The Reset by Daniel Powell Read Free Book Online Page A

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