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of the Georgia hills, life had continued. Ben felt
intense sorrow for them, for the horrible fate that had likely befallen them in
their own home, but he also felt hope for the future, that there might be others
out there that had pushed ahead with life in the years after the Reset.
    “ Seventeen ,” he whispered,
touching his hand to the ridge of scars beneath his flannel shirt. “Seventeen
of them, all gone.”
    He scoured the house, finding a large
cachet of photographs in a bedroom closet. Knowing that the day’s worst chores were
still ahead of him and that he would need to get started if he meant to finish
before nightfall, Ben just couldn’t focus on the barn until he had found a
hammer and some nails and spent a big chunk of the morning moving from room to
room, hanging photographs in the empty spaces that had once been filled with
life.

FIVE
     
    It
was slow going with the use of just one arm. He knew it would be, and he paused
periodically to snack on an apple or speak to the ponies that grazed lazily in
the orchard. They were among the handful of animals he had encountered after
emerging from the shelter. A handful of live animals—mostly scraggly birds—in
all those years of wandering.
    It was the Winstons in the photograph,
and Bert Winston was the name of the young boy. Ben found a couple of scrapbooks
in the antique hutch in the parlor, complete with the children’s baby
footprints and little snippets of their hair. Emma and Alan Winston had, in the
face of radiation-laden windstorms, life-altering fallout, consumptive
wildfires, and brutal climate conditions, given birth to two apparently healthy
children. It was a staggering notion, and it gave Ben hope that Coraline might
yet be alive. He had ventured into Atlanta twice before in search of her, the
second time barely escaping that fouled metropolis with his life.
    Atlanta was diseased—a shrine to decay
and ruin, populated by profiteers and cutthroats. If Coraline had survived, he
hadn’t found any evidence of it. No one he had spoken to had seen the beautiful
girl with the scarred chest; no one recognized her face from the lone
photograph that Ben kept in the front pocket of his dusty trousers.
    But the fact remained that, throughout all
the long years he had spent in the sterile confines of the bomb shelter, reading
books and writing in his journal and subsisting on expired protein powder, stale
vitamins and water that tasted of rust, the Winstons had brought two healthy children into the world.
    They had not given up hope, and neither
would he.
    Before he’d begun the digging, Ben had gone
out for a hike. About a mile from the back door, he’d discovered a winding
creek filled with brackish water. Whether farming was Alan Winston’s vocation
or not, Ben was impressed by the man’s engineering skills. A series of eight handcrafted
water wheels straddled the creek. They spun quietly, generating enough juice to
keep the water pumps going. There was a little shed, where thirty-four remarkably
clean automobile batteries were strung together with heavily taped conduits.
    Ben studied the fields as he walked, his
arm in a sling. They were barren, choked by the ash that had covered the world.
He had hoped he might discover some winter crops—maybe a stubble of wheat or a
few rows of bristled Vidalias—but there was nothing.
    He walked until he tired and his feet
ached before returning for a late lunch of apples, berries, nuts, and tea. The
food stayed down and he was amazed by its effect on him. The protein in the
nuts and the sugar in the berries coursed through him, and he decided to get to
it before the earth froze and he wouldn’t be able to dig. Winter would come
barreling down from the north any day.
    He chopped at the ground with a trowel
and a pick-axe. The old man’s body he left untouched in the barn. Ben wasn’t
sure yet whether he wanted to spend the energy needed to bury him, but he
wanted to do right by the Winstons. He felt