The radio was broken. It had been broken for six months. Tony Ferguson knew this because he had tried to fix it three times and failed each time, and each failure was slightly more embarrassing than the last because his father kept asking him about it.

"It's just a connection," Tony said the third time, holding the back panel in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, neither of which was doing any useful work.

"It's been broken since before the bombing," Pops Dan said. He was sitting at the kitchen table, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his shirt. "I don't need it fixed."

"You don't need it fixed. But it would be nice. If someone wanted to hear the news."

"There's no news."

"That's the problem."

Tony put the radio down. It made a dull sound on the table, like a stone dropping into shallow water. He stood there for a moment, looking at the radio, looking at his father, looking at the kitchen with its cracked linoleum floor and the window that didn't close all the way and the view of the town that used to be something and now was just ruins and hope and the constant low-grade fear of whatever came next.

He went to the garage.

The garage was attached to the house. It was not much of a garage—more of a lean-to, really, with a corrugated tin roof and a concrete floor that cracked in places and a single light bulb that flickered when the wind was right. Inside was a workbench, some tools, a pile of old radios and televisions and things that used to work and now didn't, and in the corner, covered by a tarp, something that Tony had found two months ago and hadn't gotten around to looking at.

He pulled off the tarp.

It was a microwave transmitter. Or something like one. It was the size of a small refrigerator, made of metal that had once been painted green but was now mostly rust, with a control panel that had maybe twenty buttons, of which four still lit up when you pressed them. There were labels on the panel—some in English, some in a language Tony didn't recognize, some just numbers.

He found the manual in a file cabinet in the corner. It was a university document—State University, Department of Physics, dated 1987. The transmitter had been used for atmospheric research and then forgotten when the department got new equipment and the old stuff was moved to storage and the storage room was bombed and this thing survived because it was too heavy to move.

Tony read the manual. He didn't understand most of it. He understood enough.

He plugged it in.

The lights flickered. The control panel lit up. A fan started spinning with a sound like a dying bird. Tony turned a dial. Static came out of a small speaker built into the front of the unit. He turned another dial. The static changed pitch. He turned a third dial.

The radio in the kitchen went silent.

Tony looked at the radio. He looked at the transmitter. He turned the dial back a millimeter. The radio crackled back to life.

"Interesting," he said.

He turned the dial again. The radio went silent.

He turned it back. The radio came back.

He did it four more times. Same result. The transmitter was interfering with the radio. Not just any radio—he could test this on any radio, any receiver within a hundred meters. The transmitter created a bubble of dead air, a zone of silence, a hole in the electromagnetic spectrum that swallowed every signal that came near it.

He didn't know the physics. He didn't know why this happened. He knew that when he turned the dial, things went quiet, and that was enough.

For two months, Tony played with the transmitter. He didn't tell anyone. He wasn't keeping a secret so much as he was keeping a hobby. The transmitter was interesting. It was a puzzle. It was something that worked, and in a town where almost nothing worked, that was something.

He cranked it to maximum once, just to see what would happen. The entire neighborhood went silent—every radio, every telephone, every electronic device within a radius of two kilometers died at once. People came out of their houses. They looked at their radios. They looked at the sky. They shrugged and went back inside.

Tony went back to smoking on the porch.

The militias were fighting over the eastern districts. Not armies—militias, which is to say groups of men with mismatched weapons and no formal command structure, fighting over territory that was already ruined and would stay ruined regardless of who controlled it. Pops Dan led a small group—eighteen men, mostly farmers and former factory workers, armed with hunting rifles and an old machine gun that jammed half the time.

Casey worked at the hospital, which was a former school with no electricity and limited medicine. She treated wounds with boiled water and whatever antibiotics she could scavenge. She didn't believe in heroes. She believed in clean bandages and clean hands and keeping your head down.

Tony knew none of this mattered. The transmitter mattered. The transmitter was real. The fighting was noise.

On the day the enemy attacked, Tony was in the garage, alone, turning dials.

He was thinking about nothing. He was thinking about Montana—about a girl he'd met there two years ago, before the war, before any of this. She had brown hair and laughed at his jokes even when they weren't funny. He hadn't thought about her in months. Today she was in his mind, and it was strange, the way memory worked like that.

The transmitter was humming. The dial was at maximum. Tony knew, instinctively, that it was going to do something. He didn't know what. He just knew that the humming was different now—higher, sharper, like a wire about to snap.

He reached for the dial to turn it down.

He didn't have time.

The explosion was small. Not dramatic. Not the kind of explosion you see in movies with fire and debris flying everywhere. It was a flash—a bright green flash from the transmitter's control panel—and then a smell like burning plastic and ozone and something else, something organic, and then silence.

Tony fell backward. His head hit the concrete wall. He didn't feel it. He was on the floor of the garage, his hand still reaching for the dial, and he was dead.

Casey heard the explosion. She was at the hospital, bandaging a boy's arm—the boy was sixteen, had been conscripted by one militia or another, and had taken a bullet in the arm while trying to run away from both of them.

"Stay still," Casey said.

The boy stopped moving. "Was that—"

"I don't know."

She went to the window. Smoke was rising from the direction of the Ferguson house. She recognized the shape of the garage. She recognized the Ferguson family. She knew the son—a quiet kid who spent too much time in the garage and not enough time doing anything useful.

She didn't go immediately. She finished bandaging the boy's arm. She washed her hands. She put on her coat. She walked over, slowly, the way you walk toward something you know is bad but want to delay seeing.

The garage was hot. The transmitter was melted—twisted metal, cracked glass, the smell of burnt electronics thick in the air. Tony was on the floor, his face up, his eyes open, his hand on the concrete like he'd been reaching for something.

Casey knelt down. She closed his eyes. She wrapped him in a blanket from the workbench. She carried him to the kitchen and laid him on the table.

Pops Dan came home that evening. He had been out with the militia—had heard the explosion, had come looking, had decided not to look too closely at whatever had caused it because some things you don't want to see.

He found Casey in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, drinking tea, looking at Tony's body.

"He's dead," she said.

"I know."

"I'm sorry, Dan."

"Don't be. This is how it goes."

He stood over his son's body. He looked at Tony's face—the face of a boy who had never really grown up, who had smoked too many cigarettes and fixed too many radios and never once done anything that would make him a hero.

He looked at the broken radio on the table. He picked it up. He opened the back panel. He took out his screwdriver and tried to fix it.

His hands were shaking. He couldn't do it. He put the radio down.

Outside, the militia's radios had gone silent for three hours that afternoon. Just three hours. But three hours was enough. The eastern districts were retaken. The fighting continued. The town survived.

Tony Ferguson was twenty years old.