Apex Book Company

Gabriel reached for the radio - a gaudy red transistor job in a cheap plastic case. He brushed aside a menagerie of mildewed stuffed animals just as the cramps hit. Gabriel doubled over, his empty stomach heaving violently. He broke out in a cold sweat and sat down on the edge of a rotting bunk bed.

He was in a child’s bedroom - what was left of it. Flooding from the upstairs apartment had collapsed the ceiling in all but one corner. The child’s mummified corpse lay on the bed beside him. He looked at the small, withered form. A thick stench hung in the close air. He put his mask back on. The girl had probably been about ten years old, but her shriveled remains looked like those of a one thousand year old woman. Her face was twisted into a weird grimace - a sick caricature of a smile. Gabriel stroked the hairless scalp and then touched his own head, which was dotted with a few ragged tufts of hair. His days were coming to an end.

Gabriel smiled and stood up, wavering slightly on his spindly legs. He took some pills from the pouch at his side, popped them in his mouth and washed them down with a few squirts of sickly sweet liquid from his flask. Solid food was now a thing of the past. There were canned goods in abundance everywhere he went, but it was a struggle just to keep the glucose and pills down.

He clutched the tiny red radio. A surge of energy ran up his arm and exploded softly in his brain. A warm glow spread throughout his body. He examined it–a cheap AM-only model that probably originated in some dollar-a-day offshore sweatshop. He used one hand to deftly flick open the battery case. A corroded nine-volt battery flopped out. He snapped it loose from the two thin wires that held it and let it drop to the floor.

He stuffed the radio into his canvas bag. It was so full that he had to drag it out to the stairwell. It had been a good day. He cleaned out the top two floors of this apartment building and the one next door. He made his way down the steps, dragging the bag across the parched lawn and hoisting into the cart with great difficulty. The radios clattered as the bag landed in the cart. The noise startled Gabriel. He was accustomed to total silence.

He took a moment to catch his breath, then climbed on the bicycle, checking the chain that led back to the shopping cart. He pedaled slowly, the late afternoon sun beating down unmercifully. It took an hour of cycling, punctuated by two vomiting attacks, to cover the mile to the shopping center. He pulled into the parking lot of what was once a small open-air plaza, its lot full of abandoned cars. Gabriel’s only companions were the rotted corpses laying everywhere and his fellow survivors - the apparently indestructible rats that feasted on them.

It was six months since Gabriel had seen another living human being and almost eighteen months since the fires had rained down on the mid-Atlantic seaboard. The nuclear rain had been brief - the result of a very tragic and costly mistake. Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, part of Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia were now the Hotlands - and graveyards for millions. Even the best protected government troops rarely ventured there.

Gabriel vaguely recalled a life before this one, but it became more distant with each passing day. Six months ago he had ventured to the Hotlands, sneaking across Pennsylvania’s shared border with New York. He was too busy with his work now to dwell on ancient memories.

He coasted up to the front of the shopping center, guiding his bike through a narrow doorway into an abandoned store. His breathing came heavy and ragged. A wave of weakness swept over him. He sat for several minutes, gasping for breath, his eyes gradually adjusting to the gloomy interior.

He struggled to his feet and turned on the generator. A few dim fluorescent lights flickered on. Their pale white light revealed thousands of radios of all imaginable shapes, sizes, colors and styles. They filled the long, narrow room. Gabriel went to work. He grabbed a pile of transformers and several spools of wire and began hooking each radio to the generator. It was monotonous, uninspiring work, but he worked quickly at it now. In about four hours the bag was empty.

Gabriel sat in a small open space in the middle of the room. His stomach quivered as he squirted more glucose into his parched mouth. He was surrounded by radios. They sat silently, awaiting his command.

He had arranged them so they were closely spaced, almost touching each other. Hundreds of different models shared the space, from cheap transistors to bulky antique console models in battered wooden cases to sophisticated short waves and high tech police radios.

A fat, orange full moon crept up over the skyline. Gabriel could see it through the front window. He sat in his hollowed out clearing in the midst of his radio garden. He could smell a sweet fragrance wafting on the cool breeze that swept through the store.

Gabriel had used today’s harvest to fill in the narrow aisle leading from the front of the store. He couldn’t leave his spot now without disturbing the garden. He felt the last vestiges of strength seep out of his body and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere now.

He held two switches in his trembling palm. He used one to switch off the lights and sat in the darkened room for a moment, watching as quiet waves of moonlit fire washed over the garden. He flicked the other switch and the garden hummed to life - hundreds of radios shrieking a steady drone, radioactive background noise at full volume.

No radio wave could penetrate the Hotlands. Gabriel’s garden would remain unsullied - a pristine sanctuary. The soft roar of static - multiplied hundreds of times over - caressed his body as he sank back onto the cool tile. He was washed clean of the countless layers of electromagnetic contamination that had built up over his short life.

The hum grew louder - nearly deafening now. Gabriel opened his eyes. He could see the hum now, hanging before him, static buzzing arcing in hundreds, even thousands, of lines of varying thickness. They swirled and seethed, forming arcane shapes that unlocked primeval compartments of his mind. Gabriel was in a state of supremely ecstatic bliss. Indescribable interstices of harmonic distortion and sine waves swirled in the dank, humid air. The hum intensified to a roar. The lines sparkled and flashed through billions of color combinations every second. The air seemed to turn in upon itself and then there was a blinding flash.

Gabriel lay on the cool tile in the midst of the silent garden. The generator had run down for the last time. A rat approached cautiously and nibbled at his cheek - no reaction. Sightless eyes gazed peacefully from a smiling face.