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.
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-alterin
g 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 Phil
lips, 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.
The Reset Page 3
