This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
The radio crackled to life at 3:17 AM, its static-filled voice cutting through the silence of Marcus Chen's underground bunker like a blade through fabric. He'd been monitoring the emergency frequencies for three weeks now, ever since the power grids started failing across the Pacific Northwest, but this was the first human voice he'd heard in days.
"...anyone out there... day fourteen... running low on supplies... coordinates are..." The transmission dissolved into white noise, leaving Marcus staring at the amber glow of his radio display in the dim light of his prepared shelter.
Marcus had built this bunker five years ago, back when his neighbors thought he was paranoid and his ex-wife called his preparations "an expensive hobby." The reinforced concrete walls, lined with lead sheeting, had seemed excessive then. Now, as he listened to the Geiger counter's occasional tick from the surface monitor, he understood that his foresight might be the only thing keeping him alive.
The world above had changed in ways that defied his most pessimistic scenarios. It hadn't been nuclear war or a pandemic that brought civilization to its knees, but something far more insidious—a coordinated cyber attack that had simultaneously crippled power grids, water treatment facilities, transportation networks, and communication systems across multiple continents. Within seventy-two hours, the intricate web of technology that held modern society together had simply stopped working.
Marcus retrieved his notebook, a leather-bound journal where he meticulously recorded every radio transmission, every piece of intelligence that filtered down from the chaos above. The coordinates the voice had given were roughly forty miles northeast of his location, deep in the Cascade Mountains. Getting there would mean leaving the safety of his bunker, venturing into a world where desperate people did desperate things.
