The Reset (10 page)

THIRTEEN

Alice
fell quickly into a deep sleep; Ben covered her and dressed. He slipped the
handgun into his trousers and ventured out into the night.

The fire was low, and he added a piece
of wood. He collected their packs and placed them near the tent, suddenly anxious
that they might have to flee their temporary Eden.

Something was off.

He sat at the edge of the fire and studied
the darkness, listening. He heard movement in the brush and he rested the
pistol on his knee, knowing that it was probably just a squirrel. Still, he
couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes on their campsite.

He stood watch as long as he could, but
he was tired. After nodding off for an instant, he retreated to the tent and Alice’s
warmth. He pulled her to his chest, marveling at the sensation of her warm
breath on his neck.

The shotgun was close, and that was a
comfort. He said a quick prayer and fell into his dreams, expecting Alice to
meet him there.

Instead, it was Coraline that waited for
him when he finally slipped away.

~

They
rose before dawn. Alice had covered him with a blanket in the night. She knelt
and kissed his forehead before dressing. Ben watched her. It was really
something, watching a woman dress. Things had certainly changed between them, and
that hurdle of intimacy and the revelation of his secret were burdens that had vanished
in the night.

It was invigorating.

“If we make good time to Bickley, maybe
we can just push for home tonight,” Alice said. “It would be nice to sleep in
our own bed.”

Ben smiled at the plural pronoun. “That’d
be nice.” He wanted to say more—he had so much to say, really, but words
escaped him. He finally decided just to come out with it. “Do you want to talk
about what happened last night, Alice? I mean—the scars?”

Alice shrugged, a little smile on her face.
“We have plenty of time, Ben. For now…let’s just do what we need to do to get
home. I say we scarf down a quick breakfast and get the hell out of here. Sooner
begun, sooner done.”

Her ambivalence didn’t surprise him. It
was the Alice he had come to know. “Fair enough then” he said, scrambling to dress.
The fire had died in the night, and they didn’t bother with tea. They ate
quickly and broke camp and soon they were once again picking their way through
the woods. After an hour they located the train tracks.

Day broke and they pushed forward.

At midmorning, they happened upon an
orderly little clearing in the forest. There was a small shack in the center. Smoke
leaked from a crooked chimney pipe in the tin roof. A sad excuse for a goat stood
tied to a metal post, picking at a patch of ash-covered grass near the front
porch.

Ben looked at Alice and nodded toward
the woods. They would go around it.

“You folks are
not
as clever as
you think you are,” a sonorous baritone called from behind them. They wheeled
to discover an enormous man, clad head to foot in deer hide, standing behind
them. His arms were crossed over a barrel chest, his wrists the size of healthy
pine boughs. He had a shaggy beard and square white teeth, neat and straight
like dominoes, in his wide, smiling mouth. “Although you
did
survive a
night at Parish Creek. That’s no small feat with Talmidge’s goons sniffing
around your back trail.”

“We don’t mean any harm,” Ben said. He
had stepped in front of Alice, the act as natural as breathing.

“Oh, I know it,” the man said. “If I
thought you were a threat, you’d already be dead.”

“Then thank you,” Alice said quickly.
She took Ben’s hand. “We were trying to be careful. I guess we have some work
to do on that front. What’s your name?”

“Buck,” the man replied. He unfolded his
arms and pointed at the shack. “You folks join me for coffee?”

Alice flashed a stunned grin. “Coffee?
Are you
serious
?”

“I am,” he replied. His voice was deep
and rich, melodious, and she felt strangely at ease in his presence. Buck
brushed past them into the clearing, and they watched him stride for home.

“Let’s do it, Ben,” Alice finally said.
“I trust him. I’m not sure why, but I do.”

She stepped into the meadow, but Ben
stood his ground. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice hushed. “I trusted a
fellow too, once. Remember? All it did was get me shot. What if he’s—what if
he’s one of
them
?”

“Damn it, Ben,” she said impatiently. “We
have to learn how to trust again if we’re going to make our way! He knows the
area. Maybe he can help us. And aren’t you at least a little curious about what
he said? Ben, he said we were
being followed
! Doesn’t that bother you?”

Ben scanned the woods. He looked at
Alice, who shrugged in frustration. With a sigh, he followed her into the meadow
and up to the deer man’s shack.

