​A Fiction Series

Chapter 8: The Top of the Hour

By Cliff Potts

The voice came back exactly when it said it would.

Mike looked at his watch three times in the last ten minutes and trusted it less each time, but when the carrier tone rose again out of the static and settled into something strong enough to hold, he believed the radio before he believed the watch.

“…this is the CONELRAD Radio Network…”

Nobody in the shelter moved.

The signal had strength to it now. Not perfect. Not clean. But strong enough to sound deliberate. Like somebody somewhere had gotten a grip on the machinery and refused to let go.

“…this is a civil defense broadcast. If you can hear this, remain under cover. Do not leave shelter. Repeat, do not leave shelter…”

The same voice.

Mike leaned closer, elbows on the table.

Helen stood still with a dish towel in her hands.

Tommy stopped shuffling the cards.

Carol looked up from her bunk.

Margaret didn’t move at all.

“…radiological hazards remain present in the Chicago area and surrounding communities…”

Mike nodded once.

There it was.

Not the bomb.

Not the blast.

The thing that stayed behind.

He looked at Tommy.

“That’s why we’re still down here.”

Tommy nodded without taking his eyes off the radio.

The signal crackled once, dipped, and came back.

“…remain in shelter for the full recommended period… exposure should be limited as much as possible…”

That was all.

No list of cities. No maps. No explanations.

Just warning.

Then static again.

Tommy let out a breath he probably hadn’t known he was holding.

“That’s it?”

“For now,” Mike said.

“That isn’t much.”

“No,” Margaret said quietly. “It isn’t.”

The day settled back over them after that.

Not silence. Never silence. The room had too many sounds now. The light humming overhead. The air system breathing through the vents. The occasional clink of a cup or plate. The soft, endless bed of radio hiss.

Helen poured water from one of the filled containers into a pan and set it near the beans. She looked at the shelves, the cans, the boxes, the order she had made out of everything.

“We’re going to have to write this down.”

Mike looked at her.

“What.”

“What we use,” she said. “Food. Water. Fuel. If we don’t keep track of it, we’ll start lying to ourselves.”

Mike thought about that.

Then nodded.

“Yeah.”

Tommy looked interested.

“I can do that.”

Helen smiled faintly.

“You can help.”

That pleased him more than it should have, which was probably why she said it that way.

Mike found a pencil and a cheap lined tablet from the supplies and set them on the table.

“What day is it?” Helen asked.

Mike answered automatically.

“Monday.”

Then he frowned.

“October fifth.”

He let that sit a second, as if saying the date aloud might pin the day in place and stop it from sliding any farther away.

Helen wrote it at the top of the page.

The beans went on before noon.

Helen used the Coleman stove, keeping the flame low, listening the same way Mike listened to the radio. Not because the stove was likely to betray them. Because anything mechanical felt worth watching now.

The smell changed the room.

Not enough to make it home.

Enough to remind them that heat and food and waiting could still happen in the same place.

Tommy set the table without being asked.

Carol carried spoons one at a time from the crate to the table and placed each one carefully like she was doing serious work.

Margaret folded and unfolded a towel, then finally stopped and just held it in her lap.

Mike watched all of it while pretending not to.

By afternoon the showers had done what they could.

The room still smelled like people, but now it smelled like washed people in clean shirts and damp hair. The difference mattered.

Carol had let Helen braid her hair after the shower. Tommy’s face and neck were scrubbed red in places. Mike felt human again in the shallow, temporary way a clean shirt can trick a man into feeling human.

Helen had changed too, though not visibly at first. She moved with more purpose now, less like a woman inside a disaster and more like a woman running a house in difficult circumstances. That, Mike thought, was probably what she was doing.

She saw him looking at the radio again.

“You can’t make it talk.”

“No,” he said. “But I can be here when it does.”

That was enough of an answer that she let it go.

It was Margaret who brought up the upstairs.

Not because she wanted to go. Because somebody had to say it eventually.

“What do you suppose it looks like up there?”

Nobody answered right away.

Mike sat back a little, thinking.

“Dust,” he said.

“From what?”

“From everything.”

He looked at the door as if he could see through it, then through the ceiling, then through the whole wreck of the house above them.

“Whatever made it through the cracks. Whatever settled. Soot, maybe. Fallout.” He shrugged once. “I don’t know.”

Helen looked toward the ceiling too.

