Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 52

 

  “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. The curl transformed into a smile. “This is now. This is happening. ” He grabbed Shirly’s arm. “You heard it too, didn’t you? I’m not crazy. That really was her, wasn’t it? She’s alive. She made it. ”

  “No—” Shirly shook her head. “Walk, what’re you saying? That Juliette’s alive? Made it where?”

  “You heard. ” He pointed at the radio. “Before. The conversations. The cleaning. There’s more of them out there. More of us. She’s with them, Shirly. This is happeningrightnow. ”

  “Alive. ”

  Shirly stared at the radio, processing this. Her friend was still somewhere. Still breathing. It had been so solid in her head, this vision of Juliette’s body just over the hills, lying in silent repose, the wind flecking away at her. And now she was picturing her moving, breathing, talking into a radio somewhere.

  “Can we talk to her?” she asked.

  She knew it was a dumb question. But Walker seemed to startle, his old limbs jumping.

  “Oh, God. God, yes. ” He set the mish-mash of components down on the floor, his hands trembling, but with what Shirly now read as excitement. The fear in both of them was gone, drained from the room, the rest of the world beyond that small space fading to meaninglessness.

  Walker dug into the parts bin. He dumped some tools out and pawed into the bottom of the container.

  “No,” he said. He turned and scanned the parts on the ground. “No no no. ”

  “What is it?” Shirly slid away from the string of components so he could better see. “What’re we missing? There’s a microphone right there. ” She pointed to the partially disassembled headphones.

  “The transmitter. It’s a little board. I think it’s on my workbench. ”

  “I swiped everything into the bin. ” Her voice was high and tense. She moved toward the plastic bucket.

  “My other workbench. It wasn’t needed. All Jenks wanted was to listen in. ” He waved at the radio. “I did what he wanted. How could I have known I’d need to transmit—?”

  “You couldn’t,” Shirly said. She rested her hand on his arm. She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time. “Is there anything in here we can use? Think, Walk. Concentrate. ”

  He shook his head, wagged his finger at the headphones. “This mic is dumb. It just passes the sound through. Little membranes vibrating—”

  He turned and looked at her. “Wait—there is something. ”

  “Down here? Where?”

  “The mining storehouse would have them. A transmitter. ” He pretended to hold a box and twist a switch. “For the blasting caps. I repaired one just a month ago. It would work. ”

  Shirly rose to her feet. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here. ”

  “But the stairwell—”

  “I’ll be safe. I’m going down, not up. ”

  He bobbed his head.

  “Don’t change anything with that. ” She pointed to the radio. “No looking for more voices. Just hers. Leave it there. ”

  “Of course. ”

  Shirly bent down and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be right back. ”

  Outside, she found dozens of faces turning her way, frightened and questioning looks in their wide eyes, their slack mouths. She felt like shouting over the hum of the generator that Juliette was alive, that they weren’t alone, that other people lived and breathed in the forbidden outside. She wanted to, but she didn’t have the time. She hurried to the rail and found Courtnee.

  “Hey—”

  “Everything okay in there?” Courtnee asked.

  “Yeah, fine. Do me a favor, will you? Keep an eye on Walker for me. ”

  Courtnee nodded. “Where are you—?”

  But Shirly was already gone, running to the main door. She squeezed through a group huddled in the entranceway. Jenkins was outside with Harper. They stopped talking as she hurried past.

  “Hey!” Jenkins seized her arm. “Where the hell’re you going?”

  “Mine storeroom. ” She twisted her arm out of his grasp. “I won’t be long—”

  “You won’t be going. We’re about to blow that stairwell. These idiots are falling right into our hands. ”

  “You’re what?”

  “The stairwell,” Harper repeated. “It’s rigged to blow. Once they get down there and start working their way through—” He put his hands together in a ball, then expanded the sphere in a mock explosion.

