The Reset (16 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

“I
suppose they’re
all
gone,” Arthur said. They sipped tea in the front
room, the drapes allowing a few slivers of daylight into the space. Gwen, while
still exhausted and fighting the effects of her dehydration, had survived the
night. She was improving. Lucy rallied quickly. The arrival of food and company
and her liberation from the dank crawlspace filled her with hope, and her smile
was bright. Ben replenished their water supplies and stashed a store of food in
the kitchen. “We’ve been down there in the crawlspace since Roan’s envoys came
crashing into town. They keep coming back, in fact—every couple of days we hear
footsteps above our heads. They must know that not everybody got out of Bickley.”

Ben had risen before sunrise and
ventured to the outskirts of what remained of the little hamlet. It was
gone—burned to the ground—and there were few landmarks remaining from the
nightmarish place they’d fled back in May.

A skull with a few ragged clumps of hair
and dried flesh still attached had been speared on a pike near the swooping
curve where Ben had rescued Alice. The hair that remained was long and black
and it fluttered in the breeze.

Ben had offered a quick prayer for the
innocents of the town, for surely there were others like Gwen and Arthur and
Lucy, and beaten a hasty retreat back to Bankers Bluff.

“They could return any time,” Gwen said.
They had apples and watermelon and the tea was strong and hit the spot. “We’re
not safe anymore in our home, and we can’t go back down into the crawlspace.
It’s just…Lucy and I can’t live down there.
Nobody
can.”

“You can come with us,” Alice replied.
There was no hesitation in her voice. Ben’s eyes flashed across the room.
What
are you doing?
She gave a tiny nod, reached out and covered the woman’s
wrinkled hand. “We have plenty of food to share, and our home is safe.
It’s—well, it’s as safe as one could expect in these trying times.”

Arthur smiled. “Your place is here in
Georgia, isn’t it? You didn’t push that load all the way from Arkansas—that’s impossible.
Let me ask you a question: what gives you the impression that you’re safe?
Roan’s reach is long. If your home falls inside his shadow, no matter how safe
it seems, he’ll kill you if he finds you.”

A pall fell over the room. What would it
take for them just to be left alone—to live in peace?

“When did Roan’s men come back?” Ben
finally asked.

“Hard to say, after all that time in the
dark. Time…it works differently without the light. But I’d reckon they sacked
the town at least a month ago. Could be longer than that, though. But it’s like
I said—they keep
coming back
. We heard boots on the floorboards not two
days ago.”

Gwen nodded and Lucy said, “Bad men.
They want to hurt us.”

“We won’t let that happen, sweetie,”
Alice said. She touched the girl’s shoulder; Lucy stood and hugged her, then
settled down to finish her apple in Alice’s lap.

Gwen smiled. “It’s nice to see you smiling,
Lucille.”

“Thanks, Grandma,” she replied. “I like
it when you’re happy too. Can we go with Ben and Alice? Please? I’m so tired of
the crawlspace. It’s too dirty—too many creepy crawlies down there.”

Ben and Alice shared a glance. Although
he had serious misgivings about bringing them back with them, something Alice
had said stuck firmly in the back of his mind.

She’d called me her husband
, he thought,
and a smile lit his features. Here was a family.

“Can you walk, Gwen?” Ben said.

“I believe I can. I’m worlds better
already, just having some food in my stomach.”

“Yay!” Lucy said, her little fists in
the air.

Their laughter lightened the mood, but
Ben remained wary of the prospect of caring for them. He swallowed hard. What
choice did they have? Leaving them behind was the same as killing them.

“Let’s get the rest of the guns, Arthur”
he finally said. “We’ll need to go as soon as we’re able. The sooner we get
home, the sooner we can analyze our situation. Come up with a plan.”

Arthur stood, tears shimmering in his
eyes, and pulled the younger man into an embrace. Ben was stunned by his
frailty. Could they really bring these people into their home?

Your
home?
he chided himself.
Now
it’s
your
home? You need to remember how you got there in the first
place, Benjamin Stone…

 “Let’s do it,” Arthur said. There was
optimism in his tone. “Gwen, I want you to put together some bags. Get Lucy dressed
for a long day of walking. We’ll be back in a jiffy.”

They began their clumsy trek at
midmorning. They were an odd collection of souls: two frail senior citizens, a
sightless little girl, a widowed academic and a man whose sole existence had
been one engineered to inflict pain and suffering on the human race.

