The Reset (4 page)

FIVE

It
was slow going with the use of just one arm. He knew it would be, and he paused
periodically to snack on an apple or speak to the ponies that grazed lazily in
the orchard. They were among the handful of animals he had encountered after
emerging from the shelter. A handful of live animals—mostly scraggly birds—in
all those years of wandering.

It was the Winstons in the photograph,
and Bert Winston
was
the name of the young boy. Ben found a couple of scrapbooks
in the antique hutch in the parlor, complete with the children’s baby
footprints and little snippets of their hair. Emma and Alan Winston had, in the
face of radiation-laden windstorms, life-altering fallout, consumptive
wildfires, and brutal climate conditions, given birth to two apparently healthy
children. It was a staggering notion, and it gave Ben hope that Coraline might
yet be alive. He had ventured into Atlanta twice before in search of her, the
second time barely escaping that fouled metropolis with his life.

Atlanta was diseased—a shrine to decay
and ruin, populated by profiteers and cutthroats. If Coraline had survived, he
hadn’t found any evidence of it. No one he had spoken to had seen the beautiful
girl with the scarred chest; no one recognized her face from the lone
photograph that Ben kept in the front pocket of his dusty trousers.

But the fact remained that, throughout all
the long years he had spent in the sterile confines of the bomb shelter, reading
books and writing in his journal and subsisting on expired protein powder, stale
vitamins and water that tasted of rust, the Winstons had brought
two
healthy children into the world.

They had not given up hope, and neither
would he.

Before he’d begun the digging, Ben had gone
out for a hike. About a mile from the back door, he’d discovered a winding
creek filled with brackish water. Whether farming was Alan Winston’s vocation
or not, Ben was impressed by the man’s engineering skills. A series of eight handcrafted
water wheels straddled the creek. They spun quietly, generating enough juice to
keep the water pumps going. There was a little shed, where thirty-four remarkably
clean automobile batteries were strung together with heavily taped conduits.

Ben studied the fields as he walked, his
arm in a sling. They were barren, choked by the ash that had covered the world.
He had hoped he might discover some winter crops—maybe a stubble of wheat or a
few rows of bristled Vidalias—but there was nothing.

He walked until he tired and his feet
ached before returning for a late lunch of apples, berries, nuts, and tea. The
food stayed down and he was amazed by its effect on him. The protein in the
nuts and the sugar in the berries coursed through him, and he decided to get to
it before the earth froze and he wouldn’t be able to dig. Winter would come
barreling down from the north any day.

He chopped at the ground with a trowel
and a pick-axe. The old man’s body he left untouched in the barn. Ben wasn’t
sure yet whether he wanted to spend the energy needed to bury him, but he
wanted to do right by the Winstons. He felt obligated to put them at rest.

There had been no sun to move across the
sky—only dull clouds the Earth wore like a shroud. The light gradually dimmed
and Ben resigned himself to the final leg of his task. He rigged a pulley
system from the same beam the old man had dangled from the night before, and he
began the process of lowering the contents of the freezer to the floor of the
barn. When he was finished, he unplugged the freezer and the light and
collapsed the drying racks, which he stacked in the corner. When the loft had
been purged of any evidence of its terrible purpose, he climbed down, resolving
not to return.

The grave satisfied him, and he carefully
placed the Winstons’ remains in the earth. It felt like the right thing to keep
them together—to bury them as a family. When he patted the final shovelful of
soil in place and it was full twilight, he stood back from the marker he had
fashioned, a cross made from two old fence planks, and folded his hands.

“Lord, please give these people your
love and protection in the kingdom of heaven. They worked hard in the face of everything
that happened down here, and they surely didn’t deserve to die. Thank you, Mr.
and Mrs. Winston, for...well, for
trying
, I suppose. It means something.
It truly does. In God’s name I pray, amen.”

He pulled the silver necklace he had found
from his pocket. It was a locket, with pictures of the children. He hung the
necklace from the grave marker and went inside to wash up.

