Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 29

 

  He ran his finger over the picture and laughed when he saw her expression. Her forehead was wrinkled, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to determine what the photographer was attempting or why in the heavens it was taking so long. He covered his mouth to prevent the laugh from becoming a sob.

  The vouchers went back into the box, but the ID slid into the breast pocket of his coveralls as if by Juliette’s own stubborn accord. The next thing that caught his eye was a silver multi-tool, new-looking, a slightly different model from his own. He grabbed this and leaned forward to pull his own tool out of his back pocket. He compared the two, opening a few of the tools on hers and admiring the smooth motion and neat click as each attachment locked into place. Taking a moment to first clean his, wiping his prints off and removing a bit of melted rubber wire casing, he switched the tools out. He decided he would rather carry this reminder of her and have his own tool disappear into storage or be pawned off to a stranger who wouldn’t appreciate—

  Lukas froze at the sound of footsteps and laughter. He held his breath and waited for someone to come in, for the overhead lights to burst on. The server clicked and whirred beside him. The noise in the hallway receded, the laughter fading.

  He was pushing his luck, he knew, but there was more in the box to see. He rummaged inside again and found an ornate wooden box, a valuable antique. It was just slightly bigger than his palm and took a moment to figure out how to open. The first thing he saw as the top slid away was a ring, a woman’s wedding ring. It could’ve been solid gold, but it was difficult to tell. The red glow from his flashlight tended to wash out colors, causing everything to appear dull and lifeless.

  He checked for an inscription, but found none. It was a curious artifact, this ring. He was certain Juliette hadn’t been wearing it when he’d known her and wondered if it was a relative’s, or a thing passed down from before the uprising. He placed it back in the wooden box and reached for the other item inside, a bracelet of some sort. No, not a bracelet. As he pulled it out, he realized it was a watch, the face so tiny it melded with the design of the jeweled strap. Lukas studied the face, and after a moment he realized his eyes or the red flashlight were playing tricks on him. Or were they? He looked closely to be sure—and saw that one of the impossibly thin hands was ticking away the time. The thing worked.

  Before he could contemplate the challenge of concealing such an item or the consequences of being discovered with it, Lukas slid the watch into his chest pocket. He looked at the ring sitting alone in the box, and after a moment’s hesitation, palmed this and stashed it away as well. He fished through the cardboard box and gathered some of the loose chits at the bottom and placed these into the antique before sealing it shut and returning it.

  What was he doing? He could feel a trickle of sweat work its way from his scalp and run the length of his jawline. The heat from the rear of the busy computer seemed to intensify. He dipped his head and lifted his shoulder to dab the itchy run of sweat away. There was more in the box, and he couldn’t help himself: he had to keep looking.

  He found a small notepad and flipped through it. It contained one to-do list after another, all of the items neatly crossed out. He replaced this and reached for a folded piece of paper at the bottom of the box, then realized it was more than a piece. He pulled out a thick collection of papers held together with brass fasteners. Across the top, in handwriting similar to that in the notebook, was printed:

  Main Generator Control Room Operation Manual.

  He flipped it open and found inscrutable diagrams and bulleted notes lining the margins. It looked like something she’d put together herself, either as a reminder from piecing the room’s operation together over time, or perhaps a helpful guide for others. The paper was recycled without being pulped, he saw. She had just written on the back. He flipped the manual over and checked the lines and lines of printed text on the opposite side. There were notes in the margins and a name circled over and over:

  Juliette. Juliette. Juliette.

  He flipped the manual over and surveyed the rear, only to find it was the original front. “The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliette,” it said. It was a play. One Lukas had heard of. In front of him, a fan kicked on in the heart of the server, blowing air over warm chips of silicone and wire. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and tucked the bound play back into the box. He neatly arranged the other items on top and folded the cardboard flaps together. Wiggling back to his feet, Lukas doused his light and shoved it back into his pocket where it nestled against Juliette’s multi-tool. With the box secured under one arm, he patted his chest with his other hand and felt her watch, her ring, and her ID there with its picture of her. All tight against his bosom.

