Pennsylvania Omnibus (8 page)

“Did you see them?” Dawn asked.

“They are… they… are… everywhere.”  Donavan breathed
deeply, trying to access some last store of energy so that he could finish what
he had to say.  He blinked several times, and Jed could see the life draining
from the man’s eyes.

“They have Transport drones… TRACERs out there too. 
Flying silent.  Watch.  Pook?  Pook?”

“I’m right here, Donavan.”

“Pook, if you don’t have guns, you need to make some right
now.  I don’t think you’ll make it past the walls and to the AZ…  Pook?”

“Here, Donavan.”

“You’ll have to fight your way out, most likely.”

“I’ll get us out, Donavan.  Thanks to you.  We’ll make it,
man.”

“Make it,” Donavan sighed.

“We’ll make it!”

“Make… it.”

“Thank you, Donavan,” Dawn whispered.  She was crying now,
and Jed felt like he was going to cry too.  He didn’t even know Donavan, but he
was moved by the man’s sacrifice.

There was a final gasp, and then almost a “whoosh” sound
as the last of the air escaped the dying man’s lungs.  As he died, his hand
opened, and the gold coin rolled onto the wood floor, circling in a lazy arc
before bouncing off of Jed’s shoe and coming to a stop.

Pook looked down at the coin and said, “Heads,” in almost
a whisper.  He looked at Jed and nodded his head slowly.  “Pick it up, man.  He
died to get it to you.”

Working together with Jerry and Dawn, Pook wrapped
Donavan’s body in a tarp and secured it with several sections of hemp rope,
tying it up tightly like a package.

Pook looked down on their work and shook his head.  “We’ll
have to stow him in the back for now.  I’ll get some of my men to come and get
the body and try to give him a proper burial.”

Jerry bent down and lifted Donavan’s body by the feet, and
Pook grabbed the corpse by the shoulders.  Together they shuffle-carried the
dead man toward the rear of the store and into a darkened office near the back
door.

As they hefted Donavan onto a dusty desk, a deep rumble
shook the building, followed by a thunderous roar that caused Jed and Dawn to
look at one another with unvoiced concern.  A tear rolled unchecked down Dawn’s
face.

The rumble gradually died away into the distance, and Dawn
looked upward, blinking through the moisture in her eyes, as if to check to see
if the roof was going to cave in on them.  When it didn’t, she looked back at
Jed.

Jed and Dawn stared deeply into one another’s eyes, and
for the first time he saw that she was not entirely the cool and dispassionate
professional that she’d appeared to have been the entire time he’d known her. 
She wiped away the wetness from her cheek as she studied Jed’s face for
answers.

He had none.

Murder.  Violence.  War.  These were things that were
usually outside of his world, separate from his realm of experience.  Death in
the Amish world was structured, ordered, systematic.  Even when an unexpected
accident took the lives of the young—maybe a buggy overturned, or a boy fell
under a plow—there was a system to things.  Everyone was on the same side, and
all played their parts.  Death was considered a stage of life, and it was
integrated into the system in a way that left no room for confusion or
doubt.

But this—people being gunned down in the streets—was a
foreign concept to Jed.  Implements of war loosed in the streets of cities,
mindless tools of despotic governments seeking flesh to destroy.  And for
what?  How could a young man like Jed understand the devilish and covetous
motivations that could bring about such a way of living?

It didn’t seem to Jed that Donavan had been a bad man. 
Donavan was just a Transport official who wanted
out
.  Jed had to
wonder… isn’t
out
a primal desire?  Isn’t
out
a destination found
in the heart of every man and woman?

When Pook and Jerry returned from stowing the body, the
four of them stood wordlessly for a while, as if the moment transcended words
and demanded silent recognition of the Transport man’s sacrifice.  As they
stood in gauzy silence, Jed could hear a breeze bend its way around the
building, on its journey from somewhere to eternity.  The building creaked and
whispered its age, and Jed identified the very faint
pop, pop, pop
of
the lanterns sucking oxygen through their flames.

