Love is a Longevity Factor

“Are you sure about this, Ollie?”

Olivia winces as she tightens the laces of her boots. The only thing she’s unsure about is what hits her harder; how even beneath the ever-present crackle of radio static, she can hear the fear in Ben’s voice, or how this could be the last time she ever hears that nickname, the one that only he has ever called her.

Swallowing the knot in her throat, she finishes with her laces and grabs the hand mic from the desk. “I’m sure.”

Her response is resolute, unyielding. She’s made her choice, and even though it terrifies her, the alternative is worse. The alternative makes it feel like the easiest choice she’s ever made, even though it very well might lead her to her death.

“I’d understand if you changed your mind. You can-” He takes a ragged breath and lets it out in a sigh without taking his finger off the talk button. The sound feels like a knife blade twisting between Olivia’s ribs. “You don’t have to do this, Olivia.”

Her eyes clench tight against the sting of tears. Ben’s voice is thin and small, frayed by thoughts of all the ways her plan could go horribly wrong. She wants nothing more than to assure him that everything will be fine. Her heart aches with how badly she wants to wrap him in her arms and promise him that there’s nothing to worry about. She settles for trying to lighten the mood.

“Don’t tell me you’re breaking up with me, Ben.” She huffs a laugh into the mic. “Really? Over the radio? After everything we’ve been through?”

It has the intended effect, and she’s gifted with a small, staticky chuckle. It’s not the full, rich laugh she’s heard so many times from him, the one responsible for warming her world-weary soul. But it lifts his tone and seems to put an end to his insistence that she can still rethink her decision.

“That would be pretty shitty of me, huh?”

“It really would.”

“Nah, if your terrible taste in music wasn’t a deal breaker, I can’t see what else could be.”

A tear slips out as a grin twitches across Olivia’s lips. “Hey, leave ABBA out of this.”

She waits a beat, the memory of the first time he teased her over her love of old pop music playing in her mind. He’d groaned and grumbled and told her that the best part about the world going to shit had been that he would never have to hear Mama Mia again. But then she’d made her case, telling him that it reminded her of growing up with her sisters and her mom, and the living room dance parties of her childhood. The next time he initiated contact, he surprised her by playing Dancing Queen in its entirety before saying a word. It had left her with wet cheeks that hurt from how wide she was smiling.

“What I said about Mama Mia still stands,” he’d said once the song ended. “But I found this in the stack of vinyls and figured I could suck it up just this once. For you.”

She’d tried to deny it to herself for a long time, because falling in love after the world had collapsed seemed a smoothly paved road straight to a broken heart, but that had been the precise moment that Oliva knew it was too late. She loved him.

She takes a breath and tucks the memory back in its box, then presses the button on the mic. “We both know what happens if I stay here, Ben.”

Her eyes wander around the fire station she’s called home for the last three years. It’s been safe, and she’d been lucky to find it not only well stocked, but equipped with solar panels that kept the electricity running long after the grid had gone down. But the storm that passed through the night before brought hailstones large enough to shatter the last of the functioning panels, destroying her ability to generate power. She has about two days’ worth of electricity banked in the power cells. Once that runs out she’ll lose the lights, the water pump and the refrigerator, which will make survival much more difficult.

But she’ll also lose the radio. She’ll lose Ben. And that will make survival meaningless.

She brings her focus back to the map that hangs on the wall above the desk. There are two red pushpins stuck into it, one representing her location at the firehouse, the other marking the small radio station where Ben is. The distance between the two is more than double what Olivia has dared to cross on her own. It stretches for almost 200 miles along the front range of the Colorado Rockies. Rough terrain, unpredictable weather, and dangerous wildlife fill those miles and make the trek treacherous enough. But she knows that there are bigger threats than hypothermia and mountain lions.

Ben knows it, too. After all, it wasn’t the war or the fallout or the famine that killed his brother. It wasn’t a rattlesnake or a flash flood that took his last remaining family from him. Raiders killed Alex, shot him dead just to ransack what little they could from his corpse. Olivia will never forget the sadness in Ben’s voice as he told her that the irony of it all was that Alex would have gladly given them anything they asked for, anything they needed.

Even with the population slashed to ribbons, even with humans on the brink of extinction, they are still the most violent and destructive thing on Earth.

