Ben frowned in confusion. “What?”
“I spoke with Patrice. She…she called me just before the people from the Human Accord took her into custody. Mr. Brown—his name was Mark, actually. Mark Kensington. Mr. Brown never sent either of us the chemicals that were needed to…to trigger the reaction.”
Coraline unzipped her jacket. She took Ben’s hand, pressing it to the scar tissue on her chest. He felt her heartbeat—strong and fast.
“Why? Did she tell you why he didn’t send them?”
She nodded. “Patrice said that he loved us. That he loved all of us, but that he especially wanted you and me to be together. She said—she said that he told her he wasn’t sure what might be left when Dr. Calvin’s plan ran its course, but that whatever was left…well, he wanted you and me to be together in it.”
Ben sighed. He felt sick to his stomach. He loved Alice—his wife, and the woman that had saved his life—more than anything he’d ever known. And yet, here she was. Here was his Coraline. They were together, after all these years, and the absurdity of the situation made him nauseous. His hand fell from her chest, and he turned away.
“I know,” she said. “I feel it, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Ben said. “How…if he never sent the arming mechanism, then how?” He couldn’t finish the question.
“We have our own chemists, Ben. When the time comes, I’ll be ready.
“Look, we have to go back now. We have to go back, or none of this will work. The Lawtons are already on the move. We need to do our part.”
Ben nodded. He was reluctant to return to the jail, but he knew things were already in motion.
Before they’d left the basement, Johnny had placed a call south on an old satellite phone. At least parts of the old communications grid were still in place, it seemed.
“How do I know it’s you, Ben?” Arthur had said. His voice crackled with the spotty connection, but there was no mistaking that it was Arthur.
Ben described the wedding ceremony Arthur had officiated, and the older man fell silent on the other end. “Damn, it’s good to hear your voice, Ben! Is—is Lucy okay?” he finally said.
“She is, Arthur. She is,” there was a loud shout on the other end, followed by cries of celebration. “How’s Gwen?”
“She’s doing better, but she’s nervous as a long-tailed cat on a porch full of rocking chairs about our little girl. We need to get her back home.”
“We’re working on a plan to do just that, Arthur. Tell Gwen…tell her that I don’t think it’ll be long before we’re all together again, okay?”
“That sounds great, Ben. I’ll have a word with the Lord on it, you can be sure. You, uh—you reckon we should go with these people?”
“Yeah, I think it’s our best bet.”
“Forgive me if this sounds paranoid, but what’s to keep them from hurting us once they have what they want?”
The thought had occurred to Ben as well. When he’d asked Johnny about it, the man had made a simple (and effective) argument.
“Look,” he had said, “you can throw in with us, or you can die in Roan’s prisons. It’s up to you.”
“Not much of a choice, is it?” Ben had replied.
Ann just smiled, and it put him at ease. “It’s a fine choice, if you ask me. You’ll just have to take my word for it, Ben. We’re not like Roan. You’ll have to make a leap of faith.”
And so he had. Coraline believed in them, and so he did the same.
“Listen up, Arthur. I need you to gather a few things,” he had said, relaying the instructions Johnny had given him. When he had ended the call, he felt a burden floating away. If everything worked out, they’d rendezvous with the Lawtons in Tennessee inside of forty-eight hours.
If everything worked out.
And yet he couldn’t reconcile the plans they had made with what Coraline was proposing. It seemed cruel—cosmically cruel—that after all these years he had found her, only to lose her again so quickly.
And completely.
Coraline kept her head bent against the blowing snow. She held Ben’s hand in the howling storm, all the way back to the jail, and it gave him comfort.
“They’ll come for you tomorrow,” she said when he was back in his cell. “Be ready. Things will go quickly, and we can’t miss our cues.”
Ben clutched her hand through the bars. “Please, Coraline!” he whispered. “Please, there has to be another way!”
