Pennsylvania Omnibus (7 page)

“Clever of you.  Not so much of him.  Doesn’t he know that
unis are basically worthless?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well let’s hope he gets here with the gold before he
finds out,” Pook said with a wink.  He stood up and walked toward the door. 
“We’ll have to go next door to the antique shop, that’s where I keep the
Transport forms for the AZ.”

Merrill’s Antique Shoppe had been spared most of the
damage from the recent battles that the grocery supply building had suffered. 
Pook unlocked the door with an old-fashioned metal key, and as they walked in,
only a faint blue-grey light from the streetlamps filtered into the darkened
building, casting a ghostly hue on the items in the shop.

Without even being able to see much of it, the old
building gave Jed a brief feeling of comfort.  He felt like he was in one of
the ancient buildings on his family’s farm back on Earth.  Everything in the
building was old—and for Jed, strangely, it was the first time he’d felt safe
since he’d left the Amish Zone back home.  Here he was on a planet in a
completely different solar system, and everything around him looked vaguely
familiar.

Pook pulled some heavy blanket curtains down over the
glass windows in the storefront, leaving them in almost perfect darkness.  Then
he walked through the store, and as he did he paused occasionally to light some
fuel-burning lanterns that hung from wrought-iron hooks throughout the
building.  Jed couldn’t say what kind of fuel the lanterns burned, but in his
melancholic reverie he could swear that it smelled just like kerosene.  A
golden glow flooded the store as Pook lit the last lantern.

“A lot of this stuff might look really familiar to you,
Jed,” Pook said, almost as if he sensed what Jed was feeling.  “We buy a lot of
old junk on our regular trips to the Amish Zone.  People in the City like Amish
stuff for some reason.  They’ll hang just about anything Amish on their walls. 
I sold a six-inch piece of rope the other day for a thousand unis.”  He shook
his head and let out a little giggle.  “Of course, now that unis are worthless,
maybe
I
was the one who got the short end of that deal.  Seemed good for
me at the time, though.”

“The paperwork?” Dawn asked.  To Jed, Dawn now seemed like
she was in a hurry.  Like she had somewhere else to be.

“You have a date, cousin?” Pook asked.

“I… I just don’t like hanging around in here,” she
replied.  “It gives me the creeps.  This is all great stuff, and it was super
when it was in someone’s home, but in here it seems almost sacrilegious.  Being
here in this city and separated from the people who loved it and who owned it. 
I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just weird.”

“I don’t think you’re weird,” Jed said.  “I love this
place, but I don’t think you’re weird.”

“I do,” Pook said, laughing.  “Okay, the paperwork. 
Follow me.”

He made his way through the narrow walkways between
mountains of antique furniture, carpets, tools, and household goods.  When he
got to the back of the store, he reached through the flickering shadows, and on
the far wall his hands found an old, whitewashed frame that looked like it had
once been a window.  He placed the window down on a dusty tan sofa; attached to
the back of the frame was an envelope stuffed with papers.

“Here they are,” Pook said.

Pook, Jerry, and Dawn walked back toward the front of the
store, but Jed couldn’t move.  He was staring at the window frame…

The bottom-right pane of glass was missing.  In its place
was a piece of metal, a section of an old coffee can.  You could see that the
can had once—long, long ago—been red with white print, the old-timey kind,
stomped flat and cut to fit.

The window itself looked ancient, as it always had, but
now the piece of metal coffee can looked ancient, too—maybe over a hundred
years old.  Jed stared at the old window and touched the replacement pane with
his hand.

He could almost feel the years pulse through the cool of
the metal as the coffee can stared at him, penetrating him with an ageless
accusation.

Lantern light flickered throughout
Merrill’s Antique Shoppe. The yellow-gold radiance pierced the shadows and made
them dance against the collections of old furniture, twisted wrought iron, tin
signs, and mannequins posed like fashion models arrayed in ancient dresses. 
The waltz of light and darkness reminded Jedediah Troyer of dark winter nights
sitting around the wood burner in the front room of the farmhouse, when the
firelight would shine through the glass window of the stove and his father
would tell the family stories of persecution, of Jakob Ammann, of the lives of
the martyrs.

In
this
Pennsylvania, those stories were ancient
history, mythology, anecdotes of another world altogether.  In this
Pennsylvania, a war raged just outside the front door of the Antique Shoppe—a
war with lasers and flying ships and assassin drones floating in deathly
silence, searching for rebels in the night.

Now and then frightening explosions sounded in the
distance, and the buzzing zip of phosphorescent projectiles or the crackling
beams of laser light would slice through the air over the antique shop,
highlighting both the irony and the relentlessness of time as the group of
rebels plotted amidst the relics of an era long past.

The City was under attack.  Jed wasn’t even sure what that
meant or who might be fighting whom, but the fact that he was trapped in some
acrimonious struggle between alien factions was clear to him.  Englischers—and
most other humans—were already aliens to him, so he had no trouble seeing the
conflict as a foreign engagement, a war in which he had no interest.

Pook Rayburn had just finished forging the last of the
transport papers he hoped would get Jed, Dawn, and Jerry Rios into the Amish
Zone when they heard something heavy crash against the front door of the
shop.

Jed snapped back to the present as the frightening and
desperate alert coming from the front of the shop pried his eyes and thoughts
from the window with the coffee-can replacement pane—a relic from another time
and place. 
His
time and place.

