Pennsylvania Omnibus (22 page)

This is all real, Jed. But you need
to remember what you’ve been through to get here. Don’t forget the people who
died in the City to get you out.

Jed heard the voice, but knew that
there’d been no sound other than in his mind. It was a woman’s voice, and it
sounded very familiar. He looked around, and even checked around the adjacent
rows to see if maybe one of the Amish girls was playing a joke on
him.

Don’t forget, Jed. I’m here for you,
but
they’re 
in
here too.

He had a flash vision of a man
holding a gun and pointing it at his face. He couldn’t recall the place or the
man, or anything else about the vision. It happened in the blink of an eye, but
it felt like the beginnings of a memory. Then Matthias walked over with a
canteen full of water. They both drank deeply, and as Jed watched Matthias
drink, he tried to remember the vision, but could not.

“I’d like to go to that great wall,
Matthias. The one that surrounds the AZ. I’d like to stand on it and look out
over the world.”

Matthias put the cap back on the
canteen and wiped his mouth and his youthful beard with his sleeve. A drop of
pure water glistened on the tip of his beard, and again Jed had that feeling
that he should be remembering something.

“The Amish youth like to go up on
the wall, but I’ve never seen the point in it,” Matthias said. “We know what
the English world is like, so I don’t see any use in staring out at
it.”

“I’m new here, Matthias Miller. I’m
like the English tourists, staring at our homes. I want to see it
all.”

Matthias chuckled. “All right, then.
This evening, when work is done, we’ll go stand on the wall and stare at the
English world.”

Jed smiled as he toured the tiny
structure. Matthias’s house was small and comfortable—more of a Dawdi Haus than
a full-sized Amish home. In Amish culture, the
Dawdi Haus
is usually a
smaller home, attached to or near the main house, which the farmer moves into
when he retires and sells the farm and main house to one of his children. A
large Amish family may sometimes have two or three Dawdi homes where the
parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents live and continue to
participate as valuable members of the family.

It wasn’t common for a new farmer to
start with a Dawdi Haus, but these were interesting times on this new world,
and Jed understood the necessity. At some point in the next few months, the
community would show up at Jed’s land and would build a similar house for him
to live in. He heard his father’s voice telling him to be thankful for all
graces, and this made him smile the more.

“Why are you smiling like a cat,
Jedediah?” Matthias asked. “Are you laughing at my tiny house?”

“I love it,” Jed said. “I want one
too.”

Matthias nodded. “Well, you’ll get
one soon enough. In fact, the Church will be here to build my barn in a month’s
time. I’ve already been here awhile, and my turn for a barn is coming up
quickly.”

“A barn raising!” Jed said, and
slapped Matthias on the shoulder. “I haven’t been to one since we put up the
Stolzfuses’ barn last summer.”

“Not last summer, Jed,” Matthias
said. “A long time ago. You’ve been asleep for years.”

Jed laughed. “Still. I’m looking
forward to putting up a barn. You get out of practice, you know?”

Matthias showed him to his tiny
room. It didn’t take long. “On cold nights you’ll want to do like me,” Matthias
said. “I sleep on fleeces in the kitchen near the wood stove. Not too many
freezing nights this time of year, but sometimes.” Matthias placed a full mason
jar in Jed’s hand. “Lard, for the lamp. Use it sparingly.”

Once he’d shown Jed the room,
Matthias left, and Jed checked out his new, temporary home. The small bed was
of standard Amish make: instead of an Englischer mattress, ropes were stretched
across the wooden frame to serve as springs, and these supported five boards,
planed smooth, which in turn held piles of lamb’s fleeces. The bed was pushed
up against a wall, with little room to spare at the foot, and there was no
dresser or other furniture, save for seven pegs that were set into the wall
across from the bed at eye level. There was a single lamp that looked to be a
fat lamp, and that was to suffice for his lighting.

Jed hung his spare set of clothing
on one of the pegs, then sat on the bed and pulled off his boots. He placed the
jar of lard under the bed, stretched out on the fleeces, and closed his
eyes.

Matthias had told him that the
Yoders would be bringing by supper for a week or two, until Jed was settled in.
“We’ll have many meals out as well,” Matthias had told him. “We work away a
lot, so we eat very well.”

Since he had an hour before supper,
Jed decided to rest and try to calm himself of his excitement. He could hardly
believe it: he was finally in New Pennsylvania! His dream was now within reach.
He pressed his eyelids together and tried to imagine what his farm would be
like.

But with his eyes closed tight, what
he saw in his mind’s eye was something else altogether. Jed saw the window from
his barn back home. And strangely, it wasn’t in the barn—it was sitting on a
dirty old sofa in a dark room, lighted only by a lantern. Jed stared for a
while at the old coffee can pane he’d used to fix the window, and then he fell
asleep, and everything went black.

