Pennsylvania Omnibus (17 page)

Pook, Ducky, and the surviving
resistance fighters were using the sixty seconds to reload and to prepare
themselves for the renewal of the fight. It was obvious to Jed that Pook had no
intention of surrendering. He and his team would battle to the death. There
were no heroic speeches. The music did not build amid flashbacks to better
times and shorter odds. No debate prevailed upon the stage. The men and women
of TRACE simply went about their preparations as if living or dying were
something completely outside of their control—and thus none of their
concern.

Seeing the inevitability of defeat,
and torn between competing duties and affections, Dawn finally succumbed to
Billy’s wishes and began pulling at Jed’s hand, wordlessly making known her
intention to sneak him off the battlefield toward the Amish Zone. Her orders
came from the SOMA himself, and she had every intention of keeping Jed alive
and getting him to his destination.

Jed watched all of this as the
seconds ticked by, knowing that he alone had the power to save these brave men
and women.

That was when he decided.

It wasn’t a conscious thing. He
didn’t spend minutes pondering the different options that were available to
him. He’d seen enough. Enough good people had died.

For what? For a poor farmer
boy?

It was all too much to take in
anyway, so he acted. Dawn had told him his brother was alive and leading the
rebellion. How was that possible? And the Amish do not fight! He felt like he
was in a bad dream, and that he couldn’t wake up. At the same time, he hadn’t
slept or had anything to eat since… when? It was all too confusing. What he did
next was more of an involuntary reflex than a decision.

Jed shook his hand loose of Dawn’s
grip, climbed to his feet, and walked out into the open field with his hands
up.

“I am Jedediah Troyer! And I
surrender!”

Pook sputtered and then shouted.
“What? What the hell? Jed! Somebody grab—!”

Jed kept walking, and picked up his
pace, making sure he was out in the open and easily identifiable. “I am
Jedediah Troyer, and I accept the terms of surrender!”

A drone appeared and zipped toward
him until it came to hover about fifty yards west of his position. A thin red
beam lit the ground in front of Jed, scanning a few feet left to right before
moving up and coming to rest squarely on Jed’s chest. Ducky and his men raised
their weapons again, ready to reengage on Pook’s order, but everyone could see
that it was too late. The drone could fire in a thousandth of a second and Jed
would be dead before they could return fire. There was no way they could take
the drone out fast enough to save him.

“Damn you, Jed!” Pook shouted, just
as Transport foot soldiers appeared in the distance, moving their way inward
from three different directions.

“
Rebel forces! Follow these
instructions and you will be permitted to depart safely. Leave Jedediah Troyer
and exit the area to the south. If your forces move in any other direction, you
will be engaged and terminated. Lower your weapons and move to the south
immediately
. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

Pook’s hand went up, and he
commanded the rebel team to break contact and move out. Weapons were lowered
and the team began slowly backing out of the area, heading south as instructed.
It was obvious that Pook didn’t trust Transport, but he had no other option.
Retreat was the only way the team might live to fight another day. Transport
wanted Jed, and it seemed like they wanted him alive. The government wanted him
so badly that they were willing to let an armed resistance group escape when it
could have been destroyed. Pook shouted to his men to stay alert, to be ready
in case the Transport offer was a trap.

Billy tried to pull Dawn away, but
she wasn’t having it. She dropped his hand and shook her head. “I’m staying
with Jed. No matter what.”

Billy reached out to Dawn again,
“But Dawn—”

“No matter what!”

She turned her back on Billy and
walked out with her hands raised. Transport troops were moving in now, and
Billy reluctantly turned and joined the retreating rebel force as Dawn joined
Jed. He watched over his shoulder as Dawn and Jed were surrounded.

Dawn slowly put her hands behind her
head, showing Jed by her actions what he should do to make sure that no
Transport goon with an itchy trigger finger was going to shoot them.

As the soldiers arrived, those that
were not involved in capturing the suspects moved outward to set up a defensive
perimeter. Their training made them wary of a counterattack, but they seemed
confident that the battle was over. Two soldiers grabbed Jed and pushed him
roughly to the ground face first, then began zip-tying his hands behind him.
The two troopers did not speak.

Dawn bristled. “Take it easy! He’s
surrendering!”

A gloved hand grabbed Dawn by the
face and shoved her roughly to the ground. Jed struggled, both against the men
and against his conscience, but it was too late.

With Jed restrained, the troopers
turned their attention to Dawn, and soon had her cuffed as well. The soldiers
had just lifted both arrestees to their knees when a Transport officer walked
up and lifted the visor on his helmet. He stared at Jed for several seconds
without saying a word. After a few more intense moments of silence, he shifted
his gaze to Dawn, and then back to Jed.

“So you’re Jedediah Troyer,
eh?”

Jed nodded his head. “Yes,
sir.”

The officer knelt down on one knee
so that his face was only about eight inches from Jed’s face. “Well Jed, it’s
nice to meet you. I’m Teddy Clarion, but you can just call me Clarion. Only my
mom calls me Teddy.”

Jed nodded his head again, but said
nothing.

A small airship hovered in from the
east and landed softly about seventy feet from where Jed and Dawn were being
held. Clarion moved some of the soldiers out of the captives’ field of view,
and Jed and Dawn watched as two more arrestees were dragged from the ship.
These men were also cuffed, but in addition they had black bags over their
heads that had been tied loosely around their necks with white rope. They were
thrown violently to the ground by Jed and Dawn, and struggled to rise to their
knees in protest against their captors. Clarion walked over to the two new
arrivals and, one at a time, loosened the ropes and removed the bags from the
men’s heads.

Jed recognized the men immediately.
They were Hugh Conrad and Officer Rheems, formerly of Transport and currently
rebels against the state.

