the message.

Three seconds of silence passed. She turned the page. Would Mitch send the same message again?

Yes.

This time, she could tell that he was sending the exact same code word sequence as before. He must have written down a message to send her, one he could keep repeating while she struggled to learn the code.

The ongoing message ended. Three seconds of dead air. Then it began all over again.

By the third time, Sophie felt confident that she had the correct spacing on some of the words. But it was still only a page full of symbolic notation, and she had no idea which letters to write down beside any of the transmissions except “S” for “. . .” and “— — —” which must be “O.” That left most of the message unknown.

But he would send it again. As Mitch was sending the message a fourth time, Sophie moved on to a new sheet of paper.

The radio signal cut off.

Sophie hit what she thought was the volume as she looked up, but it was the broad search dial instead. She flipped past Mitch’s frequency. Keeping herself calm, she glided the needle back to his number again. There was static there, but no voice and no more code.

“Don’t be afraid.” These words were foolish, stupid even. But she needed to hear someone say them. “Don’t be.”

She took off the headphones and left the radio speakers on, in case the signal with Mitch could be reestablished. Until then, she would decode her third pass at the message as best she could. She found the binder page on Morse code letter definitions again and began writing. Some of the questionable gaps between letters, whether they were pauses between words or not, were slowing her down. To work more quickly, she decided to write the letters out in all capitals in clustered groups of three. Then, once she had the code solidified to an alphabet, she would try to make actual words out from the mess.