The barter table sat under the crooked skeleton of what used to be a town hall awning, its civic banners long since torn down or burned. Cronauer tightened his jacket against the creeping cold and eyed the exchange in front of him: three sealed pouches of heirloom tomato seeds in return for a battered box of AA batteries, half the brand names already worn off.

“These better not be dead,” the trader muttered, thumb running nervously over a plastic lighter with no flame left in it.

Cronauer said nothing. Talking was a risk. Negotiations now weren’t about haggling — they were about survival. If someone didn’t like your terms, they didn’t walk away — they took what they wanted. He kept one hand loose by his side, near the worn pistol tucked beneath his jacket.

The seeds disappeared into his pack. The batteries vanished into the trader’s jacket. No smiles, no thanks. Both men backed away slow, guns unseen but understood, until Cronauer turned and headed down the cracked street toward the edge of town.

The sunset bled into the horizon, tainted and thin, a reminder that not even the skies were clean anymore. Philadelphia. Miami. Los Angeles. Gone, not by missiles, but by freight bombs smuggled in under the collapsing weight of a broken economy.

And New Orleans — lost not to fire from the sky, but to fire from within. Starving mobs, riots, a desperate self-destruction after the last supply lines failed.

The coasts were dead now. The South, too. If you wanted to live, you ran inland. Midwest or nothing.

Cronauer had made it to Viroqua, Wisconsin — a place nobody important cared enough to destroy. Small. Stubborn. Half-forgotten. Just the way he needed it.

He moved fast through the dying woods toward his plot — a rough scrape of farmland hidden just outside the township line. Far enough to be forgotten. Close enough to barter, when desperate.

The shack came into view through a tangle of dying trees, patched together from scrap tin and salvaged wood, its roof lined with broken solar panels and a jury-rigged water catchment system. Dominating the yard was the battered mast of what used to be an LPFM transmitter — a local station, abandoned when the last of the old world collapsed.

Cronauer had found it by accident, half-buried under vines, and almost wept when he realized what it was. With what little grid access he could scavenge — courtesy of a half-operational Starlink dish stolen before the satellites fell silent — he pulled old FCC filings, schematics, maintenance logs.

The Starlink monitor blinked fitfully, clinging to a dying constellation. Not enough for maps or messaging—but enough to skim old schematics from orbit if you knew how.

It had been licensed for 100 watts. Cronauer rewired it. Boosted it. Now it pushed over 7,500 watts through the night air.

Illegal, by old standards. But the old standards were dead. Nobody was left to enforce them.

The shack buzzed with life as he stepped inside, the spectrum analyzer scraping weak signals from the dead sky. The transmitter throbbed a low, steady pulse through the floorboards.

He dumped the seeds onto the counter, hung the jacket on a rusted nail, and laid his pistol carefully next to the transmitter rig. The only two things he trusted: Steel and signal.

He keyed the spectrum scanner, scanning the bands.

There. A blip. Small. Weak. Wrong.

Not random static. Not solar drift.

A whisper. A survivor, maybe.

Cronauer hovered over the mic switch, breathing shallow, ears tuned for something real.

He still remembered the fall.

The tariffs had shredded the economy first — a last desperate tantrum by a businessman-president who thought the world was just another casino to rig. Then came the attacks — freight containers, smuggled nukes buried inside the goods we could no longer afford to inspect.

Philadelphia. Miami. Los Angeles. Wiped off the map.

And New Orleans, torn apart by its own starving hands.

The President and his men fled into bunkers, leaving the rest of the country to rot. The cities collapsed into war zones. The coasts burned. The South starved. The Midwest endured, because it had no other choice.

Cronauer hadn’t run for cover. He ran for air. For soil. For something he could fix with his own hands.

And now, in the ruins of Viroqua, Wisconsin, he built something no government could silence.

A signal. A voice. A memory.

The world might be rotting at the edges, but as long as he had air to breathe and electricity to steal, Station Zero would keep singing into the void.

Cronauer leaned back, letting the faint pulse of the drift wash over him. The world was dead. But the signal — The signal was still alive.

And maybe, somewhere out there, someone else was too.

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