She squeezed his hand and smiled. “I’m glad that we found each other again, Benjamin Stone. I’m very grateful for that.”
She turned and ran, and Ben heard the door shut as she secured the cellblock behind her; he was alone again, his head swimming with everything that had just happened.
They were leaving. Again. And this time, they were throwing in with strangers.
There was a rustling laughter from across the way, and he pushed his face into the iron bars. Donald Finney bared his rotting teeth in a savage grin.
“There you go, wonder boy
,” he whispered. “There you go.”
FORTY-FOUR
Roan woke up angry. He studied Coraline’s nude body, her back to him in the bed they shared, with contempt. “I missed you last night, dear. Restless?”
She yawned, feigning disinterest while her heart thudded. She stretched her arms over her head, rolling over to reveal the length of her body in hopes of distracting the little tyrant. “I had to take a walk,” she said. “Too much caffeine last night before bed.”
Roan snorted. “Too much caffeine. Yeah, that’s it. Do you think I’m stupid, Coral?”
She shook her head. “Why are you talking like this? Why start the day angry? Jesus!” She turned away, fighting the urge to bolt from the bed.
“Hey. Hey!” Roan said. “Turn around! Look at me, my little blue-eyed girl.”
She did, steeling herself with a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel something, Coral. I didn’t get here without my instincts, and something inside me just feels off.”
“Don’t be paranoid,” she said, and this drew a smile from the little man. He touched the scars on her chest.
“My beautiful little blue-eyed girl,” he whispered. “My beautiful little blue-eyed girl with the key to the world inside her chest.”
She felt his excitement against her, and this time the sensation didn’t repulse her. Instead (and this was so strange), what she felt was liberation.
This would be the last time. She could endure it, just one more time.
He hovered over her, whispering all the while. “You’re my special girl, Coral. You know that, don’t you?”
“Mmm,” she replied. It was impossible to tell if she was agreeing or not, but Roan mistook it for excitement and started to move faster.
“The key to the world, right there in your chest. My special girl, Coral. Special…girl.”
She stared up at the ceiling while he finished, thankful that he hadn’t pressed her further on her whereabouts.
He rolled back onto his side of the bed. “When the time is right, you’ll bring a kingdom to its knees,” he panted. “When the time is right.”
Coraline turned away, careful to hide the little smile that lit her features. If you only knew, she thought, disgusted by the wetness between her legs.
If you only knew.
~
Wary of betraying any changes in his routine, Ben ditched the morning’s ration of protein in the toilet. He ate the bread and drank the water and, when he placed his tray outside of his cell, he did so under the hopeful pretense that it would be his final meal in captivity.
The young jailer collected the trays a little while later. He peered into the cell and, when he found Ben crouching in the darkness at the back of the space, he offered him a little nod, as if to say, Be seeing you, partner.
Then he shuffled off, and Ben’s mind raced. Was that little prick the mole? Jesus, the guy had hit him with the wand a half doz
en times in the last six weeks!
Whether it was him or not, somebody inside Roan’s organization was leaking information. That much was certain.
Ben paced. Time crept by, which meant their plan had already been put into action.
Johnny and Ann had come prepared. They’d come to Georgia with a tiny army, and that was how they’d found the miracle farm. It was pure dumb luck that their people had blundered across the place before Roan’s scouts had.
By now, Gwen and Arthur were safely out of Georgia—the reverend’s beloved guns securely in tow. Ben had asked the old man to gather up as many of the seeds as he could manage and put the ponies out for good. It made his heart ache to think of ol’ Bill and Ms. Josie out there fending for themselves, but he imagined that if they survived the winter they would be happier for it in the long run.
Still, they were fine creatures and he felt a twinge of guilt all the same.
It was impossible to tell the time without windows, but Coraline had said they would come for him near mid-day. Roan had plans; today, come hell or high water, he intended to get the information that would move his agricultural program forward for good.
