Cronauer didn’t hear the bombs.

He felt them.

It started with a jolt, like the building had hiccupped. Then the world went dark — the hum of servers, the glow of monitors, the constant whisper of cooling fans — all of it gone in an instant. Dead silence, thick as concrete. And inside a data center, there’s no window to look out of. No sky to judge by. Just walls, machines, and now — nothing.

He stood still for a long moment, hands frozen over a dead keyboard, while the backup generators failed to kick on.

Not a power outage.

Not a rolling blackout.

Something worse.

Instinct kicked in. Not the slow, corporate-approved kind of instinct bred by years in IT.

The old kind.

The kind hammered into him in sand and blood and sweat halfway across the world.

At eighteen, he’d signed up — partly out of boredom, partly out of spite, partly because it was the only thing that made sense back then. Four years in uniform taught him two things: how to build a radio station from dirt and scrap, and how to run when the world around you started falling apart.

When he left the military, he didn’t leave those lessons behind.

He built on them.

Cronauer had been raised by grounded parents — children of the ‘60s and ‘70s, when having firearms in the home wasn’t radical or political, just common sense. He grew up with a deep respect for the Second Amendment — not the twisted, loud caricature people screamed about now — but the real thing.

Responsibility.

Defense.

Independence.

Virginia law allowed concealed carry, and Cronauer exercised that right without fanfare. Not for show. Not for bravado. Because it was part of being ready. Part of being free.

His weapon of choice was the same one he carried that day — a Glock 19, tucked discreetly under his jacket. Reliable. Familiar. Just like he’d been taught.

He grabbed his backpack — already packed, always packed — and ran.

His car, an aging 1994 Honda Civic, waited a few blocks down, parked half-hidden by habit more than plan. He popped the trunk, checked the gear: a battered first-aid kit, two MREs, a crumpled canteen, a hand-crank radio, a flashlight, extra magazines.

Not a prepper.

Just someone who’d paid attention.

The roads clogged fast, but he knew the backways — IT gigs took him everywhere from server farms to swampy industrial parks.

He picked his way north and west, away from the coast, away from the smoke already bleeding up into the sky.

Philadelphia was gone.

Miami.

Los Angeles.

He knew it without hearing a single broadcast.

The grid was dead.

The rules were dead.

Now it was just survival.

He drove until the Civic coughed its last breath somewhere in Ohio. No gas. No pumps working. No lights in the towns. Just abandoned shells of grocery stores and burned-out husks of homes.

He didn’t curse.

Didn’t panic.

He grabbed what he could carry, slung the pack over his shoulder, made sure the Glock was loaded, and started walking.

Viroqua wasn’t a plan. It was a memory — a footnote from an old trip, a low-power FM station he’d stumbled across once while scanning the dial, its signal faint but stubborn. The kind of place nobody important would ever think to destroy.

He moved by night. Slept in ditches and hollow barns. Bartered when he had to. Fought once — a flash of steel and blood under a broken billboard — and kept moving.

Days blurred into weeks.

Somewhere outside of Madison, he passed a convoy — National Guard, or what was left of it — hoarding supplies behind razor wire and cold eyes. He gave them a wide berth. Trust was suicide now.

When he finally limped into Viroqua, blistered and half-starved, the transmitter tower was still there — battered, listing slightly, but standing.

The shack beside it was rotted out. The town was half-empty. But it was land. It was shelter. It was possibility.

Cronauer patched together solar panels, gutted old appliances for wiring, ripped out rusted metal to reinforce the mast. Boosted the transmitter until it screamed across the empty skies. Wired a scavenged Starlink dish into the cracked roof, stealing a thin, flickering connection to the ghosts still circling the planet.

He wasn’t a broadcaster by title anymore.

He was a broadcaster by survival.

By blood.

He wasn’t trying to rebuild America.

He just refused to let it die alone.

Cronauer keyed the mic late that night, voice rough but steady, and sent the first whisper out into the dark.

“Station Zero calling. If you can hear me, you’re still alive.”

He sat back, Glock within reach, eyes on the monitors, listening to the static.

Somewhere between survival and madness, Cronauer built a new world out of wires, willpower, and the stubborn refusal to disappear.

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