Overthrown: The Great Dark (Overthrown Trilogy Book 1)

by Judd Vowell

  13.

  “ We were running so fast, Dad. So much faster than I’ve ever seen him run. And then he said he had to stop, to catch his breath for a moment.” Jessica was a mess. She was sobbing as she told me how they ended up in the church. “We saw the church and decided to break in. When we got inside, he collapsed. I dragged him over here to the corner. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It’s ok, honey. It’s ok.”

  I put my hand on his chest and prayed for the involuntary function of breathing. I had never been much on prayer, but it felt appropriate in the surroundings. They were there. Deep long breaths. Better than short shallow ones, I told myself. I grabbed his wrist and found his pulse, although I had no idea what a good pulse might feel like. But it was there, too. Strong and steady.

  “I don’t know what to do either, Jessica. But he’s breathing. And he’s resting.” I’m not sure why, but I had not hugged her. “Come here.” We embraced for a long moment. I needed it as much as she did. I could feel her calming in my arms. “Now, listen. I have to go outside and let the others know that I’ve found you, ok?”

  “Yeah, ok. Wait, hang on. What others?”

  “You guys created quite the uproar back at camp. Daniel sent a whole crew of soldiers to save you.” I managed a small smile. “There are three of them with me. Let me go get them. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.”

  “Ok, Dad. But please...hurry.”

  ◊◊◊

  Daniel was waiting for me outside the church. He said he had seen me go inside.

  “They’re in there, Daniel. But Henry’s out cold. Some kind of exhaustion or something. I don’t know what to do.” I had held it together in front of Jessica, but I broke down right there in front of Daniel. “I just...don’t know what...to do.” I fell to my knees.

  He knelt down beside me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Alright, Gordon, it’s alright. You found them. That’s all that matters now.”

  I knew that Daniel was right, even though my heart kept reminding me that everything was so very wrong.

  14.

  D aniel had rounded up Johnson and Carter and brought them back to the church. They stood in the vestibule and discussed our options. I sat with Jessica next to Henry, still motionless and asleep.

  Daniel came in and asked to speak to me outside. “Whatever needs to be said can be said in front of her,” I told him. “She’s as much a part of this as any of us now.”

  “Understood,” Daniel said as he walked over to us. “Here’s the situation. We need to get back to Overlord. Simple as that. We’ve got doctors for Henry there. We’ve got resources. Plus, if everything goes as planned, at sunset there’s gonna be one hell of a shitstorm nearby. We need to be long gone by then.”

  “And how do you propose we get Henry back there?” I pondered.

  “Easy. We carry him. Johnson and Carter are constructing a makeshift stretcher now. Between the two of them and the two of us, we should be able to make it back before dark.”

  I understood we couldn’t stay there. It didn’t make any sense. But I didn’t know what was wrong with my son. And I didn’t know if moving him would make it worse.

  Daniel felt my apprehension. “Gordon, it’s the only choice we’ve got. You stay here and wait for Henry to wake up, and you risk everything. We’ll take care of him, I promise. But we’ve got to get him out of here.”

  I turned to Jessica. I needed family support. I needed reinforcements. “What do you think, Jess?”

  She had become very serious since Daniel had come over to us. She answered with conviction. “He’s right, Dad. It’s the only choice we’ve got. Let’s give Henry a chance.” Then she reached over to a backpack that was propped up against the wall behind her. She unzipped it all the way, revealing twelve small boxes of the medicine that I had become so familiar with over the last few years. She wiped the remaining tears from her face and looked up at me. “Let’s give Mom a chance, too.”

  15.

  H enry didn’t stir the entire trek back to Camp Overlord. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. We arrived just minutes before the sun disappeared below the horizon we had been walking toward.

  Daniel had the former prison cell across from ours cleared and set up for Henry as soon as we came through the gates. He sent one of his people to alert the doctors at camp of our situation. He did all that he could.

  Jessica and I sat with Henry while two doctors examined him. When they were finished, they conferred outside in the hallway. One of them came back in and related to us their lackluster diagnosis. “We can’t find anything wrong. Heart rate, respiration, body temperature. All normal. Near perfect, to be honest. But please understand, we don’t have all the tools we need. There’s no way to tell if his brain is ok.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. We don’t think it was exhaustion or heat stroke. His vitals are too stable. It’s almost like he just went into some sort of deep sleep that we can’t rouse him from. I hate to even mention the word coma, but I think we’re in that realm of possibility.”

  I had been down this vague road with doctors before, but I understood his limitations. I couldn’t press him much further. “So what do we do now?”

  “We wait.” The doctor took a moment before he continued. “Look, we’ll keep monitoring him and watch for any changes. I’m sorry. I wish we knew more.”

  I couldn’t respond. I was exhausted and dazed.

  Jessica’s voice cut through the fog in my head. “Come on, Dad. Let’s go lay down, if just for a little while. They’ll wake us if anything happens.”

  She was right. I needed rest desperately. We got up and stumbled across the prison corridor. I was asleep before my body hit the mattress.

