The Reset Read Online Free PDF Page B

the place that had once been America was likely frozen all the
way down to the craters where Disney World used to be.
    During the day, Ben worked; at night, he
dreamed—often of Jacksonville, where he’d waited out the unraveling in the old
bomb shelter. In the quiet moments of his day, while mending fences or patching
holes in the walls of the barn or tending to the malnourished ponies, he
wondered if there were others like him. There had been so many shelters back
then—most of the better office complexes had included them as a practical
matter of design.
    That was life in an era of grave skepticism.
    When Ben reflected on his time in
Jacksonville, he thought about the Beamers; David and Jamie Beamer had almost surely
perished in the aftermath of what had happened at the Gator Bowl. Ben had picked
through the city for evidence of their survival, but it was little more than a
cursory effort.
    He had been alone from the start.
    When it happened, he had watched as Jamie,
she of the dazzling smile and audacious sunhats, fell beneath the crush of stampeding
spectators. The first detonation, in a public square just outside Seattle’s
Space Needle, had been broadcast on the stadium jumbotrons. One minute there
were throngs of spectators watching the Super Bowl, and the next they were witnessing
the fall of Seattle. Whole sections of the city were vaporized in a flash of
blinding light. The footage had been shaky—captured from long range with the
camera in someone’s cellular phone. It revealed a column of bright orange
death, a bridge between heaven and Earth. The Space Needle disappeared, neatly
excised from Seattle’s iconic skyline; in the foreground, thousands of revelers
scurried like rats. The column stretched ever higher, acquiring mass, until it filled
the screen and the feed terminated.
    A hush fell over the stadium as 100,000
pair of eyes narrowed in confusion and fear. A low wailing started on the west
side of the stadium, and people began to scurry for the aisles. An instant
later there was Preston Phillips, the lead anchor for the American Corporate
Standard Network, his jowly face filling the screens as he reported on the
attacks, the garbled feed from New York fading in and out.
    “ …aside from that footage of Seattle,
we have reports of explosions…Denver, Pittsburg and Houston…widespread,
coordinated terror attacks. The President and the Chairman of The Human Accord have
issued a joint statement of…and citizens are urged to take refuge in their
homes and shelters…”
    Ben remembered the expression that had
briefly twisted the anchor’s stern features—one of stark terror and sudden,
desperate sorrow—before they lost the feed from New York. The signal defaulted
back to Miami, where the Super Bowl was actually being contested on the field.
John Jennings and Taylor Cowherd had fled the booth. Ricky Madden, the young
man whose grandfather had been an icon in the sport so many decades before, was
left to hold down the broadcaster’s booth by himself. His fleshy cheeks were
bright red and the look of terror in his eyes was palpable
    “…and it appears that America is now under
attack ! I repeat, coordinated terrorist attacks have taken place in…in
Denver and New York and Seattle! Holy shit, this is real, folks! As you can see
below, it’s pandemonium here in Humatrix Stadium. A huge crowd—more than 100,000—is
attempting to flee the stadium, and we’ve now received reports that Human Accord
security officials are conducting searches of all… Oh, dear God! Oh my—!”
    The feed terminated and the jumbotrons
went silent. Ben turned to the Beamers, scared beyond anything he’d ever known,
and in that instant the world outside the stadium was ripped in two.
    As he fell into that horrible memory, Ben’s
fingers often absently found the ridge of scarring down the center of his chest.
He traced the lumps of tissue there as he remembered Jamie Beamer, the woman who
had once hugged him close,