The Last Broadcast

The Last Broadcast

When the world ends, who keeps the music playing?

The world ended quietly.

Not with bombs or firestorms, not with cities collapsing into dust. It ended in stillness. A sickness swept through, a silence followed, and one by one, the voices that had filled the planet vanished.

Now, the roads are empty. The towns are skeletons of what they once were. And yet, every night when the sky folds into darkness, there is still music.

I first heard it three weeks after the last human voice I knew had gone quiet. I had been wandering the ruins of an old supermarket, looking for cans that hadn’t spoiled, when the faint crackle reached me.

At first I thought it was a hallucination, some phantom noise my grief had conjured. But no—the static was real, followed by the trembling notes of a piano. Beethoven, of all things.

I dropped everything and ran outside, pulling the battered radio I carried from my pack. I twisted the dial, heart pounding. And there it was: a voice.

“Good evening, listeners. This is WZRD, still on the air. Tonight’s request comes from… well, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

I froze in the street, tears stinging my eyes. A human voice. Smooth, calm, almost cheerful, as though nothing had happened.

Someone was still out there.

I listened every night after that. The DJ never gave his name, only signed off with, “Stay alive. Stay listening.”

His voice was warm, steady, unshaken by the emptiness of the world. He played music like a man keeping vigil—sometimes old vinyl crackling with age, sometimes digital files pulled from servers that had long since gone untended. Jazz, rock, lullabies, even pop songs from the 2000s.

But what caught my attention were the requests.

“Next up, we’ve got a track for Marie in Oklahoma City. She wanted to hear ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me.’”

I nearly dropped the radio again. Marie? Oklahoma City? There was no way. That city had burned months ago. No one could have survived.

The next night, it was another request. “This one goes out to Jamal in Nairobi. He says it reminds him of someone he lost.”

Nairobi. Half a world away. No signal could have reached like that anymore.

And then one night, he said something that made my blood run cold.

“This next song comes from Claire in Denver. She hasn’t made the request yet, but she will tomorrow.”

I wrote it off as a mistake. Maybe I had misheard. Maybe grief was twisting the words.

But the following day, while scavenging through a collapsed bookstore, I found a half-burned journal wedged between shelves. The first entry that caught my eye was scrawled in shaky handwriting:

“Tomorrow I’ll call in to WZRD. Ask them to play ‘Hallelujah.’ For him.”

My stomach clenched. That was the exact song I’d heard the DJ announce.

The entry was dated the day before the broadcast.

From then on, I started writing the requests down.

A song for someone lost in Paris. Another for a child in a refugee camp in Cairo. A lullaby for a man in Toronto who hadn’t spoken since the sickness took his wife.

Each time, I would find proof—notes, scraps of journals, old recordings—that the request had not yet been made when it aired. The DJ wasn’t just taking calls. He was receiving them from the future.

I couldn’t stop listening. Each broadcast became more haunting, more impossible.

Sometimes the DJ would pause, as though he, too, was struggling to understand. “This one… this one’s strange,” he’d say. “It came from somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore. But I’ll play it anyway.”

And then the music would pour through the static, filling the night with voices of the dead, songs of the living not yet lost, promises that time itself seemed to carry across the ruin of the world.

It was beautiful. Terrifying. Hopeful.

Last night, everything changed.

The broadcast began as usual, the DJ’s calm tone carrying across the wasteland.

“Good evening, listeners. This one’s a little different. Tonight’s request is for…”

He paused.

“For someone wandering near the broken interstate, carrying an old backpack radio. Someone who hasn’t stopped listening since the first night they heard me.”

The air drained from my lungs. That was me.

He continued, his voice lower, almost tender.

“You haven’t asked for it yet, but you will. Tomorrow. You’ll ask me to play a song that belonged to the person you loved most. And I’ll play it, even if you never tell me the title. Because the song already knows. It’s already waiting.”

The music swelled. Not just any song. Our song—the one you used to hum when you thought no one was listening. The one we danced to in the kitchen when the world still had light.

I fell to my knees, the radio clutched against me, sobbing into the static.

I don’t know what the DJ is. A man clinging to sanity in some bunker? A machine programmed to keep humanity comforted as it faded? Or something else—something that exists outside time, gathering voices that no longer have a place?

But I know this: the music will not stops.

As long as there are requests—whether from the living, the dead, or those not yet gone—the last broadcast will go on.

And tonight, I will finally make mine.