  When I woke up, I didn’t know how long I had slept. I could see through the crisscross of steel bars in our room’s only window that it was still dark outside. I sat up and saw that Jessica was awake, too. She was sitting at a small table in the corner of the room, writing. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my arms and back. The rest had done me good, even though I felt like I could go back to sleep for two more days.

  I cleared the REM-induced phlegm from my throat. “What are you doing, Jessica?”

  “Just writing it all down.”

  “All what?”

  “I don’t know. Just everything that’s happened to us. I don’t want to forget this. When we make it through and save Mom and the lights come back on and we get back to normal life, I don’t want to forget.”

  I knew then that she needed to talk. She and Henry had been through something horrible, I was sure. “Jess, you want to tell me what happened in there?”

  She stopped writing and raised her head, looking at the blank wall above the table. She waited a minute or so before she spoke. “I was so scared, Dad. I thought for sure they were going to kill us. And maybe they would have, if it hadn’t been for Henry.”

  16.

  A s Jessica told the story of her escape from the grid with Henry, I could see her independence, her adulthood, taking shape before me.

  “We didn’t know where we were at first. After the van ride. They kept the hoods over our heads and the handcuffs on us. We were in there for a long time, then they came and took me away. They put me in a room and uncuffed me, took the hood off. There was a woman there, sitting across a table from me. She was pretty and tried to be nice, but I didn’t trust her.

  “She apologized for everything that had happened, said something about Paul being a necessary sacrifice. She said that they wanted to believe us, and they needed to frighten us to do that. That they wanted to make sure we knew how strong they were. ‘Paul’s death will assure you tell me the truth, you see?’ she asked. ‘You have to understand that we won’t stand for deceptiveness. We do not need you as much as you need us.’ She was so warped, Dad. They all were.

  “I stuck with the plan, with the story that we had learned. It was so hard to keep it s
traight, but I think I did. They took me back to the room where Henry was afterward, and they took him away. That’s when I almost lost it. Alone with my thoughts.”

  Jessica got quiet. She wasn’t visibly upset, but I could tell that going back to that place was difficult. I pushed her through it. “So, Henry came back?”

  “Yeah, they brought Henry back. Who knows how long it had been. Too long. No more handcuffs and hoods, thank God. We hugged and cried. Then Henry got serious. ‘You stick with the story?’ he asked. ‘I tried to. Did you?’ ‘Yep. That should help. I think they’re giving us a break because we’re kids. But that’s their mistake.’ He was so confident, Dad. He said he could get us out of there, but that I needed to be ready. I told him I was.”

  Then she asked me something that I didn’t see coming. “Dad, did you know that Henry could pick locks?”

  ◊◊◊

  The question took me back to a flurry of memories. A series of episodes in parenting that had left me bewildered. Kids have a way of doing that. Sometimes I’d find a scene of moderate destruction or minor injury and never get a straight answer about how it happened. I longed for those scenes instead of the ones we had been facing since the Great Dark had begun.

  The subtle events that had jumped to the surface of my brain at Jessica’s query occurred when Henry was eleven. It was only for a summer, but Meg and I had been confounded by it. And it was soon forgotten with all the other minute and mundane details of daily life. Henry began locking himself in rooms all over the house. Bathrooms, bedrooms, closets. Between Meg and me, we found him at one point or another self-imprisoned in every space with a lockable door. Not to be saved, mind you. Exactly the opposite. Every time I discovered a voice behind a locked door – “No problem here, Dad. Just working on something new.”

  The symbolism of the moment wasn’t lost on me. For I realized in that transformed prison cell exactly what he had been working on during that summer years ago. Just another of his mind-growing experiments: the art of picking locks.

  ◊◊◊

  “No, I didn’t know that, Jess,” I said as a reminiscent smile crept across my mouth. “But I certainly should have.”

  17.

  “ Henry went to work on the door lock with a pick set that he had. He said he carried it with him always – just in case. ‘You know what this place is?’ he asked me while he messed with the deadbolt. I didn’t. ‘It’s the city’s utilities headquarters. I could see the power control room through my hood as we walked past it earlier. That means we’re probably on the underground floor.’ I always knew Henry was smart, Dad, but this was just weird. How did he know so much about that place?” She asked it rhetorically. “He’s smarter than any of us can imagine,” I thought to myself.

  “After he unlocked the door, he checked the hallway outside. Nobody was guarding us. ‘Told you they were giving us a break,’ he said. We went down the hall until we found a stairwell, avoiding the control room – ‘Too much activity at the brain of this operation,’ Henry had said. We made it up the stairs easy. I couldn’t believe how easy it actually was. We sneaked through the first floor halls, hiding behind corners when we needed to. We got out through a back exit door that led into an alley. ‘Need to lay low until dark,’ Henry said. ‘But we also need to get away from this building,’ I replied. Henry agreed.

  “And that’s when it got so strange, Dad. When we got to the edge of the alley.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Life inside the grid. It’s the same as before. People are just going about their business like nothing’s changed. Stores are open, the streets are clean. I didn’t remember how nice things were.”

