The Reset by Daniel Powell Read Free Book Online Page B

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