The Reset (6 page)

But there was only that single,
maddening message (
NO SERVICE!
). It was the only communication the
damned thing had offered in the entirety of those long years spent alone, toiling
to survive underground.

Those were the memories that haunted Ben
Stone during his days in the Winstons’ home. They formed the basis for all that
he understood had happened on that day (although he had tried to piece it
together, very little information on the Reset remained), and they were never
far from his thoughts.

And though they were horrible, angry
things, those recollections, he was sometimes glad to have them in the light of
day. He was glad to have them then, for when he was exhausted and sleep
provided its escape from what the world had become, it was a blessing to know
that most nights he closed his eyes and dreamt of nothing at all.

SEVEN

It
snowed on the day he found the woman in the mask. Had he put off his chores
another hour, he might not have found her body until spring.

She’d collapsed on the far edge of the
orchard; the thin layer of snow coating her rags indicated that she hadn’t been
there long.

She wore a grime-streaked gas mask, its filters
like mutilated tusks. The mask obscured her features, but he could tell that she
was slight and had long, red hair.

Ben stopped cold with indecision at the
sight of her there. After an anxious minute, he hurried back up to the house.

He’d intended to spend much of the morning
shattering the ice that now formed nightly on the creek, and he propped the heavy
garden rake he used for that purpose against the house while he ran inside for
the handgun. He paused at the kitchen window to scan the woods along the
horizon, beyond the barn, where he had dumped the old man’s body.

He hunted those woods almost daily,
taking a few emaciated rabbits and squirrels for his efforts, but he had encountered
nobody else during his time in the Winstons’ home. Even the old man’s body had vanished,
hauled off by something big or scattered to the far reaches of the forest by scavengers.

He stayed at the window for a long time,
scanning the tree line for signs of an ambush.

“Let ‘em come if they want to come,” he finally
sighed. “It can’t be helped if they do.”

He retrieved the rake and hurried back
to the orchard. The ponies were in the barn and the trees had been barren for
weeks. It was a stark landscape—hibernating apple trees, a sickly, distant forest,
and a world utterly shrouded in cold gray clouds.

He took his care in approaching the body
before gently nudging a dilapidated boot.

Nothing.

“Hey!” he called. The snow and the cold
knocked his voice down and he suddenly felt very small—very isolated. “Hey
there! Can you hear me?”

He tossed the rake aside. With the
barrel of the gun held steady on her forehead, he knelt. Long strands of that
filthy red hair snaked out from beneath a threadbare stocking cap. “Hello,” Ben
tried again, this time softly. He touched her shoulder. “Hey there—can you hear
me?”

Condensation fogged the mask. It had
been years since he’d seen one. Life was hard enough, he had finally surmised
when he’d given his own up years before, without the constant adjustments. And
besides, if the air was truly so toxic, what would a cheap plastic mask with long-expired
filters have to say about the final results?

He put the gun in the front pocket of
his coat and carefully lifted her head from the snow to loosen the straps. He
removed the mask and found a woman of probably just about his own age. She was
emaciated, the skin stretched tight across her cheeks. Her lips were cracked
and there was a nasty blister at the corner of her mouth. He knelt and felt the
faintest of exhalations.

He removed her gloves. They were
shredded, torn down the seams and just about useless. The tips of her fingers
were a pale shade of blue; they would turn black soon if she didn’t find warmth.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, that’s bad. Into
the house with you.”

He gathered her up into his arms and stood,
stunned by how light she was. She was barely there at all—eighty, maybe eighty-five
pounds at the most?

He stumbled through the snow and the
folly of his plight crashed down on him. Despite it all, he laughed.

The woman was light, and yet it was hard
going just to pack her back up to the house; it had been years since he’d carried
that much weight in his arms. As if to accentuate the futility of the human
drama unfolding quietly in the orchard, the clouds spread wide and the wind picked
up, buffeting the Georgia hills with sheets of snow that added to the gentle swells.

It took a quarter of an hour, but Ben was
finally able to maneuver her inside. He gently situated her on the couch and put
two large pots of water on the stove; he built the fire up before heading out
to the utility room.

It had to be done, and yet he was
hesitant. If he wanted to give her a proper bath—if he wanted to stave off a death
that might be just a few hours away—he would have to use the water heater.
Powering up the house likely meant an unforgivable strain on the power supply.
He hadn’t tinkered with it all winter, content to simply let the batteries
charge while wandering its rooms dressed in winter clothes, using candles and
lanterns on the nights he stayed up late to read.

But a human life was at stake. He
flipped the switch with a sigh and a delicious thrill shuddered through him
when the distinctive hum of electricity running to various appliances kicked
in. There would be warm water within an hour.