Jed was standing in a darkened room,
and the wall screen was there—a bright flat light that started out in two
dimensions, and then grew until it surrounded him on every side like a cocoon.
Then there were images on the screen, and they looked so real that he thought
he was somewhere else entirely. His brother Amos was there, only he was an old
man. And he seemed to be on trial. An Englischer read out crimes that Amos was
supposed to have committed. Theft. Rebellion. Mass murder. The prosecutor
offered evidence of these crimes, and Amos did not refute him. And images, like
memories, flashed on the screen: of bombs, and war, and innocent people dead
and dying. And then Amish men stood up, elders that Jed didn’t recognize, and
they offered testimony too. They said that Amos was guilty, and that he’d
become as murderous as the Englischers, making war and killing.

Don’t believe it, Jed. These are all
lies
.

Who are you? 
Jed thought.

It’s Dawn. I’m your
friend
.

I love you
.

I know
.

Later that evening, Jed and Matthias
stood up on the great wall, facing east. It had taken them almost an hour to
climb to the top, and Jed was exhausted. He’d been awakened from his nap by
Matthias when the Yoders had shown up with the evening meal. After they’d
supped, Matthias harnessed the horses and pulled the buggy out of the barn. It
had taken forty-five minutes of driving to reach the wall.

“I don’t come here much anymore,”
Matthias said. Darkness was falling, but from the top of the wall the two Amish
men could see to the horizon. The blue of the gloaming was on the land, and
lights were coming on in scattered country houses out in the English
territory.

“Why not?” Jed asked.

“It’s just the English. They come to
stare at us. I don’t spend much time staring back at them.”

Gazing out over the landscape
outside the wall, Jed examined the English homes, just their outlines as the
light of day disappeared into the night. “The English are not unlike us in many
ways,” he said.

“That’s a strange thing to
say.”

Jed looked over at his friend. “They
just want to be happy, Matthias. They’re just confused about what to do about
it.”

Matthias nodded. “I guess I never
thought about it that way.”

“I do,” Jed said.

“I suppose they could start by
ending all of their wars,” Matthias said.

“That might be harder than we
think.”

Matthias thrust his hands down into
the pockets of his broadfall pants. “What can be hard about choosing not to
kill one another?”

“I don’t think the English want to
kill each other,” Jed said. “At least most of them don’t. They’ve been told
what to want and what to think just like we have. They value different
things.”

“The elders say the English will
always be at war. It’s the way of their kind,” Matthias said.

“I hope they’re wrong,” Jed said.
And as he spoke the words, a blinding light—brighter than that of the
sun—erupted in the distance. In a microsecond, the bright cloud broke over the
horizon, turning night to day, and Jed instinctively pulled off his hat and
covered his face. He turned to Matthias, who was doing the same
thing.

Matthias tried to speak, but found
that he could not. “What…?”

The bright light was somehow turning
even brighter, and surrounded them in a glow that made it look like noon up on
the wall.

“Don’t look at it. We have to get
down!” Jed shouted. He moved toward the stairs and pulled Matthias behind him.
Once they were on the way down, they put their hats back on their heads and
took the stairs two at a time. They were thirty feet down when the blast blew
over the wall. It sounded exactly like they would have imagined the end of time
would sound, and the hurricane winds blowing over their heads made a deafening
roar.

“What could it be?” Matthias asked,
out of breath from the running.

Jed steadied his friend as they
continued their descent. “If it isn’t the return of Christ, then something
terrible bad has happened.”

The City ceased to exist in a
microsecond. Merrill’s Antique Shoppe, Ye Olde World English Tavern, and
thousands of other businesses, homes, and lives flashed into dust, and then
blasted outward in a wind that reached hundreds of miles an hour in the blink
of an eye.

On the command deck of the Tulsa,
hundreds of miles away, an old man watched a wall screen, and what he saw took
his breath and his words away. The mushroom cloud grew and grew. The old man’s
mouth flew open, but nothing came out.

From the telltale blues and purples,
he could see that it had been an okcillium detonation. And because it was
okcillium, the land would not be poisoned from radiation, and the sickness
would not kill those who—thanks to distance or other geographical
protection—weren’t killed in the initial detonation of the bomb. The river
would have boiled away nearest the City, and the land would be flat as a
tabletop when and if intrepid explorers chose to investigate this spot. This
vast, empty spot that had once been a large urban area, but was now, for all
intents and purposes, a parking lot.

An officer appeared between Amos and
the wall screen, and the man’s eyes betrayed his fear and wonder.
“Who—”

Amos didn’t hesitate. “It was them.”
He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “They did it to
themselves!”