After crossing the bridge, the airbus climbed smoothly to one hundred feet of altitude as it automatically directed itself in its pre-programmed route toward the Amish Zone. The buses could fly lower when leaving the City than they could when approaching it. No one had ever bombed or rigged an airbus to blow as it was leaving the City.
Hugh Conrad, in his official position as a Transport Agent, had seen Jed onto the bus, and then had ordered his underlings in the terminal to see that Jed’s airbus left promptly and without hindrance on its journey. Thankfully for Jed, and thanks to Officer Rheems and Jeff Wainwright, the computers just happened to be temporarily blinded to the fact that a wanted fugitive would be using Transport property to escape the City.
Looking out the rear window, Jed saw the bridge grow smaller behind him, and watched the ground slip farther away as the craft made its way into the fifty miles of rural zone that separated the Amish Zone from the City. All the while, the rest of the team, including Conrad and Rheems, had separated into units and were attempting to make their way out of the city using more traditional means of escape.
Jed didn’t know with any certainty when, or if, Transport would learn of the security breach and bring the airbus to a halt on the ground, but he’d been assured by Pook that this was almost certain to happen at some point during the trip. He was nervous and a little frightened, just as he’d been when he’d first left Columbia in Old Pennsylvania back on Earth and headed to the Transport spaceport out in the desert of West Texas. That is, if he’d ever been to Texas at all…
“You guys were never in West Texas.”
That’s what Dawn had said to him and Jerry as the three of them were fleeing the Transport station.
Jed now felt like he needed to question every experience he’d had since his journey first began. None of it made sense.
And then there was the coffee-can window—and that was the kicker of it all. That was the one piece of evidence that inexorably brought home the idea that he could not trust his senses, and that nothing was at all as it appeared. That window was the only thing real that Jed could identify. Everything else could be a trick.
Jed looked out the windows of the airbus, and watched as the early morning light illuminated the deep green of the countryside. Despite all of the weirdness he’d been through, these undulating hills and abundantly verdant swells of earth made him feel that he could easily be back in Pennsylvania—the old Pennsylvania, back on Earth. This place was different in many ways—it was wilder, and the old farms here were grown over with weeds, and trees, and brush—but the geography looked a lot like home.
The bus passed over a small town—or what used to be a small town, but now was just a bombed-out remnant of a town. Jed saw the piles of brick, and the burned-out businesses and homes, and he had to shake his head. Wherever this was, whether this was New Pennsylvania, or Mars, or the far side of the moon, it was clear that the wars the English insisted on fighting had followed them here from Earth.
“You guys were never in West Texas.”
She might as well have said, “You can’t trust anything.”
For the first time in his journey, Jed was alone with his thoughts. All of the scenes from his long trek were now flashing before his eyes. He saw Conrad and Rheems arresting him, and the fear returned and he felt his heart race. He saw himself hiding the gold coin in his pod, and he saw himself waking up and racing with Dawn toward…
What?
Now, in his mind, he was back at the chop shop. Dawn and Jerry were going under the knife, and Donavan—smiling Donavan—was offering to run back to the Transport station to get the coin; to risk his own life for the lives of strangers. Or did he just do it for money? Then there was the ride to the grocery, to the antique shop. And then there was death. Omnipresent death. Surreal and immediate.
What should a man believe?
If West Texas wasn’t real, was any of it real?
The window frame back in the antique store. That was real. Jed had no doubt at all in his mind that the window frame was reality. He could close his eyes right now and he was back on the farm, and he was fourteen again, and he was stomping and pounding that coffee can flat with his worn-out Amish boots and then cutting and shaping it so that it would fit perfectly in the space where the old broken pane had been carefully removed.
Yes. The window frame was real. That, at least, was something on which Jed could anchor his thoughts. Somewhere out there… or back there… somewhere in the universe, he still had family.
And that led him to think about Amos. Jed had told Dawn that Amos was wiser than his years. That was true. If Amos were here, Jed thought, I think the two of us could sort this out. He loved his younger brother so much, and he hoped with all of the hope that was within him that Amos was still on his way here. Wherever—or whenever—this here was. Amos was that window on the couch in the shop. He was real, and he was out there too. Maybe somewhere between here and Earth.
Jed opened his eyes as he felt the airbus slow to a stop. The bus hovered in place for a full minute, and Jed felt his heart race again. Adrenaline flushed through his body, and he felt his stomach give way within him as if his heart had plunged into his gut. The silence was deafening.
Jed moved around the bus, looking toward the ground in every direction, and then his gaze darted along the horizon, trying to gauge where he might be so that he’d know once the bus was commanded to land. He couldn’t see any groups—gangs or salvagers—out there. The bus hovered, shrouded in the miserable silence which permeated everything like a dense, malevolent fog.
Just as Jed moved back toward the rear of the bus in order to try to look eastward towards the City, a loud klaxon sounded, and the bus swerved and dropped radically, as if it was taking evasive maneuvers. For a fraction of a second, Jed saw a floating TRACER drone, but then it was gone.
A terrifying, deafening explosion rocked the airbus, and Jed felt his stomach rise again as the bus plummeted toward the ground.
A second explosion blew the windows out of the bus, and Jed was propelled backward, and only saved himself from falling out of the broken windows by catching a handrail with his flailing hand.
The bus hyper-rotated, as if to try anything to regain control and level flight, and for a moment the vehicle was able to arrest its own fall only ten feet or so from smashing into the earth. The airbus even managed to gain altitude briefly before another explosion violently pummeled the vehicle. This time, Jed saw what was happening. The drone that he’d seen was firing phosphorescent projectiles at the bus, and this last shot had found its mark. The bus cratered near the midsection, and fell the last twenty feet to the earth in a smoking, fiery heap.
Jed blinked his eyes, trying to clear his vision. He’d been unconscious, but only for a few seconds. The impact of the crash had thrown him to the very back of the airbus. Fire was now racing through the crumpled seating area, and there was a solid wall of flames that blocked any attempt at exit through the front.
The smoke was beginning to choke him as he struggled to pull himself upright, and just as he felt as if he might be blacking out, a strong hand jerked him through the place where the windows had once been.
Jed found himself being dragged backward through heavy and unkempt underbrush, while struggling unsuccessfully to regain his feet.