The Reset (5 page)

“Uh-huh. I can help you.”

“That’s good, Lina. We need your help,” Ben
replied. Damn, it was good that she was coming around.

They raced up the Mill Creek flyover and
onto Monument Road, the van straining now at 80 mph. Its frame shuddered and Ben
clutched the handle on the armrest, his fingers white.

“Bing-BING-Bong!” his monitor chimed.

“Jesus!” Orin hissed. When he turned to
look at Ben, his eyes were filled with contempt. “Throw that fucking thing
away, Ben. You don’t need it anymore.”

Ben panicked. His kit—the shots! He’d
taken one just before the end of the whole mess, but then he’d lost it,
probably in those first frantic moments after the southern sky had flared a
deathly orange. After a minute of futile searching, Orin caught the fear in his
friend’s eyes. He softened his tone.

“Look, Ben, missing one injection won’t
kill you. You have medicine at the house, right?”

Ben nodded. He couldn’t tell if it was his
immune system, as he’d been told all these years, or his bruised psyche, but he
suddenly felt nauseous.

“We’re almost home,” Orin said. “You can
dose up when we get there.”

On cue, he yanked the wheel and the van
darted toward what was now an unmanned guard station. The entry to Hidden
Hills, their suburban Shangri La, was unguarded.

Unguarded, but not at all open for
business.

“Hold on,” Orin grunted as they bore
down on the lowered barrier. He was doing forty-five when he hit it; the van’s
grill shattered and radiator fluid geysered up onto the windshield, creating a
shimmering green curtain.

“Christ!” Orin screamed, flicking on the
wipers. Shards of the fiberglass barrier swished back and forth on the glass.
Lina moaned as Orin struggled to keep the van under control. He popped up onto
the sidewalk briefly before lurching back into the road. He shot Ben a savage
grin. “Made it!”

As they navigated the residential
labyrinth, Ben took it all in. There were already fires. How could that be? Not
fifteen minutes earlier, they had been watching the Super Bowl! A roof burned
while a thin man dressed only in boxer shorts trickled a stream of water from a
garden hose on the blaze.

The man’s shoulders were slumped.
Why
fight it?
his posture said.
It’s all going to burn anyway.

Orin wove through columns of parked
cars, working the brakes and goosing the accelerator as residents—their neighbors—flooded
into the streets in fear. Roads with insipid Florida monikers slid by on either
side: Palmetto Street, Hyacinth Way, Orange Grove Place.

Finally, and with a desperate squeal of rubber,
Orin angled into Graham Court. He spun the wheel, jammed down on the brakes, slammed
the transmission shifter on the steering column down and executed a harried
three-point turn, backing the van across the grass until the back doors abutted
the entrance to their home. He was out in a flash, sprinting to the sliding
door and yanking his sister from her seat.

Ben went straight for the garage. There
were four pallets of water—each with six one-gallon jugs. He loaded them into
the van and pillaged the recycling bins for empty containers. There were about
a dozen empty milk jugs and he brought them into the bathroom in armloads. He drew
water in the tub and began to fill them up.

“Good call,” Orin said, popping his head
into the bathroom. “There’s Tupperware in the kitchen when you’re through.
We’ve got ten minutes, Ben. Fifteen tops.”

Lina poked her head in behind her
brother. “Fifteen…tops!” she repeated somberly, and Ben and Orin laughed
despite themselves. It was nice to see some life in the girl.

He was rummaging through the containers
in the kitchen when he heard the murmured conflict echoing down the hallway. He
inched his way toward the voices. It was coming from Lina’s room.

“We only have enough for
our family
.”
Orin said. There was an edge to his tone, though he wasn’t shouting. “I’m
sorry, Mr. Kravitch. We’re going to find my parents and then we’re going to
take shelter. You need to go home—take care of your own family.”

“We won’t use your things!” a man’s
voice pleaded. “I promise! We just need some help until the worst of it has
passed.”

“Look, I don’t appreciate you bringing
that in here,” Orin said. Ben wondered what he was talking about, but he didn’t
want to risk glancing into the room. Something in his gut told him to stay
hidden. “We don’t want any trouble. We’re just trying to do what we can to get
Lina to safety, Mr. Kravitch. We just…”

“But I know about the shelter!” the man
shouted. There was an edge to his voice—a note of frantic insanity in his
tone—that puckered the flesh on the back of Ben’s neck. “I
know
you’ve
been planning, Orin! Your dad was always talking about a revolution, so I know
you have a place to go. Take us
with you
! Please!”

“I can’t, Mr. Kravitch. You need to get
out of here—your family needs you!”

There was a grunt and the sounds of a
struggle and then the roar of gunfire. Suddenly, Lina was shrieking at the top
of her lungs. “Orin! Orrrriiiiinnnnn!” she screamed, and then the gun roared
again and the room was silent.

“Oh, Jesus! Oh dear lord and baby Jesus,
what did I do?” the man said, his voice naked with revulsion. “
What did I do
?”

Ben peered around the corner. A balding,
middle-aged man stood over Lina’s ruined body. From the corner of the room,
Orin locked eyes with him. Blood bubbled past his lips and slid down his cheek.

