The old radio hissed to life, breaking through the static of a desolate world.

‘DJ Karma, here again, bringing songs from the past to the phantoms of the future.’

Kalen twisted the knob of his beat-up pocket radio. It’d been weeks since he last heard another’s voice.

America had ended after years of being engulfed by fire along with a series of epidemics, taking the lives of most. The cities became graveyards, highways covered in dust. But somewhere not too distant stood a radio tower somehow able to draw power and a man inside it well enough to speak.

‘Here’s an oldie for all the dead or the living. A seventies number called American Pie – by some old hippie named Don Mclean. At least, I think he was a hippie. I’m sure the dead folks out there should find this fitting. The music began to play, and the words being sung made his hair stand on end, eerie against the silence of the wasteland around him.

Kalen holstered his revolver inside the pocket of his ripped, dirty jeans with the pocket radio in the other. He headed in whichever direction the signal was strongest, hoping to find the station. DJ Karma might be another survivor penned up in another forgotten underground bunker. Then again, he could already be dead, the broadcast being an old loop from a recent recording.

Any chance of finding just one life was worth the risk of leaving his bunker. Maybe there was something worth saving. So he followed the music and the sound of his radio.