When he had rinsed the clay from his
hands and forearms, he lit a candle in the kitchen. He sat at the table and ate
a small meal and read from a tattered copy of a book called
Treasure Island
that
he’d found in the boy’s bedroom. He read from the book for an hour or more
before the weight of the day’s toil and the contentment of a full stomach conspired
to push him down into sleep. He washed up and slipped into bed and the embrace
of an untroubled slumber that had been years in the making.

SIX

Each
day there were things to do; each day, the wound in his arm improved just a
little. The stitches were gone within a week. His knitting skin itched continuously,
and it took everything he had to keep from scratching at it.

Ben grew accustomed to the Winstons’
home, ever mindful of the fact that it wasn’t his place. Not yet, anyway. He
kept it tidy and began a regimen of chores that consumed his days.

He swept the porch and scrubbed the ash
from the windows, only to sit inside and watch them grow opaque in the
afternoon windstorms. He cleaned the breakfast dishes and the lunch dishes and
he swept the floors. He groomed the ponies—he’d named them Bill and Josie—and
harvested the rest of the apples. Some he canned and some he dried.

He explored the woods, finding nuts and
roots and other edible things he identified with a book he had found in the
parlor.

He kept the barn neat.

The man that had shot him was long gone.
Ben had bundled his body into a wheelbarrow and dumped it in a thicket of
spindly pine trees, a few hundred yards beyond the barn, at the edge of a
sparse forest.

One morning, he’d been surprised to see
an enormous raptor tracing lazy figure eights against the gray sky high above
that copse of trees. He hadn’t bothered to cover the old man, but he was
surprised by the bird’s presence nonetheless, for winter had come to Georgia
and he thought that the animal would have already pushed further south.

The days were cold and the nights were
frozen; it snowed often, but mostly the days were filled with falling ash—the hide
of the world that had been scorched by the Reset and the conflicts that had
followed. It pitched up from the fields in nasty cyclones before billowing
across the landscape and blotting out the sun.

The seasons had vanished. If there was
still a summer, it was noticeable only by a slightly more moderate, slightly
more humid stretch of six or eight weeks. Mostly it was fall and winter in the
world, and now the place that had once been America was likely frozen all the
way down to the craters where Disney World used to be.

During the day, Ben worked; at night, he
dreamed—often of Jacksonville, where he’d waited out the unraveling in the old
bomb shelter. In the quiet moments of his day, while mending fences or patching
holes in the walls of the barn or tending to the malnourished ponies, he
wondered if there were others like him. There had been so many shelters back
then—most of the better office complexes had included them as a practical
matter of design.

That was life in an era of grave skepticism.

When Ben reflected on his time in
Jacksonville, he thought about the Beamers; David and Jamie Beamer had almost surely
perished in the aftermath of what had happened at the Gator Bowl. Ben had picked
through the city for evidence of their survival, but it was little more than a
cursory effort.

He had been alone from the start.

When it happened, he had watched as Jamie,
she of the dazzling smile and audacious sunhats, fell beneath the crush of stampeding
spectators. The first detonation, in a public square just outside Seattle’s
Space Needle, had been broadcast on the stadium jumbotrons. One minute there
were throngs of spectators watching the Super Bowl, and the next they were witnessing
the fall of Seattle. Whole sections of the city were vaporized in a flash of
blinding light. The footage had been shaky—captured from long range with the
camera in someone’s cellular phone. It revealed a column of bright orange
death, a bridge between heaven and Earth. The Space Needle disappeared, neatly
excised from Seattle’s iconic skyline; in the foreground, thousands of revelers
scurried like rats. The column stretched ever higher, acquiring mass, until it filled
the screen and the feed terminated.

A hush fell over the stadium as 100,000
pair of eyes narrowed in confusion and fear. A low wailing started on the west
side of the stadium, and people began to scurry for the aisles. An instant
later there was Preston Phillips, the lead anchor for the American Corporate
Standard Network, his jowly face filling the screens as he reported on the
attacks, the garbled feed from New York fading in and out.

