The Reset (23 page)

“We’re
trying
,” he reiterated,
spearing a carrot and biting into it with relish, “and with your help, we’ll stock
our green houses. You were right in what you said earlier, Alice. These
people…they need fresh food. Stay and help us deliver it. You’ll enjoy being
part of something like this. We’re bringing humanity back to life, little by
little.”

It was a nifty speech. Ben had to
concede that the little man had charm. The tension dissipated just a bit, and
the conversation shifted. Roan waxed poetic about his plans for Atlanta. Marks,
Merrick and Dunbar chimed in occasionally, speaking in glowing terms about the
things Roan was going to do for mankind in the wake of the Reset.

Only Coraline refused to speak. Instead,
her eyes always downcast, she picked at her meal. It was hard to tell if she
was even listening.

Ben’s heart ached for her. What had happened
to the girl with such spirit, with such love for life?

She was gone. What remained was a husk—a
plaster shell that had been hardened by years of misery and desperation and
fear.

When dinner had been cleared, they dined
on pastries and sipped decaffeinated coffee. It was almost…well, it was almost
pleasant, having a warm drink inside a lit room while the snow piled up in
drifts outside.

“Why do you have such a kinship with the
little girl?” Coraline finally said. She looked first at Alice, and then at
Ben. “Is she your daughter?”

Alice nodded. “Not biologically, but in
every other sense of the word she is. Lucy was alone, and we took her in. She’s
part of our family. It’s as simple as that.”

Coraline nodded, her eyes returning to
her cooling coffee.

“Please,” Alice prodded, appealing now
only to Coraline. “May we speak with her? Please? We’d just like to see her.”

Roan frowned. After a long minute, he
nodded at Marks, who whispered something into his earpiece.

Ten minutes later, the door opened and
Lucy walked tentatively into the room. She wore the same tattered pajamas she’d
had on the night she was taken.

“Lucy!” Ben shouted. He almost knocked
his chair over he was up so fast. He snatched her up and into his arms and
hugged her to his chest.

“Lucy, honey, it’s us!” Alice said. She
rubbed the kid’s back and Lucy squealed with happiness.

“Ben! Alice! You came! You’re here!”

They covered her face with kisses. She was
so thin. Ben cradled her tiny body to his chest. He could feel her heartbeat
racing—the muscle fluttering like a hummingbird. “Are you hurt?” he hissed in
her ear. “Are you okay?”

“I miss them,” she whispered back. “I
want to go
home
, Ben.”

Marks was listening intently. “Where’s
home, honey?” he said. His voice was cool and mechanical, ever the tactician.
“Just tell us where home is and we’ll let you leave with Ben and Alice.”

“No, Lucy,” Alice said sharply. “Listen,
honey, we’ll get you home safely. I promise. But don’t say anything, okay? Not
one word! Did you tell them anything?”

Lucy shook her head, her lower lip
quivering. Her eyelids had become fused shut beneath those mounds of scar
tissue, but a few tears leaked out all the same. “I…I didn’t say
anything
,
Alice,” she sobbed. “They asked me all kinds of questions, but I didn’t say
anything. I don’t want to be here anymore, Alice! I just want to go home! I
want to go with
you
!”

“That’s enough,” Roan said. “You’ve had
your proof. Guards, take her back to her cell. Warden Merrick, I want these two
placed in the general population.”

Just like that, the room filled with
guards. Uniformed men swarmed Ben and Alice. A big man in military fatigues
pulled the little girl from Ben’s arms, and her sorrowful wailing filled the
room. “Ben!” she shrieked. “Ben, come get me! Come get me out of here! Come get
me, Ben!
Ben
!”

They whisked her away and then Ben and
Alice were being shoved toward the door. Ben shot a look over his shoulder.
Roan and Dunbar just grinned at him.

Coraline raised her head. It was just a singular
moment, a mere instant in which their eyes met across the room, but it was
enough for him to see.

She was crying. Her blue eyes were wet
and, although the vicious pink scar was long and wide, it was neither long
enough nor wide enough to prevent the tears from tracking down her cheeks.

FORTY

They
were taken in separate vehicles back to the jail. Ben never saw his wife again
that night, although he sensed that she was near.

“Alice?” he called out at one point. It
was cold in his cell; when he spoke, there was steam on the air. “Alice, are
you there?”

Silence.

“Oh, Alllll-iiiiccccceeee!” somebody finally
jeered, mocking him. Soon there were dozens of similar catcalls.