Ben watched Gwen and Arthur intently as
they left. Neither spared their home, or indeed what had once been Bickley, as
much as a sideways glance. They were making a clean break and trusting blindly
that Alice and Ben were taking them someplace safe.

They had left some of the food behind,
taking only enough to see them through the trip home. There was plenty at the
miracle farm, and in place of the food they pushed a cart filled with heavy
artillery, a few bags of clothes, and a couple of toys. With Arthur pitching in
on the pushing, they made decent time.

They spoke very little, leaving Ben alone
with his thoughts. Near dusk, when it became clear they would have to stop and make
a camp, he had a moment of simple clarity. He looked at the old man. Arthur’s
head was bent like a burro as he strained to push their meager possessions across
the uneven ground. Ben watched Gwen, all ninety pounds of her, stumbling here
and there as she willed herself forward.

And he watched Alice and Lucy, holding
hands, as they marched into the future together.

He understood what he had to do to
protect them. He had long ago given up the search for Coraline, but that didn’t
change what needed doing.

If they were going to be safe, he would
have to go to Atlanta to have a word with Roan.

As near as he could tell, there was just
no way around it.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Arthur
and Gwendolyn Lawton were simply astounded by what Ben and Alice had achieved
with the miracle farm.

“I just…well shit, I didn’t think any of
this was still possible,” Arthur stammered. From where they stood they had a
good view of the orchard and the ponies and the furthest edge of the sprawling
garden. Ben grinned at their disbelief; he clapped a hand on the old man’s
shoulder, glad they’d made the decision to bring these folks north with them from
Bickley.

Gwen and Lucy followed Alice inside to
wash up while Ben and Arthur locked the weaponry away and toured the property. They
went in for a glass of water before venturing out into the fields. Summer
thunderstorms had swollen Georgia’s creeks and the power station hummed along
nicely.

That night, they gathered around the
dinner table for a meal of venison and roasted vegetables. Before they tucked
into the food, Arthur asked everyone at the table to join hands. Gwen and Lucy
knew the drill, but the gesture caught Alice and Ben off guard. Human contact
had been so scarce…and yet, it seemed so natural to the Lawtons.

They joined hands and the Lawtons bowed
their heads. Ben and Alice followed suit and Arthur said a short prayer.

When dinner had been parceled out, Alice
came out with her question. “That was a beautiful blessing, Arthur. May I ask
where you learned it?”

He smiled. “In seminary. I’m a preacher,
Alice.”

“A preacher,” Ben said. “Is that
like—what, like a pastor?”

“Just different words for it, Ben. I’m a
man of God. Had a congregation of my own before the Reset.”

“Well,” Alice said, “then we’re blessed
to have you with us, Father.”

Arthur waved a hand to dismiss it.
“Let’s just stick to ‘Arthur’ if you don’t mind, Alice. I’d prefer it. Been
strong in my walk with the Lord, despite everything else, but I’m not a
preacher anymore. Not really. I’m just…just Arthur now, and that’s a good
thing.”

They left it at that, content to fill
each other in on what their lives had been like before the Reset. Gwen had been
retired almost two years from her job teaching at the elementary school in the
winter of ’38. The Lawtons’ daughter and son-in-law had lived with them long
enough to give birth to Lucy, and then they’d been on their own and Gwen had
found herself once again leading a classroom—this time with just one very
important pupil.

Ben didn’t want to push them on the
story of what had happened to the girl’s parents—not with Lucy sitting right there
at the table—and they changed the subject. Alice talked about her time at
Georgia Tech and Ben spoke in vague terms about life in Oregon and his early
employment in the premier economy.

“Goodness gracious, it must have been a
relief to know that you’d made it, son.” Arthur said. “That’s a rare
opportunity indeed, to have that kind of money.”

“Arthur’s congregation was…very modest,”
Gwen added. “We never had much, but we also never went without, I suppose.”

Arthur smiled, nodding. He patted his
wife’s hand.

“You know, I really didn’t get much of a
chance to enjoy it,” Ben replied. He told them about his living arrangements,
about how he’d only begun the corporate fealty testing when everything fell
apart. “Knowing everything I do now,” he shrugged, “I doubt it would have been
all that great. It’s the family that I lived with that I miss the most—not the
money.”