Still, he had to be careful; he went
from room to room, unplugging the few appliances the old man had enjoyed in his
infrequent dalliances with the old ways.

He returned to find that the woman on
the couch had stirred. Her left arm and the hand with the blackened fingers now
rested at the margin of her stringy hair. It was an encouraging sign. He knelt
again near her cracked lips, gauging her wind. Her respiration was shallow, but
steady.

Suddenly, and with a clacking, rattling
wheeze, the HVAC unit kicked in. A cloud of grit billowed out of the metal grate
in the corner of the room, creating a gray corona on the hardwoods. Ben went to
the grate and extended his hand. Cool air became tepid. After a few minutes, it
was warm. A harsh aroma—scorched dust—permeated the house. It wasn’t pleasant,
but there was comfort in it all the same.

They would have heat, if only for the
night.

He studied her face. Aside from the
blister, it was remarkably free of blemishes. In the years since he’d returned
topside, Ben had found that most of the survivors had suffered serious scarring
in the aftermath of the Reset. Many had been deformed. There had been a girl
outside the ruins of Baton Rouge that wore a scarf. When she removed it to eat,
he discovered that, where her nose should have been, there was only a scabbed
indentation. The flesh around her mouth was sloughing away as well. The ash
storms, so frequent in everyday life, had carried fallout; they’d ushered
radiation on their poisonous gusts.

And it was likely that they still bore such
diluted toxins, though Ben was long beyond caring. He took shelter when the
devilish cyclones blocked the dim sunlight, but he no longer feared them.

If they killed him, then he would be
dead and there would be no more wandering.

But this woman had somehow avoided the
scarring. Other than the blister, there were no sores, no suppurating wounds.
She wore an even coat of grime at the margins of the mask, but she had
weathered the storm pretty well, all things considered.

He removed her coat and began to unravel
the layers of shabby garments and tightly cinched pants. When she wore only
socks and an ill-fitting set of men’s long underwear, he covered her with a
clean blanket and went to check on the water in the kitchen.

It was tepid, and he poured a measure
into each of two bowls and returned to the woman’s side. He submerged the
damaged fingertips of the woman’s left hand in one bowl, then did the same for
her right hand.

Orin had been something of a Renaissance
man, and the smartest kid Ben had ever met. Even though he had been destined
for a job in the secondary economy (probably in the same vocation as his
father), his voracious appetite for knowledge, coupled with his arcane fancy
for what he called “dead-tree media,” had led to the creation of a sizable
library in the
Sea Best
processing plant’s bomb shelter.

And that was how Ben had passed his time
underground. He’d read most of the texts two and three times over. From Greek
philosophy and medicine to mechanical engineering and classic literature, Ben
had acquired an education in the world of information that had existed before The
Human Accord’s policies had fractured the global community. The texts had been
created at a time when education was accessible to
all
Americans, not
just the wealthiest fraction.

From Aristotle’s
Poetics
to
Spock’s
Baby and Childcare
; from Rombauer’s
Joy of Cooking
to the
DSM IV
, he had devoured the rows of books that Ben had culled from flea
markets and lovingly codified beneath subject headings of his own creation.

The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and
Therapy
had been one of Ben’s favorites. Had he not been tabbed for work in
environmental affairs for The St. Joe Company, he might have pursued a degree
in medicine at one of the universities. It was the mystery of it all—of how the
human body worked and behaved—that spurred his frequent forays into the book
that Orin had dubbed the Bible of modern medicine.

Ben had recognized the precursors of
frostbite immediately. The overnight temperatures had been dipping below freezing
for weeks, and he knew what prolonged exposure to the cold meant for even those
who were careful. He had read about circulation and tissue restoration, and he
was careful not to rush things.

She didn’t stir an inch when he put her
hands in the water.

He stood and watched her sleeping for a
long moment. She was pretty, despite the staggering gauntness of her features.

He went to the kitchen, where he bundled
himself against the cold. She needed her rest, and the chores had to be
finished.

Ben collected the rake and made for the
creek, a strange elation coursing through him.

There was a woman on the couch. Another
person
.

As he crunched through the snow, warmth flooded
into his belly.

Despite the cold and the blinding monotony
of the landscape and his trepidation about letting his guard down, he smiled.

It was a rare thing and it felt very
good.

EIGHT

When
the chores were finished and he’d returned to the living room, he saw that the
woman had pissed herself. He silently chastised himself for not thinking of it
earlier.
The Merck Manual
had discussed the connections between the body
and its sensory and neurological systems at great lengths.

