Free Pennsylvania Omnibus by Michael Bunker Page B

then.  When am I , Dawn?”
    Dawn shook her head and tried to smile, though the smile
came off more like a grimace than anything else.
    “I can’t tell you that, Jed.  I just can’t.  Not yet.  I
would if I could, and you have to believe that.  When you’re safe, and when I
have leave to tell you, I’ll tell you everything I can.  For now, we have to go
join the others.  We have work to do.”
    With that, Dawn turned and walked back through the piles
of ancient goods toward the basement of Merrill’s Antique Shoppe.
     
     
 
 (9
Okcillium
     
     
    The basement beneath the shop was
lit by a dozen lanterns scattered around the place, and the flickering, golden
light revealed a cavernous room that looked as old as anything Jed had ever
seen in the Amish Zone back on Earth.  Older even.  The dark red bricks that
made up the walls appeared to be of the handmade variety, imperfect and
inconsistent, adhered together with ancient, sandy gray mortar that here and
there had dripped down over the brick faces in haphazard fashion.  The
construction looked to Jed to be from the turn of the twentieth century, and
widely scattered mold and mildew stains marked the faces of the walls.  Bags
and boxes of old clothing and antique bits and pieces of the flotsam of time
were scattered in dusty piles around the basement and stacked high against the
brick walls—all except for the north wall, which had been cleared of the
residue of these once-loved, but now forgotten, material possessions.  The
detritus of former lives. 
    Along that north wall, standing like a line of mechanical
soldiers—or the shiny, stainless steel milking machines that Jed had seen once
in a more liberal Amish neighbor’s barn—were ten complicated-looking machines. 
The cords from the machines ran along the base of the wall and were taped
together where they terminated in an enormous plug the likes of which Jed had
never seen.
    Pook followed Jed’s gaze. “We can’t use grid power, even
if the power were up right now.  They track any anomalies in power usage very
closely.”
    “Anomalies,” Jed repeated, absentmindedly, as he stared at
the machines.
    “Freakin’ anomalies,” Jerry repeated with a smile on his
face.  He seemed to be enjoying the entire adventure immensely.
    “We had a friend who was running a single one of these
machines using grid power out in one of the suburbs of the City,” Pook said as
he worked.  “This was years ago.  Anyway, they toasted the whole subdivision
with a micro-nuke just to make sure they got him.  Killed hundreds of
people.”
    “Who did that?” Jed asked.  “Who would kill hundreds of
people to get one person for using a machine?”
    “Transport, that’s who,” Pook said through a barely
disguised sneer.
    “I don’t understand what using a machine has to do with
Transport,” Jed said.
    “ Everything has to do with Transport,” Pook said,
holding his right hand out in a clenched fist.  He squeezed the fist as if he
were crushing anything that could have fit into it.  “For all intents and
purposes, Transport is the government here, just like where you’re
from.  It all goes back to the founding of the United States and the
misinterpretation and misuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause found in the
Constitution of America.  Through time, governments used that clause to
rationalize that everything —especially in a global world with
instantaneous communication and the blurring of state, national, and
international lines, laws, and responsibilities—fell under Transport law. 
After the wars of the early twenty-first century and the globalization of the
‘war on terror,’ micromanaging Transport became the easiest way to control
populations and govern human behavior.”
    “That’s when private transport was outlawed,” Jerry said,
nodding his head toward Jed.
    “That’s right,” Pook said.  He was preaching now.  It was
a sermon he’d given before, and Jed got the