The Reset (7 page)

NINE

She
slept long into the following afternoon. Ben locked the guns away and stayed
close to the house, wary of how she might react when she regained consciousness.

He was in the living room, mixing lye and
cold water with the scant drippings of animal fat he’d managed to capture from
the winter’s game, when she appeared in the doorway.

She had a comforter draped over her
shoulders. “So…I wasn’t dreaming,” she said. Her voice had improved, but it was
still hoarse. “All of this—it’s
real
.”

Ben nodded. “It’s absolutely real. I had
a similar reaction when I stumbled across the place, believe me. I, uh…I found you
out there in the orchard. You’d fainted. We…well, we’re here.”

The woman smiled. She took a few halting
steps on wobbly legs, and Ben helped her to the couch.

“What is it?” he said.

“What you said just now. It’s like the
old times, back in the corporate shopping arcades. They used to have these big directories—huge
kiosks that showed where all the shops were. ‘You are here,’ they would say.
They had this big arrow pointed at a little stick figure.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for
it. I never spent much time in the arcades—not before the Reset, at least. I’ve
searched through a few since, but I couldn’t stay long. Too dangerous.”

The woman nodded. “So you never did your
part either, huh?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Human Accord. Patriotic commerce
and all that bullshit. You know, buying into the system—literally?”

Ben smiled. “My ‘career’ was a few
months old when things fell apart. I’m afraid I never had time to get involved
in any of that.”

The woman snickered. Her eyes darted
about the room. “We had a place like this back in Atlanta. My husband and I. We
kept it up for a long time, despite everything that happened up there.”

The memory washed over her, and her eyes
looked at nothing at all. “I tried to do it on my own, even after I lost him.”
There was a long pause. “But it was just too much for me to do on my own,” she
whispered.

Ben sat on the couch, careful not to
crowd her. “It takes time. Seems I’ve got enough of that, though. All I have
right now is time. My name is Ben, by the way.”

He extended his hand. The woman studied
him for a long moment before tentatively shaking it. Ben was happy to see the
improvement in her fingers. She would likely keep them.

“My name is Alice,” she said. “Alice Kincaid.
Thank you for your help. I think…I think you saved my life.”

Ben smiled. “You’re welcome, Ms. Kincaid.
I’m glad to have some company.”

A shadow darkened the woman’s features
and she turned away. “Just call me Alice,” she mumbled.

“You said you came down from Atlanta?”
Ben said. “I’m going there when the weather improves.”

She shook her head, a feral wariness
brightening her eyes. “Atlanta? Jesus, Ben, why would you? It’s very bad there.
Very,
very
bad. And you have this place here. Why would you ever leave?”

Just then, the heating kicked in. Her
brow furrowed and she smiled. “How on earth did you ever…?”

Ben chuckled. “It wasn’t me—I’m not
responsible for any of this, in fact. It’s kind of a long story.”

“Oh, they’re
all
long stories.
Every last damned one of them. Is there any…is there any more of that soup?”

“Yep. I was actually hoping you’d be up
soon. Would you join me for lunch?”

She nodded and he helped her into the
kitchen. He ladled stew into bowls and brewed tea. They had dried apples and
pecans, and the woman ate heartily.

“So,” Ben began. He replenished their tea.
“I have to ask—how did
you
find this place?”

Alice’s features tightened. She shook
her head once—a slight gesture, and stood, the blanket still wrapped about her
shoulders. “I need to rest now. Thank you for lunch, Ben.”

And with that she left him there. He
heard her moving down the hall, then the door in the master bedroom latched
softly.

“Well,” he said. He finished his tea and
listened to the house settling. When he was finished he cleaned the dishes and returned
to the living room to make a ball of soap.

TEN

Existentialism.

Living just to be. It was how they had come
to coexist in the Winstons’ home, and it suited them well enough. Ben mostly
tended the grounds; Alice pitched in where she could as her strength slowly
returned.

It was endless winter—days on end of drifting
snow and freezing temperatures. They’d shut the electricity off and grown
accustomed to navigating their lives from behind tiny bursts of steam.

Ben moved his things into the kids’
bedroom. The bed wasn’t as soft and the room faced the north, where it took the
brunt of the coldest winds, but he stockpiled blankets and it suited him.

Every morning, he waddled over the ice-crusted
snowdrifts on a pair of old snowshoes. It took time and energy to clear enough
ice to run the paddles that replenished the batteries. He’d run the power for
about four days after rescuing Alice. Then the juice just shut off, the
batteries exhausted, and he had no way of knowing when their charge would be
restored.

They had been four damned good days.

It was hard work, and he often exhausted
himself in the process of shattering and removing the yards of ice that formed
around the paddles. On a cold February morning, he stopped to rest and to consider
the world around him.

Barren—their part of the world was utterly
barren.

Aside from a couple dying juniper and
cypress trees at the boundary of the woods, there was no foliage. Snow covered everything,
some of the drifts piled as high as the second story of the Winstons’ house. It
looked to him, in that moment, as hospitable an environment as the surface of
the moon, that master of the tides whose rare appearances now evoked minor
celebrations, the atmosphere was so congested.

