Overthrown II: The Resurrected (Overthrown Trilogy Book 2)

by Judd Vowell

  The farmhouse and its surrounding acreage where we took refuge from the dark chaos had been in my family for what seemed like forever. Located in rural countryside hundreds of miles from any metropolitan area, I had been reared and raised there, and I knew every corner of its fenced-in land by heart. I was off and educated and married when my mother died inside the house, and I expected my father to sell it and move to the city soon after. But he had stayed, although he was rarely at home. An international businessman of some sort that none of us ever understood, work was his life. But we had discovered that there was something else when we arrived at the sanctuary farm a year before. Dad had also been a prepper, stocking up for an unimaginable apocalypse that actually came. His preparations hadn’t made our lives much easier, but they had given us the opportunity to survive.

  I had settled into a daily routine once I had the strength to move on my own without the worry of collapse. Routine helped. Routine kept the minutes and the hours and the days moving forward. It gave me focus for my daily fight against disease, but it also gave me purpose after the worst loss a wife and mother can endure. If not for Henry, I believe I would have given in to the darkness. Gordon was gone forever, as was Jessica. Henry and routine got me through.

  I would wake in the morning to a prepared breakfast next to my bed: sliced apple fresh from the farm’s orchard, two hard-boiled eggs from our ever-dependable chickens, and a tea-like concoction that included vitamins and medicine. Henry was a meticulous care-taker, especially when it came to my nourishment. I think he had made it his mission that summer to cure me. I guess I was all he had left, too. Our desperation worked both ways.

  After my morning meal, I would make the journey out of bed and downstairs. I wanted to be outside at times while I was fighting, although I kept the moments brief due to the oppressive heat. We still had fans throughout the house running on generator power (thank you, Dad), so indoors was consistently cooler. And that made every day, opening the back door and stepping outside, feel like an electric blanket was enveloping me. But I soaked it in anyway. The fresh air, the perspiration that appeared almost instantaneously on my skin, the sound of animals and insects and life. I would sit on the farm’s covered porch until I could bear the heat no longer. Then, back inside, I would read.

  My father had a collection of books that would rival most smaller towns’ libraries, stored on shelves in every room of the farmhouse. There was fiction in the study and philosophy in the front bedroom. Biographies in the den and histories in the hallways. Most of the walls throughout the home held books, from their floors to their ceilings, beckoning a visitor to spend hours looking at their spines in wonderment and intrigue. My father, both a speed-reader and lifelong insomniac, had read every book in the house. And what was even more mind-boggling than that? He remembered them all. He was brilliant in so many ways, but I realized as I got older that his brilliance kept him at a distance, from me and everyone else. That’s why he was gone during my childhood so often. Work was the excuse, but choice was the real reason. His mind was restless. And so even when he was home in my formative years, he was usually locked in a room reading.

  I started with Siddhartha that summer, letting Hesse guide me on a Buddhist trek through the Nepalese countryside. Next was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, riding a bike of American philosophy with Pirsig. I read the beginning chapters of McCarthy’s The Road, walking with the boy and his father through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but had to put it down. It was just too close to my own reality. I chose books that I had never wanted to read, for various reasons, but books that I always knew I should read. I gravitated to stories of journey and travel, maybe out of curiosity or maybe out of want. I still don’t know why, but they certainly helped me through my recovery. And they would eventually inspire me to make a trip of my own.

  But back to the hottest summer I remember. And the afternoon tornado that brought new life into our home. I was reading The Perfect Storm that day, a speculative tale that seemed fitting in retrospect. I was trapped on a boat with no way to escape a once-in-a-lifetime meteorological event off New England’s coast when a soaking-wet Henry came barreling through the study’s closed door. He had a frantic look on his face.

  “What is it, honey?” I asked him, as he was catching his breath.

  “We gotta get to the basement, Mom,” he said. “It’s a storm...and it’s coming right for us.”

  6.

  H enry told me later how he outran the tornado that came that day out of nowhere, after we found a way to live through it.

  He had been two miles or more from the house when he felt the thunderstorm brewing. He was on his daily hike across the farmland, checking the traps he kept set for animals that may have been caught the night before. The dry summer that year had forced thirsty creatures to venture out, and Henry had become adept at capturing them as they searched unfamiliar territory. He was resetting a medium-sized trap that a clever raccoon or possum had escaped when the afternoon’s elevated temperature dropped drastically, over a matter of seconds. And then came the unmistakable smell of rain.

  At first, it had excited him. The prospect of clouds carrying moisture to quench the hard ground and replenish the creeks and streams and rivers made him smile. The animals he had been capturing had become less healthy over the dry summer, and their meat less edible. And the farm’s garden was struggling to produce good crops. Granted, there was only two of us to feed, and our basement supply of canned goods was still ample. But while we weren’t starving, the earth was. And a good rainstorm would at least help ease that.

  Henry made his way out of the cluster of trees he had been inside, giddy to see how big the storm was and which direction it might be moving. But as he broke from the trees, the first roll of thunder rumbled, and then an ear-shattering crackle. It was so loud that he froze and winced a bit. Then he looked up and saw that the massive thunderstorm was nearly on top of him.

