The Reset (3 page)

“This jacket ain’t enough, Ben! It’s not
nearly enough!”

“Oh, it’s enough. It might not feel like
it come 3:00 a.m., Winston, but you’ll survive the night. Might be close, but I
believe I’ll still have you to deal with in the morning.”

Winston grew silent. He stared off into
space, apparently grasping the nature of the night ahead of him.

Ben collected the plate and the lantern.
He was almost to the door when he heard Winston’s wheezing laughter.

“What is it, old man?”

“’Might be close’ you said! Might be
close! Guess what, Ben?”

Ben turned. Winston was grinning there
in the gloom.

“The difference between drowning and
treading water is just an inch or two.
That’s
close. You remember that,
son, come 3:00 a.m.! A dad-gum inch or two!” He cackled until his laughter
dissolved into a coughing fit. Ben watched him a moment longer. He closed the
door and headed into the house to prepare for surgery
.

TWO

He
couldn’t keep the stew down. Three times he had tried, and three times his stomach
had rejected it, in addition to the apples he’d eaten earlier. His body had adapted—the
years of protein powder, tepid water and 800-calorie days had seen to that—and
it would take time to adjust.

He put a pot of water on the wood stove
to warm while he gathered the supplies he would need: iodine, as well as a
needle and thread. There was the aspirin and maybe a pint of whiskey left, most
of which he poured into a tin cup.

He worked at the sink, ruefully eyeing
the stew that taunted him while the wind gusted outside.

When he had a rolling boil, he dropped
the needle and a steak knife into the pot. The blade was dull, but it would
have to do.

While he sterilized the implements, he
dipped off a cup of water and added half of the iodine. He was nervous about
using so much, but he wouldn’t get a chance to use the rest of it if he acquired
an infection.

After a few minutes, Ben used tongs to
retrieve his tools.

He removed the bandage and gripped the
knife as firmly as he could. Wind howled in the darkness outside the kitchen
window, and he studied the changes in his gaunt reflection—he cataloged his own
agony—as he touched the steaming blade to the edge of the wound, and then down,
deep down inside, searching for the slug and searing his flesh along the way.

Ben screamed—a shrill, pathetic shriek
that filled the room and died instantly at the window pane, the wind outside billowing
ash against the glass and swallowing the frantic cries of a terrified old man
in a barn and an injured young man in a kitchen, a world of difference between
them.

THREE

Ben
lay still in the dark, unable to sleep. The pain in his arm had dulled some—the
aspirin and whiskey and the removal of the slug had seen to that. But his
conscience chipped away at him. With every gust of wind, his thoughts floated
out to the barn.

That man tried to kill you
, he chided
himself.
You’re damned lucky to be alive, and you know it. You don’t owe the
bastard any favors!

It didn’t matter. Sleep wouldn’t come
until he checked on him.

“All
right
,” he finally hissed.
“Shit!”

He left the warmth of Winston’s bed,
found an ill-fitting jacket and went to the linen closet. He grabbed a
comforter and went downstairs, feeling his way through darkened corridors.

He looked outside and found that the
clouds had parted. The silver moon offered just enough light to catch the dull
shine of the slug on the windowsill. It was a misshapen mound of metal, and
he’d been fortunate the bone hadn’t shattered on impact.

He lit the lantern and went outside.

“Got a blanket for you, old man,” he
called into the gloom of the barn. It was cold and silent and the space felt
empty and dead. He shined the lantern on the stall door and saw that Winston
had vanished, the chains coiled like a timber rattler at the base of the gate.

“Shit!” he wheeled, thrusting the light
into the center of the barn. The lantern wasn’t much, but it was enough to see
what had happened.

Bert Winston dangled from a rope he’d looped
over the rafters, up near the loft that had caused the whole damned incident. His
head slumped forward on his chest, his eyes, mercifully, shut.

Ben crumpled to the barnyard floor. A
sudden rack of sobs gripped him, and he was overwhelmed by the strange sense of
loss he felt for the old man.

But he shot you!
the voices—those
constant companions—chided him.
Just be thankful you didn’t have to kill him
yourself. He did you a favor, Ben! A favor…

They were little comfort.

