Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

Ken spent another hour scanning channels, then sent me back out to trim the antenna again. Almost immediately upon my return, we heard a voice.

“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 KJOB, 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 Manny, coming to you from Crooked Lake, Florida. Our opening reading for today’s show is from the Book of Matthew, chapter 24, verses 21 and 22: ‘For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now-and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.’”

“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 channel clear,” Ben said.

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

Pastor Manny kept right on reading from Matthew.

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

“Oh.” That presented a bit of a problem. Pastor Manny barely paused to take a breath, let alone long enough to let me talk. We listened to him talk about Matthew’s end-of-times predictions for ten minutes or more. Then Pastor Manny announced a reading from Revelations, and our speakers filled with static. Maybe he was hunting for the right verse.

I pushed in the switch again. “Pastor Manny, come in, Pastor Manny.”

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

The static ceased “Another new listener? How wonderful. Please keep the channel clear out of consideration for our listeners.”

“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 Manny, do you have any idea how we could get in touch with FEMA? Preferably someone high up?”

“‘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 Manny came back on, his voice was quieter, resigned. “Florida is in the green zone-it’s one of the less-affected areas. There isn’t much FEMA presence. The Florida National Guard is handling security here. I probably couldn’t find anyone from FEMA even if I were inclined to abandon my calling to look. But the seventeen-meter band is usually full of transmissions in the late afternoon. Most of the signals are coded, but sometimes there’s a clear transmission-I think some relief units are reporting in to Washington that way.”

“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 antenna to twelve feet, eleven inches on each side, which Ken said would help optimize reception on the seventeen-meter band. It didn’t make sense to me-why wouldn’t a longer antenna be better than a short one? But when Ben and I had messed around with the radio on our own, we’d reached no one, so we took Ken’s word for it.

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.

After skipping through five or six machine transmissions, Ken happened upon a person talking. “. . bales of chain-link fencing, 850 pounds of coiled 8-gauge wire, 410 16-foot posts. .”

When the guy took a short break from reading his list, Ken broke in. “KJOB.”

The radio hissed. “QLR.”

“That means he’s busy,” Ken explained. “QRA,” he said into the mic.

“QLR.”

“Rude bastard. I asked him for his call sign, and he basically told me to buzz off.”

I took the mic from Ken and mashed the switch. “We have an emergency.”

“I repeat, QLR. This block of frequencies is reserved for interagency coordination. Clear the frequency.”

“Interagency-like, the government? That’s great, I need to speak to someone high up in FEMA.”

“Under the Federal Emergency Recovery and Restoration of Order Act, I am authorized to confiscate your radio and place you in summary detention if you do not clear this frequency immediately. QLR.”

I shot a worried look at Ken. He shook his head. “They’d need a sophisticated triangulation setup to even find you.”

“This is life and death,” I said into the mic. “We’re in a refugee camp. The DWBs are kidnapping people. The guards know, but they aren’t doing anything-they’re getting paid off by the DWBs. We need help.”

“What sector?”

“Sector? We’re in the refugee camp in Maquoketa, Iowa.”

“Hold.” I heard papers rustling for a moment. “Call 18,160 kilohertz in one hour. I’ll notify the coordinator for your sector. QLR.”