Dawn smiled. This was the life she wanted to live, and this was the man she wanted to live it with.
Before noon, the frame of the barn was already in place, and when the midday meal was called, the siding was already beginning to go up.
A light and perfect breeze accented the day, moving just lightly enough to keep everyone cool in the bright sunlight, and the smell of mown grass, cut lumber, and roasted chicken mixed in the air.
The women were laughing and clearing the long wooden tables of empty platters and bowls when the first sounds of war were heard.
Dawn was doing what many of the young ladies had done just after the dinner was over. She was the last of the ladies who’d climbed up a very tall ladder to the peak of the new barn so that she could look out over New Pennsylvania from the very top. Jed was seated on the center beam, straddling it and nailing in a rafter, when he turned and saw Dawn looking at him with a big smile on her face.
“Get ye down before ye hurt ye by fallin’!” Jed said with a laugh.
“I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” Dawn said with a playful smile on her face.
“It’s just a barn,” Jed said.
Dawn laughed. “Oh, so you think all those single Amish beauties just climbed this rickety ladder one after another to look at a barn?”
“What else is there to look at?” Jed asked.
“Jedediah Troyer, that’s what!” Dawn said.
“Oh, get ye down!”
A low rumble shook the ground just then, and both Jed and Dawn looked up as a formation of maybe a dozen or more white drones, spherical and without markings, appeared over the high perimeter wall that ringed the Amish Zone.
“Dawn, get down!” Jed shouted. But Dawn, like everyone else who saw the sight, was frozen in place.
Just then, an attack craft—from Jed’s point of view it had to be a TRACE fighter—sped from his left and engaged the drones, shooting two of them down in a shower of laser light and sparks. The two drones exploded and spun toward the ground, crashing in balls of fire and smoke.
One of the drones dropped precipitously, then shot back upward and fired a long volley of phosphorescent projectiles that struck the TRACE fighter and blew it out of the sky.
Now chaos reigned. Explosions rocked the ground, and more drones appeared on the horizon. An endless number, seeming to stretch from one end of the heavens to the other.
“Dawn!” Jed yelled, and she looked up and caught his glance. “Please get down!” he hollered, as four TRACE fighters zoomed overhead and then banked toward the approaching drones.
“You too!” Dawn shouted, but not before a flash of laser light split the air near her, sending crackling electricity like lightning through the air. She was halfway down the ladder when another explosion hit Matthias’s little house, and almost at the same instant several of the buggies were struck and exploded, cartwheeling through the air before crashing down to the earth in splinters.
Another drone crashed nearby, and Dawn looked up in time to see three more TRACE fighters zip overhead at an extremely high speed. By now, Amish families were gathering together, and the parents were leading their children to run and hide—rushing to anywhere that might offer them safety. Dawn saw a family running across a field of low, green tobacco, and could only watch as a large TRACE ship crash-landed right in front of them. The family stared for a moment, and then turned and ran the other way.
The ship was huge, and Dawn was thankful that it hadn’t exploded on impact. As it was, the crash landing had gouged up several acres of cropland. She shook her head and stared out at the confusion and destruction. War had erupted in the Amish Zone, and death and destruction now rained down from the sky. This certainly wasn’t the first time a devilish government had unleashed its military to try destroy the Amish—but for those who were experiencing it, the scene was like none they’d ever imagined.
The Amish are raised on stories of persecution and violence. They know the tales by heart from the time they are children in the crib. They’ve always known that such things have happened often enough in the past. But the human mind is alike in every race and sect of people: when the danger isn’t close enough, or when enough generations have passed so that the reality of hardship and persecution ceases to be real, the threats fade. They take on the quality of interesting fiction. But now, on this Saturday, as the blood of saints and tyrants began to mingle in the soil of New Pennsylvania, the ghosts and pains of the past took on new life for the residents of the Amish Zone.
From the wreckage of the downed TRACE aircraft, Dawn saw a figure appear. Old, and bowed down a bit from age and circumstance, the figure crawled out of the fighter and began to walk stoically toward the new barn.
Amos.
Dawn began to run toward her friend, but she’d only taken a few steps when she remembered that Jed was still atop the barn. She skidded to a stop and swung around just in time to see a phosphorescent projectile split the center beam of the barn—which gave way under Jed’s weight.
Dawn’s eyes met Jed’s for just a moment as he began to fall, but in an instant he had flipped over backward and plummeted to the ground, landing beyond her view. Her breath caught in her throat and her hands came up to her mouth and she had to look away. As she did, she saw that Amos was running toward her with a hand outstretched. He got to her just as she pushed away and ran inside the barn.
As the two friends stepped over a portion of the shattered beam, they saw Jed lying in the rubble. He was bloody, and he looked for all the world like he was dead.
A buggy pulled by two galloping black horses sped up the lane and then turned into the drive at Matthias’s farm. Black buggies were everywhere: some scattered as horses bolted in fear, some shattered from explosions, and others being used by Amish farmers to get their families to safety.
Eagles was driving the horses hard, and Pook and Ducky were crammed into the buggy, holding on for dear life. Another buggy backed out into the drive as an Amish man tried to get control of his horses, and to avoid a collision Eagles turned the horses through a hedge. Their buggy nearly launched into the air as it crashed through the bushes and slid across the lawn, and the weight of the three militia soldiers, all thrown against one side of the buggy, flipped the vehicle over, separating it from the horses, who broke and ran across the field in terror.
Just as another buggy pulled up next to the destroyed one, Pook Rayburn kicked open the side door of the crashed vehicle—the side door which was now pointed straight upward toward the sky—and he and Ducky crawled stiffly out of the wrecked pile of wood and metal. Once they’d made their way to the ground, they checked one another for injuries and, finding none, looked around to see what might have happened to Eagles. But the salvager was nowhere in sight. Two of the Yoder boys climbed out of the newly arrived buggy and joined Ducky and Pook next to the wreckage.
They all looked at one another and started to walk around the wrecked buggy when they saw the whole shattered vehicle shift and move. From the midst of the debris, Eagles stood slowly to his feet. He had splinters and pieces of shrapnel in his beard, and there was blood running down one side of his face. The wild man spat his wad of green tobac on the busted-up buggy and then looked up at Pook, Ducky, and the Yoder boys.
“Taadaa?” he said.
Pook found the rest of his squad, along with Dawn, his supreme commander Amos Troyer, and an injured and unconscious Jedediah Troyer, huddled next to the damaged and smoking skeleton that used to be Matthias’s house.