“Can any of it be cleaned?”

Mike hesitated.

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

Margaret asked it softly, but it still landed hard.

Mike rubbed a hand across his mouth.

“We don’t know what kind of shape it’s in. We don’t know what’s broken, what’s blown out, what’s covered in dust. We don’t know anything yet.”

Tommy listened closely.

“So when we do go up…”

“When we do go up,” Mike said, “we don’t touch anything we don’t have to. And we don’t stay longer than we need to.”

Carol looked between them.

“Can I get my bear then?”

Helen answered before Mike could.

“If it’s safe.”

Carol absorbed that without liking it.

The radio spoke again at the top of the next hour.

This time the message was shorter.

“…remain sheltered… avoid travel… avoid unnecessary exposure…”

And then, before the signal broke, something else.

“…local authorities are not fully restored…”

Mike leaned in.

But the rest of it drowned in static.

He swore under his breath, not loudly, just enough to make Tommy look at him.

Mike ignored that.

“That means no one’s running much of anything,” Helen said.

“No,” Mike answered. “It means they aren’t ready to admit who is.”

Margaret nodded once.

That sounded like government, all right.

After the broadcast faded, Tommy asked to see the radiation counter.

Mike looked at him for a moment.

Then stood up, crossed to one of the shelves, and pulled a small box from behind a stack of folded rags.

It wasn’t much to look at. A plain case. A dial. A grille. A handle. A thing built to do one unpleasant job.

Tommy stared at it.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“It tells you if it’s safe?”

Mike shook his head.

“No.”

Tommy frowned.

“Then what good is it?”

Mike held the box in both hands a second before answering.

“It tells you when it isn’t.”

That settled the matter.

For Tommy, anyway.

Helen looked at it longer than he did.

“You bought that?”

“Mail order.”

“From the magazine?”

Mike nodded once.

Helen almost smiled.

“Of course you did.”

He set it back where it had been.

“Doesn’t matter yet.”

But he checked that it was there twice before he sat back down.

They played cards after that.

Nothing complicated. Just enough to keep Tommy busy and Carol interested. Margaret joined for one hand, then two. Helen won the third and didn’t mention it. Mike lost track of the score on purpose.

At some point the game stopped mattering and simply became what their hands were doing while they waited for the next voice to arrive out of nowhere.

That, Mike thought, was probably what routine really was.

Not comfort.

Just agreed-upon motion.

The evening meal was beans, crackers, and the last of the canned chicken mixed through for flavor.

Nobody complained.

Nobody praised it either.

It was hot. It was food. It was there.

Afterward, Helen wrote the meal down in the tablet. Water used. Fuel used. Food opened.

Seeing it on paper made the day feel more official than Mike liked.

Tommy watched her write.

“You think we’ll still be down here next Monday?”

Helen stopped writing.

Mike looked at the radio.

Margaret looked at her hands.

Carol looked at Tommy like he had asked something rude.

Mike answered because someone had to.

“I don’t know.”

That was the truth.

It was also, by now, the family’s main language.

The next top-of-the-hour broadcast came stronger than the last two.

Not longer.

Just stronger.

The same voice.

The same caution.

The same refusal to say more than it had to.

But near the end, there was one line that changed the room.

“…essential services remain limited…”

Mike sat very still.

Helen looked at the sink.

Then at the shower.

Then at the light.

She understood before anyone said it.

“Limited where?” Tommy asked.

Mike answered without looking at him.

“Everywhere.”

Nobody said much after that.

The room had not changed.

The light still worked. The water still ran. The air still moved. The radio still found its way back to them every hour like a tired man keeping a promise.

But the word stayed with them.

Limited.

That was a different kind of danger.

The kind that didn’t arrive all at once.

The kind that wore things down.

Before they settled for the night, Mike checked the lock on the door, the air flow at the vent, the water in the containers, the stove fuel, the radio battery connection, and the radiation counter on the shelf.

Then he sat down and listened to the static until Helen told him to stop pretending he wasn’t tired.

He almost argued.

Didn’t.

Tommy was already on his bunk. Carol curled against Helen. Margaret lay flat with her eyes open, looking at nothing.

Mike turned the radio lower but did not turn it off.

At the top of the hour, he wanted to hear the voice again.

Not because it knew anything useful.

Because it kept coming back.

And right then, that counted for more than information.

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