Overthrown II: The Resurrected (Overthrown Trilogy Book 2)

by Judd Vowell

  “Go on,” I instructed, hiding the emotional effects of what he had said. I had waited to hear him say those words my entire adult life.

  “I met Salvador Sebastian while I was away on business, so many years ago now that it feels like a different lifetime...”

  He spoke for a long time, and Henry and I listened without comment or expression. I didn’t want to believe any of it, but it was too unreal to be something imagined. My father, Quinn Connors, an ANTI- leader and the man behind the most lethal army that the world had ever seen. I cringed inside myself. He told us what had happened since the battle at Camp Overlord, how he had discovered that Jessica had become an important figure inside the rebellion, and how he had thought that Salvador had killed her in a drone attack.

  He looked up from the table as he finished. “That’s the story until a few weeks ago. Until I found Jessica again. That’s when everything changed for me. If it hadn’t already.”

  “This is crazy,” Henry said. He got up from the table and went to the door that led outside into the back acreage of the farm. He turned before he went out. “The truth is, Grandad, you were never a part of our lives even before the darkness. I never respected you because of that. Not until we got here and found the supplies you left. But now, that’s all over. I don’t think I could love you any less than I do right now.” He slammed the door shut behind him.

  Neither of us spoke for a while after Henry left. It had been a brutal thing to say, but I couldn’t fault him for it. I understood his sentiment. Finally, Dad said, “He’s got fight in him. He always did. Even as a tiny baby. That’s why he’s still alive today.”

  “Save it, Dad. Don’t try to make things better with your compliments and charm. It won’t work on me and you know it.” I still couldn’t believe what I had just heard. “As much as I need time to process this, I can’t afford it. Because Jessica is out there. And she’s at risk, right?”

  “Very much so.”

  I was exasperated, and I was tired. “So what are you proposing we do about it?”

  “You, Henry, and myself...we make a trip to Texas.”

  4.

  D ad’s plan to bring Jessica back to the farm was at least simple. He claimed that he had convinced the group of Omega XT with him to help. They were his men, he said, and they were sympathetic to his situation. Besides, pulling Jessica alone out of the Lefty camp in Texas wouldn’t jeopardize ANTI‑’s ultimate mission. She was one rebel out of many. And Dad had assured the small group of Omega XT soldiers that she would remain harmless, living out her days with Henry and me at the farm.

  “Unless, of course, you wanted to join us,” he said to me. “I could get the three of you immunity, even with the things Jessica has done. You could live in the grid of your choice.”

  “How dare you,” I said. Chance sensed my anger and started to show her teeth. “You come here after a year, not even knowing if we’re still alive. Then you act like this, like you’re offering us salvation.” I took a long breath. “I was surprised about your involvement at first, but I shouldn’t have been. I should have seen this coming years ago. So you can take your grid and your electricity and your new society, and you can shove it up your ass, Dad. The only reason you’re still sitting here is Jessica. You make me sick, but I’ll stomach you for her.”

  He glared at me for a few seconds, not knowing how to react. He was a torn man, I thought. Torn between his flawed passion for ANTI- and the family he had left behind to fulfill it. “This is my house, Margaret. Without everything I provided, none of you would have survived. You don’t have to like me, but I would expect some decency for the man who kept your family alive.”

  “I’m sure Gordon would appreciate your graciousness. That is, if he was still here.” My sarcasm silenced him, and we both cooled off a bit. “Let me talk to Henry,” I said. “If we do this, it will be on his terms. He’s the one I thank for my life every day.”

  I stood, but before I moved to the door, I asked one question of my long-lost father. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know the answer, but I had to ask. “Why, Dad?”

  He looked up at me with regret in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t say anything. I turned and went outside to find Henry. Chance stayed behind at the table, her body stiffened like a statue and her eyes trained on my returned father.

  ΔΔΔ

  Henry had walked a long way from the house. I found him standing with his back to me, staring without focus into the distant sky. He heard me approaching.

  “You believe him?” he asked without turning around.

  “I do, Henry. He’s lied many times before, no doubt about it. But he’s telling us the truth today. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “So what’s supposed to happen? We’re going to save Jess, and then he leaves ANTI‑, and we’re all gonna live happily ever after? I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t either.” He turned to look at me before I continued. “I don’t think he’s ever going to leave ANTI‑. But he will help us get to Jessica. And I think he’ll protect us the best he can once we come back home.”

  “How are we getting her out?”

  “We load up and go to Texas. Today. Right now. When we get there, you and I go to the Lefty camp, find her, and get her out of there. Grandad will have his trusted Omega XT waiting to bring us back.” It sounded preposterous as I heard myself say it, but I had to display some confidence. A mother will try anything to save her child, preposterous or not. “I think it could work.”

  “You should hear what you’re saying, Mom. The Omega XT? Helping us? Yeah, right. And what if Jess doesn’t wanna leave the camp? Then what?”

  “She’ll want to leave when she sees us, Henry. She’ll want to come back here where she can be safe.”