“
…aside from that footage of Seattle,
we have reports of explosions…Denver, Pittsburg and Houston…widespread,
coordinated terror attacks. The President and the Chairman of The Human Accord have
issued a joint statement of…and citizens are urged to take refuge in their
homes and shelters…”

Ben remembered the expression that had
briefly twisted the anchor’s stern features—one of stark terror and sudden,
desperate sorrow—before they lost the feed from New York. The signal defaulted
back to Miami, where the Super Bowl was actually being contested on the field.
John Jennings and Taylor Cowherd had fled the booth. Ricky Madden, the young
man whose grandfather had been an icon in the sport so many decades before, was
left to hold down the broadcaster’s booth by himself. His fleshy cheeks were
bright red and the look of terror in his eyes was palpable

“…and it appears that America is now
under
attack
! I repeat, coordinated terrorist attacks have taken place in…in
Denver and New York and Seattle! Holy shit, this is real, folks! As you can see
below, it’s pandemonium here in Humatrix Stadium. A huge crowd—more than 100,000—is
attempting to flee the stadium, and we’ve now received reports that Human Accord
security officials are conducting searches of all… Oh, dear God! Oh my—!”

The feed terminated and the jumbotrons
went silent. Ben turned to the Beamers, scared beyond anything he’d ever known,
and in that instant the world outside the stadium was ripped in two.

As he fell into that horrible memory, Ben’s
fingers often absently found the ridge of scarring down the center of his chest.
He traced the lumps of tissue there as he remembered Jamie Beamer, the woman who
had once hugged him close, sincerely hopeful that their young ward could make
the world a better place.

When the madness blossomed all around
them, she had fallen. Her husband David, the portly, brilliant Jimmy Buffet enthusiast
who toiled in the secondary economy so he could take weekend boating trips along
the Intracoastal, had stopped to help his wife regain her footing. Even as the
torrent of humanity pushed Ben forward—even as he clutched Lina’s tiny hand in
his own, helping her navigate the chaos—he watched for a split second as David
stooped to help his wife.

It was no use. The tide crushed them
under and there they vanished. They were on the concourse one second and then they
were gone, and Ben had held Lina’s hand and screamed for Orin, churning his
legs and pushing against the panicked masses as they streamed for the exits.

After the Miami detonation, night had
become day throughout the state of Florida. There was a bellowing, rushing
suction as the atmosphere was drawn out of Jacksonville’s stadium while a
shimmering gyre of orange death humped skyward along the southern horizon, like
the first waking throes of some long-slumbering fire god. The chaos ceased for
an instant while terrified football fans studied the sky, the air now whistling
past them as that mountain of poison became Everest, erasing the stars and
feeding itself on oxygen.

400 miles away, and yet it colonized the
heavens.

There was a furious concussion; it buffeted
the stadium, knocking every person in attendance to the ground. The jumbotrons
and scoreboards creaked, cracked, splintered and fell, crushing spectators in pools
of sparking electricity. There was a deafening roar—a horrible harmony of the
Miami blast and the raw terror of the thousands in the Gator Bowl.

The world was reeling, and that was its
cry.

Ben recalled how the initial impact of
that tainted air had flung him to the ground, and then he was up again and running,
little Lina tucked under his arm. It wasn’t until he had managed to descend the
stairs and was back in the parking lot on State Street that he’d realized Orin—bleeding
from an ugly gash on his forehead but otherwise whole—had also made it out.

“What do we do?” Ben brayed, hysterical.
Lina was limp in his arms, her face buried in his armpit as the sky roiled and
pitched above them, the cloud of fallout spreading.

“The van!” Orin shouted. “We’ve got to
get to the van! There’s a key in the dash and we’ll—we’ll go to the shelter!
Hand her over, Ben.”

“I got her! It’s okay, Orin, let’s just
go!”

“No way! She’s my sister—my responsibility!
Come on, Lina honey!”

She perked up at the sound of her
brother’s voice and reached desperately for him, and then they were sprinting again
and it wasn’t until they’d found the van and Orin was behind the wheel and practically
standing on the accelerator that Ben had been able to so much as snatch a
breath.

