[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 620 - Reopening the Public Channel Broadcast

The snowstorm had stopped.

Maybe God had sensed Simon's urgency and ended it far sooner than expected.

Kaya clicked her tongue in amazement.

Simon pushed open the wooden door and drew a deep breath of the Arctic's sharp, biting air.

His left leg was splinted with a brace Kaya's father had carved from wood, giving him a slight limp, but it did nothing to touch his mood.

Kaya was bundled in a thick reindeer-hide coat, crouching in the snow to reharness the three big dogs to the sled. Her cheeks were flushed red from the cold. Her eyes burned with unmistakable excitement.

Beside her, the old man and the old woman tossed bags of rock-frozen dried seal meat and a few odds-and-ends supplies into the storage box at the back of the sled.

They'd brought nearly everything they owned.

The Polar Radar Station was a far cry better than this drafty little wooden cabin. Ample fuel, a generator, modern kitchen equipment.

Simon watched Kaya bustle back and forth, and the corner of his mouth pulled open without him noticing.

Having a woman around to chatter at him seemed considerably better than spending the whole day talking to three dogs.

These past few days together had given him a thorough read on this Arctic girl. Wild. Straightforward. Quick with her hands. And she was a fanatically devoted radio listener who followed his every word without question.

A partner this ideal on the wasteland was the kind you couldn't find even if you searched with a lantern.

"Hey. What are you staring at?"

Kaya patted the husky on the head and turned to shoot him a look.

"Get on the sled. We need to reach your base before dark."

"I've had enough of boiled blubber every single day. I want that pasta and canned meat you kept talking about."

Simon shrugged.

"Your satisfaction is guaranteed, ma'am."

He hobbled over to the sled and climbed on with some effort, settling into his seat.

The three dogs barked with excitement.

Under Kaya's commands, the sled carved deep tracks through the thick snow and shot straight for the Polar Radar Station.

Several hours later.

That metal fortress, half-buried in ice and snow, appeared on the horizon.

The massive antenna array stood rigid against the freezing wind.

The highest-level communications hub left on the entire North American continent.

Inside the station, the old man and the old woman were completely stunned — by the blinking instrument panels, by the warmth pouring out of the heating system.

Kaya wasn't intimidated in the slightest. She felt a little hot, yanked off her coat, and followed Simon into the main control room in long strides.

"This is your turf?"

She stared at the whole row of darkened monitors and the extraordinarily complex console, her eyes lighting up.

Simon pulled over a wheeled leather chair and dropped into it. His fingers moved with practiced fluency, rattling away at the main console.

"That's right." He didn't look up. "This is the source of hope."

Screen after screen blinked on in front of him.

A blue-tinged glow cast his profile in sharp relief.

He glanced at the digital clock on the wall.

Since the last time he'd cut the public channel broadcast — well. Over a month had passed.

On this wasteland, a month was enough time for countless people to die in despair.

He had to speak up. Right now.

"Help me push that red slider all the way to the top."

He pointed to a control valve on the right side of the console.

Kaya didn't hesitate for a single second. She reached out and shoved it hard to the end.

A deep, muffled mechanical rumble rose from somewhere far beneath the station.

Outside, the massive antenna array began to turn, slowly, with agonizing patience, realigning toward the satellite cluster hanging in orbital space.

"Maximize power output."

Simon hit Enter.

"We're going to give this dead, miserable world a little something to wake it up."

He pulled the foam-capped microphone toward him, cleared his throat, and tapped open a classic audio file on the touchscreen.

---

The camera cuts across ten thousand kilometers.

North America.

The crumbling ruins of a city.

On an interstate highway choked with wrecked vehicles, a handful of ragged survivors leaned against a rusted school bus, breathing in ragged gasps. The logging axes in their hands had blades bent and chipped from overuse. The machetes had notches knocked out of them.

Ammo had run dry 3 days ago. They needed to scavenge a few more houses, find some bullets.

All around them.

A dense, seething mass of Walkers pressed in from both ends of the highway, dragging their rigid bodies forward.

A complete dead end.

The man in front had a full beard. He closed his eyes in despair.

For the past month and more, they'd wandered like headless flies between abandoned cities, desperate to find somewhere, anywhere, where the Walkers were even slightly fewer.

But there was death everywhere. Ruins everywhere.

The voice that had once broadcast safe routes to them on the radio every night at eight o'clock sharp had gone silent for a full month.

Without those broadcasts, they'd lost all sense of direction. Lost the will to keep scraping by.

This was the cruelest thing about the apocalypse.

There was nothing left to hold onto.

The bearded man wrapped his arms tight around his skin-and-bones daughter.

The herd was within 10 meters now. Blood-blackened claws already stretching toward them.

The battered old car radio on the school bus's driver seat suddenly burst with a sharp, grating crack of static.

ZZZZT.

Two seconds.

Then the furiously pounding beat of a drum kit slammed through, mixed with the savage slash of an electric guitar, blasting straight out of that worn-out speaker.

A hardcore rock intro.

Hard enough to make every window on the school bus tremble.

AC/DC. A classic. That outrageously aggressive rhythm shredded the oppressive silence hanging over the highway in an instant.

Every survivor froze.

Even the Walkers faltered, drawn by the sudden enormous noise, their movements stuttering in one brief, stumbling moment of delay.

Right at the instant the intro hit its peak.

A voice cut straight over the screaming guitar and rang out simultaneously in every corner of the country. Deeply familiar. Deeply magnetic. Carrying just a hint of devil-may-care American swagger.

"Greetings to you all, from beneath the Northern Lights!"

The bearded man's eyes snapped open.

His rims went red.

"I am Citizen Z."

Simon's voice traveled through the satellite signal with perfect clarity, reaching into every hellhole on the map.

"Hey folks, sorry I'm late."

"I was on vacation for a while — and along the way, I found myself a wife..." A beat. "Well. A partner."

That one delightfully cheeky wasteland joke sent tears spilling down the faces of people all across the country who'd been huddled at their radios.

Some wept with their heads in their hands in abandoned basements.

Some raised bottles in a cheer inside bloodstained bunkers.

That man had not died.

He had not abandoned them.

Hope was back online.

"I know this past month has been brutal."

Simon's tone in front of the microphone turned dead serious.

"Monsters everywhere you turn. Despair everywhere."

"You feel like the world has thrown you away."

"But I have a top-secret piece of news I need to share with you."

The rock music dropped just slightly in volume. But that hard-driving drumbeat kept hammering, relentless, alive, pounding away at every listener's heart.

➤ Next: High Risk, High Reward