“
Alice
!”

“Oh, Aaaal-issss! Daa-dee’s
home
!”

The calls gave way to rattling laughter
and then the silence returned.

“You don’t get it, do you? It’s just
you
down here, boy,” a gruff voice finally called out. “You think they’d keep a
woman down here with the rest of the fucking scourge?

“Roan’s got different plans for women, wonder
boy. He always has, from day one. Most every man in this jail that had a woman
when things went to shit can talk to you about
that
. Your old lady’s in
for a long night, I’m afraid. A damned long night indeed.”

Ben was sick. He curled up on the mattress
and pulled the blanket up over his head and said a long, feverish prayer for
his wife. He prayed for the Lawtons, not knowing if Gwen had survived her
injuries, or if Arthur could even persevere in a world without his wife and his
granddaughter, his affirmation that there was still a God in the heavens.

He prayed for Lucy.

After a time he covered his ears with
his hands, hoping to erase the sorrowful cries and the incessant whispers, and
he said a prayer that sleep would come and, at least for a few hours, take him
away from this terrible place of misery and madness.

~

They
tried to feed him in the morning, but Ben refused the food. The tiny mound of
gray meat on the tray looked—well, it resembled the stew the old man had been
simmering on the stove on the night he’d been shot at the miracle farm.

There was a crust of stale bread and a
tiny plastic cup filled with dirty water. These he consumed before resigning
himself to the indignity of using the “toilet” in the corner. When the previous
night’s meal had run through him in a stinging, watery torrent, he discovered
that he had no way to clean himself. He tore a shred from the blanket and did
what he could.

When the guards came a few hours later
to collect his tray, he pressed his face against the bars. “My wife,” he
whispered to the jailer, a young man with burn scars on his cheeks and nervous,
distrustful eyes. “What happened to my wife? Will Roan allow me to speak with
her?”

The boy drew a deep breath, as if
considering his answer, and spat in Ben’s face. Ben felt the phlegm dripping
down his forehead. He swiped it away, furious.

“Now you stay back from the bars,” the
boy drawled. “Next time, I’ll give you a dose.” He touched a button on an
unfamiliar device and an electrical current snapped at the end of a long metal wand.

“Please, you don’t understand! My wife
and I…we had
dinner
last night with Roan! He needs us to…
ah, ah, ah
!”
Ben shrieked. The man had touched the device to the iron bars. A dull, aching
jolt coursed through his fingers and up his arms and he fell hard to the
ground. His bowels let go and more diarrhea soaked the seat of his pants.

“Ow!” he cried. It was all he could
muster. His mouth just wouldn’t work. “Ow!”

“That’s your freebie, bud. It’ll be a
lot harder next time. You’ve been warned,” the guard said, moving down the
line.

Sensation returned slowly. When he was
able to stand, Ben crept to the edge of his cell, the pain still alive in his
joints. He could hear the guards collecting trays and tormenting the other
prisoners. “Hey,” Ben hissed. He could just see the edge of a cell across the
hall from his. “Hey! Anybody there?”

“Shh!” a voice shot back.

Ben nodded. He put his back to the wall,
waiting for the guards to leave. At least an hour later, he heard a whisper.
“Hey. Hey, wonder boy!”

Ben pressed his face into the bars. He
reached a hand out into the corridor, waving at the man whose form he could
just barely see.

The unfortunate fellow didn’t have any
legs, and he pushed his spindly nubs through the space in the bars. Ben gasped.
This man was almost thin enough to slide through, he was so withered!

“I noticed you didn’t eat!” the man
called. “Next time, save it aside. You can toss it over here if it doesn’t suit
you, wonder boy!”

“I will,” Ben replied. “I will, I
promise. When’s dinner? I’ll save my portion tonight, I swear.”

The man laughed. “Dinner? Jesus Christ,
that was
it
, wonder boy! Chowtime’s done for the day around here. But
hey! Hey, don’t forget what I said tomorrow morning, okay kid?”

“Okay. I…I won’t. What’s your name?”

“Donald Finney. Used to be a respectable
man, if you can believe that. Had kids and a wife. Worked two jobs…lived in a
house
.
I had it all, wonder boy. Had it all!”

“What did you do? I mean, to be put in
here?”

Finney was silent for a long moment.
“Do? Shit, I didn’t
do
nothing. Roan snatched me in a round-up. Same as pert
near everyone else around here.”

“Round-up?”

“Got to keep the jails full, wonder boy!
Full jails means full bellies!”