  “I don’t think you understand what’s happening out there, Mom. It’s a war. For you and me and everyone else who’s survived this darkness. If Jess hasn’t come back to us already, then she’s made her choice. She wants to fight. And to be honest, I can’t blame her. I wouldn’t have come back either if it hadn’t been for you.”

  I could see that he believed what he was saying. He and Jessica were young and idealistic. They weren’t afraid of so many things like me. But I knew one thing that Henry didn’t. I knew what it felt like to carry a parent’s love.

  “There are some things that I can’t explain to you, Henry, no matter how hard I try. And you’ve already done the greatest thing for me. But I need for you to do this, too. Please. I need to get my daughter back. I thought I had lost her once. I can’t bear to lose her again. Especially since I have a chance to save her.”

  He thought for a moment, looking away from me as he did. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll go along with it. But if she doesn’t wanna leave, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “This rebellion must really be something,” I said.

  “Mom, you have no idea.”

  5.

  C hance climbed the stairs with me to the large bedroom on the second floor of the farmhouse. I packed a small bag with few clothes, as Dad had instructed. Then I stood frozen for a moment in the middle of the room, unable to leave. I stared at the bed where I had spent so much of my life for the past two years. Where I had dreamed of death and what may come after. Where I thought I would take my last breath. Chance barked at me after a minute or so, and I broke from my past visions of so much pain and horror.

  “Let’s go, girl,” I said as I gave her a rub across her snout. I shut the bedroom’s door behind me, and it felt like I was closing off a sad section of my past. I wondered how long we might be gone, how long it would be before I might see that room again. Something told me it would be longer than I anticipated.

  Henry and I rode in the backseat of one of the ANTI- humvees on the trip to Texas with Chance between us. Dad rode up front with the Omega XT soldier who drove. The inside of the vehicle was stripped down to metal, our slightly cushioned seats the only exception. It was exactly what I thought a m
ilitary vehicle would be like. Certainly not ideal for a thousand-mile journey.

  We left the farm in late afternoon and drove non-stop through the night. The roadways were ours alone, the darkness like a shroud except for the piercing beams of our headlights. None of us talked, and I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The possibilities of Jessica kept me awake. What had she been through? How damaged might she be? Would she come home with us or stay in the fight?

  The sun had not yet risen when I felt the vehicle slow and make a turn. I tried to see a landmark or road sign outside my window, but the darkness was still too complete. Soon enough, Dad turned in his seat and spoke.

  “We’re arriving now,” he said.

  I nodded and turned to Henry. He was sleeping peacefully, his face against the window. I touched him lightly on his shoulder and he woke with a jump. He snapped up his head in confusion and started looking this way and that.

  “It’s ok, baby,” I said. “You’re ok. Just time to wake up, that’s all. We’ve arrived.”

  He settled down, then stretched his arms above his head. “Here goes nothin’,” he said.

  ΔΔΔ

  Dad had planned for us to set up our position a mile from the Lefty camp at an intersection of interstates outside San Antonio. When we stopped, he got out of our humvee and began to bark instructions at his Omega XT soldiers. They quickly staked out brown-and-tan camouflage tents, then covered the vehicles with tarps of the same design. Henry and Chance and I stood watching them work. Their efficiency was impressive.

  “Drones,” Dad told us, pointing to the sky ominously as he said it. “Don’t want anyone to know that we’re here. Now get your stuff together and get inside a tent. We’ll go over our plan of action from there.”

  We did as he said. The tents were large and spacious. It wasn’t long before Dad came into ours. The light of the breaking sunrise shone through the tent’s opening as he entered.

  “Step one complete,” he announced with a clap. “We made it here safe and sound.”

  “You say that as if you were worried about it,” I said with question.

  “I worry about everything, Margaret. Especially when it comes to Salvador Sebastian.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked. “When do we go get Jessica?”

  “Later,” Dad said. “Just before sunset. They stop flying the drones at dusk. We’ll use the darkness they created for cover, just as we did last night.”

  “Stop saying ‘they’ please,” Henry said with disgust. “You’re still a part of them, aren’t you?”

  “Henry, it’s complicated,” Dad said. “You’re still just a boy. Things of this magnitude would be impossible for you to understand.”

  “Screw you, Quinn!” Henry yelled. He had disconnected himself from his grandfather so much that he had used his proper name. I began to fear that I had pushed him too far.

  “Not now, Henry,” I pleaded. “Just give me the next twenty-four hours. That’s all I ask. Don’t hate him until we get our Jess back. Then you can hate him all you want.”

  The rage running through Henry’s body was palpable. He looked away from his grandfather for just a second to look at my face, and he calmed. “Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I’m good. For twenty-four hours, I’m good.”

  I turned to my father. “Dad, let’s just keep this as business. We’re here to complete a job, and that’s it. We’re all thankful that you want to save Jessica. But let’s leave it at that. Ok?”