Buck, apparently, was a disciple of an
overlooked school of interior design: Middle-21
^st
Century Deer.
Glass-eyed trophies of every size and shape leered from all four walls. A tidy little
bed stood in the corner, and there was a table and chairs and a little kitchen.
A bookshelf held thirty or forty titles. Ben thumbed through them while the
deer man fixed coffee at the stove. “I know a place where there’s still quite a
store of the stuff,” he said when he had the coffee on the table. Grinning, he
even produced a canister of sugar, placing it in the center of the table with
obvious pride. “It’s instant, but it’s better than nothing. I’ve got it knocked
on how to make a decent cup of the stuff.”

“So,” he said when they were all seated,
“what are you two doing in my woods?”

“We’re going to Bickley,” Alice said.
“We’re hoping to find some supplies there.”

The man nodded. He sipped his drink, a
few droplets glistening in the long whiskers of his moustache. His red beard was
streaked with gray and he had bright brown eyes that didn’t often blink. Ben
put him at 6’5” and 220 pounds—maybe a little more.

“Bickley’s a dangerous place, I’m
afraid. Course, there’s not many places that aren’t anymore. Go if you must,
but there’s a good chance it’ll end badly. You two,” he winked at them, “aren’t
impossible to keep tabs on, you know. I made you almost immediately yesterday
afternoon. So did those
other
boys.”

“Other boys?” Ben said. He was almost
finished with his coffee, the old delicious treat warming him from head to toe.
He had to remind himself to slow down, to savor it.

Buck nodded. “Three of them. I don’t recognize
‘em right off, so I can’t say where they’re from for sure, but I reckon they
work for Talmidge. They were up into the wee hours, watching
you
, son,”
he pointed at Ben with a large index finger. “Saw you in the firelight.”

“Please, call me Ben. And this is Alice.
You…you
saw
them?”

“Like I said, I was keeping tabs on you.
If those boys were going to move on you, I’d have helped you out. But they left
long before dawn and I haven’t seen ‘em yet today. If you really want to go to
Bickley, it’s just another few hours by foot. I can show you how to get there.”

“We…we’re looking for seeds,” Alice blurted.
She waited for his reaction.

“Seeds?” he said, braying laughter. “You
uh…you folks plan to do a little farming, do you?”

“Could be,” Ben replied. “We thought
we’d give it a shot.”

Buck stroked his beard. “Well, I doubt
it’ll work for you, but at least you’re trying. I’ll give you that. I’ve
managed to grow some herbs myself—mostly indoors, mind you. Sage and whatnot.
Don’t have much of a green thumb, truth to tell. But…well, I guess there’s an
old hardware store that just might still have some. It’s out on the Trout River
Road. That’ll steer you clear of Bickley—maybe even keep you out of harm’s way in
the process. There’s a wicked element in that little town. Eddie Talmidge lives
there, and ol’ Eddie doesn’t take kindly to outsiders poking around his little
village.”

Ben nodded. “Thanks for the warning.
We’ll avoid it if we can. What about this store?”

Buck put on a wistful smile. “Ah, damn! I
used to love that place! Ol’ Putt Allen’s Mercantile. I spent a lot of time in
there before the Reset. Used to,” he paused and swallowed thickly. A shadow
darkened his features. “Oh, I used to have a family of my own to look after in
those days. I’d take my boys in there for lumber and hardware and such and ol’
Putt and his little clan would be playing cards and smoking cigarettes and
debating the price of Vidalias. Putt always gave my boys sodas from the cooler.
Free of charge, every last time. They were good people, those old timers. Good
country people…”

They sat in silence for a moment before
Buck stood and went to the kitchen. He returned with a pencil and a clean sheet
of paper and began to draw, those big rough hands tracing elegant lines. Ben
watched, mesmerized. This deer man was talented.

After about fifteen minutes, Buck turned
the paper around and put his index finger on an ‘X’ in the center of the map. “Here
we are, and these are the woods you just came through. Go back that way and
angle south for about…oh, maybe eighty, ninety minutes. You’ll eventually meet
up with the Trout River, where you want to go east. Walk its banks another
forty minutes or so and you’ll hit an old steel bridge and a gravel road. That
road leads to Talmo. Now, before you get any ideas, I’d stay out of Talmo, too.
Bad elements there…hell, bad elements
everywhere
. Don’t walk on the
road, but kind of follow it north until you see Putt’s shop. And hear this—I
wouldn’t
go inside at night. Probably someone bunking down in there, and you don’t want
to catch them out like that. What happens when you get to Putt’s is up to you,
but this here map’ll get you there.” He finished by tapping it with a meaty index
finger.