Arthur wore a knowing smile.
“Maybe—maybe not. Who is to say? But I do believe that those were among the darkest
days in American history. Things are bad now, of course, but at least they’re
honest—at least they’re fair. I’m an old man, son. When I was a boy, the world
was all so very different.” He put his fork down and hunched forward over the
table.

“Life wasn’t…back when I was a kid, life
wasn’t preordained. Almost anybody that wanted to could go to college, and the
economy wasn’t so fragmented. There wasn’t such a clearly defined caste system.
I went to divinity school
after
finishing an economics degree at Emory,
if you can believe that. Little ol’ Arthur Lawton, whose daddy toiled for forty
years as a saw filer at the local lumberyard, earned
two
college
degrees.” He held up two fingers to underscore the point.

This time, it was Gwen’s turn to smile.
The love and admiration they had for each other was palpable. “Arthur and I met
at Emory. I earned my degree in education there. I had
seven years
under
my belt before the Human Accord mucked up the school system in this country and
began restricting public enrollments.

“Before they stepped in, though? My, those
were good times, weren’t they Arthur?”

“Aye. Before the Human Accord started
the designation system, Gwen’s classes reflected what a great place America had
become. Kids from all walks of life—all kinds of ethnic and religious
backgrounds—attended class together. Then they yanked the D6s first. What was
the rationale behind that, Gwen?”

“’Ethnic consistency,’ was the phrase
they used, I think.”

Alice nodded. She stabbed the air with
her fork. “That’s right. I remember all of that nonsense! HA executives called
it ‘consistency,’ but they were really looking for racial homogeneity. After
them, it was the D7s and D4s, am I right?”

“That sounds about right,” Gwen said. “I
was still a very young teacher. So idealistic. I kept in touch with the
students over the years. A great many of them died in the wars—fodder for the
Human Accord’s global ambitions. I sometimes think that’s why they were picked
in the first place.”

“What do you mean?” Ben said. Public
education fascinated him—things had been so different back on the ranch.

“They took the poor away. They took
people that didn’t adhere to the state’s religious beliefs. They took the
children of immigrants. Soon, I was left with a tiny class filled with little
robots—well, robots or monsters, really. Some of those kids were downright
mean, and most of that came from entitlement. But I’ll be honest—in the end it
was just a class filled with wealthy children that all looked alike, spoke
alike, and believed the same things.”

“Progress,” Arthur said, his voice
dripping with contempt. “This was the Human Accord’s idea of how things were
supposed to go.”

“Then, after seven years, I was just replaced,”
Gwen continued. “It’s true that my parents had been laborers, but that didn’t
discount the value of my degree, for heaven’s sake! I’d
earned
it, just as
my replacement had. But I lacked pedigree. I had come from modest people, and
that made me less desirable.

“I worked at a school in the secondary
economy for a number of years, and then I was shuffled on from that place, too.
In the end, I kept the books for Arthur’s church and did some sewing on the
side. So much for my teaching career.”

“You still teach me, Grandma,” Lucy
said. “I love our lessons!”

There were tears in Gwen’s eyes—tears of
regret, most likely—but her smile was sincere. She took her grandbaby’s tiny
hand in her own. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had, Lucille. The best job by
far!”

“And I’ll be frank,” Arthur said. “We
may just be a couple of old farts, Gwendolyn and I, but we’ll do our best to
help out around here. We’re so thankful that you two came into our lives. We
feel—well,
we
feel blessed to be here with you. With God as my witness,
we feel like we’re here for a reason.”

Lucy’s lips formed a shocked ‘O’.
“Grandpa!” she said.

“What? What is it, Lucy?” he replied,
suddenly worried.

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You
said ‘farts’! At the dinner table, Grandpa!”

“Aye—that I did, Lucille. That I did. I
apologize, sweet girl.”

She dissolved into giggling laughter,
and soon all of them were laughing. It felt so good—so natural to share a meal
by candlelight with good people, and soon there were tears in each of the
adults’ eyes.

They were tears of happiness and relief
that had been years in coming.

~

Lucy
insisted on sleeping with her grandparents, and Ben and Alice set the three of
them up in the largest bedroom. Gwen and Lucy cleaned up for bed and turned in shortly
after dinner; Gwen wanted to comfort Lucy in her new environment, and she
needed to recharge her batteries after two long days of walking.