  Afraid of the lightning that would inevitably strike with a storm like that, Henry began to run, away from the wall of clouds to another large cluster of forest just a few hundred feet away. Snaps of thunder seemed to become continuous as he ran. Huge raindrops began to fall around him, like blobs dropped randomly from some giant eye-dropper in the sky, until they became a sheet of rain that was inescapable. Once he made it to the group of trees, he stopped to catch his breath and enjoy his refuge for a moment. But the moment was shortened by the sound that most people describe as a freight train. Henry turned around to see the sky had turned from thunderstorm gray to the sickening dark green that presaged a tornado. He knew what it was, without doubt. The only question that remained was whether or not he could outrun it.

  He reminded himself of his left leg, once such a hindrance of immobility that running was only something everyone else could do. “Don’t give out on me now,” he said loudly to his leg, and he was off. Cutting a straight line to the farmhouse, he focused on his motion, ignoring the sounds of the storm behind him. He had decided that looking back would do him no good, so he didn’t. If he were to be sucked up off the ground by mother nature, then at least it would be quick and hopefully painless. Not knowing was the important part. So he ran as if that might happen at any moment. And it may have fueled him just enough, because he made it to the house with enough time to make sure he could move me out of harm’s way.

  I stood from the couch where I had been spending the quiet afternoon, as fast as I could but still slowly, deliberately. I was still far from my full strength. Henry took me by my arm and pulled gently but forcefully. “As fast as you can, Mom,” he yelled, as the sound of the tornado began to overcome us. I felt my ears pop as the air pressure plummeted around us. “NOW!” Henry screamed.

  As we got to the basement’s doorway, I quickly turned to look out the kitchen’s bay window that faced the backyard and farmland beyond it. The tornado was not defined, although I could see its circular motion and the havoc it was wreaking as it made its way toward us. Its gr
eenish-gray color filled the sky outside the window, and I felt surrounded by destruction. The sound of it all was near-deafening. Henry began screaming desperately from behind me. “GET DOWN THERE NOW, MOM!!!”

  Henry slammed the basement door behind us and engaged the deadbolt lock. As I made it to the underground floor, I could hear metal and wood and brick tearing apart. It sounded as if the house was being ripped from its foundation, just a few feet above us. I covered my ears and closed my eyes, feeling a stream of uncontrollable tears fall down my cheeks. And for some reason, in that moment of primal fear, the tears made me think of the rain that we had needed so badly.

  7.

  T he basement door remained shut while the tornado passed over us, with only its deadbolt lock in place. “That’s a good sign,” Henry remarked, once the storm’s destructive noises had died down. “Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounded.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, hoping he was right even though all of my senses were telling me otherwise.

  “You stay here, Mom,” he instructed. “I’ll go upstairs and make sure it’s not too dangerous for us.”

  “Be careful, Henry,” I told him. I couldn’t say much more. My body was aching, and my energy depleted. My muscles had been flexing throughout the storm’s attack, bracing for an impact that never came. It had left me unable to move.

  I heard him unlatch the door’s lock when he reached the top of the basement’s staircase. And then I heard him walking, out of the doorway and above me. His footsteps were quick and haphazard as he moved from room to room. Or what I hoped were still rooms. After a minute or more, his voice came from the top of the stairs.

  “Mom, it’s ok. I think the house is ok.”

  That was enough to re-energize me. I got to my feet and climbed the stairs. When I entered the first-floor hallway, I saw that Henry was right. The walls were intact, the ceiling still above my head. I reached out and touched the wall in front of me to confirm what I was seeing.

  “But what about the noise? What about the terrible noise?” I asked, but Henry was gone, inspecting the second floor.

  I walked slowly down the hallway until I reached the large open kitchen, with its bay window that faced the sprawling land in back of the house. It was still overcast and raining outside, but the terrifying daytime darkness had passed. I could see the littered yard, with giant limbs and branches scattered throughout. As I got closer to the glass, I saw one of our cherished ancient oaks on its massive side, uprooted just a few feet away.

  I still didn’t understand how the farmhouse had avoided any damage, especially with the sounds we had heard. “Finally some luck for this family,” I said to myself as I turned away from the window. And that’s when I saw the door that led from the kitchen to the garage, broken from its top hinge and leaning awkwardly. I went to open it, but it was jammed, lodged in its tilted frame.

  “Let me try, Mom,” Henry calmly said from behind me. I had not heard him when he came into the room, his quiet way still carrying him, even in life’s most stressful moments. I felt a wave of comfort knowing that he was near me again. He worked on the door, finally grabbing its knob with both hands and pulling with all his strength until it gave. And then we saw the destruction that we had heard as the tornado moved over us.

  ΔΔΔ

  I still referred to it as “the garage” because that’s what it was when the home was built so many decades before. But it had become more like a second section of the farmhouse, partially converted years earlier into a living space with a finished apartment above it. My parents had agreed to let me move into the area when I was in high school, separating myself from what I thought was overbearing authority and claiming my teenage independence. It was all for show, of course. The door was rarely locked when I lived there. And with my father gone so often, I still spent most of my free time in the main section of the house, with Mom.

