Sometime later, after they have left the radio room, I returned. I didn’t expect to find any video given the circumstances now, but I thought I might be able to listen to shortwave radio broadcasts.
While the others were in rest mode, I sat in front of the radio and slowly spun the dial, moving up and down the radio spectrum, listening for anything that was human. I sorted through the noise and found one station broadcasting, but it sounded more like a looped tape on automatic than anyone attempting communication with others.
I was about to give up, which is to say, I decided to make one more run up the band when I picked up faint words. I focused in and heard a human voice making repeated calls in the clear. He was searching for anyone who was still alive, or still had a radio, or still had power.
I listened to him for five minutes and then heard a more powerful answer. A woman’s voice saying that she was in Lincoln, Nebraska, and heard him.
“We are an enclave of more than one hundred,” said the man. “We’ve set up in a distribution center for Wal-Mart. We have a warehouse full of material and are ready to trade.”
I noticed that he didn’t give his location but that made sense. If they had access to a major distribution center, it could mean enough food to survive for months. It could mean ways of improving life with power generation. It could mean that civilization wasn’t quite as dead as it seemed.
Another voice joined and said that they had found a large supply of food and were set up near a hydroelectric dam. The power had failed, but only because no one around knew how to repair the generators.
I felt the joy build. I was hearing that people survived. I was hearing, based on what I could tell, that the middle part of the United States was recovering already.
The center of the country, where I had sent my wife for her safety. The place I thought would have the best chance of weathering the impact of the asteroid. Where they wouldn’t have to worry about tsunamis and where there were no active volcanos. Sure, if the Yellowstone caldera went, then that would be it for those west of the Mississippi and maybe the Ohio Valley would be buried under the volcanic residue, but right now, they were surviving.
As we passed over what had been the Midwest, I tried to get a lock on those transmissions. I learned that there was another enclave in eastern Wyoming, one in Minnesota and one in Kentucky. Nothing from farther south and nothing from any of the coastal areas. Those had been wiped out in the tsunamis.
But for me, this was all good news because it meant that sending Debbie into Kansas had been the right thing to do. It meant that she was safe there, at least for the minute and I knew that there were survivors in that area. It was the best that I could hope for.