After an appropriately solemn period of respectful
silence, Jerry turned to Pook and tapped him lightly on the arm.

“So what’s this about making guns?” he asked.

“We’ll have to go down to the basement.”

“Lead the way.”

Dawn and Jed stayed behind for a moment longer, and when
the others were gone, Dawn’s hand came up to her mouth.

Jed noticed a slight tremor in the hand, and that small
involuntary expression communicated to him her fear and sorrow.  He didn’t know
what to do, but he felt that he should do
something
, anything—so he did
what he would have done for Amos, or even for his mother if they were upset. 
He put his arms around Dawn and drew her close to him in an embrace.  He didn’t
second-guess his reasons for reaching out to Dawn, and she seemed to
immediately submit to what the moment required.

As if the act of Jed embracing her gave her permission to
release a pent-up torrent of emotion, Dawn collapsed into him, squeezing him
tightly, and a loud sob escaped from her as the tears flowed freely.

“Thank you, Jed.”

“No.  Thank you for getting me out of that place, Dawn,
and for watching over me on this trip.”

“It was…” She paused a few beats.  “It
is
my
job.”

Jed moved to pull away from her, his mind reeling at
everything that had transpired since he’d left Old Pennsylvania on this
journey.

“Your job?” he asked.

Dawn grabbed him as he pulled away, and pulled him back
into her arms.

“Yes,” she said. “Your safety is my job.”

Jed continued to embrace her, and as his gaze drifted
across the antiques, the light flickering among them, he saw them for what they
were: moments that marked real lives that were lived.

“I have so many questions,” Jed said as he pulled away
from Dawn’s embrace again.

“I know, Jed.  I know you do.  You have been very
patient.  But we don’t have time to go through everything right now.  Lives are
at stake, and you know that.  It would all blow your mind out of your ears…
seriously.”

“I know.”  Jed took a step backwards, then began to move
towards the door that led down to the basement.  When he did, Dawn’s hand
darted out and grabbed his hand.

“Jed, everything is not as it seems.  I know you probably
know that by now, but no matter what happens, you need to believe that you can
trust me.  I’m here to help you, and to keep you alive.  I can’t answer all of
your questions, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t believe me if I could.  But
I’ll tell you whatever I can when the time is right.  For right now, my
job—
our
job—is to get you to the Amish Zone. That is my one and only
mission in life.”

Jed looked down at his boots, and then back up at Dawn. 
He was still holding her hand, so when he turned again he pulled her gently
behind him.

“Let me show you something,” Jed said softly over his
shoulder.

“What?  Here?  In the shop?”

“Yes, it’s back here where Pook kept his forgery
papers.”

“Okay” was all that Dawn could manage to say as she let
herself be pulled down a dark aisle and then back up another row that was dimly
lit by lantern light.

When they were back in the little nook where Pook had
removed the old relic from the wall, Jed pointed to the antique window that now
rested against an old, dusty couch.  Jed went down to a knee and reached out to
touch the flattened coffee can that served as a replacement to a long-ago
broken pane.

“This window frame came from the old barn on my farm. 
Back in Old Pennsylvania.”

Dawn stood quietly a while, and when Jed finally looked up
at her, she was staring at him, as if she wasn’t sure what she should say.

“I broke this window pane with my slingshot when I was
fourteen years old.  I replaced the pane myself with this coffee can.  I looked
up at this window in the gabled end of our barn only days ago, when I was
leaving to board the airbus to start this trip.”

“That wasn’t days ago, Jed.”

“I know.  I know that.  But at the most it was nine years
ago, and that’s if the window frame made the trip with us on the ship, and I
don’t believe that it did.  It was here when we got here, and it was covered in
a lot of dust.  Something is wrong.”

“Maybe it’s another window and it just really looks like
yours.  Maybe you’re homesick, and you remember a window a lot like this one?” 
Dawn didn’t say these things as though she believed them.  She said them as if
she were offering them up as excuses… reasons to suspend disbelief for just a
little while longer.

