Numbers Station Story Idea

Twelve years after a Zombie Apocalypse, the world is mostly de-populated. People living on islands are presumed to be safe, assuming that no one from the outside has entered since the outbreak. A fast-acting virus that is transfered by biting kills people within minutes and re-animates their bodies. The zombies are slow, but will attack until their bodies break down and disintegrate from strain.

The main action (probably) takes place in France where a group of survivors live underground. The hero is a young orphan who spends his time helping find food for the village. In his spare time he fiddles with old machines. After getting an old radio working, he soon finds a signal being broadcast, even though they are the only group for miles. The leader of the settlement tells him that that signal has been broadcasting for many years and was once a beacon of hope for the survivors. Rumour has it that the Transmission began on the day of the outbreak (December 24, 1998). It has repeated the same message over and over again in Russian Morse Code. It is assumed to be coming from an abandoned station somewhere. The story fascinates the Hero and he decides to look into it on his own time. While looking for food, he sneaks off to a library to look for books to help him decipher the message.

He translates the message as "Turn Back, Turn Back. The sun is setting. 2-3-3-0-4-5. Endless. Turn Back. Repeat." and later finds the journal of a man who lived in their settlement and studied the signal before giving up when they were forced to move underground. During the four years that he recorded and studied the broadcast, it never changed. The Hero begins to dismiss the broadcast as just being an old station with a repeating machine, but he still listens to it at night.

One night, the message changes. It stops for several seconds and a voice comes on and states the current date, time, weather, moon phase and other things (wind speed, barometric pressure, et cetera). As the voice is saying these (all in Russian) another, garbled and distorted voice (sounding something like it is being played backwards) grows louder and louder until the first voice can no longer be heard. The second voice eventually stops, and the morse code resumes. The whole thing lasts 117 seconds.

The Hero concludes that there must be someone living in the broadcast station and petitions the Chief to let him take a party to find the survivor(s) and perhaps salvation (if a broadcast can be sustained for that long, there must be civilisation or at least resources) but his request is declined. After many tries, he is given leave to go find the source of the broadcast, but he can not take any of the village's men with him and no married women may go. His childhood friend decides to go with him and they take what weapons that they are allowed.

They meet up with other survivors, get a vespa and fight zombies and such.