“Why do you call me that?”

“What…you mean wonder boy? Guess it’s on
account of you had a woman with you. But that’s all done with, ain’t it son?”

“Where did they take her, Finney?”

“
Away
,” the man hissed. “Don’t
reckon it much matters, wonder boy. You won’t be seeing her again. That’s the
bottom line.”

Ben slumped to the ground. His eyes
darted around the jail cell. Misery and despair. Dank walls covered with black mold
and crude pictographs—figures and marks etched in feces and blood and who could
guess what else these poor souls could use to document their detention in the
stockades of hell.

Ben closed his eyes and wept, and when
he was finished and he’d cried all the tears that were left inside of him, he
noticed that the whispering had begun again.

In that way, most of a month passed.

FORTY-ONE

Ben
scratched at the beard while he worked at the shard of meat. Like the rash on
his chest and the sores on his left ankle and calf, the beard itched almost
constantly.

He’d given in after a few weeks, but he
still had a hard time keeping the stuff down. It had made him sick the day
before and he’d hacked it up into the sewers, but he had to try.

What were his options? He was dying.

The strips of flesh got stuck between teeth
that hung loose in his gums and he gagged, but eventually he managed to choke
down breakfast. He slid his tray into the corridor, wary of what the young bull
with the nervous eyes might do if he didn’t place it precisely inside the designated
collection area.

He’d suffered through four more doses
during his detention, each more horrific than the last.

Life had become a series of terrible
tests—a chain of long, cold seconds that spun out into forever. No wonder these
poor men whispered all day and all night. He had also begun a series of
conversations—sometimes with Alice, sometimes with Arthur Lawton. He spoke with
his parents on occasion, people he’d only known through the musings they’d
recorded decades before on the dead technology that was the Internet.

Sometimes he talked to Mr. Brown. Other
times, he cursed Alex Calvin; he swore and ranted and raged against the man
that had brought humanity to the edge of extinction.

One cold morning, Coraline came to his
cell.

“Ben,” she said. Her voice was soft.

He peered at her through the shadows, not
really certain that she was real. The cellblock had grown deathly silent, the
others sensing her presence.

“Corr?” he croaked. “Is that you?”

She nodded. “Come with me, Ben. We need
to talk.”

He stood and crossed the cell on
unsteady legs. Jesus, he’d lost so much weight…

The boy with the nervous eyes opened his
cell and Ben flinched a little at the sight of his weapon. The guard stepped
aside and Ben moved out into the hallway, squinting in the intensity of the
fluorescent lights.

“Alice?” he said. “What happened to
Alice?”

Coraline just smiled. “This way,” she
said. She took his hand. Her own was soft—so incredibly soft, and he was
suddenly ashamed of himself. Ashamed of how he looked, of how his filthy hand
must feel in hers.

He couldn’t hold her gaze.

“Interrogation,” she said to the jailer,
and he escorted them through a maze of hallways and into a nondescript room
that was filled with blinding white light.

Alice was there. Her face was hidden
beneath a hood, but he knew it was her. Ringlets of red hair spilled from
beneath the shroud. He saw her emaciated frame hitch as she struggled for air.

“Alice!” he called. “Alice, I’m here!
It’s Ben! I’m here!”

A guard snatched the hood away and he
saw Alice’s terrified eyes and gaunt features. “Ben,” she whispered, then
turned away from him. “Oh God, Ben…”

She was so thin. Violent purple bruises
ringed her neck. She looked worse than the day he’d found her in the orchard.

But those things didn’t break his heart.
What did was the fact that his wife wouldn’t look at him. She would not meet
his eyes.

What had they done to her?

Roan and Marks entered the torture
chamber together. Another man, a portly, bearded fellow with round spectacles
and jowls, trailed behind them like a pet dog. At least somebody around there
was getting enough to eat.

“Restraints,” Roan said.

Coraline squeezed his hand. She let go,
but not before something passed between them. She looked at him, and in that
instant he saw
her
. In that moment it was
his
Coraline, and not the
hollow, vacant woman she’d been at dinner.

It was his Corr—his best friend and the
first love he’d ever known.

She sat next to Roan as Ben was shoved hard
into a metal chair. His ankles and wrists were secured with leather manacles.

Marks stood and began to flip through a
bound sheaf of papers. He paced back and forth in front of the prisoners.

“No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
No. No,” he said, using a pencil to tick the items off of a checklist. Ben looked
at his wife, but she just stared vacantly at the floor.

