The Reset (14 page)

Screams echoed from the back of the van,
and there was more shooting. Ben limped across the street just as Buck was
throwing open the rear doors. A big man with red hair tumbled down onto the
ground, the women piled on top of him.

They had the chain around his neck. Groping,
terrified, furious fingers found the man’s eyes, his nose, his mouth. They
pried him open, tearing at his skin—stretching and ripping and gashing all the
while.

They were pulling him apart.

If he could have gathered the breath, the
man likely would have screamed. But it was no use. They were on top of him, crushing
him flat even as they blindly tore him to pieces.

“Alice!” he shouted. She looked up, her
face twisted in a savage grimace. “Alice—Alice we have to go!”

A bullet whistled past his head. The driver
was still out there, and he’d taken cover in the diner. He snapped shots at the
shackled women and Ben watched in horror as a red blossom spread across a very young
girl’s back. She fell to the sidewalk without a sound, her arms at her sides
and her eyes a pair of glassy mirrors.

It was pitiful, these helpless women
chained together while the scarred man used them for target practice.

“Delaney!” the older woman cried. “Oh, Dee!”

They left the redhead there in the
street. He lay in a puddle of viscera; where his eyes had been there were now only
two pulped sockets. His jaw was distended and off center, what remained of his
hair clinging to his scalp in bloody patches.

And yet he breathed. Ben watched his
chest as it rose and fell—rose and fell.

Screw it. He had to help them. He
scurried over to the ladies and put his back to the van, even as Scarface loosed
another volley of bullets. There was a shriek as one of them took one in the
thigh. Ben yanked hard on the chain, straining to pull them out of the line of
fire.

“Come on, now! Take cover!”

He tugged again and the women finally responded.
They dragged the dead girl with them behind the van, its rear doors providing
scant cover.

“Come out!” Quade called from the diner.
“You’ll all be killed when Mr. Talmidge finds ye’! You’ll be hunted down and butchered,
but if you give yourselves up willingly, you might still have a chance!”

The shotgun roared and Alice shot him a
quizzical expression. “The deer man,” Ben said.

“Buck?” the old woman gasped. Her hands were
covered in blood—blood from her leg wound, and from the girl’s back. Alice pressed
on the woman’s thigh, but it looked like a glancing shot. She would manage.
“You can’t trust him, mister!” she hissed. “He works with Talmidge.”

The shotgun roared again. “He’s already
killed one of them,” Ben said. “I trust him just fine.”

“Dee! Oh, God…wake up, honey! Can you
hear me? Dee!” a woman about their own age said. She blew air into the dead
girl’s mouth.

“Keys,” Alice said. She eyed the
redhead. “He has them. I think I can get to them.”

Ben shook his head, but Alice was
insistent. “We have to get out of these handcuffs.”

She darted into the street, the women paying
out slack in the chain. A bullet bounced off the asphalt at her feet and the
shotgun roared for a third time—Buck providing cover. She dug through the redhead’s
pockets until locating the keys, just as his hand clamped down over her wrist.
His sightless, bleeding face shot forward and he sunk his teeth into her
arm—his jaw apparently working just fine, thanks very much.

Alice shrieked, and there was a horrible
noise as the man spat a chunk of her flesh into the street. He fell back, cackling
hysterically—Alice’s blood glistening on his teeth.

She scrambled back to the van. She was
hunting through the keys when they were suddenly awash in light.

A pair of dirt bikes rounded the corner
and Ben stood and opened up with the automatic, spending the clip. Both riders
dumped their bikes, and Ben watched in dismay as the man in black fled into the
darkness.

The other rider crawled toward them. Glistening
bone protruded from the back of his useless left arm. He’d left most of his
face on the road, and Ben was horrified as he drew near.

He recognized him from the culvert—the
one they called Pinnock.

“Get out of here,” the injured man gasped.
He tossed his handgun toward the clustered women and crumpled to the ground. He
took a few final rasping breaths before growing still.

Alice snatched the gun. She walked over
and calmly put a bullet in the redhead’s temple before running back to the van,
blood pouring from her arm in thick gobbets. She handed the gun to one of the
women and hunted through the mass of keys.

“Small keys,” she muttered. The blood slicked
her fingers, making it hard going. “Small keys, small keys, small keys….”

She found one, plunged it into the
handcuffs and sprung the mechanism. She slipped the cuffs off and worked on the
others. She freed each of them, save the poor girl. Delaney was gone.

“Ye cunts!” the scarred man called. Was
that fear in his voice? “Ye’ll damn us all, ye cunts! Roan won’t care that we
tried to hold up our end of the deal—he’ll butcher every soul in Bickley, you
mark my words!”

“Quade!” It was Talmidge, shouting from
down the street. “Hold your position, Quade! I think we’ve got ‘em pinned down!”

Ben heard Buck reloading. “The hell you
do!” he yelled.

“Hey there, Buck!” Talmidge called after
a long pause. “Nice of you to make it into town. Finally ready for that reunion
with your kin, are you?”