Ben was shocked. To hear the big man
tell it, there were many more people out there than he’d known. True, he’d
always stuck to the back roads throughout his travels, but it was both
exhilarating and frightening to hear that so many places still held people.

They discussed the terrain and then they
were up and the big man was filling their packs with deer jerky. He gave them two
or three pounds of the stuff, at least. “Got more than enough to share,” he
said when they insisted it was too generous. “It’s nice to be able to help some
folks out from time to time. It’s easy to forget what having company over is
like.”

“Why?” Alice asked when they were
standing outside. “Why give us coffee and draw us a map? You don’t know anything
about us.”

Buck laughed. “But I
do
know
people, and it’s like I said—if I thought you were the wrong kind, Miss Alice,
you’d already be dead. These are
my
woods. I know everything that
happens here, and I knew from the start that you two were okay. Those others,
though.” He shrugged and held their eyes for a long moment. “Be careful out
there. That’s about all I can say.”

They shook hands and Ben and Alice set
off for the woods. They were almost out of earshot when Ben turned. “Just out
of curiosity: where do you find the deer, Buck? I’ve hunted all through the
winter and only managed a couple scrawny rabbits and squirrels. Barely got
anything out of ‘em.”

“Oh, the deer are out there, Ben. You just
have to know where to look. You want to know something? The world’s coming back.
It’ll never be the way it was before, thank the good Lord, but it’s coming back
just the same. Don’t you forget it, now. It’s not all gloom and doom out here.
It’s not all misery and heartache. The world’s coming back.”

Ben nodded and they turned and left him
there.

“Bring me some tomatoes if you get ‘em
to take!” Buck called when they were almost out of the clearing.

Alice waved in reply and they stepped
into the brush, keeping one eye on the map and another on the forest. Silently,
carefully, they made for the river.

FOURTEEN

As
they approached the Trout River, reminders of the old world were everywhere. The
skeletal remains of all sorts of vehicles—combines and trucks, mostly, but more
than a few abandoned cars as well—pocked flatlands that had once produced
blueberries, collard greens, and Vidalia onions. They passed dozens of dilapidated
homes, those sad monuments collapsing in the clay, all charred timber and
shattered glass.

They found the Trout River and hiked
east, following the lazy water’s passage on its way to the ocean. There were
tracks all along the banks—deer and raccoon and what looked like some sizable
paw prints.

“Even if we don’t find what we need,”
Alice said, “I’m glad that we gave it a shot. It’s heartening to see others hanging
in there—that there’s more out here than just blowing ash and dying trees.”

“Yeah, and I have to admit that I kind
of liked Buck. I think he’d make a decent neighbor. We’ll have to pay him a
visit down the road—bring him some apples, at the very least. Return the favor
for the jerky.”

It had been delicious, that jerky—instant
energy in the form of salty deer flesh. It had been better than anything Ben
had eaten in years—since the cookouts in the Beamers’ back yard or the
family-style meals Ms. Black had prepared on the ranch.

The river ducked under a bridge and they
scampered up the bank, walking briskly at the edge of the open road. Ben
thought about the previous night’s encounter. It gnawed at him, the enormity of
what they’d shared, coupled with the foolish guilt that he now felt at
betraying the memory of a girl who had almost surely been dead for more than a
decade. There were those things to consider, as well as the shared knowledge of
what he truly
was
.

Alice knew.

She knew what Dr. White had put inside of
him. She understood the destructive power that he represented with every breath
he drew.

Finally, he just had to stop. “Alice? Hey,
listen! Can we please just talk about what happened last night? Just for a
moment? It’s killing me.”

She turned to face him. The day was
warming, and she’d stripped down to a tee-shirt. Ben studied her, overcome with
emotion. She was lean and fit. Her eyes were clear, her thick red hair swept
back in a ponytail to reveal the graceful arch of her neck. The winter had been
good to her, and she had grown strong and healthy.

Dang, but seeing her that way made him
happy.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Alice? Knowing
what I am? Aren’t you…aren’t you scared to be around me?” His heart was beating
so fast that he was scared he might blow right then and there.

She laughed and darted forward, hugging
him hard and placing her cheek against his chest. His arms fell across her back
and, after a moment, he returned the hug. She peered up at him.

“When I lost Brian, it was like the
Reset had happened all over again. It was…well, it was my own personal
apocalypse, Ben. It was my own private dissolution of all the things that made
life worth living. When I fled Atlanta, I did it because I wanted
to die
.
I just didn’t want to give Roan the satisfaction of capturing me, and I
couldn’t reconcile the way things had become there with…with any kind of purposeful
life, I suppose. You have to understand that I didn’t bring any supplies with
me, Ben. I left without a plan, without a compass, without hope. I was giving
up and I was giving in, and that was fine with me. I’d made my piece with it.