The truth was that the world had passed
into shadow—into a state of decay so total that even sunlight rarely penetrated
the gloomy miasma of ash. But
this
place and this…this dead old man—they
were, in their way, tiny rays of sunshine in their own right.

They were survivors
.

Over the last three years, Ben had
encountered but a handful of other wanderers. And those, almost to the very
last, had been dangerous, desperate people.

They had been
hungry
people, and
he had taken great care in his dealings with them.

Ben knew there were places where people
were gathering, makeshift towns where survival was predicated on violence and
betrayal.

He avoided them, and the people that
called them home.

But Winston had been different. The old
man had coaxed fruit from the trees. Hell, he’d managed to keep the trees
alive
in the first place. He’d made food from the earth. He’d taken pride in his
home, and he had struggled to build a life for himself, when everything and
everyone else seemed content to simply allow the old ways to wither and die.

Ben swiped away the tears, keenly aware
of what he still had to do. He went to the work bench and searched through the drawers
until he found a stubby knife with a curved blade. He climbed the ladder and
sawed through the rope.

Winston’s body crashed to the floor in a
heap.

Ben turned his attention to the loft. Winston
had been curing meat. An inexplicable object—a small, top-loading freezer—
hummed
in the corner. The old man was running juice to the place after all! There was
even a dim fluorescent light mounted in the corner.

Ben approached the nearest rack, where
he found rows of paper-thin strips of drying meat.

Jerky.

He resisted the urge to sample it; instead,
he went to the freezer.

When he opened it, ice crystals cascaded
down onto a pile of parcels wrapped in faded newspaper. Ben took the first and
cut away the twine.

It was a roast. A simple bottom
roast—not unlike the dinners he’d enjoyed when he was living with the Beamers back
in Jacksonville.

There were other packages—scores of
them—and he rummaged through the freezer until he found what he was looking for.
Hoping, praying even, that it might be poultry (maybe even a chicken!), he
unwrapped it.

As he stripped the frozen newsprint (
Interim
CEO of Disney Vows Retaliation
) from the parcel, dread coursed through his
veins.

Of course it wasn’t a chicken. Things
could never be that simple, not in a world without livestock.

He knew what it was. And yet, he still had
to check. He still had to be sure.

And when he did, sadness crashed over
him like a wave.

The woman’s eyes were open and clouded
by freezer burn—her lips slightly parted. Patches of ice crystals coated her
cheeks.

His first instinct was to drop it, to run
back inside the house and gather his things and go as far from the farm as his
tired legs would take him, but he fought the urge. She had been someone’s
daughter. Perhaps she had been someone’s mother.

Instead of fleeing, he said a few words
for the woman. When he was finished, he returned to the freezer: there were three
more round packages inside.

Ben unplugged the thing. It would be
plenty cold enough and, if it wasn’t, what difference did it make? He could not
do what Winston had done, so it made no difference.

He put everything back inside, collected
the lantern and carefully made his way down the ladder, where he walked past
Winston without pause. When he made it back to the house, he tossed the stew into
the bushes and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep in his new bed.

FOUR

Dawn
broke cold and gray. Ben checked his shoulder; the stitches had survived the
night. He irrigated the wound with iodine and applied a fresh bandage before
shrugging into a flannel shirt and heading for the kitchen.

He stoked the coals in the cast-iron
stove and put a pot of water on to warm before heading out to collect an armful
of apples.

It would be a long day and he had to rebuild
his strength. He quartered the fruit and slipped the slices into the water. In
the full light of day, he could evaluate things.

In the pantry, he found a plastic
container filled with dried leaves. He unscrewed the lid and was overwhelmed by
the pungent aroma of tea; there were plenty of the black leaves in the pantry and
he took two and placed them in the bottom of a chipped coffee cup with the
words
Georgia Farmers Local 309
printed in black script on the front.
When the water steamed, he brewed a cup of tea and took it out onto the back
steps.

He sipped tea and watched the sky turn
colors. Under different circumstances, he realized, he might have felt something
like contentment.

Instead, he was anxious. He had a hole
in his shoulder that would probably become infected. There was a dead body in
the barn, and a few others in the loft. There was a house to look after and the
pervasive uncertainty of what horrible things might venture down the very road that
had delivered him to the old farmhouse.