  “You don’t understand—” She faced Jenkins. “It’s for the radio. ”

  He frowned. “Walk had his chance. ”

  “We’re picking up a lot of chatter,” she told him. “He needs this one piece. I’ll be right back, swear. ”

  Jenkins looked to Harper. “How long before we do this?”

  “Five minutes, sir. ” His chin moved back and forth, almost imperceptibly.

  “You’ve got four,” he said to Shirly. “But make sure—”

  She didn’t hear the rest. Her boots were already pounding the steel, carrying her toward the stairwell. She flew past the oil rig with its sad and lowered head, past the row of confused and twitching men, their guns all pointing the way.

  She hit the top of the steps and slid around the corner. Someone half a flight up yelled in alarm. Shirly caught a glimpse of two miners with sticks of TNT before she skipped down the flight of stairs.

  At the next level, she turned and headed for the mineshaft. The hallways were silent, just her panting and the clop, clop, clop of her boots.

  Juliette. Alive.

  A person sent to cleaning, alive.

  She turned down the next hallway and ran past the apartments for the deep workers, the miners and the oil men, men who now bore guns instead of holes in the earth, who wielded weapons rather than tools.

  And this new knowledge, this impossible bit of news, this secret, it made the fighting seem surreal. Petty. How could anyone fight if there were places to go beyond these walls? If her friend was still out there? Shouldn’t they be going as well?

  She made it to the storeroom. Probably been two minutes. Her heart was racing. Surely Jenkins wouldn’t do anything to that stairway until she got back. She moved down the shelves, peering in the bins and drawers. She knew what the thing looked like. There should be several of them floating about. Where were they?

  She checked the lockers, threw the dingy coveralls hanging inside them to the ground, tossed work helmets out of the way. She didn’t see anything. How much time did she have?

  She tried the small foreman’s office next, throwing the door open and storming to the desk. Nothing in the drawers. Nothing on the shelves mounted to the wall. One of the big drawers on the bottom was stuck. Locked.

  Shirly stepped back and kicked the front of the metal drawer with her boot. She slammed the steel toe into it once, twice. The lip curled down, away from the drawer above. She reached in, yanked the flimsy lock off its lip, and the warped drawer opened with a groan.

  Explosives. Sticks of dynamite. There were a few small relays that she knew went into the sticks to ignite them. Beneath these, she found three of the transmitters Walker was looking for.

  Shirly grabbed two of them, a few relays, and put them all in her pocket. She took two sticks of the dynamite—just because they were there and went with everything else—and ran out of the office, through the storeroom, back toward the stairs.

  She had used up too much time. Her chest felt cool and empty, raspy, as she labored to breathe. She ran as fast as she could, concentrating on throwing her boots forward, lunging for more floor, gobbling it up.

  Turning at the end of the hall, she again thought about how ridiculous this fighting was. It was hard to remember why it had begun. Knox was gone, so was McLain. Would their people be fighting if these great leaders
were still around? Would they have done something different long ago? Something more sane?

  She cursed the folly of it all as she reached the stairs. Surely it had been five minutes. She waited for a blast to ring out above her, to deafen her with the concussive ferocity trapped in that stairwell. Leaping up two treads at a time, she made the turn at the top and saw that the miners were gone. Anxious eyes peered at her over homemade barrels.

  “Go!” someone yelled, waving their arms to the side, hurrying her along.

  Shirly focused on Jenkins, who crouched down with his own rifle, Harper by his side. She nearly tripped over the wires leading away from the stairwell as she ran toward the two men.

  “Now!” Jenkins yelled.

  Someone threw a switch.

  The ground lurched and buckled beneath Shirly’s feet, sending her sprawling. She landed hard on the steel floor, her chin grazing the diamond plating, the dynamite nearly flying from her hands.

  Her ears were still ringing as she got to her knees. Men were moving behind the railing, guns popping into the bank of smoke leaking from a new maw of twisted and jagged steel. The screams of the distant wounded could be heard on the other side.

  While men fought, Shirly patted her pockets, fished inside for the transmitters.

