Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 28

  Juliette Nichols stuck one boot through that narrow gap. The doors only opened partway to hold back the deadly toxins, to force the argon through with pent-up pressure, so she had to turn sideways to squeeze through, her bulky suit rubbing against the thick doors. All she could think of was the raging fire that would soon fill the airlock. Its flames seemed to lick at her back, forcing her to flee.

  She pulled her other boot through—and Juliette was suddenly outside.

  Outside.

  There was nothing above her helmeted head but clouds, sky, and the unseen stars.

  She lumbered forward, emerging through the fog of hissing argon to find herself on a sloping ramp, the corners by the walls caked high with wind-trapped dirt. It was easy to forget that the top floor of the silo was belowground. The view from her old office and the cafeteria created an illusion of standing on the surface of the earth, head up in the wild air, but that was because the sensors were located there.

  Juliette looked down at the numbers on her chest and remembered what she was supposed to be doing. She trudged up the ramp, head down, focusing on her boots. She wasn’t sure how she even moved, if it was the numbness one succumbed to in the face of execution—or if it was just automated self-preservation, simply a move away from the coming inferno in the airlock, her body delaying the inevitable because it couldn’t think or plan beyond the next fistful of seconds.

  As Juliette reached the top of the ramp, her head emerged into a lie, a grand and gorgeous untruth. Green grass covered the hills like newly painted carpet. The skies were intoxicatingly blue, the clouds bleached white like fancy linen, the air peppered with soaring things.

  She spun in place and took in the spectacular fabrication. It was as if she’d been dropped into a book from her youth, a book where animals talked and children flew and grays were never found.

  Even knowing it wasn’t real, knowing that she was looking through an eight by two inch fib, the temptation was overwhelming to believe. She wanted to. She wanted to forget what she knew of IT’s devious program, to forget everything she and Walker had discussed, and to fall instead to the soft grasses that weren’t there, to roll around in the life that wasn’t, to strip off the ridiculous suit and go screaming happily across the lying landscape.

  She looked down at her hands, clenched and unclenched them as much as the thick gloves would allow. This was her coffin. Her thoughts scattered as she fought to remember what was real. Her death was real. The ugly world she had always known was real. And then, for just a moment, she remembered that she was supposed to be doing something. She was supposed to be cleaning.

  She turned and gazed at the sensor tower, seeing it for the first time. It was a sturdy block of steel and concrete with a rusted and pitted ladder running up one side. The bulges of sensor pods were stuck like warts on the faces of the tower. Juliette reached for her chest, grabbed one of the scrubbing pads, and tore it loose. The note from Walker continued to stream through her mind: Don’t be afraid.

  She took the coarse wool pad and rubbed it against the arm of her suit. The heat tape wrapping did not peel, did not flake away like the stuff she had once stolen from IT, the tape they had engineered to fail. This was the brand of heat tape Juliette was used to working with, Mechanical’s design.

  They are good in Supply, Walker’s note had said. The good had referred to the people of Supply. After years of helping Juliette score spares when she needed them most, they had done something extraordinary for her. While she had spent three days climbing stairs and three lonely nights in three different holding cells on her way to banishment, they had replaced IT’s materials with those from Mechanical. They had fulfilled their orders for parts in a most devious way, and it must’ve been at Walker’s behest. IT had then—unwittingly and for once—built a suit designed to last, not disintegrate.

  Juliette smiled. Her death, however certain, was delayed. She took a long look at the sensors, relaxed her fingers, and dropped the wool pad into the fake grass. Turning for the nearest hill, she tried her best to ignore the false colors and the layers of life projected on top of what was truly there. Rather than give in to the euphoria, she concentrated on the way her boots clomped to packed earth, noted the feel of the angry wind buffeting against her suit, listened for the faint hiss as grains of sand pelted her helmet from all sides. There was a terrifying world around her, one she could be dimly aware of if she concentrated hard enough, a world she knew but could no longer see.