But they are also still the thing that makes fighting for every sunrise worth it. Keeping Ben in her life is worth all the sunrises Olivia has ever seen and however many she has left.

“Yeah. I know.”

She can hear the change in Ben’s voice, fear still there, but giving way to acceptance. She knows what he’s leaving unsaid. That he wishes he could be the one to make the journey. Or that they could meet somewhere halfway so that neither of them would have to cross the entire distance alone. She knows how he feels. She knows that she’s his sunrise, too.

He doesn’t say those things because he can’t make the trip. The same storm system that took out her solar panels had also knocked the antenna on the roof of his station askew. Luckily, his power source hadn’t been compromised, and the damage to the antenna hadn’t been extensive, so Ben had been able to climb up to make the necessary repairs.

That was where his luck had run out, though. His foot found a slick patch of moss-covered roofing, and he slipped on the way back down, landing hard and wrong and leaving him with a broken ankle. The effort it took just to drag himself back inside and get the radio up again made it clear that he wouldn’t be hiking through the front range any time soon.

They both know there is only one way that they can keep the connection they’ve found in one another.

Olivia leans back against the desktop, imagining that she’s speaking to Ben face to face despite never having seen him. Over time, they’ve given each other vague details about their appearances. She knows that he has brown eyes and a scar on his chin that cuts through a coarse beard. She knows his hair curls when it gets too long, and that it once was chestnut colored but now it’s struck through with gray, just like hers. She squeezes the button on the mic and imagines looking into his eyes, imagines reaching for his hand to twine her fingers with his.

“Before I heard your transmission that first time, I was barely holding on, Ben. Yeah, I was alive. But I wasn’t living. I was just breathing and… and waiting.”

She doesn’t expand on the waiting point because he already knows what she had been waiting for. For the first year that Olivia had been at the fire station, she had been waiting for her sisters to join her. They had been in touch over the radio, and were making plans to travel to where she was, because it was a safer and more secure location than the abandoned apartment they had been staying in. But weeks turned into months, and then months piled into a year and no matter what frequency she tried, Olivia couldn’t reach them. She could only guess at what had happened to them, and most days she tried not to. So when she stopped waiting for her sisters, she started waiting for the breathing to stop.

“I know, Ollie.” The acceptance was coupled with empathy now, the fear just an undercurrent, like the static. “It was the same for me before you.”

“I don’t want either of us to go back to that, Ben. I can’t.” She sniffs and shakes her head. “I won’t. Not without trying.”

“Okay.”

The fear is gone from his response, though she knows he still feels it. She does, too. They both will until she reaches the radio station. She knows that it will be worse for Ben, sitting there while the days stack up, no way of knowing where or how she is. No way of knowing if she’s even still alive. But at least it will be temporary. If all goes according to plan, it will take her somewhere between ten days and two weeks. That beats the hell out of not knowing forever.

Aside from the waning fear in his tone, Olivia hears something else, something that heartens her and makes her more confident that she’ll reach her destination. Trust. Belief. Ben believes in her, is putting his heart in her hands, because he trusts her to do whatever is necessary for them to be together.

“Okay,” she repeats back to him, throat thick with determination and hope and love and fear.

She sets the mic down on the desk and looks up at the map. Reaching up, she pulls out the red pushpins, then slides her fingers under the edges where the map is taped to the wall, carefully removing it and folding it to take with her. It’s the last thing she tucks into the backpack she’d loaded up that morning. As she fastens the clasp on the pocket where she stows the map, she hears Ben’s voice come through the speaker again.

“Can I play you a song before you head out, Ollie?”

She licks her lips, tasting the salty tears that had fallen there without her notice. The memories of all the times he’s played music for her tumble through her heart like books falling from a shelf. He’s played songs to lift her mood, he’s played songs to lull her to sleep, he’s played her his favorite songs as a way to show her more of himself. He’s also played songs to say the things that are too hard or that hurt too much or that he’s afraid to say.

And there’s one huge thing that they have never said out loud, despite the fact that both of them knew and felt it for over a year.

Olivia picks up the mic again and nods as she presses the button. “My own personal DJ wants to send me off in style?” She lets out a breathy laugh, then swallows the emotion threatening to choke her and swipes at her eyes to dry them. “Of course.”

“Good.” Ben clears his throat. “I think you’ll like this one.”

