The Reset Read Online Free Page A

and die.
    Ben swiped away the tears, keenly aware
of what he still had to do. He went to the work bench and searched through the drawers
until he found a stubby knife with a curved blade. He climbed the ladder and
sawed through the rope.
    Winston’s body crashed to the floor in a
heap.
    Ben turned his attention to the loft. Winston
had been curing meat. An inexplicable object—a small, top-loading freezer— hummed in the corner. The old man was running juice to the place after all! There was
even a dim fluorescent light mounted in the corner.
    Ben approached the nearest rack, where
he found rows of paper-thin strips of drying meat.
    Jerky.
    He resisted the urge to sample it; instead,
he went to the freezer.
    When he opened it, ice crystals cascaded
down onto a pile of parcels wrapped in faded newspaper. Ben took the first and
cut away the twine.
    It was a roast. A simple bottom
roast—not unlike the dinners he’d enjoyed when he was living with the Beamers back
in Jacksonville.
    There were other packages—scores of
them—and he rummaged through the freezer until he found what he was looking for.
Hoping, praying even, that it might be poultry (maybe even a chicken!), he
unwrapped it.
    As he stripped the frozen newsprint ( Interim
CEO of Disney Vows Retaliation ) from the parcel, dread coursed through his
veins.
    Of course it wasn’t a chicken. Things
could never be that simple, not in a world without livestock.
    He knew what it was. And yet, he still had
to check. He still had to be sure.
    And when he did, sadness crashed over
him like a wave.
    The woman’s eyes were open and clouded
by freezer burn—her lips slightly parted. Patches of ice crystals coated her
cheeks.
    His first instinct was to drop it, to run
back inside the house and gather his things and go as far from the farm as his
tired legs would take him, but he fought the urge. She had been someone’s
daughter. Perhaps she had been someone’s mother.
    Instead of fleeing, he said a few words
for the woman. When he was finished, he returned to the freezer: there were three
more round packages inside.
    Ben unplugged the thing. It would be
plenty cold enough and, if it wasn’t, what difference did it make? He could not
do what Winston had done, so it made no difference.
    He put everything back inside, collected
the lantern and carefully made his way down the ladder, where he walked past
Winston without pause. When he made it back to the house, he tossed the stew into
the bushes and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep in his new bed.

FOUR
     
    Dawn
broke cold and gray. Ben checked his shoulder; the stitches had survived the
night. He irrigated the wound with iodine and applied a fresh bandage before
shrugging into a flannel shirt and heading for the kitchen.
    He stoked the coals in the cast-iron
stove and put a pot of water on to warm before heading out to collect an armful
of apples.
    It would be a long day and he had to rebuild
his strength. He quartered the fruit and slipped the slices into the water. In
the full light of day, he could evaluate things.
    In the pantry, he found a plastic
container filled with dried leaves. He unscrewed the lid and was overwhelmed by
the pungent aroma of tea; there were plenty of the black leaves in the pantry and
he took two and placed them in the bottom of a chipped coffee cup with the
words Georgia Farmers Local 309 printed in black script on the front.
When the water steamed, he brewed a cup of tea and took it out onto the back
steps.
    He sipped tea and watched the sky turn
colors. Under different circumstances, he realized, he might have felt something
like contentment.
    Instead, he was anxious. He had a hole
in his shoulder that would probably become infected. There was a dead body in
the barn, and a few others in the loft. There was a house to look after and the
pervasive uncertainty of what horrible things might venture down the very road that
had delivered him to the old farmhouse.
    He ran through the previous