  Dad was shaken by the way Henry had spoken to him. Maybe he had hoped that Henry’s initial aggression toward him would have eased by then. But he didn’t know what Henry had been through. He didn’t know what any of us had been through.

  “Dad?” I said. “Did you hear me?”

  His eyes refocused. “Yes, yes, of course. Business it is. What was I saying?”

  “Dusk,” I said.

  “Yes, dusk. We send you out at dusk. It will be up to you to get inside their camp. And once you do, you’ve got until dawn to get Jessica out of there and back here. Everything must be done in the dark. Understand?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said. “But how are we supposed to get inside their camp?”

  “That’s easy,” Dad said, walking closer to Henry. “Your son is basically one of them. He should know exactly what to do.”

  6.

  H enry and I, with Chance at my side, began walking toward the Lefty camp while the bottom edge of the sun was still above the western horizon. We wanted to arrive there before total darkness had settled over the camp, so that the rebel guards could see us for who we were. But as Dad had advised, we couldn’t leave too early or else a surveillance drone might spot us. Our timing had to be near-perfect.

  Our destination sat just south of an interstate that looped around the interior portion of San Antonio. We followed the interstate west from where Dad and his Omega XT had set up our temporary camp. It was an eerie and strange experience for me, seeing for the first time how empty the world had actually become. It was so quiet that we could hear our footsteps on the concrete, Henry’s left leg still barely hesitating when it came forward but almost unnoticeable. I was relieved when he started to speak. I needed the distraction of conversation.

  “Mom, I’ve got to warn you about something,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know how we’re gonna get past the guards at this camp.” I heard more concern in his voice than I cared to hear. “There was some sequence of questions and passwords when we got to Camp Overlord, but that was so long ago. I don’t remember them.”

  “And we need to know those passwords? We can’t explain that we know someone on the inside? We can’t tell them who we are?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I have a feeling it doesn’t work that way. Especially after what happened at Overlord. This is a tight organization. We were lucky to be with people who had been recruited back in Nashville. We couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. There’s not a lot of trust left in the world.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? Maybe Grandad could have come up with some other way. We could have planned for this.”

  “Mom,” he said gravely, “I don’t want to upset you, but hear me out. I don’t like any of this. I know you believe him, but I don’t. It just feels like we’re walking into a trap. Like I said, there’s not a lot of trust left. Goes for me, too.”

  I considered what he said. And as much hostility to my father as I was feeling, I didn’t think the man had it in him to double-cross us. We were still flesh and blood. “Henry, think about it, why would he put himself at risk like this? He’s out on his own, defying the group that is now running the world, the group that will kill him if they find out, to save Jessica. Why would he run that risk?”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been asking myself. And the only answer I can come up with scares me. Because none of it makes sense – the Omega XT helping us, his discovery of Jessica without ANTI- knowing about it, his undercover trip to the farm. If you look at the other possibility, it all starts to add up.”

  Henry was brilliant at deduction. He always had been. And he could read between the lines in life better than anyone I knew. That’s why he had done so well in science before the darkness. For him, solving experiments took half as long as the other kids.

  “So what’s the other possibility?” I asked.

  “Simple: they want Jess because now she knows everything about Lefty,” he said. “And we’re the way they can get her.”

  ΔΔΔ

  We had noticed the obstruction on the interstate from a distance, but we couldn’t tell what it was until we were a few hundred feet from it. It was a long mobile home spread across the lanes of the road, blocking passage. The sun was beginning to touch the horizon in front of us when we saw a man come out of the home’s center doorway. He blew an airhorn as he walked slowly down the steps that led from the trailer, and it filled the silence of the oncoming night. We stopped, and Chance yelped at the sound.
r />   The man got to the bottom of the mobile home’s stairs and kept walking toward us. He moved like a military man, stiff and regimented, like his steps had been practiced to be exactly the same every time. But he was dressed in jeans and boots and a leather jacket. He wore a cowboy hat on his head, and he held a shotgun across his chest. Two other men appeared from out of the trailer behind him, dressed the same, then two more who looked different and less Texas cowboy than the others.

  “Let me handle this,” Henry whispered to me as the five men came down the interstate. They walked almost in cadence until they were ten feet from us.

  “What do you want?” the lead guard said. His voice was deep and worn. Henry had said he didn’t remember how to answer. I wondered what he might say in response.

  “My sister,” Henry said calmly. “She’s in there and I need to see her.”

  The lead guard cocked his shotgun. “Turn around, folks. You’re not welcome here.”

  “No, wait...” Henry said, but stopped as the man raised his shotgun and pointed it directly at us. Chance barked loudly. The sun was dropping away fast, and soon it would be too dark for them to see us clearly. I felt panic constrict my chest.

  “I’ll give you three seconds to turn around and walk away, kid. That’s it.”

  “Her name is Jessica, and I’m Henry,” he blurted out. The other two cowboy guards cocked their shotguns and pointed them at us. Henry didn’t waver. “I saved your damn revolution at Overlord, so who cares if I don’t know your damn passwords! I’m not going anywhere until I see my sister!”