Marks sucked his teeth. He ruffled
through the pages. “Okay! Here’s one! We’ll call this one a maybe, Mr. Roan.”

He pushed the paper into Ben’s face.
“Can you read that for me, please?”

“Carrots?” Ben replied.

“Little louder?” Roan said. “We can’t
quite hear you!”

“Carrots,” Ben repeated.

“That’s it?” Marks said, turning to the
bearded man. “You’ve been at this now for almost six weeks and that’s
it
?
You’ve had
six weeks
and the only thing you’ve got to show for it is a
‘maybe’ for germinating carrots?”

“We…we…we…” the fat man stammered. He
took a deep breath, composing himself. “We’ve tried everything, Mr. Marks.
There’s a missing variable. The greenhouses will work just fine sir, but until
we f-f-fi…until we locate that variable, we won’t be successful.”

“And what variable is that, Mr. Trent?”
Roan said. He regarded the botanist like he was dog shit, scraped straight from
the soles of the Italian loafers his men had looted from the Barney’s on
Peachtree. “What’s the missing variable?”

“The soil, sir. It doesn’t matter if we
have the water and the light. The climate and the…the…the,” he sighed, “the
technology. Agriculture is, and always will be, a matter of receptive soil.”

“Did you hear that?” Roan boomed
theatrically. He crossed the room to stand before them. “Soil! We need it. You
have it. Let’s make a deal!

“I’m
so
glad we kept you alive,
by the way. I was almost certain that we wouldn’t need you, but it looks like you’re
still necessary after all. So here it is, kids. This is your only chance.
Here’s your
one shot
at freedom. Where did you grow these vegetables?
Tell us, Alice,” he reached out and stroked her cheek. She flinched at his
touch. “Please…tell us, where did you make your garden grow?”

Alice raised her eyes. Her lips pulled
back in a devilish grin. “Fuck you, Roan! Fuck you. We’ll
never
tell
you. And when this rotten little experiment of yours runs its course, you’ll be
dead—just like everybody else. When you’ve lost all of the people you claim to
govern and there’s nothing left but an empty city filled with ash and dust, you’ll
die like the rest of them, you stupid,
pathetic
little man.”

Roan’s cheeks flushed crimson. He
lurched forward and slapped her. Her head cracked to the side, but the blow
didn’t have the desired effect.

Blood seeped down from her nostril. She
licked most of it away, but some dripped onto her teeth, which she once again
bared in that savage grin. “It doesn’t matter, Roan. You can hit me all you
want, but it won’t make any difference.
You
can’t make things grow. We
can
.”

Roan sneered at her. Something had
changed in the man. Ben thought he looked—damn, the little fellow looked
nervous.

Nervous and frustrated and maybe even a
little scared.

Ben stared at Alice, then back at Roan,
who showed them his back as he returned to his seat, rubbing his hand where he
had hit her. “Take them back to their cells. Mr. Marks, I want you to schedule
this pathetic fuck for his first trip to the butcher. Tomorrow afternoon.

“Then, I want you to feed that mouthy
bitch her husband’s calf muscle. We’ll see if her information improves when
poor hubby’s hopping around like the rest of these fucking cripples.”

“No!” Alice shouted. “No! You touch him,
Roan, and I’ll do it! I swear that I will and you know that I can! I’ll
kill
myself
before your men so much as lay a hand on me, or on Ben or Lucy. You
want the food? We’ll give it to you, but you have to let us go! Set us free,
Roan. You need to do it right now!”

She kept screaming, even as Roan’s
guards were dragging her away.

“Alice!” Ben called. “Alice!”

Somehow, his voice penetrated the chaos.
Her ranting stopped instantly, and she finally saw him. “Ben! Oh Jesus Been, I
didn’t do it! Ben!”

Then she was gone. They pushed her
through one door, and then he was herded quickly through another—the boy with
the nervous eyes holding the wand to his back.

They marched him back to his cell and the
boy hit Ben with such a dose of electricity that he fell to the concrete like
he’d been shot out of a cannon, stiff as a board. His chin met stone and split
wide, and a pool of thin blood slowly spread around his head.

The guards drug him into the cell and
slammed the door shut, just as a cry rose from the far end of the cell block.

“WHOO!” the prisoners replied in unison,
slapping the concrete. “WHOO! WHOO! WHOO!”

Ben remained still and silent, oblivious
to the din erupting all around him—to the discord of a revolution stirring deep
in the bowels of hell.