“Goddammit!” Orin cursed, slamming his
fist against the steering wheel for emphasis. He threw the van into reverse,
plowing into an SUV. He spun the wheel and put the van through its paces. With
a squealing fishtail they were free and careening through columns of panicked
pedestrians. Ben felt the van buckle, rise slightly, and settle as they hit
something.

“Jesus—what was that?” Ben said.

“Who the fuck cares? Lina, honey, put on
your seatbelt,” there was another rugged bump and that sensation of something large
passing beneath the van’s tires “—and buckle it tight! We gotta get home! We
have to get--”

“What was that? What in the hell
happened
back there?” Ben shrieked, bouncing around in his seat as Orin piloted the van
through the chaos. It took a moment, but he was finally able to latch his
seatbelt.

“
That
,” Orin said as he smashed
through some shrubs, popped over a curb and veered straight through a grassy
stretch of park, “was the end of the fucking world. Someone just started a
revolution.”

Ben stared at Orin. The older boy’s face
was an angry mask; tears leaked from the corner of his right eye. Blood oozed
down his temple. Ben turned to Lina; the little girl just stared straight ahead,
sucking her thumb, her eyes vacant husks.

Orin punched the accelerator and they tore
through the park, tires shredding sod, before hopping another curb and squealing
onto the entrance ramp to the Mathews Bridge. A smattering of other vehicles had
also escaped the sports complex; they were desperately attempting to make it
onto the bridge, but most of the traffic came in the form of pedestrians. Orin
weaved across two lanes before passing the last of the runners; he put the
pedal down as far as it would go and the needle on the speedometer crept upward:
55—60—65.

Ben looked out the back window in time
to see a station wagon plummeting over the edge. A heavy-duty truck had nosed
it cleanly off the bridge and through the guardrail, and it was at least 150
feet to the water.

The truck was gaining on them.

They screamed across the St. Johns
River, barreling through sparse traffic on the Arlington Expressway. A column
of police cars—lights blazing—clogged the opposite lanes of traffic, heading
for the sports complex.

“It’s all connected, right?” Ben asked.
“First Seattle, now Florida?”

“Of course they’re connected. Whoever
did this—it was all mapped out. You heard Phillips—he said there were
explosions in Denver and Pittsburg too. This is huge, Ben. It’s the end of it
all
.
We’ll meet up with Mom and Dad back at the house. They’ll have to…” he bit his
lip and gathered himself, “…they’ll have to help us move our things into the
shelter. Jesus, we should have been prepared for this! When we get back, I need
you to gather supplies, Ben. Water—as much as you can possibly cram into the
van. Lina? Lina, honey?”

The little girl didn’t so much as blink.

“Lina, I need you to snap out of it!” It
was dangerous, but he turned, leaned across the center console and slapped her
hard on the cheek with his left hand. “Lina!” he shouted, looking back just as
the left front fender coaxed a shower of sparks from the guardrail.

Her thumb fell out of her mouth and she
stared at her brother in stunned silence before disintegrating into a wailing
mess. “Lina! Sister, honey, listen to me…we need your help!” Orin said,
watching her in the rearview. “We’re taking you to the clubhouse, sweetie! All
this time you’ve wanted to come and see it—we’re finally taking you with us!”

The shock of the blow wore off and her
cries became sniffles. “I can really come to the clubhouse?”

“Of course you can,” Ben said, “but when
we get home, we need you to help us gather supplies.”

“What kinds of supplies? Can I bring Little
Beth?” she said, referring to the tattered ragdoll that had been her constant
companion since she’d been able to hold herself up in her crib.

“Of course you can,” Orin said. “You’ll
need to pack some clothes in a bag, Lina. Take three of everything. Socks,
shirts, pants—load it all up. Grab Little Beth and your clothes and put them in
your backpack, and then we’ll need you to help us gather food. Can you do that,
honey?”

Orin leaned hard against the steering wheel,
narrowly avoiding a Subaru that had flipped over on the expressway. A body, bloodied
and still, was smashed up against the concrete barrier.