He ran through the previous evening’s
events in his mind. What was it the old man had said?

Been a long time since that road
produced any travellers…

He thought hard about it while he
finished his drink. “Well,” he finally muttered, ditching the sodden leaves in
the bushes, “it can’t be helped. If someone comes, then someone comes.”

He went inside and ate the softened
apples, chewing slowly while his stomach adjusted to the sensation of solids.
He thought he could actually
feel
it expanding, the long-forgotten fullness
a shock to his beleaguered system. He ate the apples and had a cup of steaming
water, and the effects were almost instantaneous. He rushed down the hallway
and just made it to the toilet before violently evacuating his bowels. He was
racked with cramps and the pain was excruciating, but the spell lifted about as
rapidly as it had come and he was able to stand and wipe the sweat from his
brow. Carefully, he worked the handle on the toilet, certain that nothing would
happen. The old man must have kept an outdoor latrine, and he’d just consigned
himself to a pretty horrible morning chore.

But the damned thing worked. Like the
freezer in the barn and the faucet in the kitchen, the toilet was operational. Ben
whistled in appreciation and made for the pantry.

Inventory. Somebody had put by scores of
canned peaches and cherries and apple preserves; there were plastic canisters filled
with walnuts and pecans and dried berries and a few more bricks of tea. There
were herbs—mint and oregano and rosemary—and there was some mealy flour that
the old man had somehow milled. There were a few cans of long-expired processed
foods, including a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. There was a plastic
container filled with strips of dried flesh, which he placed outside on the back
step.

When he had a feel for the pantry, he
moved into the parlor. The mantle was covered with porcelain figures—statues of
little kids with wide eyes in various outfits and poses. He picked up a little porcelain
boy. The words
My Little Town
were stamped on the bottom.
Narragansett,
Rhode Island
. There was a boy dressed as a postman, a little girl dressed
as a nurse, and an infant being rocked in a cradle by a large dog. A couple of
die-cast racecar models were parked in the corner. That antique clock stood
watch in the center.

He leafed through the magazines:
Field
and Stream
and
Southern Living
and one called
Georgia!
Somebody sure had a high opinion of the Peach State.

He sat and studied the room. Something was
off. After a moment, he figured it out.

The walls were speckled with holes.
Lots
of holes—entire constellations of them. Otherwise, they were utterly bare.
Someone had put everything away. In the corner stood an old piano—the yellow
keys chipped and worn. He lifted the lid on the bench and found dozens of
framed photographs inside.

His heart lurched at the sight of them.
The picture on top featured a youngish couple and two children, a little girl
and her slightly older brother. They stood before a Christmas tree, blissful
smiles for the camera. Ben touched the picture, placed his fingers on the cheek
of the woman. It was
her
. He turned the frame over and undid the clasps
on the back. Someone had written
Christmas Eve, 2046
, on the back.

“Damn,” he muttered. He carefully
returned it to the bench. They had been making a go of it as a family.
Surviving.
Thriving
.

Bert Winston hadn’t lived here since he
was a boy. He, or
somebody
, had done away with the family at least a
couple of years before.

What was it the old man had said?
Ayuh,
been my place since I was a boy…

Ben had heard that phrase before, but
where? The fellow outside of Pensacola. He’d been from Boston originally, and
he’d peppered their conversations with the Yankee affectation.

Jesus, what had he done to them?

Ben cycled through the photographs, a
catalogue of happier times and a testament to the power of persistence. Here,
tucked away in the isolation of the Georgia hills, life had continued. Ben felt
intense sorrow for them, for the horrible fate that had likely befallen them in
their own home, but he also felt hope for the future, that there might be others
out there that had pushed ahead with life in the years after the Reset.

“
Seventeen
,” he whispered,
touching his hand to the ridge of scars beneath his flannel shirt. “Seventeen
of them, all gone.”

He scoured the house, finding a large
cachet of photographs in a bedroom closet. Knowing that the day’s worst chores were
still ahead of him and that he would need to get started if he meant to finish
before nightfall, Ben just couldn’t focus on the barn until he had found a
hammer and some nails and spent a big chunk of the morning moving from room to
room, hanging photographs in the empty spaces that had once been filled with
life.