She sits on the edge of the desk and closes her eyes as she hears the needle drop through the radio. It only takes a few seconds for her to recognize the tune. As soon as she does, her eyes well up and she brings a hand to her mouth to cover a gasp. “Oh, Ben,” she whispers into her palm.

He’s playing ABBA, Lovers (Live a Little Longer). He lets the whole song play before he lifts the needle. When he does, Olivia lifts her mic and speaks into it.

“I thought you said playing ABBA for me was a one-off.”

His response comes without hesitation. “Screw it. When you get here I’ll play you Mamma Mia every goddamn day if it makes you happy, got it?”

Combined with the lyrics of the song, it’s as close to a declaration of love as he can come without saying it. At this point she’s glad it’s never been passed over the airwaves. At this point, the prospect of falling into his arms and telling him she loves him, of hearing him say it, too, without the static and the miles and the danger in between them just adds more motivation for her to make it there in one piece.

Olivia nods. “Got it, Ben.”

They both know this is it. This has to be it, because she has to leave. The sooner she does, the sooner the waiting ends and the fear can rest.

She lets out a breath and presses her mic button again. “Listen. Take care of yourself. I’ll be there before you know it.”

He gives her a half-laugh. “Before I know it, huh?” There’s a pause, and then his voice is back. “You be safe, Ollie. I need you to be safe.”

“I know. I will be.”

“Okay. I’ll see you soon.” He chuckles, a real one, one that catches him off guard, and Olivia beams at the sound. “Never said that to you before.”

She picks up the two red pushpins and unzips an inner pocket in her backpack, dropping them in, then picks up the mic for the last time. “See you soon, Ben. Over and out.”

It takes her thirteen and a half days.

She shows up dirty and tired, sore and bruised, a bandage made from a torn t-shirt wrapped around a long cut on her right forearm. She shows up limping on aching limbs, her breathing coming in ragged gasps from the exertion.

But the second she sees the dilapidated sign for 102.7 KPLJ, she forgets the miles she’s crossed. She forgets the panic she felt when she had to hide from a group of raiders midway through her journey. She forgets the hunger that gnawed at her stomach on the days when hunting failed her. She forgets the pain in her arm and in her feet and she picks up her pace until she’s running for the door.

And then he’s there.

He’s not just a voice on the radio anymore, he’s real. Her Ben.

He hobbles over on makeshift crutches and lets them fall away so that he can envelope her in his arms. She lets him, wraps her own around his waist and leans sobbing and shaking against him. She feels one of his palms press against her shoulder blade, the other cradling the back of her head, and she buries her face into his shirt. He’s warm, his hold on her is strong, and it feels exactly as she always thought it would.

When she finally pulls back to look up at him, she finds that she already recognizes his face. She’s thought about those eyes so many times before. She’s spent countless hours thinking about the shape of those lips and the cut of that jaw. And it seems to her like he is experiencing the same, already familiar with the pattern of her freckles and the accordion folds of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

“Hi, Ollie,” he finally says through tears, his thumb coming up to sweep beneath her eye. She nearly collapses when his voice hits her ear without the scratchy static, when his skin touches hers for the first time.

“Hi, Ben,” she manages, smiling as more tears roll free from her lashes. She turns her face to kiss the inside of her wrist as he cups her cheek. “I made it. Hope you’re still willing to play Mamma Mia, because-”

He doesn’t let her finish, leaning in to cut her off with a kiss. It’s firm and intentional, if short, but it makes her melt and go quiet. Ben doesn’t pull away before speaking, kissing her in between words. “Every damn day,” he says. He does pull back then, just enough to find her eyes with his. “I love you, Ollie.”

She nods, reaching up to comb her fingers through the hair that curls behind his ear. “I know you do. I’ve known for a long time. It’s what’s kept me going, Ben.” She drapes her arms over his shoulders and leans in so that her lips hover just in front of his. “I love you, too,” she tells him, then closes the distance with another kiss.

They make their way inside the station, and after Olivia gets cleaned up and puts some food in her stomach, after they take some more time to appreciate the fact that they were finally together, Olivia pulls out the map and two red pushpins from her pack. When it’s hung up on the wall again, the pushpins both mark the same place. Their home at the end of the world.

The next morning’s sunrise is the most beautiful one that either of them have ever seen.