  She started up the steep slope and headed vaguely toward the gleaming metropolis over the horizon. There was little thought of making it there. All she wanted was to die beyond the hills where no one would have to watch her rot away, so that Lukas the starhunter would not be afraid to come up at twilight for fear of seeing her still form.

  And suddenly, it felt good to simply be walking, to have some purpose. She would take herself out of sight. It was a more solid goal than that false city, which she knew to be crumbling.

  Partway up the hill, she came to a pair of large rocks. Juliette started to dodge around them before she realized where she was, that she had followed the most gentle path up the crook of two colliding slopes, and here lay the most horrible lie of them all.

  Holston and Allison. Hidden from her by the magic of the visor. Covered in a mirage of stone.

  There were no words. Nothing to see, nothing to say. She glanced down the hill and spotted sporadic other boulders resting in the grasses, their arrangement not random at all but where cleaners of old had collapsed.

  She turned away, leaving such sad things behind. It was impossible to know how much time she had, how long in order to hide her body from those who might gloat—and the few who might mourn.

  Climbing toward the crest of the hill, her legs still sore from ascending the silo, Juliette witnessed the first rips in IT’s deceitful veil. New portions of the sky and the distant city came into view, parts that had been obscured by the hill from down below. There seemed to be a break in the program, a limit to its lies. While the upper levels of the distant monoliths appeared whole and gleamed in the false sunlight, below these sharp panes of glass and bright steel lay the rotted dinginess of an abandoned world. She could see straight through the bottom levels of many of the buildings, and with their heavy tops projected onto them, they seemed liable to topple at any moment.

  To the side, the extra and unfamiliar buildings had no supports at all, no foundations. They hung in the air with dark sky beneath them. This same dark vista of gray clouds and lifeless hills stretched out across the low horizon, a hard line of painted blue where the visor’s program met its end.

  Juliette puzzled over the incompleteness of IT’s deceit. Was it because they themselves had no idea what lay beyond the hills, and so couldn’t guess what to modify? Or did they deem it not worth the effort, knowing nobody would ever make it this far? Whatever the reason, the jarring and illogical nature of the view left her dizzy if she studied it too closely. She concentrated instead on her feet, taking those last dozen steps up the painted green hill until she reached the crest.

  At the top, she paused while heavy gusts of wind buffeted against her, causing her to lean into their turbulence. She scanned the horizon and saw that she stood on the divide between two worlds. Down the slope before her, on a landscape her eyes had never before seen, lay a bare world of dust and parched earth, of wind flurries and small tornadoes, of air that could kill. Here was new land, and yet it looked more familiar to her than anything she’d encountered thus far.

  She turned and peered back along the path she had just climbed, at the tall grasses blowing in the gentle breeze, at occasional flowers dipping their heads at her, at the bright blue and brilliant white overhead. It was an evil concoction, inviting but false.

  Juliette gave this illusion one last admiring gaze. She noted how the round depression in the center of the hills seemed to mark the outline of her silo’s flat roof, the rest of her
habitable home nestled deep in the belly of the soil. The way the land rose up all around made it look as though a hungry God had spooned out a large bite of the earth. With a heavy heart, she realized that the world she had grown up in was now closed off to her, that her home and her people were safe behind bolted doors, and she must be resigned to her fate. She had been cast off. Her time was short. And so she turned her back on the alluring view and bright colors to face the dusty, the dead, and the real.

  • • • •

  As she started down the hill, Juliette pulled cautiously on the air in her suit. She knew Walker had given her the gift of time, time no cleaner before her ever had, but how much? And for what? She had already reached her goal, had managed to haul herself out of the sensors’ sight, so why was she still walking, still staggering down this foreign hill? Was it inertia? The pull of gravity? The sight of the unknown?

  She was barely down the slope, heading in the general direction of the crumbling city, when she stopped to survey the foreign landscape before her. The elevation made it possible to choose a path for her final walk, this maiden walk, across the tall dunes of dry earth. And that’s when she saw, gazing out toward the rusting city beyond, that the hollow in which her silo resided was no accident. The hills bore a clear pattern as they stretched into the distance. It was one circular bowl after another, the earth rising up between them as if to shield each spooned-out bite from the caustic wind.