Ben dashed at the man, hurtling himself at
his back. He caught him low, the tackle flinging them both forward. Their
momentum pushed the shotgun up under the man’s chin and it went off, the man’s
face and the top of his skull vanishing in a cranberry mist. The back of
Kravitch’s skull smashed into Ben’s face. His nose crumpled and the world went
momentarily black, and then the husk of the man was beneath him.

Ben didn’t quite lose consciousness, and
he pushed himself to his feet, the world around him shimmering behind a curtain
of tears. He kicked the man’s body off the shotgun, which he picked up and
threw across the room.

He turned to Lina.

“Oh God!” he said. He touched her
shoulder, but she was gone. He pulled her close and rocked her in his arms. “Oh
my God, Lina!”

He’d never known such pain.

“
Ben
,” Orin croaked. “
Ben
,
bring her here
.”

Ben lifted her. How much did she weigh?
Forty pounds? He tucked the girl in close to her brother. “Take the bike,” Ben
whispered. His teeth were slick with blood. “The van’s too…just take the bike.
Go over the fence. Go…
now
. There’s enough…there’s enough in the shelter for
a long time.”

“Orin,” Ben pleaded. He was weeping,
holding the boy’s hand. How long had he known him? Months? “Orin, you have to
come with me! Please, Orin? Please come with me? I can’t do this by myself, and
you’ll get better. I’m scared and…”

“Go,” Orin said. “Go
now
. Before
they come around here. There will be others. Go, Ben.”

“No, I don’t want to leave you, Orin, I
don’t think…”

But the older boy shuddered and a change
coursed through him and then his eyes were like glass. Ben fell hard on his ass
and vomited. Blood from his burst nose mingled with the Cherry Coke and nachos
he’d been snacking on in the stadium, many lives ago when they had been
watching a football game at the downtown stadium.

A goddamned football game!

He retched until he was spent and then
stood and pulled the comforter from Lina’s bed. There was a cartoon character
on the blanket—one of her favorites—and he used it to cover them both.

He found his backpack and stuffed it
with the last of his immuno enhancers. Only two packs remained, and a sudden
sense of dread gripped him. What would happen to him if the ranch was gone—if
Mr. Brown could no longer send fresh supplies of medicine?

“Jeez, Ben,” he chastised himself, “think
of someone else for once!”

 He hunted through the bathroom cabinet
for medical supplies and returned to his room to collect the only picture of
Coraline that he owned. He took his telephone charger and a flashlight. He
packed two bottles of water and a box of energy bars and few items of clothing
before he slung the pack over his shoulder and crept out the back door to the
shed, where he found the old beach cruiser that Orin had lent him.

He walked the bike out to the street and
took stock of the place. All around him, life was disintegrating. Three houses
down, a man dressed only in sweatpants kept a shotgun trained on a writhing,
bloodied figure in the driveway in front of his house. The shirtless man locked
eyes with Ben for an instant, the challenge clear in his eyes, and Ben put his
head down and stood up on the pedals, gathering speed. There were fires and
people shouting at each other; a few cars raced up and down the narrow streets,
but Ben mostly had the roads to himself.

The concussion of the Miami blast had
seemingly tripped every car alarm in Duval County, the cacophony adding a terrible
score to the devolution in the streets.

He was about a mile from the house when
he encountered the little girl in the street. She might have been two or three
years old, and she wore a white jumper spotted with something dark—maybe it was
catsup or chocolate sauce, but Ben wasn’t hopeful. Not on that day. He hammered
on the brakes and came to a skidding stop.

“Hey,” he called, and she looked up to
him, her eyes filled with tears. Her hair was mussed, like she’d just gotten up
from a nap. Her lip quivered, and she was two steps away from losing it
completely. How she had found herself there alone, Ben could only guess.

She raised her arms in the universal
sign for
pick-me-up!
and took a halting step further into the street just
as the out-of-control Mercedes came barreling around the corner, its tires
squealing on the hardtop. Ben watched the accident unfold in slow motion, and
it was the worst thing he’d ever seen—the worst
sequence
of events—that
he’d ever been unable to forget.

Life had been hard in those cold, hungry
years after the Reset. That was a fact. But nothing was worse—even the things
that had happened to Orin and Lina—than the memory of the harried man in the Mercedes
sedan; nothing was worse than seeing the car hit the little girl wandering
alone on the far side of the street.

The driver stopped. To his credit, he
had not fled. Together, they tried to revive her, to see if anything could be
done. When it was clear that she was beyond help, the man just fell onto his
side in the middle of the street. He curled into a ball, right there in the
middle of the street, emitting a low-pitched keening sound and holding his head
in his hands. All of this happened while the shock of what he had just witnessed
crashed down on Ben like a rogue wave.

After a long minute, he stepped back onto
the sidewalk and collected his bike, and then he was pushing it through the
woods and toward the shelter, moving only out of human instinct. He was maybe a
hundred yards into the trees when he heard a fierce collision. He briefly wondered,
with a peculiar sense of detachment, if the man had picked himself up from the
street before the cars collided.

Ben pushed ever further into the woods, putting
the fractured world at his back. When he finally arrived at the fence, he hid
the bike in a palmetto grove. He scaled the fence and trotted across the
grounds to the deserted processing plant, where he angled directly for the crumbling
office complex before stepping into the protection of the shadows. He paused to
scan the forest. Satisfied that he had not been followed, he snapped on the
flashlight, entered the old processing plant and barricaded the door behind
him.

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!