There was a guttural snarl and then Buck
was sprinting down the center of the street, running straight into the darkness
that had swallowed Talmidge. A half dozen pistols shots cut the man’s legs out from
under him. Buck struggled to his knees and leveled the shotgun, firing twice in
Talmidge’s direction.

“Now!” Buck growled. “Run, Ben! Do it
now!”

Ben took Alice’s hand. They sprang
around the side of the van, hustling for the edge of town. For the safety of
trees and darkness and the palmetto grove outside of Arthur’s staid colonial on
the hill.

Bullets whistled past them—twanging
hornets in the night. He heard cries and realized the women were following
them. It sounded like another had been hit. Still, he gripped Alice’s hand and
they shambled for cover—putting distance between themselves and the horrible
little town of Bickley. They scurried through the night until the shooting
slowed, and until the only sounds were the frantic snap of brush at their legs
and their ragged breathing.

Behind them, Buck and Quade and Talmidge
traded gunfire in the street.

They had made it.

“We have to go back,” Alice panted. The women
had fallen behind, and now they were alone. “We have to go back for them, Ben.
We’re the only hope they have.”

“We can’t,” Ben hissed. His torso was on
fire. He was dizzy—so close to fainting. “Alice, I’m hurt bad. We can’t…can’t
go back….”

More shots. They weren’t close, but whoever
was out there wasn’t giving up. Someone was hoping to get lucky.

They knelt. “We have to help them!”
Alice hissed. “I can’t let them be taken to Atlanta, Ben. I just can’t….”

“You don’t understand. I
can’t make
it
, Alice,” Ben said. “I’ll die if we go back.” He groped in the darkness,
reaching for her hand. He found it, lifted his shirt and gently pressed her
hand to his side.

“Oh God, Ben!” she said. “Oh my God! Who
did this to you? What happened back there?”

“We have to…it’s time to go,” he croaked,
darkness closing in on all sides. “We got what we came for, Alice. I found
them.”

She was silent, even as the women’s anguished
screams now carried on the night air. They’d caught up to them.

“Okay. Let’s move,” she said. She helped
him up and they limped away.

They’d covered most of a mile, angling
back toward the house where Ben had left his pack, before she asked her
question. “You said you found them,” she said. “What did you mean by that,
Ben?”

“The seeds,” he wheezed. “I found the
seeds.”

TWENTY-THREE

Everything
was just where he had left it. Alice dressed their wounds as best she could,
and Ben leaned against her for support as they trudged toward home. She wore
his pack, filled now with seeds and canned food. She carried the guns—all
four
of them, counting the one Pinnock had surrendered.

It was a huge burden for such a small
woman, but she bore up under it and kept pushing forward.

On and on they walked. The clouds
thinned from time to time and the moon shone down, lighting a dim path through open
meadows and decaying woodlands.

They walked and they searched, and
before long they found a place to sleep.

The house had burnt to the ground, but a
little lean-to out back had survived. A small supply of firewood had been stacked
optimistically in the corner, as if the Reset had just been a short
interruption in the grand scheme of things and that, when Christmas rolled
around and it was time for lazy evenings by a roaring hearth, there would still
be enough to have a fire.

They ducked behind the firewood,
concealing themselves. It would be a fine place to pass the few hours remaining
before dawn.

Alice helped Ben shrug out of his
clothes. His tee-shirt was soaked with blood. She could feel him leaking—the
blood welling and seeping down his side. How much time did he have left?

“Thirsty,” Ben croaked; he was fading. Alice
helped him to the ground. She re-bandaged his wounds as best she could. Aside
from the major laceration, which needed sutures, there were three smaller
puncture wounds. These had already clotted.

Ben was dying; she was sure of it. He
was dehydrated and pale. His tongue snaked out over cracked lips. “Thirsty,” he
repeated.

“I’ll be back. Rest easy, Ben. I’m going
for water.” She kissed him hard, lingering there while she choked back the
tears. “Rest easy. I’ll be right back.”

She grabbed their empty water bottles
and stole back into the night, struggling with their dilemma. Would he be alive
when she returned? Had they spoken their last to each other?

She ran most of a mile before stumbling
across the stream. It gurgled through the Georgia countryside and she knelt at
a wide, still place where the water calmed in a pool. She bent and drank deeply.
It was cold and sweet, and when her belly was full, she filled the bottles and took
just a single moment to gather herself for the trip back to Ben.

In that instant, the clouds parted and
the moon shone through. Its silver form glowed in the center of the pool—seemingly
within arm’s reach—and it was beautiful. She leaned out over the water to catch
a glimpse of herself. Blood freckled her cheeks and forehead. Her hair was a
wild tangle. She closed her eyes and muttered a quick prayer.

When she opened them, she found she had
a visitor.

On the opposite bank, not twenty feet
away, a huge buck drank from the water. There was a rustling in the brush, and
the big male was joined by a doe. The animals watched Alice with curiosity, and
without a whit of fear. Their reaction startled her, but it made perfect sense:
humans
had become the novelty.

