The Last Broadcast

The thing about death on this scale, real, biblical, Old-Testament wrath-of-God type stuff, is that it’s quiet. Not at first, no. First, there’s the coughing. The screaming. The crying over bodies that won’t stop leaking. But then... it’s like the volume knob of the world gets turned down until it’s just you, the sun, and the flies.

Mickey Taylor had been a DJ in Gainesville, Florida. Midnight to four, 98.7 The Blaze. He used to spin records and make stoners laugh with stoner jokes. The apocalypse came in three parts for him: first, the station went dead quiet, no incoming calls, no news updates, no ads. Then management stopped showing up. Then his wife, Lena, stopped breathing.

He buried her in the backyard. No ceremony. No priest. Just her favorite Phish T-shirt wrapped around her head, and a little solar garden light shoved into the ground to mark the spot. The Florida sun didn’t care. It kept beating down, as if nothing had changed. Humid, hot, angry.

But Mickey wasn’t done talking.

He scavenged fuel for the station’s backup generator and started broadcasting again. Not music, not jokes. Just him and a microphone, spinning words into the void.

“If you’re out there, this is Mickey the Blaze Man. 98.7 FM. I don’t know if anyone’s listening. I don’t know if the towers even still work up north. But this frequency runs clean across north Florida, and if you’ve got ears and a battery-powered radio, I’m here.”

He read Bible verses some nights, which was ironic because he’d been agnostic since Bush Jr. was still mispronouncing “nuclear.” He played old vinyl: Bowie, Zeppelin, even a little Waylon Jennings. He told stories about Lena, about a feral dog he started feeding, about the sound of silence that now came from the I-75.

And sometimes, he’d hear the faintest thing through the receiver. Voices. Maybe. Once, a woman in Georgia. Said her name was Angela, she was holed up in a church outside Valdosta with her twin boys and an old man who thought he was Moses. She asked Mickey if he’d heard about the dreams.

That was when the real weirdness began.

They all started dreaming about the same two people. An old Black woman on a porch somewhere in the Midwest, humming gospel and offering peace. And a dark man in cowboy boots with fire in his eyes, walking highways with crows in his wake.

Angela described the porch woman like she’d met her. Said she called herself Mother Abigail. Said the boys dreamed of her every night. The old man Moses had packed up a cart and walked west two days later, “following the Lord.”

Mickey’s dreams were... different.

He saw the other one. The cowboy. The Walking Dude. Sometimes he was in Mickey’s driveway, leaning on the hood of the dead Corolla. Sometimes he was inside the radio booth, just watching, smiling like a crocodile in church. Mickey would wake soaked in sweat, smelling fire.

He stopped broadcasting for a few days after that.

A week passed before he got the message.

It came through as static at first, then a low hum. Then, a voice. Real human. Male, hoarse, urgent. Coming from an old CB radio he had scavenged from a state trooper’s cruiser near Lake City.

“This is Franklin County Emergency Broadcast... if you’re in the Tallahassee region, we’ve set up a survivor station at Apalachicola High School. We’ve got food, fuel, and medicine. Repeat, Apalachicola High School.”

Mickey didn’t even hesitate. He packed his gear, including a copy of Ziggy Stardust and his dead wife’s wedding ring, filled the van with fuel, and hit the road with the dog, now named Joplin, riding shotgun.

The drive west on Highway 20 was a horror movie in slow motion. Burned-out cars, bodies rotting in church pews, vultures fat and lazy. But it was the silence that got to him. Florida had always been noisy—frogs, bugs, idiots with fireworks. Now it was just his tires and the occasional buzz of flies.

He found signs. Hand-painted boards nailed to trees.
“Survivors this way.”
“Mother Abigail calls.”
“Do not follow the Man with No Face.”

Then, around Blountstown, Mickey ran into his first live person since Lena died.

A kid. Maybe fifteen. Pale. Shirtless. Standing in the middle of the road with a machete and a smile that said, “I’ve seen what comes next, and you won’t like it.”

Mickey slowed down. Cracked the window.

“You headed west?” the kid asked.

Mickey nodded.

The kid tapped the machete against the roof. “You dream about him too?”

Mickey didn’t answer.

“He wants you,” the kid said. “He knows about your station. He said you could be useful.”

“I’m not useful to anyone anymore.”

“That’s not what he thinks. He says you’re still got a voice. A voice people listen to.”

The kid’s eyes had gone glassy. “He says to tell you... the west is a lie. The corn will rot. The porch will burn. You belong with us.”

Then the kid stepped aside and let Mickey pass. No fight. Just a message delivered, like some post-apocalyptic UPS.

He found the school. Apalachicola was half-flooded, but they’d sandbagged the perimeter. Survivors stood on the roof with rifles. Others cooked beans over campfires in the parking lot. Someone had spray-painted THE BODY AIN’T DEAD IF THE VOICE STILL SPEAKS across the gym wall.

They took him in. Fed him. Cleaned his wounds. Listened to his voice like it was prophecy.

The new leader was a woman named Rosa Trammell. Former hospice nurse from Macon, Georgia. She was strong, short, mean, and tired. She had dreams about the porch woman. They were headed west in two days. Colorado. Boulder.

“You coming?” she asked Mickey, wiping sweat from her brow.

Mickey looked out toward the sea, where gulls still circled the bones of the old world. He looked down at Joplin, who had curled up under the bench beside him.

He nodded. “Yeah. But I’m bringing the station.”

Rosa raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll broadcast along the way. Let people know where we’re headed. If he’s using radios to whisper lies, I’ll use mine to shout the truth.”

Rosa didn’t smile, but she nodded.

And so the convoy left the Gulf Coast with Mickey’s voice echoing across the swampy silence of the South, warning, calling, promising something better than darkness.

Somewhere in the charred ruin of the Panhandle, the Man with No Face listened too. And he smiled.

END