  Lukas shook his head. He wondered what the hell he was thinking as he stole out of the small and dark room, a tall panel of winking and blinking lights watching him go.

  5

  “Eyes, look your last!

  Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips,

  O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

  a dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

  The bodies were everywhere. Covered in dust and dirt, suits worn down by the toxic eaters that lived in the winds, Juliette found herself stumbling over more and more of them. And then, they were constant, a mass of boulders jumbled together. A few were in suits similar to her own, but most wore rags that had been eaten away into streamers. When the wind blew past her boots and across the bodies, strips of clothing waved like kelp in the down deep’s fish farms. Unable to pick her way around them all, she found herself stepping over the remains, working her way closer and closer to the sensor tower, the bodies easily in the hundreds, possibly the thousands.

  These weren’t people from her silo, she realized. However obvious, the sensation was startling. Other people. That they were dead did nothing to diminish the soul-shattering reality that people had lived so close and she had never known. Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.

  She made her way through dead bodies thick as crumbling rock, the forms becoming indistinguishable from one another. They were piled high in places, and she had to choose her path carefully. As she neared the ramp leading down to this other silo, she found herself needing to step on a body or two in order to pass. It looked as though they’d been trying to get away and had scampered over one another, creating their own small hills in a mad attempt to reach the real ones. But then, when she reached the ramp leading down, she saw the crush of bodies at the steel airlock door and realized they had been trying to get back in.

  Her own imminent death loomed large—a constant awareness, a new sense worn on her skin and felt keenly in every pore. She would soon join these bodies, and somehow she was not afraid. She had passed through that fear on the crest of the hill and was now in new lands, seeing new things, a terrible gift for which she had to be grateful. Curiosity drove her forward, or maybe it was the mentality of this frozen crowd, all in scrambling repose, bodies swimming over each other and reaching toward the doors below.

  She swam among them. Waded, where she had to. She stepped through broken and hollow bodies, kicked aside bones and tattered remains, and fought her way to the partly cracked doors. There was a figure there frozen between its iron teeth, one arm in, one out, a scream trapped on a gray and withered face, two eye sockets empty and staring.

  Juliette was one of them, one of these others. She was dead, or nearly so. But while they were frozen in motion, she was still pushing ahead. Shown the way. She tugged the body out of the gap, her breathing loud in her helmet, her exhalations misting on the screen before her nose. Half the body pulled free—the other half collapsed inside the door. A mist of powdered flesh drifted down in between.
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  She wiggled one of her arms inside and tried to push through sideways. Her shoulder slipped through, then her leg, but her helmet caught. She turned her head and tried again—and the helmet wedged tightly between the doors. There was a moment of panic as she could feel the steel jaws gripping her head, supporting the weight of her helmet, leaving her semi-dangling from its grasp. She swam her arm all the way through, trying to reach around the door for purchase, to pull herself the rest of the way, but her torso was stuck. One leg was in, the other out. There was nothing to push against or pull in order to go the rest of the way. She was trapped, an arm useless on the inside, waving frantically, her rapid breathing using up what remained of her air.

  Juliette tried to fit her other arm through. She couldn’t turn her waist, but she could bend her elbow and slide her fingers across her belly through the tight space between her stomach and the door. She curled her fingers around the edge of the steel and pulled. There was no leverage in those confines. It was just the strength in her fingers, in her grip. Juliette suddenly didn’t want to die, not there. She curled her hand as if to make a fist, her fingers bent around the edge of those steel jaws, her knuckles singing out from the strain. Jerking her head against her helmet, trying to bang her face against the damned screen, twisting and shoving and yanking—she suddenly popped free.

  She stumbled forward, a boot catching briefly on the gap behind her, arms windmilling for balance as she kicked through a pile of charred bones and sent a cloud of black ash into the air. It was the remains of those who had been caught in the cleansing fire of the airlock. Juliette found herself in a burnt room eerily similar to the one she had recently left. Her exhausted and bewildered mind spun with outrageous delusions. Perhaps she was already dead, and these were the ghosts awaiting her. Maybe she had burned alive inside the airlock of her own silo, and these were her mad dreams, her escape from the pain, and now she would haunt this place forever.