Ben sat in the dark, waiting patiently for his appointment with the butcher.
~
Roan spent part of the morning in the botany lab, interrogating Dr. Trent on the scope and magnitude of his ineptitude as a scientist.
“I…I…I,” the scientist stammered. He took a deep breath. “Mr. Roan, it won’t work until we find fertile land. My assistants have taken samples from as far south as Florida, as far north as South Carolina. This ground,” he swept a hand at the dozens of garden plots, “is contaminated. They obviously f-f-found a place where the soil is still relatively pure, Mr. Roan.”
Roan felt the rage boiling up inside of him. That little impulse—that feral rat of paranoia that chewed from time to time at the back of his psyche—had ceased to let him alone.
He was pissed.
“This is unacceptable, Trent. Completely unacceptable.”
“We need the lo-lo-lo,” another pause, “location of their farm. That’s the key. Find it, and we’ll be able to replicate their success. I promise you.”
Roan seethed. With a sweep of his arm, he shoved everything—microscope and sample rack and binder and coffee mug—to the linoleum floor, where it all shattered with a terrific crash. In one fluid motion, he pulled the little stiletto from the scabbard clipped to the back of his belt. The blade glinted in the sterile laboratory lights, and Trent shrieked, his pudgy fingers splayed in terrified supplication as Roan advanced on him.
“No! P-p-please, Mr. Roan!”
Roan snarled, plunging the knife into the man’s soft belly. It made a puncturing sound, and then the scientist’s blood sloshed onto the linoleum in thick gouts.
“If you can’t make the food,” Roan hissed, twisting the blade as awareness leaked from the poor man’s eyes, “then you’ll be the food.”
When Trent was dead, Roan let him fall to the floor. He straightened his jacket and went to the nearest sink, where he cleaned and dried his blade.
“Time to find that fucking farm, I guess,” he said, patting the sides of his hair in the little mirror over the basin.
“There’s fresh meat in there,” he told the guard stationed just outside the laboratory. “See to it that Dr. Trent is properly processed.”
He strode down the hallway, the ill feeling in his gut temporarily forgotten.
FORTY-FIVE
The explosions rocked Atlanta at just a few minutes past noon. They echoed through a city made quiet by rationed electricity and shuttered factories, and they had the desired effect on the people subsisting inside Roan’s fortified walls.
They were synchronized blasts, and they leveled homes and office buildings alike in quadrant four with devastating precision. Mansions in Candler Park and Chelsea Heights were reduced to splinters; the few buildings that remained on Emory’s derelict campus were targeted, and Roan’s security forces—already depleted as hundreds of scouts searched in vain for the Stones’ farm—scrambled to quell the uprising that took root in quad three.
Somebody within the Montana contingent clearly knew explosives.
The people were tired. The men had grown weary of life under the constant threat of imprisonment. The women were exhausted from the degradation and fear that had accompanied Roan’s maniacal plans to expand the population.
They took to the streets with rocks and bottles. A few had guns, and the gutters ran red while they clashed on Peachtree Street.
Marks was escorting Ben to the butcher shop when the alarms clanged throughout the prison. There was an immediate reaction, as hundreds of detainees sprang to life. They hammered at the bars of their cells, howling at the guards that ran up and down the corridor like so many disoriented ants in a flash flood. Emaciated arms stretched through the bars, snatching at the uniforms of Roan’s soldiers. The crackle of dosing wands filled the air as guards touched them to the iron bars. The air filled with an acrid stench—the sickly combination of singed flesh and hot metal.
“Merrick!” the security officer spat into his radio. “We need live rounds in cellblock nine! Things are falling apart down here!”
An expression formed on the big man’s face—confusion and anger. “Who is this?” he snarled, unsnapping his holster and drawing his sidearm. “Where is the warden?”
There was an electronic bleat as the locks on the cell doors were deactivated.
A call—had it come from Finney?—stabbed through the confusion.
“WHOO!”