“I wasn’t
looking
for
anything—other than a way out of that hell. I wasn’t looking for anything, and
yet…what I found was
you
.”

Ben grinned. “Hey, now. If we’re being
technical here,
I
found you.”

She nodded. “That’s right, Ben. You
found me and you saved me. You took me in, and you showed me another chance at
life, so I don’t fear you at all, Ben. I have absolutely no fear of you. Only love
and affection.

“What happened last night was
wonderful,” she said, and her cheeks flushed. “It was...well, I’m just excited
to have another chance, Ben. I’ll leave it at that, and I hope you know it in
your heart. I don’t fear you at all. I don’t think I ever could.”

He looked away, swiping the tears from
his eyes. He kissed the top of her head and she squeezed him even harder.
“Thank you…” he started, but his reply was cut off by a mechanical droning in
the distance.

They crouched, scanning the horizon. A
jeep came trundling toward them. It was a fair distance, but closing fast.

“There—into the ditch!” Ben said, and
they scurried into the little trough at the side of the road. The rains had
been scarce and they were lucky it was dry.

“There’s a culvert!” Alice hissed. It was
at least a hundred yards in the distance, in the direction of the approaching
jeep.

“Hustle, hustle! Go for it!” Ben said,
and they were scurrying as fast as they could over the rocky terrain. They were
hunched over, but Ben felt terribly exposed all the same. He waited for the
staccato bursts of automatic gunfire.

Fifty yards…forty…thirty. They fell to
their knees, crawling on all fours, while the truck approached.

It kicked up dust on the road. A man was
standing up in the back. He had a gun and a set of binoculars, which he used to
scan the road before them.

Ben reached the culvert first. He
turned, just as Alice collapsed in a heap, ten feet from cover. The jeep’s
tires vibrated above them, and Ben could hear music—some angry marriage of
shouting and percussion—and then the jeep slid to a halt.

Alice winced. Tears streaked her face,
and he could see where her ankle was stuck in the ground at a terrible angle.
He scuttled forward, took hold of her leg and pulled. Alice grunted just as the
suspension of the jeep was yawning on the road above them. Her leg came free and
they scurried into the darkness.

Their backs to the concrete wall, they
sat as deep in the shadows as they could manage.

Someone switched off the music and they
heard mumbled discussion. It was a disagreement, but a good-natured one.

“It ain’t what you think it is, Cap,” a
deep voice called.

“Bullshit,” a gravelly voice shot back.
“Pinnock, get yer skinny ass down there and collect it. Bring it here. Might
belong to our lovebirds, and if they’re coming this way.”

“Aw, Cap, why do I always have to…?”

“Move your ass, Pinnock!”

There was a grunt and the sound of boots
crunching over stone. Then a thin man with acne and an oddly shaped head—bullet-shaped,
like a tapered canning jar—scrambled into the ditch. Ben kept his arm across
Alice’s chest, willing them both deeper into the concrete wall. His left arm
was poised to level the shotgun, his finger on the trigger.

Neither breathed. Neither dared take a
breath.

"I don’t want to touch it, Cap! It
could be…I don’t know, it could be a trap of some kind!”

“It’s a fucking apple, Pinnock! Just
because you’ve never seen one before doesn’t mean it’s a trap. Jesus, boy! Stop
grousing and pick that goddamned thing up or you’ll be
walking
back to
Bickley.
You
can explain to Mr. Talmidge why you were afraid to touch a piece
of fruit, for the love of Pete!”

Pinnock stooped to pick it up. One of
them—likely Alice when she’d fallen—had lost it in the ditch. Pinnock wore
green camouflage pants, heavy black boots and a filthy white t-shirt. A tiny
tuft of blond hair sat atop that oddly shaped head. He held the apple at arm’s
length, like it was a venomous snake or something, and peered up at his boss.

“Now poke yer head inside that culvert,
Pinnock. Make damn sure they’re gone, long as you’re down there.”

“Aw, Cap, I don’t want to…”

The sound of boots jingling on the road
echoed from above. It had the desired effect.

“Okay, okay!” Pinnock said. His arm went
up reflexively—he was probably used to taking a swat or two. He crept over to
the lip of the culvert, where he cupped a hand over his eyes and peered into
the darkness.

“Hal-lo?” he called softly. His voice
bounced around on the concrete walls. “Any-body-in-there?”

