Free Broken Branch by John Mantooth Page B

in. He said not fitting in makes him angry.”
    G.L. regarded the boy for a long time, and Trudy thought she saw fear in the old man’s eyes. At last he sighed and said, “There’s no demon in you, boy. In fact, there’s no demons at all. Only people. Lord, with all the people about, who could have ever dreamed up demons?”
    Almost as soon as he finished speaking, the sky cracked open with lightning. The wind picked up, almost knocking Trudy over. She held on to the lowest limbs of an oak tree and watched as the wind caught G.L. and carried him up over the trees, where he was flung far across the sky until she couldn’t see him anymore.
    Only she and Rodney remained.
    She reached for him, beckoning her son to her bosom. She wanted so badly to shield him from the storm. But he stepped away from her and turned to the wind, waiting for it to overtake him. She swore, and just before he was tossed into the deepest part of the swamp, she saw him look back.
    When she woke, the rain was no longer beating upon the hatch. There was no thunder. She lay perfectly still, trying to work out some scenario in her mind where it was going to be okay, where the dream she’d had was just a dream, where she’d be allowed to leave this place and her son wouldn’t turn away from her and face the wind.
    She couldn’t see it, though, no matter how hard she tried.

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    Some time later, she climbed the ladder again, dragging her bad hip along despite the pain, and tried the hatch. She wasn’t expecting much—if anything, she hoped the rock had shifted enough for her to just peek out—so when it lifted open easily, she was stunned. Throwing it back, she pulled herself through the opening, only to find water up to her knees. She stood to her full height to see what devastation the storm had wrought.
    Except there was none. The place was clearly changed, but other than the deep flooding (which, now that she thought about it, seemed too deep), there were no signs of damage. The trees were unbroken, their limbs strong and intact. A light misting of rain fell. The moon—half of it anyway—lay in the sky, half-tilted, as if napping.
    She turned and gasped when she saw that all of the houses were gone. Only a single cabin remained, and she saw again that she was in the dream, except she couldn’t be dreaming, could she?
    It didn’t feel like a dream, but, of course, the best dreams never feel like dreams; they carry the weight of reality, and there could be no doubting that weight was pressing on her now.
    Something changed. At first it only seemed to be the light, but then she realized she was moving, tumbling, falling. When she finally stopped, she was back inside the shelter, the darkness so intense that she could almost pretend she wasn’t there at all.
    But she was, and hours later when she found the energy to get up and climb the ladder, the rock was still there and the hatch wouldn’t move even an inch.

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    Trudy lost track of time inside the shelter. It was impossible to do otherwise, as the darkness muted any semblance of the outside world. She was alone, and she resigned herself to the fact that she was likely to die that way.
    She was aware that everyone else might already be dead. The storm might have killed them all, in which case, she found her own fate a little easier to swallow. If her children were dead, Trudy had nothing else to live for anyway. How sad, she thought. Her life had once held so much promise, but she’d thrown it all away for James Sykes, a man she didn’t even love. But that wasn’t quite true, was it? She didn’t love him, had never loved him, but he wasn’t the only reason she’d thrown her life away. She’d also done it for God. Some people, she knew, had to be brought to the Lord kicking and screaming, but then there were others like herself that just craved to have that void filled in their lives. To say she needed