And yet Ben was optimistic.
Someone
had come—someone with which to share the burden of isolation—and his thoughts
rarely strayed from the quiet woman he now shared a home with. He still planned
to search for Coraline in Atlanta. It would be one final journey, one last
effort to locate the girl who had owned his heart so many years before.

But the notion of actually finding her
grew just a little dimmer every day. It was better to concentrate on reality, on
things that truly
were
. When Coral flashed into his thoughts, when he paused
to glance at the shabby photograph he kept in his pocket, he chastised himself.

“She’s
gone
,” he hissed. “Probably
dead, Ben. Face it. That girl’s been gone for a long time and you know it. Be
thankful for things that
are
…”

And Alice certainly
was
. In the
days after he had rescued her, her fingers had blistered, cracked, and bled as
they healed, but she lost no flesh. In a week’s time her cheeks had begun to
fill out.

Ben recognized the change. He’d seen it
in himself, packing on at least twenty pounds throughout his months in the
Winstons’ home. The manual labor had made him strong, and he felt healthier
than he had even before the Reset had forced him down into the shelter.

And, in the most hopeful development of
all, Alice was beginning to open up. She’d allowed him tiny sips of herself,
but when he pushed for larger swallows, she grew sullen, locking herself in her
room for hours at a time. Ben learned that she had been a teacher before the Reset.
She and her husband were active in politics—fighting the effects of what she
called
corporate stratification
even while earning their living in the
premier economy.

Alice spoke of her husband often. She
and Brian had loved each other very much, it seemed, and Alice was proud of the
life they’d made before the Reset. Ben was happy to listen to her talk about
him, to hear the pride in her voice when she discussed his generosity and his
willingness to persevere through the worst of the Reset’s aftermath.

At night, they discussed books and culture
and what life had been like before the Reset. Actually, that wasn’t completely
accurate;
Alice
talked—she was very well spoken when the topic
interested her—and Ben listened. She was bright and, even though Ben had no way
of knowing if the things she said were true or not, he believed that she didn’t
lie to him. When she spoke of how things had been, energy infused her words
with life; she was a natural storyteller, a born educator.

They were drinking tea, watching the
flames settling in the hearth, on the night she told him about the Reset.

“You really don’t know any of this, Ben?”
she said. She wore a smile—part incredulity, part sincere curiosity.

“You have to understand, Alice…I was in
the shelter from the very beginning. I was completely cut off. And there
weren’t any textbooks just lying around when I came back topside, I’m sorry to
say. The world had…had
shifted
, and there was nobody left to talk with. I
didn’t find much in the way of media—no real record of what happened. Think
about it, Alice—I was down there for almost
ten years
.”

“Well, that’s true,” she agreed, “there
wouldn’t be much to come back to; that’s such a large part of the problem—that
lack of primary data. But if you want the Cliff’s Notes version of what
happened when the world ended,” she paused, still in awe of her housemate’s lack
of understanding, “the story I’m about to tell you begins with the Kids.”

“The Kids?” he replied, careful not to
betray the adrenaline now pumping through him.

She sipped her tea. “Very little has
been written about the Kids. Very little has been written about
any
of
this. Who cares about keeping a record when the raiders are at your door?”

The fire flicked shadows about the room
and the wind howled, blowing ash and grit against the house in rhythmic,
ticking flurries. “The Reset, you see, unfolded in at least three stages. To be
honest, its effects are still revealing themselves; that’s the sad reality of
how complete the destruction was. It’s all so
damned sad
. I may never
know—
we’ll
probably never know—whether some cultures have rebuilt. I’d
like to believe there’s a working power grid in Australia. I’d like to trust
that children in India are learning how to read in schools, and that there are
buses that run on a regular schedule in Italy.” She grew silent, staring at the
fire. “But I doubt that’s true. I think that life in those places—it’s probably
no different than it is here.

“You see, Brian used to spend a lot of
time on this old HAM radio he’d scavenged. He taught himself how to use it, and
he scoured the dial with that thing every morning. He made contact here and
there with other survivors, mostly nomads on their way to someplace else. But
there had never been a real spark—never enough of an indication that folks were
rebuilding—to spend much effort searching for a recovery. We’ve been on our own
from the start. That much is true.”

“And yet,” Ben said, nodding at a
photograph of the Winstons, a picture of the smiling family he had remounted on
the wall, “here you and I sit, sipping tea together in a comfortable home. We
have a roof over our heads. We have warmth. We exist, in this moment, inside
the very evidence that a recovery was happening, Alice.”

“That’s true,” she replied with a nod.
Her hair was lustrous in the firelight. “You’re quite the optimist, aren’t you
Ben?”

He shrugged. “The glass
is
usually
half full, I suppose. Sorry to interrupt, though. Keep going, Alice. Please.
Tell me about the Reset.”

“Well, there were the initial attacks,
which you know were simply horrific, followed by the global response, and
finally the aftermath. God, it all went to hell so fast. It all happened so
damned
quickly
!” she winced in wonderment. “There was just no time to really
reconcile how the Kids had been used to bring the world to its knees.”

