Final Haven, The

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The static crackled through the ancient radio like the dying breath of civilization itself. Marcus Thorne pressed his ear closer to the speaker, his weathered hands trembling as he adjusted the frequency dial with practiced precision. For three months, he had heard nothing but the endless white noise of a dead world, but tonight something was different. Beneath the electronic hiss, he could swear he heard a pattern. Three short bursts. Three long ones. Three short again. SOS. Marcus pulled back from the radio, his heart hammering against his ribs. In the dim candlelight of his makeshift shelter, carved from the ruins of what had once been Cedar City's public library, shadows danced across walls lined with salvaged books and canned goods. The irony wasn't lost on him that a former librarian had found sanctuary among the very volumes he'd once catalogued and shelved. The signal came again, clearer this time. Definitely SOS, followed by what sounded like coordinates. Marcus scrambled for a pencil stub and began transcribing the numbers onto a scrap of paper. His hands shook so violently he could barely write, but he managed to capture the transmission before it faded back into static. 38.5816° N, 109.5498° W. The coordinates meant nothing to him immediately, but they represented something he'd begun to believe was extinct: hope. Somewhere out there, beyond the wasteland that had swallowed his world, another human being was alive and trying to communicate. Marcus set down the pencil and rubbed his eyes, trying to process what he'd just heard. Six months had passed since the disaster that everyone had simply come to call "The Fall." Nobody knew exactly what had triggered it—some said it was a cascade of climate disasters, others blamed a global economic collapse that spiraled into war. Most likely, it was all of these things at once, each crisis feeding the others until civilization simply couldn't hold together anymore.