Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 10

 

  Jahns had long since stopped smiling. She stood close to Marnes. He turned back to the plants, watched a worker snip off a red ripe tomato and place it in her basket.

  “I think Holston wanted to let the air out of the silo, you know? I think he wanted to come down and investigate the thefts himself. Kept wiring me every day for reports like a life depended on it. ”

  “I’m sorry to bring it up,” Jahns said, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  Marnes turned and looked at the back of her hand. His bottom lip was visible below his mustache. Jahns could picture him kissing her hand. She pulled it away.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Without all that baggage, I guess it is pretty funny. ” He turned and continued down the hallway.

  “Did they ever figure out how it got in here?”

  “Up the stairwell,” Marnes said. “Had to be. Though I heard one person suggest that a child could’ve stolen one to keep as a pet and then released it up here. ”

  Jahns laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “One rabbit,” she said, “confounding the greatest lawman of our time and making off with a year’s salary of greens. ”

  Marnes shook his head and chuckled a little. “Not the greatest,” he said. “That was never me. ” He peered down the hallway and cleared his throat, and Jahns knew perfectly well who he was thinking of.

  • • • •

  After a large and satisfying dinner, they retired a level down to the guest rooms. Jahns had a suspicion that extra pains had been taken to accommodate them. Every room was packed, many of them double- and triple-booked. And since the cleaning had been scheduled well before this last-minute interview adventure of theirs, she suspected rooms had been bumped around to make space. The fact that they had given them separate rooms, the mayor’s with two beds, made it worse. It wasn’t just the waste, it was the arrangement. Jahns was hoping to be more…inconvenienced.

  And Marnes must’ve felt the same way. Since it was still hours before bedtime, and they were both buzzing from a fine meal and strong wine, he asked her to his small room so they could chat while the gardens settled down.

  His room was tastefully cozy, with only a single twin bed, but nicely appointed. The upper gardens were one of just a dozen large private enterprises. All the expenses for their stay would be covered by her office’s travel budget, and that money and the fares of the other travelers helped to afford finer things, like nice sheets from the looms and a mattress that didn’t squeak.

  Jahns sat on the foot of the bed. Marnes took off his holster, placed it on the dresser, and plopped onto a changing bench just a few feet away. While she kicked off her boots and rubbed her sore feet, he went on and on about the food, the waste of separate rooms, brushing his mustache down with his hand as he spoke.

  Jahns worked her thumbs into the soreness in her heels. “I feel like I’m going to need a week of rest at the bottom before we start the climb up,” she said during a pause.

  “It’s not all that bad,” Marnes told her. “You watch. You’ll be sore in the morning, but once you start moving, you’ll find that you’re stronger than you were today. And it’s the same on the way up. You just lean into each step, and before you know it, you’re home. ”

  “I hope you’re right. ”

  “Besides, we’ll do it in four days instead of two. Just think of it as an adventure. ”

  “Trust me,” Jahns said. “I already am. ”

  They sat quietly for a while, Jahns resting back on the pillows, Marnes staring off into space. She was surprised to find how calming and natural it was, just being in a room, alone, with him. The talk wasn’t necessary. They could just be. No badge, no office. Two people.

  “You don’t take a priest, do you?” Marnes finally asked.

  “No. ” She shook her head. “Do you?”

  “I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it. ”

  “Holston?”

  “Partly. ” He leaned forward and rubbed his hands down his thighs like he was squeezing the soreness out of them. “I’d like to hear where they think his soul has gone. ”

  “It’s still with us,” Jahns said. “That’s what they’d say, anyway. ”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Me?” She leaned up from the pillows and rested on one elbow, watching him watch her. “I don’t know, really. I keep too busy to think about it. ”

  “Do you think Donald’s soul is still here with us?”

  Jahns felt a shiver. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had uttered his name.

  “He’s been gone more years than he was ever my husband,” she said. “I’ve been married more to his ghost than to him. ”

  “That don’t seem like the right thing to say. ”

  Jahns looked down at the bed, the world a little blurry. “I don’t think he’d mind. And yes, he’s still with me. He motivates me every day to be a good person. I feel him watching me all the time. ”

  “Me too,” Marnes said.

  Jahns looked up and saw that he was staring at her.

  “Do you think he’d want you to be happy? In all things, I mean?” He stopped rubbing his legs and sat there, hands on his knees, until he had to look away.

  “You were his best friend,” Jahns said. “What do you think he’d want?”

  He rubbed his face, glanced toward the closed door as a squealing kid thundered down the hallway. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you. ”

  Jahns wiped at her eyes while he wasn’t looking and peered curiously down at her wet fingers.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. She slid to the edge of the small bed and reached down for her boots. Her bag and stick were waiting for her by the door. “And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually. ”

  5

  On the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the habitual. The clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. Jahns was able to lose herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number, seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. The kink in her left knee was even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t know. She took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped between the treads and got caught there. With it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. Like another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.

  When they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals that produced this useful waste, Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.

  Technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. The bottom third. But even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors each, her brain didn’t work that way. Floor one hundred was a better demarcation. It was a milestone. She counted the floors down until they reached the first landing with three digits, and stopped for a break.