“The seventeen?” Ben said, fighting the
urge to touch his chest. “I heard about them from a man I met on a road near
Pensacola. His name was Benedict.”

She nodded. “That number’s been disputed
but, again, nothing has been verified. It’s one of the great ironies of my life
as a historian, Ben; the Reset was so effective—so thorough in its
destruction—that it rendered my field pretty much obsolete. Who cares about
history? What happened
happened
, and there was no reason to dwell on the
‘why’ or the ‘how.’ Think about our lives—I mean our lives
today
. We
live almost exclusively in the moment. If we’re lucky we think about tomorrow,
but certainly we don’t dwell on yesterday. It’s how
he
wanted it to go. I’ve
had a lot of time to think about it, and I’m damn sure convinced of that.

“And look, even though we sit here by a
warm fire in a comfortable house, our survival isn’t guaranteed. There are
people out there,” she pointed to the window for emphasis, “who would sooner
see us slaughtered than work
with us
to create an actual life on this
farm. Death and toil, Ben. That’s the new world order. Death and toil.”

They sat in silence for a long moment.

“Okay,” Ben finally said. “I’ll accept that
things are hard—that the world is filled with brutality. It wasn’t too long ago
I took a bullet in the shoulder, remember? But why? Why did any of this happen?
Who was the ‘he’ you mentioned earlier, and who were the Kids?”

Alice nodded. “There are a few stories
out there about the Kids. The tale of the homecoming is certainly the most
prominent.” She looked into Ben’s eyes. “Think back, Ben. Go back to what you
remember about your time in Florida. Can you picture it?”

Ben nodded. He had already told her
about that night at the Gator Bowl.

“And now go back even further—to the
turn of the century. It started with, of all things, a basketball game. This
was in Portland, Oregon, pretty close to where you grew up, if I’m not mistaken.
The thing that happened at the Rose Garden? Well, it made the 9/11 attacks look
like child’s play.”

“9/11?”

“2001. A terrorist group flew a pair of
airplanes into a couple of buildings in New York City. They attacked the
Pentagon, and they were gunning for the White House too. The World Trade Center
was considered one of the early precursors to The Human Accord’s political
takeover of global public life. I used to teach a class that touched on those
early terror attacks, back when I was living in Arkansas. I was working at a
little school—a place called Harding College. Times were much better then, Ben.
This was in the late ‘20s.”

Ben smiled. “You were a professor. I had
no idea.”

Alice nodded. “I was extremely young and
extremely naïve in those days. Fresh out of school and looking to change the
world. Still, they were good, happy, ignorant days. You know, I’d actually been
at Georgia Tech for nine years when the shit hit the fan? Brian had been there for
thirteen: old lucky number thirteen.

“Anyway, there were some pretty dark
days in this country before The Human Accord took over national security. I’m
not saying life was much better with THA at the controls, but the big attacks—the
all-out slaughters, really—
did
slow down. People felt safer venturing
out in public. But no one knew that the thing that happened at the Rose Garden
would have such a long reach. That’s how it went in those days. You heard about
terrorism, but it was so common that it didn’t leave a mark unless it touched
you directly. Everyone had a cause, and there were so many that were willing to
die, and
to kill
, for that matter, for their beliefs. Oklahoma City.
Dallas. Seattle. New York, of course. The large cities took the first batch of hits,
but then it trickled down: Tallahassee, Omaha, Little Rock. Terrorist attacks
on U.S. soil had been rare in the 1900s. They’ve been all too common in this
century, though.”

“How did…how did the thing that happened
in Portland tie into the Reset?” Ben said. This time, his hand
did
find his
chest, though Alice couldn’t possibly understand the gesture.

He knew things, just not everything.

“They were called the Rose Garden
Bombings. It had been disguised as foreign terrorism, but it had been a
home-grown plot from the beginning. More than twenty-thousand perished in the
blasts. Two professional sports teams were obliterated, just like that. Scores
of wealthy powerbrokers died—movers and shakers among the corporate elite. It
had been a huge blow to the psyche of the American people—half a billion strong
had been moved to pass immediate, sweeping surveillance legislation. Life after
the bombings,” she shook her head, “was no picnic for many Americans. There
were labor camps, witch hunts, secret trials. It was just another example of
that age-old cycle of human distrust, and tens of thousands lost their lives.

“The only survivors of the blasts had
been a small group of children and their caretakers. Nineteen little miracles,
whose nursery in the bowels of the building had somehow survived unscathed. The
man responsible for the attacks, we learned years later, was, to say the least,
an improbable suspect.”

A rueful shake of the head said it all.

“His name was Alexander Calvin. He had
been on the cover of all the magazines—had won the Nobel Prize. He probably
was
the world’s greatest bio-engineer—no hyperbole there. Alex Calvin was also a
radical—a rabidly anti-Human Accord dissident whose hatred of what the corporate
economy had done to the world developed into an obsession with toppling the
system.”