Read Online Pennsylvania Omnibus by Michael Bunker - Free Book Online

asked.  To Jed, Dawn now seemed like
she was in a hurry.  Like she had somewhere else to be.
    “You have a date, cousin?” Pook asked.
    “I… I just don’t like hanging around in here,” she
replied.  “It gives me the creeps.  This is all great stuff, and it was super
when it was in someone’s home, but in here it seems almost sacrilegious.  Being
here in this city and separated from the people who loved it and who owned it. 
I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just weird.”
    “I don’t think you’re weird,” Jed said.  “I love this
place, but I don’t think you’re weird.”
    “I do,” Pook said, laughing.  “Okay, the paperwork. 
Follow me.”
    He made his way through the narrow walkways between
mountains of antique furniture, carpets, tools, and household goods.  When he
got to the back of the store, he reached through the flickering shadows, and on
the far wall his hands found an old, whitewashed frame that looked like it had
once been a window.  He placed the window down on a dusty tan sofa; attached to
the back of the frame was an envelope stuffed with papers.
    “Here they are,” Pook said.
    Pook, Jerry, and Dawn walked back toward the front of the
store, but Jed couldn’t move.  He was staring at the window frame…
    The bottom-right pane of glass was missing.  In its place
was a piece of metal, a section of an old coffee can.  You could see that the
can had once—long, long ago—been red with white print, the old-timey kind,
stomped flat and cut to fit.
    The window itself looked ancient, as it always had, but
now the piece of metal coffee can looked ancient, too—maybe over a hundred
years old.  Jed stared at the old window and touched the replacement pane with
his hand.
    He could almost feel the years pulse through the cool of
the metal as the coffee can stared at him, penetrating him with an ageless
accusation.
     
     
     

     
     
 (8
Merrill’s
Antique Shoppe
     
     
    Lantern light flickered throughout
Merrill’s Antique Shoppe. The yellow-gold radiance pierced the shadows and made
them dance against the collections of old furniture, twisted wrought iron, tin
signs, and mannequins posed like fashion models arrayed in ancient dresses. 
The waltz of light and darkness reminded Jedediah Troyer of dark winter nights
sitting around the wood burner in the front room of the farmhouse, when the
firelight would shine through the glass window of the stove and his father
would tell the family stories of persecution, of Jakob Ammann, of the lives of
the martyrs.
    In this Pennsylvania, those stories were ancient
history, mythology, anecdotes of another world altogether.  In this
Pennsylvania, a war raged just outside the front door of the Antique Shoppe—a
war with lasers and flying ships and assassin drones floating in deathly
silence, searching for rebels in the night.
    Now and then frightening explosions sounded in the
distance, and the buzzing zip of phosphorescent projectiles or the crackling
beams of laser light would slice through the air over the antique shop,
highlighting both the irony and the relentlessness of time as the group of
rebels plotted amidst the relics of an era long past.
    The City was under attack.  Jed wasn’t even sure what that
meant or who might be fighting whom, but the fact that he was trapped in some
acrimonious struggle between alien factions was clear to him.  Englischers—and
most other humans—were already aliens to him, so he had no trouble seeing the
conflict as a foreign engagement, a war in which he had no interest.
    Pook Rayburn had just finished forging the last of the
transport papers he hoped would get Jed, Dawn, and Jerry Rios into the Amish
Zone when they heard something heavy crash against the front door of the
shop.
    Jed snapped back to the present as the frightening and
desperate alert coming from the front of the shop pried his eyes and thoughts
from the window with the coffee-can replacement pane—a relic from another time
and