“. . . Hello? … hello? . . . Is anybody out there?” the voice hesitated and crackled through the static.

“Hey, listen to this!”, Jayne exclaimed, “There’s somebody on the radio.”

Julian and Jayne thought that sooner or later they would be able to find a radio station on the air, but from their location deep down in the canyon they hadn’t heard anything.

One day Jayne took the portable radio up to the rim at what passed for sunset these days, and scanned the AM frequencies. “There,” she thought, “Is that something?”

She turned the radio and held it higher, twisted it as if trying to align the radio with the exact parallel the radio wave was beaming through the desert.

“Hello, hello, this is Frank over in Johnson City, well, outside what used to be Johnson City. It’s gone, and everything near the Air Force base, but over on this side of town, we’re OK. Well, we’re not OK, but we’re alive. There’s six of us here. Everybody’s pretty sick. I found this old radio station a few miles outside town and thought there might be some food somewhere inside, so I broke in. I think it’s a remote transmitter for the station in town, but I found a generator and cranked it up, and found a manual that explained how to operate the remote station in emergencies.”

“We’re afraid to go anywhere. It looks pretty bad all around. The town is gone, of course, and the base, and up to the north, and the east, too, there’s still black clouds all over everything. It’s pretty dark here, too, with the dust and everything.”

“A couple of days ago a truck went by here, with men carrying guns. They didn’t look like they were here to help us, so we hid. We’re all a bunch of old people who live in a trailer camp out west of here, in Snake Canyon. We didn’t know what happened, and then finally figured out it was the worst.”

“I’m not going to stay on the air very long, because we decided we ought to ration the gas, but wanted to see if anybody, anywhere, was listening. I’m going to ty to transmit for 15 minutes or so every evening.”

“Is there anybody out there who can help us? We don’t know what to do. Some of us tried to drive out of here a couple of days ago, but came back and said it was too bad up north, and some more went south, and when they didn’t come back, some more went that way, too. But they came back, they found the bodies lying right there on the road, lying right there where somebody killed them and took the car.”

“We don’t know what to do. Please send help, please help us.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s Johnson City in New Mexico”. Click.

“Hey Julian,” Jayne yelled, “Did you hear that? There’s somebody else out there, somewhere called Johnson City, in New Mexico.”

Julian and Jayne listened the next evening, and the next, but never heard from them any more.

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