“No, Dawn.”  He touched the metal replacement pane again. 
“This is what I know.  This is the only thing I know in the whole universe
right now.  This is my work.  It was a point of humor between my dad and me.  I
looked at it all the time.  I put this can here.”  His fingers traced the
raised lettering on the flattened, ancient coffee can.

“There are a lot of things that I just can’t tell you yet,
Jedediah.”

“Just tell me where I am, and what happened to my
home.”

“Where… well,
where
is an interesting question. 
And I don’t mean to sound mysterious, or to put you off when you’re obviously
concerned and maybe worried too, but the real question—and it’s another one
that I can’t yet answer for you—isn’t
where
are you, but
when
.”

Jed looked up at Dawn, but his hand didn’t leave the metal
can in the window frame.

“So answer it, then. 
When am I
, Dawn?”

Dawn shook her head and tried to smile, though the smile
came off more like a grimace than anything else.

“I can’t tell you that, Jed.  I just can’t.  Not yet.  I
would if I could, and you have to believe that.  When you’re safe, and when I
have leave to tell you, I’ll tell you everything I can.  For now, we have to go
join the others.  We have work to do.”

With that, Dawn turned and walked back through the piles
of ancient goods toward the basement of Merrill’s Antique Shoppe.

The basement beneath the shop was
lit by a dozen lanterns scattered around the place, and the flickering, golden
light revealed a cavernous room that looked as old as anything Jed had ever
seen in the Amish Zone back on Earth.  Older even.  The dark red bricks that
made up the walls appeared to be of the handmade variety, imperfect and
inconsistent, adhered together with ancient, sandy gray mortar that here and
there had dripped down over the brick faces in haphazard fashion.  The
construction looked to Jed to be from the turn of the twentieth century, and
widely scattered mold and mildew stains marked the faces of the walls.  Bags
and boxes of old clothing and antique bits and pieces of the flotsam of time
were scattered in dusty piles around the basement and stacked high against the
brick walls—all except for the north wall, which had been cleared of the
residue of these once-loved, but now forgotten, material possessions.  The
detritus of former lives. 

Along that north wall, standing like a line of mechanical
soldiers—or the shiny, stainless steel milking machines that Jed had seen once
in a more liberal Amish neighbor’s barn—were ten complicated-looking machines. 
The cords from the machines ran along the base of the wall and were taped
together where they terminated in an enormous plug the likes of which Jed had
never seen.

Pook followed Jed’s gaze. “We can’t use grid power, even
if the power were up right now.  They track any anomalies in power usage very
closely.”

“Anomalies,” Jed repeated, absentmindedly, as he stared at
the machines.

“Freakin’ anomalies,” Jerry repeated with a smile on his
face.  He seemed to be enjoying the entire adventure immensely.

“We had a friend who was running a single one of these
machines using grid power out in one of the suburbs of the City,” Pook said as
he worked.  “This was years ago.  Anyway, they toasted the whole subdivision
with a micro-nuke just to make sure they got him.  Killed hundreds of
people.”

“Who did that?” Jed asked.  “Who would kill hundreds of
people to get one person for using a machine?”

“Transport, that’s who,” Pook said through a barely
disguised sneer.

“I don’t understand what using a machine has to do with
Transport,” Jed said.

“
Everything
has to do with Transport,” Pook said,
holding his right hand out in a clenched fist.  He squeezed the fist as if he
were crushing anything that could have fit into it.  “For all intents and
purposes, Transport
is
the government here, just like where you’re
from.  It all goes back to the founding of the United States and the
misinterpretation and misuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause found in the
Constitution of America.  Through time, governments used that clause to
rationalize that
everything
—especially in a global world with
instantaneous communication and the blurring of state, national, and
international lines, laws, and responsibilities—fell under Transport law. 
After the wars of the early twenty-first century and the globalization of the
‘war on terror,’ micromanaging Transport became the easiest way to control
populations and govern human behavior.”

“That’s when private transport was outlawed,” Jerry said,
nodding his head toward Jed.