I’d been listening to that frequency for three months – then a voice started reading back the SERVICE CODE I buried with eleven men.
We’ve been holed up in the substation since the collapse, me and Travis, running the radio off two truck batteries and a prayer.
If that code is live, then everything we did to end this – every grave we dug – meant nothing.
I’m Hollis. I ran communications for the eastern relay before the grid went dark, back when there was still a grid to run.
Travis is half my age and thinks I’m losing it. Maybe I am.
But I know that code. I wrote half of it.
The signal comes in at 0300 most nights, same window, same dead air, then static that almost sounds like breathing.
I sat with the headphones clamped tight, knuckles white on the dial.
“It’s bouncing off the ionosphere,” Travis said. “Old recording. Ghost transmission. Happens all the time.”
I let it go. But the next night the voice came back, and this time it paused between numbers like it was reading off a page.
Ghosts don’t pause to find their place.
A few nights after that, it added a string of digits at the end. Grid references.
I copied them down with a shaking pencil and laid the paper flat on the table.
I knew those numbers cold.
They were the coordinates of the bunker. The one we collapsed ourselves, four hundred feet of rock dropped on top of it.
“Travis,” I said. “It’s reading our coordinates.”
He didn’t even look up from the wiring. “Impossible. We sealed that place. Nobody walked out of there. The dead don’t keep maps.”
“Then who’s transmitting?”
“Nobody, Hollis. You’re hearing ghosts.”
I pulled the headphones off and set them on the table so he could hear the speaker himself.
The voice came through thin and flat.
It finished the code. Then it said my name.
MY FULL NAME. Rank and all.
I went completely still.
Travis finally turned around, and the color drained out of his face, because the voice on the radio wasn’t done.
It said, “Hollis. We know you’re still down there. Open the east hatch – we sent someone to bring you home.”
What We Did Down There
The bunker wasn’t on any map that survived the collapse.
That was the point.
Eleven men went in. We’d gotten intelligence – bad intelligence, it turned out, or maybe not intelligence at all, maybe just fear dressed up in official language – that the relay network had been compromised from the inside. That someone in the eastern corridor was broadcasting coordinates to groups we didn’t want having coordinates. Shelter locations. Water caches. The hospital convoy routes.
People were dying because of those leaks.
So command gave us a directive. Not written. Nothing was written anymore. You went in, you handled it, you came back with the frequency dark.
I don’t want to say more than that about what handling it meant.
What I will say is that the eleven men in that bunker were not innocent of the thing they were accused of. I verified it myself before we did anything. I’m not a murderer. I was a lot of things in those months, but I checked. I made sure.
We collapsed the entrance on the way out. Charges we’d placed on the way in, set into the rock above the main access shaft. Travis triggered them from two hundred meters back, and we stood there and watched four hundred feet of limestone come down like a slow exhale.
That was eight months ago.
I haven’t slept a full night since.
The East Hatch
The problem – one of several problems – is that there is an east hatch.
I know because I designed the access schematic. Secondary egress, mandatory on any installation that size. It’s cut into the rock face about sixty meters northeast of the main entrance, covered by a steel plate, covered by that with about three feet of loose shale we raked over it ourselves.
It wasn’t on the official blueprints. I added it six weeks before everything went wrong, because I’d been in enough collapsed structures to know you always need another way out.
Nobody else should have known it was there.
Travis was looking at me now with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before. He’s twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven, doesn’t know his own birthday exactly because records got spotty toward the end. Big kid. Grew up somewhere flat and agricultural, Iowa or Indiana, one of those. He doesn’t scare easy.
He looked scared.
“Who else knew about the east hatch,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Me. You. Command, maybe, if they pulled the full schematic. But command isn’t – ” I stopped.
“Command isn’t anything anymore,” he finished.
Right.
“So who is that,” he said, pointing at the radio.
The speaker was quiet now. Just the background hiss, that almost-breathing static. 0317 by my watch. The window was closing.
I picked up the mic. Travis grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t,” he said.
“If there’s someone alive out there – “
“Hollis.” His grip tightened. “If there’s someone alive out there who knows that code, who knows those coordinates, who knows your name and rank – what does that tell you?”
I thought about it.
It told me one of two things. Either someone from the network had survived and was trying to make contact through the only frequency they knew we’d be monitoring.
Or someone who’d had access to everything those eleven men had known was sitting at a transmitter right now, reading off a dead man’s notes.
I set the mic down.
The Night We Walked Out
I need to back up. I need to tell you about Reyes.
Sergeant Dennis Reyes, eastern relay, eight years in communications before the collapse. He was the one who found the leak in the first place. Traced it through three layers of routing, did the work nobody else had patience for, sat with logs for two weeks straight until he had a name.
He was also the one who told command. And command, to their credit or discredit depending on how you look at it, believed him immediately.
Reyes was supposed to come with us into the bunker. He knew the layout, knew the people inside, would have made the whole thing go faster and cleaner. But the morning we went in, he was gone. Sick, someone said. Stomach thing, bad water, he’d be back in two days.