  Juliette descended into the next bowl, pondering this, watching her footing as she went. She kicked aside the larger rocks and controlled her breathing. She knew from working deep in the flooded basins, swimming beneath the muck that burly men cringed from as she unclogged the drains, that air could be conserved through calmness. She glanced up, wondering if she had enough in the suit to cross this bowl and make it up the next great hill.

  And that’s when she saw the slender tower rising from the center of the bowl, its exposed metal glinting in the sparse sunlight. The landscape here was untouched by the program in her visor; reality passed through her helmet untarnished. And seeing this, the familiar sensor tower, she wondered if perhaps she’d gotten turned around, if she had surveyed the world once too many times from the crest of the hill, if she was in fact trudging back toward her silo, crossing ground already crossed once before.

  The sight of a dead cleaner wasting away in the dirt seemed to confirm this. It was a bare outline, ribbons of an old suit, the husk of a helmet.

  She stopped and touched the dome of the helmet with the toe of her boot, and the shell crumbled and caved in. Whatever flesh and bone had been inside had long ago drifted off on the winds.

  Juliette looked down the hill for the sleeping couple, but the crook of those two dunes was nowhere in sight. She suddenly felt bewildered and lost. She wondered if the air had finally worked past the seals and heat tape, if her brain was succumbing to noxious fumes, but no. She was nearer the city, still walking toward that skyline, the tops of which were still rendered whole and gleaming, the sky above them blue and spotted with bright clouds.

  It meant this tower below her…was not hers. And these dunes, these great mounds of dead earth, were not meant to block out the winds or hold back the air. They were meant to shield curious eyes. To block this sight, this view, of some

  other.

  4

  “One, two, and the third in your bosom. ”

  Lukas held the small box tightly against his chest as he hiked up to the landing on thirty-eight. Here was a mixed-use level of offices, shops, a plastics factory, and one of the small water treatment plants. He pushed through the doors and hurried down corridors quiet from the day’s cleaning until he reached the main pump control room. His IT master key allowed him inside. The room housed a tall and familiar computer cabinet from his Tuesday maintenance schedule. Lukas left the overhead light off to keep the small window in the door darkened to passersby. He slid behind the tall server rack and the wall, scooted to the ground, and fished his flashlight out of his coveralls.

  In the soft red glow of his night light, Lukas gently peeled the flaps of the box apart, revealing the contents inside.

  The guilt was immediate. It punctured the anticipation, the thrill of discovery, of intimacy. It wasn’t guilt from defying his boss or lying to Deputy Marsh, nor of delaying the delivery of items he had been told were important. It was the violation of her things. The reminder of her fate. Here were Juliette’s remains. Not her body, which was lost and gone, but the remnants of the life she had lived.

  He took a heavy breath, considered closing the flaps and forgetting the contents, and then thought of what would become of them anyway. His friends in IT would probably be the ones to paw through them. They would tear open the box and trade items like kids swapping candy. They would desecrate her.

  He bent the flaps open further and decided to honor her instead.

  He adjusted his light and saw a stack of silo vouchers on top, wrapped in a piece of wire. He pulled these out and flipped through them. They were vacation vouchers. Dozens of them. He lifted them to his nose and puzzled over the tangy scent of grease emanating from the box.

  A few expired meal cards lay underneath these vouchers, the corner of an ID badge poking out. Lukas reached for the badge, coded silver from her job as sheriff. He searched for another ID among the various scattered cards, but it appeared it had not yet been replaced with whatever color Mechanical used. There hadn’t been that much time between her being fired for one offense and being put to death for another.

  He took a moment to study the picture on the badge. It looked recent, just as he remembered her. Her hair was tied back tight, leaving it flat on her head. He could see loose curls sticking out to either side of her neck and remembered the first night he had watched her work, how she had braided her long hair herself while she sat alone in a pool of light, peering at page after page in those folders of hers.