Free The Vigil by Chris W. Martinez

The gaunt woman hunched over her orbital chart. Alone in the pale glow of the bunker lights, she whispered with anticipation as she traced a finger along the hand-drawn lines. Her head jerked left and she checked another polymer sheet, this one a calendar, also drawn in her own hand. The year written at the top: 2073.
    Normally, the calendar served as little more than a grim reminder of how long it had been since she last saw or spoke to another human being—four years, eight months, and five days—but now it triggered a rush of hope.  
    Her pulse quickened, the jittery tingle urging her on, but she had to be patient. She had to be absolutely sure before she risked going up again. She cross-referenced the chart against the calendar a second time, and then once more.
    The calculations checked out. This could be her last chance, she had no choice but to take it.
    She jumped up from her chair, went to the other side of the small room, and opened the sealed door that led to the quarantine chamber. The motion-activated lights in the corridor blinked on as she passed through.
    She came to another door, opened it, and went inside. On a wall hook by the door hung a gray radiation suit. She put it on, boxy and bulky across her whittled frame, the legs and arms several inches too long, but functional all the same.
    At the opposite wall, a metal ladder stretched 80 feet to the hatch above. She clambered up, slow and clumsy in the suit.
    At the top, she threw her arm over a ladder rung and held fast, waiting for the burning in her muscles to cease. Once her strength returned, she reached up and turned the hatch release.
    Now, the hardest part. With both hands on the top rung, she took a deep breath, stiffened her legs, bent her head down, and with the top of her back she heaved the hatch upward.
    First with a grunt, and then a growl rising to a desperate scream, she moved the metal mass inch by agonizing inch. Blinding sunlight poured in through the widening crack and she pushed the hatch further, her legs trembling with adrenaline as her body slowly straightened, until finally the portal stood open.
    She pulled herself out and collapsed on her back onto the parched earth. Above, the dirty-blue sky. Cloudless and blank, the mute, expressionless face of an indifferent universe.  
    The radiation gauge on her wrist powered up as her suit absorbed the sun’s energy. She lifted her arm and checked the levels on the gauge. High enough to leave a grown man flopping like a fish on the ground.
    She stood up and surveyed the jagged landscape, an endless boneyard of dust and stones. The truck had broken down about 500 yards to the west. She and her unit commander had gotten as close to the bunker as they could before the engine died, but after coming so far across the desert, it seemed a petty cruelty for the vehicle to quit with only a tiny fraction of the journey remaining. Even crueler that her companion had perished there, too.
    As she trudged across the stark wasteland, her last memory of him played over and over again in her mind.
    She had avoided direct exposure to the initial blast, but he had not been so lucky. His chin and neck maroon with drying blood, he rasped through cracked lips for her to go on without him. His hemorrhaging had grown so severe, he insisted, that even if he survived the march to the bunker, he would be gone within a day. She knew he was right, as right as he had been about so many other things: that orders be damned, their only chance was to escape to the remote bunker; that the deadly fallout would reach the desert, as it would inevitably reach everywhere; that the world as they knew it would soon be gone, forever gone, erased in a blink of time even shorter than humanity’s momentary scratch on the vast arc of the eons.
    Finally, she made it to the truck. Yet again, seeing it untouched came as both a relief and a crushing disappointment. Relief because nobody had stripped it of its precious equipment;