He wasn’t back in two days.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. People got sick. People disappeared. The world was full of both by then.
But standing in the substation at 0317 with my name still hanging in the air from a radio speaker, I thought about Reyes. His handwriting on the logs. The way he’d annotated the access schematics when I’d shown them to him, pencil marks in the margins, his system.
He would have known the east hatch. I showed him the plans myself.
I told Travis.
Travis sat with that for a minute. Then he said, “Is Reyes someone who’d want to bring you home, or someone who’d want to bring you in?”
I didn’t know. That was the honest answer. I didn’t know what Reyes thought about what we’d done, because I’d never had to find out. He was gone before it happened, and after, there was no after that included him.
The Decision
We had until dawn, roughly. If someone was at the east hatch, they’d wait for a response window, maybe two or three hours, and then either move or transmit again the following night.
Travis wanted to wait. Sit tight, monitor the frequency, gather more information before we did anything.
I understood that. It was the right tactical call.
But I kept thinking about the pause. The voice pausing between numbers like it was reading off a page. That’s not a looped recording. That’s not a ghost. That’s a person, tired, maybe reading by flashlight, running their finger down a list.
That’s someone who found a piece of paper somewhere and is using it to find me.
The question is whether they’re using it to find me because they want to help me or because they want to finish something that got left unfinished.
I pulled on my jacket. Found my boots. Travis watched me.
“You’re going,” he said.
“I’m going to look. Not open anything. Not make contact. Just get eyes on the hatch location and see if there’s sign of anyone.”
“That’s how people die, Hollis.”
“People die either way.”
He argued for another four minutes. I know because I watched the clock. Then he laced up his own boots.
That’s the thing about Travis. He thinks I’m losing it, and he’s probably right, and he follows me anyway. I don’t know what that makes him. Loyal, maybe. Or just as lost as I am.
Sixty Meters Northeast
The rock face in the dark looks like nothing. That’s by design.
We came at it from the high side, staying in the tree line, taking forty minutes to cover ground we could’ve crossed in eight. Cold night. November, I think, though I’ve lost exact track. Frost on the shale, which meant footprints would show.
I saw them before I saw the hatch.
Boot prints in the frost. One set, coming from the northeast, stopping at the rock face.
The shale we’d raked over the hatch had been moved. Not thrown aside, not dug up – moved carefully, set in a rough pile to the left. Like someone who knew what they were uncovering and didn’t want to damage it.
The hatch was still closed. Steel plate, flush with the rock.
And sitting against it, back to the steel, wrapped in a jacket too light for the weather, was a person.
Asleep. Or unconscious. Hard to tell from forty feet.
Travis put his hand on my arm. I was already moving.
I got within ten feet before I could make out the face.
It wasn’t Reyes.
It was a woman I’d never seen before. Maybe forty, dark hair going gray at the temples, a radio handset clipped to her jacket. Her lips were moving slightly. Dreaming, or cold, or both.
There was a notebook in her lap. Open. I could see handwriting, columns of numbers.
I stepped on a piece of loose shale and her eyes came open.
She didn’t go for a weapon. She didn’t run. She looked at me for a second, and then she said, in a voice rough from cold and probably days of not talking to anyone, “You’re Hollis.”
“Who sent you,” I said.
She held up the notebook. “Reyes. He’s been dead six weeks. Fever. But before he went, he spent three days writing down everything he could remember about the eastern relay network. Every frequency. Every access point. Every name.” She paused. “He said you’d need to know that what happened at the bunker – he knew before it happened. He chose not to stop it. He wanted you to know that. That he made the same call you did.”
I stood there in the frost.
“He also said you’d be monitoring this frequency. Said you’d be paranoid enough not to respond, but you’d be curious enough to come look.”
Travis came up beside me. He didn’t say anything.
The woman closed the notebook. “There’s a settlement. Eighty-three people, running a water filtration system off a river forty kilometers west. They need someone who knows communications. Someone who can get the relay network back up.” She looked at me steadily. “Reyes said you were the only one left who could do it.”
The hatch behind her was cold and sealed and had four hundred feet of rock on the other side of it.
But she’d come from the other direction. West. Forty kilometers.
Eighty-three people.
I looked at Travis. He was already doing the math, I could see it. Weighing it. His face working through something.
“How long to get there,” he said.
“Two days if the weather holds.”
He looked at me. I looked at the notebook in her hands, Reyes’s handwriting from six weeks ago, from a man making his last accounting of things he’d done and not done.
I thought about eleven men.
I thought about eighty-three.
“Show us the route,” I said.
She stood up, slow, joints stiff from the cold. Pulled a folded map from inside her jacket.
Travis picked up the piece of shale I’d knocked loose and set it back where it had been, careful, like it mattered.
Maybe it did.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it along to someone who’d sit with it.
For more unsettling tales, check out what happened when a cop reached for his cuffs when he saw me bleeding on the highway or the mystery that unfolded when my uncle left me his gun shop – but the first thing I found had my dead brother’s name on it.
