The Last Voice on Earth

The airwaves were mostly silent now.

Static hissed softly like a distant sea, its white noise a familiar ghost. At exactly 7:00 p.m., just like every evening for the past three years, a man’s voice crackled through the empty frequencies.

“Good evening, survivors. Or... just me again,” said RJ, his voice warm but tired. “Broadcasting live from Station Echo-9, still here in what’s left of Brooklyn. The sky was yellow again today. The birds haven’t returned, but the rats are doing just fine.”

He chuckled quietly at his own joke. No one else was laughing, but that was okay. RJ was used to the silence now.

He leaned back in his chair and looked around the dusty studio. The posters on the walls had faded. Cobwebs hugged the corners. The coffee mug beside him hadn’t held coffee in over a year, but he still kept it there, like a ritual.

He reached out, tapped a button on the control panel, and played an old jazz record. The scratches in the vinyl were now part of the music.


-Before the world went quiet, RJ had been a part-time radio host. He’d loved the sound of his own voice, loved the thought of people listening to him as they drove home from work, or made dinner in tiny apartments. But when the Collapse came—when the power grids failed, the governments crumbled, and cities turned to graveyards—he held on to the mic like it was an anchor.

And so, every night, RJ talked.

To no one.

Or so he believed.


---

In a forgotten bunker buried under a mountain in Vermont, 17-year-old Mira sat wrapped in a blanket, headphones clamped tightly over her ears. Her cheeks were pale. Her fingers were thin. But her eyes were wide with life every time that voice came through.

RJ.

She had found his signal by accident during a bleak winter night, when her hands were shaking and the silence in the bunker felt like it would swallow her. The voice cut through the static like a miracle. She’d screamed in surprise, then cried in relief.

Since then, she never missed a broadcast.

RJ didn’t know she existed. But Mira knew everything about him. His love for jazz, his hopeless attempts at rooftop gardening, the dog he used to have named Saturn, the way he missed “weird things” like streetlights flickering on at night.

She filled pages in a notebook with his words. Copied them like prayers.


---

For a long time, she didn’t dare speak. What if he couldn’t hear her? What if reaching out broke something sacred?

But silence was starting to scare her again.

One night, when the wind howled above ground and the bunker’s generator sputtered weakly, she climbed to the surface. The cold was sharp, but she powered up the solar transmitter she’d repaired over months of trial and error. She stared at the microphone like it might bite her.

"...Hello?"

Her voice cracked. It sounded foreign, even to herself. She hadn’t spoken aloud in nearly a week.

"...Can you hear me?"


J froze.

He was midway through another story—something about pigeons he once saw dive-bombing a politician—when the radio made a sound that didn’t belong to static.

A voice.

Faint. Nervous.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

He blinked hard and checked the equipment. Had he fallen asleep? Was it a dream?

Then the voice came again. Real.

“I hear you!” he shouted, nearly knocking over the mic. “Yes, I hear you! Who is this?!”

There was a long pause before the girl answered.

“My name is Mira... I’ve been listening. For a long time.”

RJ leaned into the mic. His heart was racing. “You’re real.”

She laughed softly. “You sound surprised.”

“I thought I was mad. That I’d been talking to ghosts.”

“Well,” Mira said, “then we’re both mad. I’m talking to a voice in the dark, and it’s the best part of my day.”


-They talked for hours. About books. About how she’d found the bunker. About the sky—how in Vermont, it turned a pale violet at night now. About her parents, who hadn’t made it. About RJ’s rooftop garden that never grew anything but weeds.

He made her laugh. She made him pause, reflect, remember how it felt to be connected.

They made a pact before signing off.

“Same time tomorrow?” RJ asked.

“I’ll be here,” she promised.

--or the first time in years, RJ felt purpose. He cleaned the studio. He repaired the backup generator. He searched through boxes of old records to play new songs for her. His broadcasts had always been habits.

Now, they were lifelines.

And Mira? She started speaking again. Singing softly to herself. Fixing up the transmitter more. She even began writing her own thoughts in her notebook instead of just copying his.

Every night, their voices met.

They played music for each other.

They told stories, real and imagined.

They read poems.

They dared to dream of what might come next.

e world had ended.

But not for them.

For them, it had only paused—until a voice called out through the static, and another voice answered.

Two people, hundreds of miles apart, held together by a thread of sound.

And in a world full of silence…

That thread was everything.