  She stumbled through the scattered remains toward the inner door and pressed her head against the thick glass porthole. She looked for Peter Billings beyond, sitting at his desk. Or perhaps a glimpse of Holston wandering the hallways, a specter searching for his ghostly wife.

  But this was not the same airlock. She tried to calm herself. She wondered if her air was running low, if sucking on her own exhaust was like breathing the fumes of a hot motor, choking off her brain.

  The door was sealed. It was real. The thousands were dead, but she wasn’t. Not yet.

  She tried to spin the large wheel, but it was either frozen in place or locked from the inside. Juliette banged on the glass, hoping the silo sheriff would hear her, or maybe a cafeteria worker. It was dark inside, but the thought lingered that someone must be there. People lived inside silos. They didn’t belong piled up around them.

  There was no answer. No light flicked on. She leaned on the large wheel that secured the door, remembered Marnes’s instructions, how all the mechanisms worked, but those lessons felt like so long ago and she hadn’t thought them important at the time. But she remembered something: After the argon bath and the fire, didn’t the inner door unlock? Automatically? So the airlock could be scrubbed? This seemed like something she remembered Marnes saying. He had joked that it wasn’t as if anyone could come back inside once the fire had run its course. Was she remembering this or making it up? Was it the wishful thinking of an oxygen-starved mind?

  Either way, the wheel on the door wouldn’t budge. Juliette pushed down with all her weight—and it felt locked to her. She stepped back. The bench hanging from the wall where cleaners got suited up before their deaths looked inviting. She was tired from the walk, from the struggle to get inside. And why was she trying to get inside? She spun in place, indecisive. What was she doing?

  She needed air. For some reason, she thought the silo might have some. She looked around at all the scattered bones of an uncountable number of bodies. How many dead? They were too jumbled to know. The skulls, she thought. She could count those and know. She shook this nonsense from her head. She was definitely losing her senses.

  “The wheel on the door is a stuck nut,” some receding part of her said. “It’s a frozen bolt. ”

  And hadn’t she made a reputation as a young shadow for working them free?

  Juliette told herself that this could be done. Grease, heat, leverage. Those were the secrets to a piece of metal that wouldn’t budge. She didn’t have any of the three, but she looked around anyway. There was no squeezing back through the outer door, she knew she wouldn’t make it a second time, not that kind of straining. So she had this room. The bench was secured to the wall along the back edge and hung from two chains. Juliette wiggled the chains, but didn’t see how they could come free, or what good they would do her anyway.

  In the corner, there was a pipe snaking up that led into a series of vents. It must be what delivered the argon, she thought. She wrapped her hands around the pipe, put her feet on the wall, and tugged.

  The connection to the vent wiggled; the toxic air had corroded and weakened it. Juliette smiled, set her teeth, and yanked back ferociously.

  The pipe came free of the vent and bent at its base. She felt a sudden thrill, like a wild rat standing over a large crumb. She grabbed the free end of the pipe and worked it back and forth, bending and wrenching the fastened end. Metal would snap if you could wiggle it even a little bit, if you did it long enough. She had felt the heat of weakened steel countless times while bending it over and over until it broke.

  Sweat beaded on her brow and twinkled in the dim light allowed by her visor screen. It dripped down her nose, fogged the screen, and still she yanked and pushed, back and forth, growing frantic and desperate—

  The pipe snapped, taking her by surprise. Just a faint pop bled through her helmet, and then the long piece of hollow metal was free. One end was crushed and twisted, the other whole and round. Juliette turned to the door, a tool now in hand. She slid the pipe through the wheel, leaving as much as she could hanging out the side, just long enough that it wouldn’t brush the wall. With both gloved hands wrapped around the pipe, she lifted herself to her waist, bending over the pipe, her helmet touching the door. She bounced her weight on the lever, knowing it was a jerking motion that freed a bolt, not a steady force. She wiggled her way toward the end of the pipe, watching it bend a little, worried it might snap in half long before the door budged.