Ben closed his eyes. He could feel
Alice’s heartbeat. There was terror between them—pure, unbridled fear. It was
all he could do to keep himself from cutting the man down, from plunging into
daylight and blasting at the men in the jeep with the shotgun.

It certainly beat getting slaughtered in
the darkness, like carp in a barrel.

“Come
on
, Pinnock!” the deep
voice called down. “You really need to grow a pair, boy!”

“I got a pair, Quade!” the thin man shot
back. “You just…you just shut up!”

He turned back to the culvert and took a
few tentative steps inside. Fifteen feet of darkness—that was all that
separated them now. “Anybody in HERE!” he shouted. His voice boomed in echo and
there was an explosion that blew him flat on his ass.

Ben could barely hear Pinnock’s shrill screams
as the thin man scrambled out of the ditch and back up to the road. From just
inches above their heads a maelstrom of wing-beating fury—a boiling mass of
bats—exploded toward the culvert’s opening. Ben covered Alice as the tiny
animals’ wings whipped the air all about them, tangling in her hair and getting
stuck in his coat. Thirty seconds later the colony was gone, and Ben could hear
Cap and the one Pinnock had called Quade taking their shots at Pinnock.

“You…you should have
seen
yourself, Pinnock! My
God
, but you scream like my sister!” Quade said.
“It was priceless!”

“Here!” Pinnock said, when the laughter abated.
“Here’s your damned apple! I hope you choke on it.” He threw it toward the jeep
and scrambled out of the ditch.

“Oh, it ain’t for me,” Cap replied, “and
you should watch your tongue, you fucking grunt. This is going straight to Mr.
Talmidge. Might find himself an interest in tracking down our lovebirds if
there’s more where this came from.”

The jeep roared back to life and
crunched off down the road and Ben and Alice were finally alone with the
darkness and their pounding hearts.

“Alice?” Ben finally whispered.

“Oh god!” she hissed. Her hand were
shaking. “Oh my god, Ben, that was too close!”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so. I think I just turned it a
little. Let’s get out of here.”

He helped her to the mouth of the
culvert. The woods were maybe a mile in the distance, but they hobbled straight
for them, thankful to be off the road.

They found Putt’s Hardware forty minutes
later. It was a busted up, two-story feed and seed with gaping holes in its shaker-shingled
roof. The gasoline pumps out front had been vandalized and the front windows
were missing. Some charming soul had scrawled
PUD’S PLEASURE PALACE
in red spray
paint on the sign above the front door.

A buzzard sat there, scanning the road
like a prison bull.

“Dang,” Alice said. “That place gives me
the willies. Maybe we should just head home, Ben. We’ve had our close call for
the day, I think.”

“Yeah, I feel it too. I definitely don’t
like the idea of poking around in there. But we came all this way for a reason,
Alice. If we find some seeds,” he sighed, “well, it could be a game changer.
We’ve got to give it a shot. It might be the difference between making that
farm work, and then we wouldn’t have to leave again.”

They pondered it in silence for a time. “Okay,
you’re right. What’s the plan?” she finally asked.

Putt’s stood at the far margin of a wide
clearing. There was a marsh behind it, the husks of reeds and thistles trembling
slightly in the breeze. There were no trees to speak of, and only a little
ramshackle shed in the process of falling over out behind the main building. A
chain-link nursery center was connected to the main building, its gate banging in
the breeze.

Ben studied it through the binoculars.
They were maybe a half mile away, tucked under a blackberry bramble that had overtaken
a long stretch of pasture fencing.

“Wait here,” he finally said. “You keep
that handgun ready and keep an eye on me through the binoculars. I’ll hustle in
and take what I can. Give me fifteen minutes from the time I hit the front door.
If I’m not back, Alice, you have to leave. You have to promise me that. Go straight
back to Buck’s. I’ll meet you there if I can. If I’m not there by nightfall, you
beat a trail for the miracle farm. Follow the path we marked and don’t stop
until you’re home, okay?”

She nodded. “I can do that. Take care,
Ben. I don’t want to make that hike by myself.”

He grinned and kissed her. Now she had
ash in her hair and smeared across her cheeks, and he brushed it away and unloaded
his pack. When he was finished, he chambered a round in the shotgun.

“I’ll be right back. Wait here, ‘kay honey?”

She laughed and kissed him again and
then he was off, sprinting hard for Putt’s Mercantile. She watched him until he
disappeared inside, oblivious all the while to the footsteps creeping closer on
her blindside.