You put your headphones on. Those dusty old monsters, wrecked with so much accumulated skin from audiolophiles long gone you'd have no trouble molding them back into a man. The ear covers are falling off and smell disarmingly like a hamster cage. It's become a ritual for you, that quiet bit of revulsion.
You turn the dial to hear the roar as you browse through a million variations on the same theme. A hissing and crackling if which for only a moment would yield to anything or anyone else would make its anger much more tangible. To mentally keep track of how many you've gone through you watch the needle eclipse the frequency lines. The tick marks on the dial mostly just unpainted grooves now dissolved away by generations of human solvent.
You pick up the microphone, it too reeking of its damp accumulations. The rusted teeth of the cover so brittle and inviting, fitting for the message which it carries. The "on air" button still sounds its magnificent claxon clunk when pressed, the mechanical counterpart to a butcher's cleaver coming down to split bone. Reflexively you blow through the small hole on the cover to test and see if its on before giving your address.
You read dutifully down the page, crumpled, torn, stained, rewritten, stapled, taped and rehashed over and over again. The message a simple one, passed down now through 4 generations of survivors, once held in high honor now reduced to a few coals of the once roaring flame. Yes, you two dozen and some now haunt rather than inhabit these halls, sending signals daily hoping for a sign.
You hear something, faint and fast. Some syllables, some sound, some psalm or such. You strain to listen, the rubberized cushions of the headset crumbling as you press them tighter, straining for salvation in that sound. Twice then thrice "survivors of the second calamity, we search for others. If you can hear us send a signal back."
You scramble to my room where I'm organizing the rations we have left. Not enough to make it 2 months if we're lucky, definitely not enough to give us any hope. You grab me by the arm and you pull me to the setup. You take the headphones. Jamming them on my head, you break one of the muffs completely. Breathing heavily, with a smile on your face fit to crack our containment, you tell me to listen. And I hear nothing but the static.