What in the world?

Before anyone could even ask what caused the noise, Pook
was up and running towards the door.  He drew an antique twelve-gauge shotgun
from an old umbrella stand as he passed it, and pumped a shell into the
receiver before cautiously unlocking the door with his left hand and pulling it
open.

Slumped against the doorframe was a man in a dark,
military-style trench coat, and when the door opened the man fell into the
entryway.  His black features were barely licked by the light of the kerosene
lamps, but even from Jed’s location fifteen feet away he could see that the man
on the floor was Donavan, and that he was still alive.

Jerry Rios—a large man, but athletic and quick—was moving
now, and so was Dawn.  Together with Pook they dragged Donavan into the shop,
Dawn unconsciously trying to avoid stepping in the blood that trailed onto the
hardwood floor as they struggled to move the injured man.  Once they’d cleared
the doorway, Pook stuck his head outside and looked around, checking that
Donavan had not been followed.  Satisfied that there was no immediate threat,
he closed the door.

Jed didn’t know how to react and, peering over Jerry’s
shoulder, he could see that Donavan’s eyes were open and blood was seeping out
of the corner of his mouth.  When the wounded man saw Dawn and Jed, he smiled
and shook his head, before coughing out some of the blood that was beginning to
build up in his throat, blocking his airway.

Dawn was searching Donavan to try to ascertain his
injuries, probing with her hands, and Jerry was propping up the injured man’s
head when Pook returned from locking the door.

“What happened, Donavan?” Pook asked.

“They got me,” Donavan said, and laughed again. “Isn’t
that what they say in the old movies?”

“This isn’t a movie, Donavan!  Who got you?  What
happened?” Dawn asked.

“Transport.”

“But you
work
for Transport!”

“I think I’ve been fired,” Donavan replied wryly.  “We
mutually agreed that I had no future with the company.”

“Are you going to tell us what happened?” Pook asked.

Donavan’s head lolled to one side.  “They showed up just
as I was leaving the ship with the coin.  They didn’t have to say anything.” 
He gasped and inhaled deeply before continuing. “I could tell by the way they
were walking towards me with their hands reaching towards their guns that I was
busted, so I ran.”

Another laugh brought on a fit of coughing and more blood
came up before Donavan spoke again.  This time no one peppered him with
questions.  Their silence implored him to continue.

“I got out of the building, and I was almost back to the
van when one of them got me.  It was a good shot, man, I’m telling you.  I was
almost behind the van and one of them hit me in the lower back.  Kidney shot. 
Game over.”

Dawn gasped, and Jerry carefully rolled Donavan onto his
side.  Blackish blood was seeping from a hole in the trench coat and soaking
into the ancient hardwood floor.  Jerry gently eased Donavan onto his back
again.

Donavan laughed again.  “Sorry about your floor, Pook.”

“Shut up, man.  This is a serious wound.  We can’t get you
to a doctor, and you know that.”

“I know.  I know it.  I’m done.  I’m just glad I made it
back here.”  As he said this, his hand opened and in his bloody palm was Jed’s
gold coin.

“We can give you the unis we owe you, Donavan,” Dawn said
with obvious sadness in her voice, “but you’ll never spend them.”

“I know.  You guys can keep them.  They’re almost
worthless anyway.”  More coughing and wheezing as Donavan struggled to hang on
to the thread of thought that was still pulling him onward.  “I just waited too
long to get out.  I was planning to get my own BICE removed next week, but it’s
too late now.”

“Ah, man,” Pook exhaled and then looked around, “I didn’t
think about that.”  He slapped his hand against the door in anger.  “Your
BICE.  They can track you here.”

“No, they can’t,” Donavan said with a grunt.  He brought
his left hand up to the back of his head, and when he pulled his hand back it
was covered in blood.

“I didn’t even look at his head after he said he was shot
in the back,” Jerry said.  He rolled Donavan’s head to the side, and they could
all see that Donavan’s short, curly hair was matted with blackened blood.

“You cut it out yourself, you crazy fool?” Pook asked.

“Yeah.  I ditched the van not far from the station and
then I crawled down an alley.  I cut the BICE out with a piece of sharp
aluminum I found behind a recycling unit.  You’d be surprised at what you’re
capable of doing when you still think you might survive.”  Donavan laughed
again, which set him off on another coughing spell.  He gagged a little on his
own blood.

“Can’t they track his TRID?” Jed asked.  He had only the
faintest idea what ‘tracking’ really was or how anyone could do it, but it
seemed to him that if they could track a BICE they could track a TRID.

“No,” Dawn said.  “Most of the people, like me, who had
the newest BICE units didn’t require a Transport ID chip.  They’re all-in-one
now.  The Transport ID is in the BICE unit.”  She showed Jed the back of her
hand and he could see an old, healed scar, barely visible in the dancing light
from the lanterns.  “I had my TRID removed when I got the new BICE unit a
couple of years ago.”

“Listen,” Donavan sputtered.  He was fading fast, and Jed
could see that the man’s life was coming to an end.  “I don’t have much time,
so listen up.”  His voice was a low wheeze, and his eyes fluttered as he
struggled to push out words.  He coughed again, but this time it was weaker and
he choked a little on the blood as he tried to raise his voice.  “There are
Transport units everywhere.  They know there are TRACE resistance groups active
in the City, so they’re looking.  They’ll come here, and probably soon.”