  I hadn’t thought much about it myself. About what the ANTs’ existence was like inside their protected blocks across the world. Secretly I had hoped they were living like we were. But that wasn’t the truth. Jessica’s revelation was hard to hear, but not surprising. After all, humans have a knack for being sadistically amnesic when a superiority complex is at stake.

  “I know, honey. People can be cruel without knowing it when they choose to be ignorant.” I was trying to make her feel better about the whole thing. That’s what fathers do when their children are learning the bitter realities of life. We didn’t need to dwell on it. “How did you guys get the medicine?”

  “Right, the medicine. We were able to find a good hiding spot in a parking garage. That’s one thing we didn’t see – cars. I guess not everything is the way it was. So the garage seemed like a perfect place to take cover. We hid there until late night. On the city map we had with us, we located the hospital, then the pharmacy building. We got there after walking the streets for a long time. Whenever we thought someone was near, we had to stop and hide. It was nerve-racking. We didn’t know if they had found out we had escaped. We were looking over our shoulders the whole night.

  “The pharmacy building wasn’t guarded. It was locked, but Henry had that covered. Then it was just a matter of finding Mom’s medicine. Once we did that, we moved south through the city. Henry thought it was best to get as far away from the place where we had tried to enter as possible. Then I guess it was just luck. We heard those explosions. The ANTs at the border did, too. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We saw the ANTs leave their patrol area at the intersection we were next to. ‘It’s now or never,’ Henry said, ‘but don’t leave me, Jessica.’ Turns out that was a funny thing to say. Like I told you before, he ran faster than I’d ever seen him run. And we didn’t stop until we got to that church. And now Henry’s...”

  She couldn’t finish her last thought, but she didn’t need to.

  ◊◊◊

  We sat silently. It had been a harrowing experience for her to re-live. But I was thinking that Daniel needed to hear it for himself. Their escape story contained valuable information for the Lefty movement. For some reason, I was starting to feel more of a connection to Daniel and his team. After seeing the ANTI- modus operandi, it seemed like the Leftys were the only chance the world had. I started worrying for Anna.

  “What about Anna, Jessica? Did you guys ever see her on the inside?”

  “No, we didn’t. But you know what Henry told me when we were hiding in the garage? He said he could’ve sworn he heard her behind a closed door as they were leading him down the hall. He said her voice was ‘unmistakable’ – that was the word he used. That it had the same tone as that first day we were here. In the orientation meeting. When she told that guy off that questioned her. Henry said she was in that utilities building...and she wasn’t taking any shit.” She looked at me apologetically. “Sorry, but that’s what he said.”

  “That’s ok, honey.” I gave her a wink and a smile. “And I bet Henry was right. I can’t imagine Anna taking shit off anyone, especially the ANTs.” Our circumstances had become much more dire with Henry’s condition, but I was trying to ease the emotions of it all. In the back of my mind, I had begun mulling over our options on getting back to Meg. They weren’t good unless Henry recovered. And soon. “I need to talk to Daniel, ok? We’re going to be alright, Jess. Triumphs forever, remember?”

  She nodded slightly, keeping her head bowed and her face partially hidden. I stood and walked to her, pressed her head against my chest and kissed the top of it. There wasn’t anything left to say.

  As I let go of Jessica to go find Daniel, he walked into our room, startling me. He had a frantic look on his face. It was a look that I hadn’t seen in the short time I had known him.

  “They’re coming,” he said, forebodingly.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The ANTs. I don’t know why, but they’re coming.”

  18.

  D aniel vanished as quickly as he had appeared. “Stay with Henry,” I told Jessica. “Let me go find out what’s going on here. I’ll be right back.” I was nervous and getting panicked. How could I protect Henry? How were we going to get out of there? How was I going to save Meg?

  I ran after Dani
el, but there was no slowing him down. We were in the central atrium of the camp before I caught up with him. The energy level throughout the camp was heightened. Lefty soldiers were running this way and that, equipping themselves with guns and grenades and various war gear while moving to their pre-assigned stations of defense. Although they hadn’t planned for a battle this soon, they were surprisingly prepared.

  “Daniel, wait! What the hell is happening?!?” He stopped. “Please,” I asked, “just tell me what is happening.”

  He turned around and faced me. “The distraction team. The ones that were supposed to lure the border ANTs out and create a gap for the others to escape...”

  “Yeah?” I answered.

  “Well, they lured ‘em out, alright. Too far. The ANTs wouldn’t stop chasing them. I guess they were on edge after the explosions. Two of my guys got out after a vicious gunfight in the streets. They got back just a little while ago, badly injured but alive. We don’t know how, but we guess they were followed. We sent out a reconnaissance team to confirm it.”

  “What about the guys on the inside of the grid? What about Anna?”

  Daniel shook his head. “We assume they never found her. She wasn’t with them when they joined the fight in the streets.” He took a breath. “We lost ‘em all, Gordon. All but the two that made it back to Overlord.”

  I started speaking my instinctive thoughts. “I have to get out of here. I have to get my kids out before they get here.”

  “No way, Gordon. There’s no time. And think about Henry,” he said as he grasped my arm to settle me. “Go hunker down with your kids, Gordon. Hold on to Jessica. We’ll do everything we can to protect this place.”