Orin had brought him to the SeaBest facility almost daily, so he knew the way well. When he reached the bomb shelter, he entered without ceremony. With a groan and a series of heavy mechanical thuds, he turned the wheel, sequestering himself from a world coming unstitched above his head.
He put his pack down on the table where they had played chess and took stock of the place. They had done a fine job of restoring it.
LEDs bathed the room in soft white light and the filter—powered by lithium batteries—had already begun its methodical task of cleaning the air.
Ben opened his pack. He found his cell phone, cycled through the meager collection of names in his address book and tried to call Coraline. The attempted connection quickly fizzled.
NO SERVICE!
The display was cracked.
He tried again.
NO SERVICE!
And that was his first night. He hadn’t bothered to keep track of how many times he tried to call Atlanta. He had tried until the battery was exhausted, and then he had waited patiently for it to charge. Then, he exhausted the battery a second time.
Many hours later, and with no way of telling whether it was day or night, he fell into a deep sleep. If he had only been able to connect with her, if only a single time! If he could know if she had survived the attacks, if Atlanta still stood!
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 inde
ntation. 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….�
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“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.
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.”
The Reset Page 5