The Reset Read Online Free PDF

obligated to put them at rest.
    There had been no sun to move across the
sky—only dull clouds the Earth wore like a shroud. The light gradually dimmed
and Ben resigned himself to the final leg of his task. He rigged a pulley
system from the same beam the old man had dangled from the night before, and he
began the process of lowering the contents of the freezer to the floor of the
barn. When he was finished, he unplugged the freezer and the light and
collapsed the drying racks, which he stacked in the corner. When the loft had
been purged of any evidence of its terrible purpose, he climbed down, resolving
not to return.
    The grave satisfied him, and he carefully
placed the Winstons’ remains in the earth. It felt like the right thing to keep
them together—to bury them as a family. When he patted the final shovelful of
soil in place and it was full twilight, he stood back from the marker he had
fashioned, a cross made from two old fence planks, and folded his hands.
    “Lord, please give these people your
love and protection in the kingdom of heaven. They worked hard in the face of everything
that happened down here, and they surely didn’t deserve to die. Thank you, Mr.
and Mrs. Winston, for...well, for trying , I suppose. It means something.
It truly does. In God’s name I pray, amen.”
    He pulled the silver necklace he had found
from his pocket. It was a locket, with pictures of the children. He hung the
necklace from the grave marker and went inside to wash up.
    When he had rinsed the clay from his
hands and forearms, he lit a candle in the kitchen. He sat at the table and ate
a small meal and read from a tattered copy of a book called Treasure Island that
he’d found in the boy’s bedroom. He read from the book for an hour or more
before the weight of the day’s toil and the contentment of a full stomach conspired
to push him down into sleep. He washed up and slipped into bed and the embrace
of an untroubled slumber that had been years in the making.

SIX
     
    Each
day there were things to do; each day, the wound in his arm improved just a
little. The stitches were gone within a week. His knitting skin itched continuously,
and it took everything he had to keep from scratching at it.
    Ben grew accustomed to the Winstons’
home, ever mindful of the fact that it wasn’t his place. Not yet, anyway. He
kept it tidy and began a regimen of chores that consumed his days.
    He swept the porch and scrubbed the ash
from the windows, only to sit inside and watch them grow opaque in the
afternoon windstorms. He cleaned the breakfast dishes and the lunch dishes and
he swept the floors. He groomed the ponies—he’d named them Bill and Josie—and
harvested the rest of the apples. Some he canned and some he dried.
    He explored the woods, finding nuts and
roots and other edible things he identified with a book he had found in the
parlor.
    He kept the barn neat.
    The man that had shot him was long gone.
Ben had bundled his body into a wheelbarrow and dumped it in a thicket of
spindly pine trees, a few hundred yards beyond the barn, at the edge of a
sparse forest.
    One morning, he’d been surprised to see
an enormous raptor tracing lazy figure eights against the gray sky high above
that copse of trees. He hadn’t bothered to cover the old man, but he was
surprised by the bird’s presence nonetheless, for winter had come to Georgia
and he thought that the animal would have already pushed further south.
    The days were cold and the nights were
frozen; it snowed often, but mostly the days were filled with falling ash—the hide
of the world that had been scorched by the Reset and the conflicts that had
followed. It pitched up from the fields in nasty cyclones before billowing
across the landscape and blotting out the sun.
    The seasons had vanished. If there was
still a summer, it was noticeable only by a slightly more moderate, slightly
more humid stretch of six or eight weeks. Mostly it was fall and winter in the
world, and now