“Only my mother calls me Teddy,” the man said. And that’s when Jed knew. It was the Transport official who’d captured them in the No Man’s Land west of the City. The man who had killed Conrad and Rheems.
“I’ll give you five more seconds, and if you aren’t up here, I’ll come down and kill you there,” Clarion said.
When Jed emerged from the cellar, he felt as though he were entering some kind of nightmarish alternate universe. The same serene Amish great room in which he’d sat politely just moments earlier had now been stained by violence and death. The bodies of Elizabeth Yoder, her husband, and Matthias lay lifelessly on the floor, blood pooling around them. Jed could only stare in shock at his friend Matthias, a good and peaceful man who now lay facedown in his own blood. Four Transport officers in full battle gear stood around the room, eyeing Jed and Dawn warily.
“Your time is up,” Clarion said. “We’d hoped to use you two for… morale purposes… among the plain people here, but you just couldn’t leave things alone, could you, Mrs. Beachy?”
Dawn didn’t reply.
“You should have known we’d find out you were trying to help the boy.”
Dawn sneered. “You brought me here. What did you think I’d do?”
“We hoped that we could just hold you and produce you if ever Jed here needed convincing,” Clarion said. “Of course, we didn’t know at the time that our insiders here, the Yoders, were working with the rebels too.”
“There seems to be a lot you didn’t know,” Dawn said.
“I know what happens next,” Clarion said, smiling.
“I’m a soldier,” Dawn said.
“Soldiers die.”
“Then we all know where we stand,” Dawn replied.
Clarion didn’t speak again. He turned and gave some orders to his men, and as he did, Jed noticed a slight motion on the floor. He glanced down at Matthias and saw his friend’s hand move. Matthias was still alive!
“Hold it!” Jed shouted, and when Clarion looked at him, Jed acted like he’d been speaking to the Transport men, rather than to his friend.
“We’ll hold nothing,” Clarion replied with a smirk and raised his weapon. “Like I said. Time’s up.”
The noise was deafening as the windows of the Yoder house exploded inward and the green blinds were ripped from their moorings. Jed sensed the impact coming before it came, or perhaps he’d seen a shadow move through the blinds, but in any event he grabbed Dawn firmly by the arm and, as the impact happened, pulled her to the ground.
Clarion and his men reacted slowly. Too slowly. And most of them were dead before they’d even realized what happened. The windows of the Yoder house imploded as men smashed through them simultaneously. Jed recognized Pook Rayburn as he pulled the trigger on his pistol and fired the shot that hit Teddy Clarion in the head, killing him. The wild man named Eagles appeared like a specter behind one of the Transport soldiers and, lightning-fast, produced a knife from somewhere in his mass of odd and mismatched clothing and cut the soldier’s throat, throwing him to the ground.
Flying head first through the far window, Jerry Rios hit the floor and rolled, and came up shooting, taking down the last two soldiers. In the blink of an eye all of the Transport fighters were dead or dying.
Eagles, the unkempt savage, was standing in front of Dawn and Jed with a bloody knife clutched in his mammoth hand, and when the two looked up at him he smiled. There was a huge wad of tobac in his mouth, and saliva—mixed liberally with greenish particles and pieces of glass—was in his beard. He was the most beautiful thing that Jed had ever seen, other than Dawn.
Spittle flew from Eagles’s mouth as he shouted triumphantly. “Goa Eeguls saving the Amish boy and girl!” He lifted his hands into the air dramatically. “Ta-daa!”
KNOT 5:
The Peaceful Kind
(28
A LONG HAUL
NOW
Jed rocked back and forth beneath the wide blue sky. He was lying on his back, a green soldier’s blanket laid over his chest, as he was carried on a stretcher held aloft by four men. He saw the beautiful wispy clouds, some connected by gossamer threads of vapor and others seemingly more solid, like great billowy ships adrift in a heavenly sea, and he felt the rhythm of the swaying as the men walked. He had a headache, there was no denying that, and he could hear the people who traveled with him talking as the group moved.
“The only portal left is up on the Shelf, and now with the AZ gone, it’s our only hope.” It was Pook Rayburn talking, and Jed smiled when he recognized the voice. He’d grown to like Pook while working with him on the farm over this past week. He closed his eyes and focused his attention on the voices, hoping that by doing so maybe the headache would fade.
“It’s a long haul, but we’ll make it.” This time it was Dawn Beachy speaking. “We don’t really have any other choice.”
“I hope he’s going to be able to walk at least part of the way,” a third voice said.
There was a loud, derisive sound as one of the men snorted aloud and then spat. “Boy being hurting,” that deep and easily identifiable voice scolded. “Eeguls and boys carrying he all everywhere if needing be.”
“I understand, Eagles,” the third voice said. Ducky, Jed thought. I know his voice and his tendency to worry. “And I’m not complaining,” Ducky added. “Besides, as short as I am I’m not really carrying any of Jed’s weight at all. I’m just saying it would be nice if he improves and he can walk part of the way.”
“He’s had a major head injury,” Dawn said. “Angelo and I had to do four hours of surgery just to get all the shrapnel from his shattered BICE out of him… all so no little piece would get into his bloodstream or work its way around so that it cut something important.”
“He’s lucky to be alive after that fall,” Pook added.
“Okay!” Ducky said with a sigh. “Just so everyone knows: I’m not complaining about us having to carry Jed. Not at all.”
“We all want him to improve and get better, Ducky,” Dawn said.
“That’s all I was saying,” Ducky said.
Jed opened his eyes again and stared into the sky. So beautiful. The headache blurred a little around the edges, and he concentrated on breathing deeply, tried to focus his attention on where he was and what might be happening. So: his BICE was gone. Shattered in a fall. That was one thing. He tried to access it, as if he believed that what he’d just heard wasn’t true. He concentrated and imagined his BICE control panel coming up, but however much he focused, nothing happened.
He watched the clouds again as they moved, and then closed his eyes and took several very deep breaths. He tried to let all of the tension go out of his body, noting that as he did so, the headache seemed to lessen just a bit. Then he opened his eyes again. He imagined the sky and the clouds as being made of tiny pixels, and he tried to soar up there so he could get a closer look. Nothing happened, so he settled himself again. To be without the BICE interface now… it seemed like trying to think or operate without part of his own mind. Surely all of his new powers hadn’t been stripped from him?
He tried to remember everything he’d been told about how the brain worked. He evened out his breathing again, and this time he really concentrated. He imagined the new synapses that had been formed when the BICE was first installed, and he tried to think of them as little switches that could be flipped on and off at will. He once again pictured himself bringing up his BICE control interface. And this time, something spectacular happened.