There wasn’t much (she probably had very
little to give, truth be told) to clean up, but the urine had seeped through her
long johns and onto the blanket. The smell was intense—an acrid, tart aroma. This
woman was literally consuming herself. Her body had been running on empty for
so long that it was burning up the very last of her muscle. The spent proteins
and sugars her system had mined from her emaciated body excreted a foul odor,
and he wondered if he should try to give her some broth before doing anything
else.

He decided it was better to stabilize
her temperature.

He put the blanket aside. Kneeling, he gently
massaged the fingers on her right hand, pushing blood down and back into her
fingertips. Save for a tiny sigh, she did not stir.

He spent twenty minutes on each of her
hands before heading to the bathroom to draw a bath.

A gusher of rust-tinged water gurgled
into the dusty tub, followed by a stream of clean, steaming hot water.

He grinned.

How long had it been since the tub had
been used? He let his hands linger in the flow, the warm water yet another
alien thrill.

“Stopper! Jeez, Ben!” he scolded himself
after he had allowed the water to flow unchecked for a minute or so.

He adjusted the temperature and plugged
the drain before returning to the living room, where he began to peal the woman
from her long underwear.

It was just one more bizarre hurdle to
clear—one of many that would follow in the days to come, assuming she survived
the night. How long since he’d seen a woman in the nude? It had been before the
Reset—back when he and Coraline were young and life at the ranch had been
simple and the future was filled with optimism.

He undid the buttons at the woman’s chest
and carefully slid the long johns first down one shoulder, and then the other.
He swallowed thickly as he brought the garment down past her breasts. They were
small and firm atop the stark ridges of her ribcage, the nipples a bright, fleshy
pink.

As he pulled the long johns down around her
hips and past her pelvis and her knees and down over her feet, he marveled at
the stark whiteness of her flesh. Save for an occasional mole and the smattering
of freckles on her chest and shoulders, her skin was as white as the little
caps of foam that formed on the waves he used to watch with Orin—methodical
breakers that had traveled great distances to finally exhaust themselves on the
sandy beaches of the Nassau Sound.

He carried her into the bathroom and
slipped her gently into the tub. With a washcloth and a bit of soap, he bathed
her. He started with her toes and worked his way up to the top of her head. Supporting
her back, he slid her down into the water. Her hair fanned out and a cloud of filth
instantly darkened the water. He worked the soap into a lather and massaged her
scalp, feeling the tautness of her skin there, the close ridges of her skull.

She had lost so much weight. Ravaged muscle
groups still existed at her thighs and her biceps and shoulders, but her
forearms were brittle and he was very careful in handling her. Her collarbones
and shoulder blades were like shale rock beneath a parchment of skin.

He bathed her until the water cooled.
The grime formed a film in the tub and the heavier sediment collected beneath
her. He pulled the stopper and waited while the tub drained, then supported her
with his left arm while he rinsed her with a shower of hot water. Finally, he carried
her into the master bedroom, dried her skin with a towel and dressed her in a
pair of sweatpants and an oversized tee-shirt. He returned her to the sofa and
covered her with a clean blanket before heading into the kitchen to make
dinner.

When it was finished—a tiny bit of stewed
rabbit with dried mushrooms and herbs—he brought a bowl to her side and waited
for it to cool. Her respiration had improved—it was now strong and measured—and
he was gratified to see her shift slightly on the couch. He touched the palm of
her right hand and her eyes fluttered open.

Disorientation—fear and confusion—flashed
in her green irises.

“It’s okay,” Ben said. He spoke in
hushed tones, trying to keep her calm. “Don’t be afraid. I don’t mean you any
harm—I promise. You…I,” he stammered. “I, uh…I found you. In the orchard
outside. You fainted….”

“You…found me,” she croaked.

Ben nodded. “That’s right. You’re safe
here.” He showed her the bowl of stew. “Can you eat?”

She nodded, and he brought a spoonful of
broth to her lips. She closed her eyes while he fed her. After a dozen sips of
broth, she was asleep again, snoring softly.

Ben stood; he allowed himself another
smile. It had been that kind of day. He ate his dinner in the kitchen, standing
at the window while snowflakes fell in the dark.

When it was time for bed, he carried her
into the master bedroom and slipped her beneath the blankets. He made a bedroll
for himself at the foot of the bed and brought a candle and a novel, a drama
called
Alas, Babylon
, into the room, content to read while the woman he
had found in the orchard snored the sleep of the just in the bed above him.

The last thing he remembered before
extinguishing the candle and pulling the blankets to his chin was the whirring
click of the heat exchange. As warm air billowed down into the room, he sighed
and fell into the most satisfying night of rest he’d had since leaving the shelter.