Free The Vigil by Chris W. Martinez Page A

disappointment because such an occurrence would mean there were other survivors out here, somewhere.
    She didn’t want to look. She wanted to forget. But inexorably her eyes pulled in the direction of the silent mound of stones. Not once since she had left him had she seen buzzards or other scavengers picking through the grave. Through the ceaseless procession of sunbaked days and frigid nights, death ruled unchallenged over its barren kingdom.
    This was no longer her world. It had been made alien beneath her feet.
    She climbed into the truck and turned on the communication system. A small miracle that the vehicle’s solar array still worked. She clicked through the radio channels, already knowing she would hear only static, but still she had to complete the ritual before turning to the real reason for her visit.
    She shut off the radio, activated the telecommunications laser mounted on the roof, and pulled the viewfinder up to her face. The electronic eye briskly scanned the open expanse above.
    There it was. Her heart pounded at the sight: gleaming in the heavens, its modular sections stretched out like an archangel’s wings, the space station slowly crossed the sky.
    She had first spotted the station two years ago, then twice after that, always on the same orbital track. In all likelihood, the crew had been communicating with and receiving supplies from a surface base somewhere. Perhaps they could help her, even if only to relay information to her or send word of her location.
    Regardless of how little the station might be able to do, or how few living people remained on the planet, she refused to lose hope. Or, rather, hope refused to leave her . She could feel it burning in her DNA, the species instinct to claw out from the brink of extinction.
    She locked the telecommunications laser onto the station. The crew could only receive and respond to the digital message she had encoded in the beam if they noticed the laser in the first place, so she set the wavelength to visible light, maximized the amplitude, and initiated a simple signal from an era long past: SOS in Morse code.
     
    ☼
     
    “And now coming into view is South America, in all its splendor,” said the woman’s voice, soft and dulcet over the swelling strains of Ravel’s Daphnis Et Chloé: Daybreak . “Marvel at all the different colors of the Atacama Desert and the majestic Andes Mountains, flawless and pristine, as if formed by a painter’s hand…”
    He looked down upon the vista—the curvature of the planet shining in the sun, the delicate halo of atmosphere holding back the black of space—and for that moment he forgot his breath.
    “All is still below,” the voice continued. “All is peaceful and perfect.”
    He lost himself in the intricate tableau, a wrinkled band of mountains, a feather of cloud. From up here, he could see no evidence of civilization, no petty grids, no gray geometry, no cold clusters of artificial light. Just the grand skin of Earth, all traces of humanity invisible as microbes to his eye.
    His sight passed across a flat slate of featureless desert. Suddenly, a starburst of violet light flashed out from the center of the plain. Again it came, repeating in a pattern of some kind.
    The sequence felt familiar to him, but he couldn’t discern how. No doubt it was a signal, possibly a distress.
    He felt compelled to turn and tell someone, but found himself strangely paralyzed, unable to look away. He tried to move his hands but… he had no hands to move. He felt no body, no air on skin, no physical sense at all. Just a visual perspective, forever staring down at the spinning Earth.
    He struggled to recall where he was and why. Then he realized he couldn’t even remember his own name.
    The woman’s voice narrated on, “As we continue east, soon you will see a great, gray expanse. This region was once a vast jungle, the mighty Amazon Rainforest…”
    A surge of panic. The majesty of the view became a prison, a forced