  Marnes was breathing deeply, she noticed. But she felt great. Alive and renewed in the way she had hoped the trip would make her. The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.

  They split a small loaf of bread between them, sitting on the metal grating of the wide landing with their elbows propped up on the railings, their feet swinging over empty space, like two kids cutting class. Level one h
undred teemed with people coming and going. The entire floor was a bazaar, a place for exchanging goods, for cashing in work chits for whatever was needed or merely coveted. Workers with their trailing shadows came and went, families yelled for one another among the dizzying crowds, merchants barked their best deals. The doors remained propped open for the traffic, letting the smells and sounds drift out onto the double-wide landing, the grating shivering with excitement.

  Jahns reveled in the anonymity of the passing crowd. She bit into her half of the loaf, savoring the fresh yeastiness of bread baked that morning, and felt like just another person. A younger person. Marnes cut her a piece of cheese and a slice of apple and sandwiched them together. His hand touched hers as he passed it to her. Even the breadcrumbs in his mustache were part of the moment’s perfection.

  “We’re way ahead of schedule,” Marnes said before taking a bite of fruit. It was just a pleasant observation. A pat on their elderly backs. “I figure we’ll hit one-forty by dinner. ”

  “Right now, I’m not even dreading the climb out,” Jahns said. She finished the cheese and apple and chewed contentedly. Everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. Or in pleasant company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise of the crowd.

  “Why don’t we come down here more often?” she asked.

  Marnes grunted. “Because it’s a hundred flights down? Besides, we’ve got the view, the lounge, the bar at Kipper’s. How many of these people come up to any of that more than once every few years?”

  Jahns chewed on that and on her last bite of bread.

  “Do you think it’s natural? Not wandering too far from where we live?”

  “Don’t follow,” Marnes said around a bite of food.

  “Pretend, just as a hypothetical mind you, that people lived in those ancient aboveground silos poking up over the hillside. You don’t think they would move around so little, do you? Like stay in the same silo? Never wander over here or up and down a hundred flights of stairs?”

  “I don’t think on those things,” Marnes said. Jahns took it as a hint that she shouldn’t, either. It was impossible sometimes to know what could and couldn’t be said about the outside. Those were discussions for spouses, and maybe the walk and the day together yesterday had gotten to her. Or maybe she was as susceptible to the post-cleaning high as anyone else: that sense that rules could be relaxed, temptations courted, the lack of pressure and the waste of a double cleaning giving excuse for a month of jubilant wiggling in one’s own skin.

  “Should we get going?” Jahns asked, as Marnes finished his bread.

  He nodded, and they stood and collected their things. A woman walking by turned and stared, a flash of recognition on her face, gone as she hurried to catch up to her children.

  It was like another world down here, Jahns thought to herself. She had gone too long without a visit. And even as she promised herself to not let that happen again, some part of her knew, like a rusting machine that could feel its age, that this journey would be her last.

  • • • •

  Floors passed without care. The lower gardens, the larger farm on the one-thirties, the pungent water treatment plant below that. Jahns found herself lost in thought, thinking on her conversation with Marnes the night before, the idea of Donald living with her more in memory than reality, when she came to the gate at one-forty.

  She hadn’t even noticed the change in the traffic, the preponderance of blue denim coveralls, the porters with more satchels of parts and tools than clothes, food, or personal deliveries. But the crowd at the gate showed her that she’d arrived at the upper levels of Mechanical. Gathered at the entrance were workers in loose blue coveralls spotted with age-old stains. Jahns could nearly peg their professions by the tools they carried. It was late in the day, and she assumed most were returning home from repairs made throughout the silo. The thought of climbing so many flights of stairs and then having to work boggled her mind. And then she remembered she was about to do that very thing.

  Rather than abuse her station or Marnes’s power, they waited in line while the workers checked through the gate. As these tired men and women signed back in and logged their travel and hours, Jahns realized the time she had wasted ruminating about her own life during the long descent, time she should’ve spent polishing her appeal to this Juliette. Rare nerves twisted her gut as the line shuffled forward. The worker ahead of them showed his ID, the card colored blue for Mechanical. He scratched his information on a dusty slate. When it was their turn, they pushed through the outer gate and showed their golden IDs. The station guard raised his eyebrows, then seemed to recognize the mayor.

  “Your honor,” he said, and Jahns didn’t correct him. “Weren’t expecting you this shift. ” He waved their IDs away and reached for a nub of chalk. “Let me. ”

  Jahns watched as he spun the board around and wrote their names in neat print, the side of his palm collecting dust from the old film of chalk below. For Marnes, he simply wrote “Sheriff,” and again, Jahns didn’t correct him.

  “I know she wasn’t expecting us until later,” Jahns said, “but I wonder if we could meet with Juliette Nichols now. ”

  The station guard turned and looked behind him at the digital clock that recorded the proper time. “She won’t be off the generator for another hour. Maybe two, knowing her. You could hit the mess hall and wait. ”

  Jahns looked to Marnes, who shrugged. “Not entirely hungry yet,” he said.

  “What about seeing her at work? It would be nice to see what she does. We’d try our best to stay out of the way. ”