  And again, the noise of war seemed to fade, to become insignificant. She hurried through the door to the generator room, back to Walker, her lip bleeding, her mind on more important things.

  17

  • Silo 17 •

  Juliette pulled herself through the cold, dark waters, bumping blindly against the ceiling, a wall, no way to tell which. She gathered the limp air hose with blind and desperate lunges, no idea how fast she was going—until she crashed into the stairs. Her nose crunched against the inside of her helmet, and the darkness was momentarily shouldered aside by a flash of light. She floated, dazed, the air hose drifting from her hands.

  Juliette groped for the precious line as her senses gradually returned. She hit something with her glove, grabbed it, and was about to pull herself along when she realized it was the smaller power line. She let go and swept her arms in the blind murk, her boots bumping against something. It was impossible to know top from bottom. She began to feel turned around, dizzy, disoriented.

  A rigid surface pressed against her; she decided she must be floating up, away from the hose.

  She kicked off what she assumed was the ceiling and swam in the direction that she hoped was down. Her arms tangled in something—she felt it across her padded chest—she found it with her hands, expecting the power cord, but was rewarded with the spongy nothingness of the empty air tube. It no longer offered her air, but it did lead the way out.

  Pulling one direction gathered slack, so she tried the other way. The hose went taut. She pulled herself into the stairs again, bounced away with a grunt, and kept gathering line. The hose led up and around the corner—and she found herself pulling, reaching out an arm to fend off the blind assaults from walls, ceiling, steps—bumping and floating up six flights, a battle for every inch, a struggle that seemed to take forever.

  By the time she reached the top, she was out of breath and panting. And then she realized she wasn’t out of breath, she was out of air. She had burned through whatever remained in the suit. Hundreds of feet of exhausted hose lay invisible behind her, sucked dry.

  She tried the radio again as she pulled herself through the corridor, her suit rising slowly toward the ceiling, not nearly as buoyant as before.

  “Solo! Can you hear me?”

  The thought of how much water still lay above her, all those levels of it pressing down, hundreds of feet of solid flood—it was suffocating. What did she have left in the suit? Minutes? How long would it take to swim or float to the top of the stairwell? Much, much longer. There were probably oxygen bottles down one of those pitch black hallways, but how would she find them? This wasn’t her home. She didn’t have time to look. All she had was a mad drive to reach the stairwell, to race to the surface.

  She pulled and kicked her way around the last corner and into the main hallway, her muscles screaming from being used in new ways, from fighting the stiff and bulky suit, the viscous atmosphere, when she realized the inky water had lightened to something nearer charcoal instead of pitch black. There was a green tint to her blindness.

  Juliette scissored her legs and gathered in the tubing, bumping along the ceiling, sensing the security station and stairwell ahead. She had travelled corridors like these thousands of times, twice in utter darkness when main breakers had failed. She remembered staggering through hallways just like this, telling coworkers it would be okay, to just stay still, she’d handle it.

  Now she tried to do the same for herself, to lie and say it would all be okay, to just keep moving, don’t panic.

  The dizziness began to set in as she reached the security gate. The water ahead glowed lime green and looked so inviting, an end to the blind scrambling, no more of her helmet bumping into what she couldn’t see.

  Her arm briefly tangled with the power cord; she shook it free and hauled herself toward that tall column of water ahead, that flooded straw, that sunken stairway.

  Before she got there, she had her first spasm, like a hiccup, a violent and automatic gasp for air. She lost her grip on the line and felt her chest nearly burst from the effort of breathing. The temptation to shed her helmet and take a deep inhalation of water overpowered her. Something in her mind insisted she could breathe the stuff. Just give her a chance, it said. One lungful of the water. Anything other than the toxins she had exhaled into her suit, a suit designed to keep such things out.

  Her throat spasmed again, and she started coughing in her helmet as she pulled her way into the stairwell. The rope was there, held down by the wrench. She swam for it, knowing it was too late. As she yanked down, she felt the slack coming—the loose end of the rope spiraled in sinking knots toward her.