  Once Jessica and Henry were old enough, they would stay in the garage when we visited. It was a huge space. The lower level was a giant open room with endless entertainment options. A real-life kids’ paradise. There was a movie projection screen that covered one entire wall, with two rows of leather reclining chairs facing it. There was a pool table, ping-pong, and two pinball machines. A seemingly endless stack of board games occupied one wall of shelves. A wide selection of books, of course, occupied another.

  The apartment upstairs was just as large, with slanted ceilings on either side that followed the triangular roofline. It held two beds, a full bathroom, and even a small kitchenette. It was nice enough that, once I had left for college, my father would stay in it when he came home late at night from one of his business trips, so as not to disturb my mother.

  But all of that was gone when Henry pulled open the door. Not vanished, but transformed by nature’s violence, reduced to a massive pile of splintered wood and broken bricks in a matter of minutes. I froze in shock at the sight, amazed by the power of the storm and saddened by the unforeseen loss. It was just material, but it was also memories. I felt weak again, overcome by emotions. Destiny seemed to have it in for us, and fate was refusing to let us up for air.

  Henry stepped through the fractured doorway and onto the rubble. The rain had begun to subside, and I started to hear birds chirping. Maybe they were letting their families know that they were alright.

  “Stay there, Mom,” Henry said as he kept moving across the mess. “It’s tricky out here. I’m just going out to check on the rest of the house.”

  I let my legs relax and sat. I was overwhelmed, feeling tears pour out of my eyes again. I saw no need in wiping them away, as I knew there were more to come. I needed the release, the shedding of grief. For my former life, for my disease, for Gordon and Jessica.

  The noise that broke me from my depressed trance was slight and barely audible. Familiar enough, but something I hadn’t heard since before the darkness. It was a whimper, a cry from somewhere beneath the debris of the former garage. I held my sobbing in check, focusing my ears to hear it again. And there it was, the whimper, undeniably there. I couldn’t tell from which direction it came, but I knew it was out in front of me somewhere, hidden below the destruction.

  Then, as if she knew I had heard her, she told me exactly where she was located, with one unmistakably loud bark.

  8.

  I don’t know what happened to the dogs after the Great Dark spun our world into chaos. I assume that most died. Humanity had become harsh and unkind, based on the reports we had heard and the stories from Henry’s journey. Dogs were neglected, I’m sure, if not eventually eaten out of desperation. Those who did escape that fate couldn’t have made it in the wild very long. After generations of domestication, our closest animal companions weren’t very equipped to defend themselves against more aggressive species. The darkness had been a sad prospect for humans, but even more so for our beloved pets.

  My family had dogs on the farm when I was growing up. They were what we called “outside dogs” – big Labradors and Retrievers who lived and slept outdoors, keeping other small wildlife away from the house. Because of that, I was never close to them in the way that a lot of dog-lovers were with their own canine family members. Our outside dogs would approach me for a stroke on the head or to ask for food, but the relationship didn’t go much further. When one of them would meet some mortal accident, Dad would find another and our lives would move on without much interruption.

  Then Gordon surprised me with a puppy on our third anniversary, and my opinion on dogs changed forever. He was heartbreakingly adorable, a beagle with ears and paws too big for the rest of his body. And he had a howl that kept us up at night for two weeks. Gordon had gotten the dog to help ease my depression from miscarriage. I had lost two babies by then, and I was admittedly crushed by the possibility that a child might not be part of our future. But Gordon came through, as he always seemed to do. We named the puppy Streak, because his constant movement made him look as if some other animal was chasing after him all the time. Also b
ecause he had the cutest white stripe of fur down the middle of his face, from the top of his head to the tip of his black nose. For a year, we raised him and spoiled him and forgot about kids. He was the happiest dog I had ever met, and he brought back to me some of the happiness that had disappeared from my life.

  The day Streak died I was with him. We had installed an underground electric fence in our front yard just a few weeks earlier, afraid that his boundless energy may lead him into the street outside our house at the wrong moment. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened, with the fence’s shock not strong enough to stop him that sunny morning. It wasn’t the driver’s fault. I don’t think she ever saw Streak. He was barely a year old, still such a puppy. I ended up blaming myself, and the cycle of depression started all over again. I swore off dogs forever. “Never again, Gordon. I couldn’t take it again.” And then, before I knew it, I was pregnant with Jessica and Henry.

  The kids begged for a puppy many times, as all children do. But I wouldn’t relent. When they were older, I told them about Streak, and about how his death was almost too much for me to take. I tried to make them understand, but children can’t relate to true loss. They’re protected from it, naturally. So Jessica and Henry never gave up asking for a dog, but my answer was always the same: a resounding no.

  But what I had never considered was an animal in need, homeless, lost. It never crossed my mind what I might do if I discovered a dog in desperation. I had too soft a heart to think about that scenario, even if I had built a hardened wall around it after Streak’s death. But thought didn’t factor into what I did when I heard the dog trapped beneath the tornado’s rubble. Emotion took over, and I started digging.