Before she closed the door, she clutched
Ben’s hand and kissed Alice on the cheek. “Thank you both. From the bottom of
my heart, thank you for what you’ve done for us and our little one.”

“We’re happy to have you all here with
us,” Ben said, and he was. For the second time that day, he felt good about
having others with them on the farm. The trick would be whether or not he could
keep them safe if Roan’s men stumbled down the Peach Orchard Road. That they
might was a persistent source of anxiety for him, and he found his attention
drawn to the road at least a few times each day.

Hell, if
he’d
found the place…

After they’d cleaned up, Alice poured sun
tea and she and Arthur and Ben brought some chairs out on the front porch. Ben lit
just a single candle, which he placed on the railing. A smattering of clouds
floated in a star-filled sky, and a plump yellow moon cast a thin light over
the farm and the road and the acres of ash-covered fields stretching far into
the distance.

A bird called out occasionally and they
were content to sip their drinks in the muggy darkness, just listening to the
night settling around them. After a time, Arthur spoke up.

“Lucy’s mom—our daughter, that is—committed
suicide. This was…well, it happened just a short time after she’d lost her
husband.”

“Oh, Arthur,” Alice replied. “I’m so
sorry!”

The tall man nodded in acknowledgement.
“Our little girl’s name was Melinda. She was such a great kid who grew into
such a great young woman; she became pregnant with Lucy later than most, as you
can probably guess by our ages. At the time, we thought we’d been blessed with
a miracle, and it turns out we were right on the money there. That little girl
inside there, despite all of her setbacks, is the best thing that ever happened
to Gwen and me.

“Only Melinda…I guess she didn’t see it
the same way. She was so distraught when Shane was killed. I was the one that
found his body up there in Macon. He’d been on his way to Atlanta, searching
for a doctor and looking for medical supplies. Home births are tricky in the
best of times, but after the Reset? Shoot, I reckon it was Roan’s men that probably
got him, but we can’t be sure. He’d been…oh, they’d robbed him. I’ll just leave
it at that. We brought his wedding ring home and buried what was left right
there on the side of the road.

“And our Melinda…she slipped into a dark
place. Then she had Lucille and, and she’d just been so
frightened
.
Lucy’s condition scared the hell out of her. She wouldn’t hold the baby.
Wouldn’t nurse her. Gwen and I tried to help Melinda along. We tried to
facilitate a bond between them, but Melinda just collapsed into herself. She was
too far gone, I suppose.

“She’d just lost Shane, and then her
pregnancy wasn’t at all what she had expected. We found that our little girl had
left us on a cold winter morning. Lucy was just a few months old. She had been in
the room, sleeping peacefully in her bassinet, when her mama took her own life.
Every day I thank the good Lord that Melinda didn’t hurt that child before she
left us.

“She…” he cleared his throat, “Melinda used
a knife. There was just a short note. I’ve got it memorized.
I’m so sorry
for everything that’s happened
, it said.
I’ve got to go now, as there’s
nothing left for me here. I love you, Mom and Dad. Take care of Lucy
. That
was it.”

His voice caught on that last part, and
it took him a few minutes to get it back under control. Ben and Alice gave him the
time.

“And that’s just what Gwen and I aim to
do. As long as there is a breath in either one of us, we’ll take care of Lucy.”

Alice reached out in the darkness. She
took Arthur’s hand, his knuckles swollen with arthritis, the palms covered with
blisters from the long days spent pushing their things up from Bickley. “Then
we’ll take care of her with you, Arthur. You can trust Ben and me, and you can
count on us. We’ll do this together.”

He squeezed her hand in response. “I
know it, Alice. I think I’ve known it from the minute that husband of yours
stepped into our living room with a shotgun he had no intention of using, all
those months ago.

“Good Lord, he was a scared young man!”

Ben grinned at the memory. “I’m really not
much for guns, Arthur,” he agreed, touching his shoulder where he’d been shot.

“Can I ask you a question, Ben?” Arthur
said.

“Go ahead.”

“How old are you?”

Ben took a deep breath. He hadn’t
celebrated a birthday in…shoot, in years. He could tell that Alice was eager
for his response too, and there was a curious tension on the porch. “I
guess…let’s see, I guess I’m about thirty-one or thirty-two now. What year is
it, precisely?”