Clarion pulled a pistol from his
holster, and without any cinematic soliloquies or impassioned or sarcastic
speeches, shot both men through the head. Their bodies flipped backward and
shook on the ground, gyrating in their violent death throes.

Clarion watched the bodies as they
twitched. “Disturbing, isn’t it? Jed Troyer, I’m sure you haven’t watched many
movies, but the lady probably has. It’s criminal they way they show people just
falling over dead when they’re shot in the head—flopping over like a sack of
grain.  In reality, the nerves and synapses continue to fire for some time.
Muscles twitch, even if the whole brain is destroyed. It’s quite gruesome and
troubling, wouldn’t you agree?”

Jed and Dawn just stared, neither of
them able to respond.

Clarion walked back over to Jed with
the pistol in his hand and pointed it at Jed’s head. “So you
surrender?”

Jed watched the bodies of Conrad and
Rheems as the nerves that animated their spasms died, and their sickening jerks
and twitches came to a halt. He just nodded his head.

Clarion stared at Jed with a fierce
intensity—attempting, it seemed, to peer into Jed’s soul. After a long pause,
he jerked his head a little to one side and smirked.

“Pity.”

Just as the mystery of the word
struck him, Jed was grabbed from behind; he flinched at the sharp stick of a
needle going into the meat at the base of his neck. He tried to turn his head,
but could only move it enough to see one of the soldiers jabbing Dawn as well
before the darkness overwhelmed him and the lights went out.

With the captives secured, Teddy
Clarion surveyed the battlefield. Dead rebels were strewn here and there, and
small fires burned among the ashes. As he took a step forward, he saw a small
object near the toe of his boot. He picked it up and examined it. An odd item—a
cigarette lighter, but strange in its manufacture.
Some kind of rebel
technology
, he thought to himself.
I know someone who will want to take
a look at this.

Lost in darkness, Jed felt like he
was swimming toward a faint light, but he couldn’t feel his body moving, and
only sensed its motion by the cloudy shimmering of iridescence caused by his
struggles. He could breathe easily enough, but the occlusion of his vision gave
him the impression that he was underwater, and an unspecific panic reflex took
hold of his mind.

Floating in the brown-gray darkness
he saw images of things that he knew, visions floating in the water, or behind
it and through it. He saw Zoe, his milk cow, struggling in the murk; he saw the
window with the coffee can that had replaced the missing pane; and he saw the
face of his brother leaning over to reach for him from the other side of a gulf
that stretched between them. He reached up for his brother’s hand, and as he
did so he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head and his vision cleared
instantaneously, as if someone had flipped a switch. And as instantly as his
sight was made perfect, he now found that he was standing (if it can be called
standing—he couldn’t feel his body) on a hillside that was covered in the
greenest grass he’d ever seen.

He realized that it may not have
been his real self standing on that hillside. Maybe he was a boy; or maybe he
was someone else entirely. He couldn’t rightly tell. He looked up. The sky was
so blue that it took his breath away, and as he looked around he could see the
minutest details, as if his eyesight had improved a thousandfold in a
moment.

He glanced back up at the blue sky—a
blue like the blue he’d only seen on his mother’s palette when she painted
patterns on smoothed boards that she would sell to the tourists. His mother
never painted natural things, like people, birds, or trees, because creating
images of anything God had made was forbidden. It was against the
ordnung
: the rules of their community. But she did like to paint
patterns and hex signs in bright colors on pieces of plywood, cut round and
sanded. The myth that Amish hex signs were always religious or superstitious,
or that they were put up on barns to keep evil spirits away, was one that had
been trumpeted by secular authorities and governments—and of course by the
tourist industry, to add mystery to the Amish story, and thus attract tourist
dollars. To the Troyer family, the hex signs were just a way for Jed’s mother
to express her artistic side, to display her ethnic identity, and experience
the joy of painting. She always picked the most beautiful colors to use in her
projects.

Jed was staring up into a sky that
was
this
color of blue when he saw what looked to be meteors—or
missiles?—falling from the sky and impacting the ground in brilliant oranges,
reds, and browns. The display lasted for only seconds, but to Jed it felt like
it went on much longer.

Then from the same blue sky—or,
rather, in front of that sky, between him and the blueness—he looked on as
numbers appeared, long rows of digits moving quickly from right to left, zeroes
and ones and symbols that meant nothing to him. These numbers flashed and
disappeared, and then he was in a darkened room and there was a screen of white
suspended in the air in front of him. He looked down at his arms and legs and
hands, and it was just as if they were his own, from his point of view, but the
parts were somehow different, foreign to him. He lifted his hands and saw them
rise up in front of his face. He examined them, but they looked artificial; he
was moving them, but they didn’t feel like
his
. It wasn’t that they
weren’t right, it was that they were…
too
right. The tiny hairs on the
backs of his hands moved as if molested by a gentle breeze that he could not
feel. He could flutter his fingers and touch his nose, but the feelings were
still just—not… quite… right.

On the white screen—which brought to
mind what he’d heard of Englischers’ televisions or movie screens—he could see
his family’s farm, as if from the road, and he found he could reach out and
touch the screen and the image would react to his touch. He could zoom in any
direction and look around the farm.

And they made an image of the beast,
and did worship it…

The words of a sermon preached in
his church by an elder came to him almost in spoken form, but then the thought
was gone and he found he could interact with the picture on the screen simply
by opening and closing his hand in front of him. He was just getting the hang
of manipulating the image of the farm when everything in his view flashed
white, and again he was submerged in the dirty waters, unable to feel anything,
floating, reaching for the light. Feeling the urge to panic. Then blackness
swarmed over him again, and he slept.