Then the doors were opening, the detainees flooding into the hallway in droves. Some scooted forward on their hands, springing forward with the agility of squirrels. Ben watched in horror as three of them took a guard to the ground and began to claw at the man with their fingers.
His cries died abruptly, and Ben saw them using their teeth.
They were starving, these men, and they were coming his way.
Marks shoved the barrel of the gun into his back. “Move!” he said. All around them, Roan’s guards were losing the battle. There were just too many detainees—too many furious, starving men.
“Pick it up!” Marks said, and they jogged for the door. They made it just ahead of the pack of men giving chase. Marks put his shoulder into it, but the door wouldn’t budge. Eight inches of thick metal, and the thing wasn’t moving.
He wheeled, looking to the ceiling where a camera blinked down at him. It took him three shots, but he got it.
He turned the gun on the advancing detainees. Ben was frightened. The madness in their eyes—the combination of ravenous hunger and furious madness made his knees weak.
Marks fired into the throng. Ben watched in horror as the back of a man’s head exploded, misting the others in pink and gray tissue fragments. Another took a blast in the chest, the force lifting him up off the ground and sending him tumbling like a thistle on the wind.
This only further enraged them, and now there were more. With Roan’s guards neutralized, the entire cellblock was coming. Ben pushed his back to the wall while Marks snapped off shot after shot. How many did he have?
Blood slicked the corridor, and then the detainees fell over the security chief like a wave. They pulled him down, restraining him even as he tried to put the barrel to his temple. A man, still whole, wrestled the gun away and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers.
Marks screamed. It was a horrible thing, that scream, born of raw fear and excruciating pain as dozens of sharp fingers dipped into his belly and pulled at his flesh, tearing and rending the man into shreds with wet, sloshing sounds. He screamed, even as bearded faces dipped into his chest and came up crimson.
Ben hammered on the door, but the detainees did not touch him. Instead, a few looked at him with something bordering on reverence.
“Wonder boy!” Finney called. He scooted over to Ben and fixed him with a glare. “You and Ms. Coral, huh?” he said.
<
br /> Ben nodded. “We knew each other, many years ago.”
Finney nodded. “Well, God be with you, wonder boy. God be with you.”
There was a heavy metallic thud behind him. The lock. He worked the handle, pushed the door open.
“Wait!” the man with the gun called. He pulled it out, checked the magazine and handed it to Ben. “Three shots left. Be careful.”
Ben nodded. He went to the nearest fallen guard, rifling through his pockets until he had what he needed. He took the dead man’s handcuffs and his tazer, then turned and ran, flying through the chaos of fleeing prison guards and the detainees from the adjacent cellblocks who had overrun the building. He found the stairs and climbed two flights to the lobby, where he prayed they would be waiting for him.
The glass doors were shut, and he couldn’t pry them open. He used a bullet on the glass, stepped through, and ran out into the street. Four inches of fresh powder had accumulated, though it was not snowing. The day was gray and cold and clear, the sun a shrouded orb tracking out toward the west.
The street was deserted.
He started to trot south, toward the house where he’d met the Montanans. He stuck to the sidewalk, hoping he might be able to quickly duck into one of the dilapidated buildings if Roan’s men came down the lane.
But nobody came. The running warmed him up, and soon he had his bearings. He found the house. A burly truck with an extended cab sat idling in the driveway.
Ben went around back and opened the kitchen. Coraline and Alice were there. So was Ann.
And so was Johnny. He lay prone on the kitchen table, unconscious, his torso a bloody mess.
“Alice!” Ben said, but she was already in his arms. Her embrace was fierce.
“Oh my God, you’re alive!” she cried. Tears covered cheeks that were streaked with dried blood. “You made it!”
He held her face. “Are you hurt?” he said.
She nodded at Johnny “I’m okay. He…he saved me. It’s bad, Ben. He was hit three times.”
The Reset Page 24
