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 incredulit
y, 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 responsi
ble 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.”
Ben lost himself in memory, returning to his time on the ranch. To his time in Dr. White’s home, and in Mr. Brown’s school. A single tear tracked down his cheek.
“He called himself Dr. White, and he lived on a sprawling ranch outside of Bend. He’d recruited a cadre of dedicated followers, and he built his version of a utopian society there on the bluffs. This culture—it became the second wave of his fame. The world media portrayed him as a saint—the benevolent caretaker of the Rose Garden Nineteen, those poor orphans whose overwhelming loss would be at least softened by a first-rate education and an easy path to employment in the premier economy. White would see to it that these children knew comfort and security, while just about everybody else scrambled after resources and fought to scratch out a place in a dying world.”
She snickered. “He had planned the attacks on the Rose Garden. He had engineered the weapons that triggered the Reset. Alex Calvin was brilliant and he was patient, and it proved to be a terribly destructive combination.”
Ben looked away. He had never known his parents, of course, and yet in that moment he was choked by grief for their loss.
John and Kathryn. They had enjoyed living in the United States, although it had become clear to him when he went through their things that they would always be Londoners in their hearts.
Mr. Brown had taken great lengths to procure keepsakes for each of the children. The last time Ben had seen Coraline, she was still wearing her mother’s silver wedding band—the one with her parents’ initials engraved on the interior and the thick gouges on the exterior, where it had been scarred by falling concrete—on a chain around her neck.
The Reset Page 6