She splashed water over her face, washing
away the blood and ash. She combed her hair with her fingers. When she was finished,
the deer maintaining their quiet study all the while, she lifted her hand in a
gesture of farewell. Hope welled up from somewhere deep inside her, and she watched
them another instant before hurrying back to Ben.

“Ben?” she said. He was still. “Ben?”

She put her ear to his lips, relief
shuddering through her like a cold breeze. He was alive, his respiration
shallow. His forehead was hot. She poured a capful of water into his mouth and
he sputtered and woke.

“The Reset,” he said. “I was dreaming
about the Reset.”

“Don’t do that. Dream about something
else. Dream about a garden, Ben. Dream about a garden filled with food and a
life on the miracle farm. Here—I have water.”

He took some and lay back down. “I owe
you,” he whispered. A shiver ran through him “You saved me.”

She said nothing, choosing instead
simply to smooth his sweat-matted hair. Within the minute he was gone again, snoring
as he slept.

“
God help us
,” Alice whispered.
She closed her eyes, touched her forehead to his. “Please, God, give us the
strength to find our way home.”

She curled up next to him and drifted
into sleep.

And in that fashion, Ben Stone and Alice
Kincaid procured enough seeds to attempt a summer garden.

TWENTY-FOUR

There
was a moment on the third day when Alice lost hope. It was all so much to carry—the
guns and the food and Ben himself, who was barely capable of stumbling much
further through the woods. She’d run out of bandages and had resorted to
tearing strips from her tee-shirt. And yet the wound in his side continued to
bleed.

It was bad, but the thing that hurt the
most was that they were lost. Alice simply could not find the path home.

“There,” Ben finally said on the
afternoon of the third day. His lips were cracked, his cheeks gaunt. He was
hounded by fever. He pointed a blood-streaked index finger at a spindly jack
pine. It bore a shallow notch in its bark. “There it is, Alice. Keep your…keep
your eyes open.”

Sure enough, there had been another, and
then another, and soon the terrain grew familiar. Perhaps they had just been
running parallel to the trail the whole time. It didn’t matter—they were getting
closer.

At dusk, the miracle farm appeared like
an ancient monolith in the distance.

“Ben!” she cried. His head lolled
against his chest. He looked up and Alice was terrified by what she saw. His
vacant eyes were bloodshot. Soot and ash had rendered his skin a dingy gray.
How much blood had he lost?

“Ben, we’re here! We’re home!”

They covered that last mile a little
faster and, when they finally stepped into the kitchen, Ben collapsed in a heap
on the floor. Alice checked his pulse. It was weak, but he was alive. She
scurried about, lighting candles, prying off his boots and stripping him of his
blood-soaked garments.

He’d bled through the latest round of
rags. In the light of day, she’d actually found
seven
wounds in total. Still,
only one threatened his life. It gaped open like the gill of a salmon—five
inches of angry red skin. The blood loss had slowed, thankfully, but the long
walk had done nothing to facilitate clotting.

She built a fire in the cast-iron stove
and put water on to boil. She knew that Ben had removed a bullet in that very
kitchen (it was still there on the sill) all those months before, and it made
her sad to think that the place now doubled as their operating room.

She cleaned and stitched the wounds. She
bathed him right there on the floor, using washcloths to swipe the blood and
grime from his skin. She took her time washing his hair. He woke just once,
giving her a quick smile before drifting back into the ether. When she was
finished, she brewed him a cup of tea and helped him into bed.

“We’re here?” he rasped, when she had
tucked him beneath a cool sheet. “We’re…safe?”

She kissed his temple. “We’re here, Ben.
We’re safe.”

His answer was another tiny snore, and
she left him and went to sit at the kitchen table. She flipped through the seed
packets.

“My word,” she whispered. “Watermelon!”

Visions of cold melon danced through her
head. A smile, perfectly unexpected in the wake of all of they’d experienced in
the last week, formed on her lips and she barked a giddy laugh.

“
Freaking watermelon
!”

It was late and she was exhausted, but
she did what needed doing. She put water on for a bath. While it warmed, she stashed
the seeds in a clay jar that she tucked far in the back of the cabinet above
the electric range. They’d almost died for those seeds, and she couldn’t think
of anything more valuable in that moment.

She took her time, cleaning and oiling
the guns before opting only to hold onto the shotgun for protection. The others
she locked in the safe the Winstons kept in the back of the front closet.

When she’d triple-checked the locks, she
poured herself a small dose of the whiskey they had left and took a bath. The
water was wonderful—therapeutic and intoxicating. She sipped whiskey and closed
her eyes and let her mind go blank.

The bath was rejuvenating; the filth and
grime slipped from her skin and formed a crust on the surface of the water.
When it became tepid, she scrubbed herself clean, released the water, and
rinsed from a bucket of cold water she’d held in reserve.

She put a fresh gauze bandage on her wound
and scrubbed her teeth and crawled into bed next to Ben. His fever had broken,
it seemed, and he was sleeping soundly.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered in his ear.
“We’ll start the garden
tomorrow
.”

The word had never tasted so
good on her lips.