Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 53

 

  She drifted slowly toward the surface, very little of the built-up pressure inside her suit, no quick ride to the top. Another throat spasm, and the helmet had to come off. She was getting dizzy, would soon pass out.

  Juliette fumbled for the clasps on her metal collar. The sense of déjà vu was overpowering. Only this time, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She remembered the soup, the fetid smell, crawling out of the dark walk-in. She remembered the knife.

  Patting her chest, she felt the handle sticking out from its sheath. Some of the other tools had wiggled out of their pockets; they dangled from lines meant to keep them from getting lost, lines that now just made them a nuisance, turned them into more weights holding her down.

  She rose gently up the stairwell, her body shivering from the cold and convulsing from the absence of breathable air. Forgetting all reason, all sense of where she was, she became singularly aware of the noxious fog hanging all around her head, trapped by that dome, killing her. She aimed the blade into the first latch in her collar and pressed hard.

  There was a click and a fine spray of cold water against her neck. A feeble bubble lurched out of her suit and tumbled up her visor. Groping for the other latch, she shoved the knife into it, and the helmet popped off, water flooding over her face, filling her suit, shocking her with the numbing cold and dragging her, sinking, back down to where she’d come from.

  • • • •

  The freezing cold jolted Juliette to her senses. She blinked her lids against the sting of the green water and saw the knife in her hands, the dome of her helmet spinning through the murk like a bubble heading in the wrong direction. She was slowly sinking after it, no air in her lungs, hundreds of feet of water pressing down.

  She jabbed the knife into the wrong pocket on her chest, saw drivers and spanners hanging by their cords from her struggle through the blackness, and kicked toward the hose that still led through four levels of water toward the surface.

  Bubbles of air leaked out of her collar and across her neck, up through her hair. Juliette seized the hose and stopped her plummet, pulled upward, her throat screaming for an intake of air, of water, of anything. The urge to swallow was overpowering. She started to pull herself up, when she saw, in the undersides of the steps, a shimmering flash of hope.

  Trapped bubbles. Maybe from her descent. They moved like liquid solder in the hollow undersides of the spiral staircase.

  Juliette made a noise in her throat, a raw cry of desperation, of effort. She pawed through the water, fighting the sinking of the suit, and grasped the railing of the submerged stairway. Pulling herself up and kicking off of the railing, she made it to the nearest shimmer of bubbles, grabbed the edge of the stairs, and pushed her mouth right up to the metal underside of the step.

  She inhaled a desperate gasp of air and sucked in a lot of water in the process. She dove her head below the surface and coughed into the water, which brought the burn of fluids invading her nose. She nearly sucked in a lungful of water, felt her heart racing and ready to burst out of her chest, stuck her face back up against the wet rusty underside of the step, and with her lips pursed and trembling, managed to take in a gentle sip of air.

  The tiny flashes of light in her vision subsided. She lowered her head and blew out, away from the step, watching the bubbles of her exhalation rise, and then pressed her face close for another taste.

  Air.

  She blinked away underwater tears of effort, of frustration, of relief. Peering up the twisted maze of metal steps, many of them moving like flexible mirrors where the trapped air was stirred by her mad gyrations, she saw a pathway like no other. She kicked off and took a few steps at a time, pulling herself hand over hand in the gaps between, drinking tiny bubbles of air out of the several-inch hollow beneath each tread, praising the tight welds where the diamond plate steps had been joined many hundreds of years ago. The steps had been boxed in for strength, to handle the traffic of a million impacts of boots, and now they held the gaseous overflow from her descent. Her lips brushed each one, tasting metal and rust, kissing her salvation.

  • • • •

  The green emergency lights all around her remained steady, so Juliette never noticed the landings drifting past. She just concentrated on taking five steps with each breath, six steps, a long stretch with hardly any air, another mouthful of water where the bubble was too thin to breathe, a lifetime of rising against the tug of her flooded suit and dangling tools, no thought for stopping and cutting things free, just kick and pull, hand over hand, up the undersides of the steps, a deep and steady pull of air, suck this shallow step dry, don’t exhale into the steps above, easy now. Five more steps. It was a game, like Hop, five squares in a leap, don’t cheat, mind the chalk, she was good at this, getting better.

  And then a foul burn on her lips, the taste of water growing toxic, her head coming up into the underside of a step and breaking through a film of gas-stench and slimy oil.

  Juliette blew out her last breath and coughed, wiping at her face, her head still trapped below the next step. She wheezed and laughed and pushed herself away, banging her head on the sharp steel edge of the stairs. She was free. She briefly bobbed below the surface as she swam around the railing, her eyes burning from the oil and gas floating on top. Splashing loudly, crying for Solo, she made it over the railing. With her padded and shivering knees, she finally found the steps.

  She’d made it. Clinging to the dry treads above her, neck bent, gasping and wheezing, her legs numb, she tried to cry out that she made it, but it escaped as a whimper. She was cold. She was freezing. Her arms shivered as she pulled herself up the quiet steps, no rattle from the compressor, no arms reaching to assist her.

  “Solo—?”

  She crawled the half dozen treads to the landing and rolled onto her back. Some of her tools were caught on steps below, tugging at her where they were tied off to her pockets. Water drained out of her suit and splashed down her neck, pooled by her head, ran into her ears. She turned her head—she needed to get the freezing suit off—and found Solo.

  He was lying on his side, eyes shut, blood running down his face, some of it already caked dry.

  “Solo?”

  Her hand was a shivering blur as she reached and shook him. What had he done to himself?

  “Hey. Wakethefuckup. ”

  Her teeth were chattering. She grabbed his shoulder and gave him a violent shake. “Solo! I need help!”

  One of his eyes parted a little. He blinked a few times, then bent double and coughed, blood flecking the landing by his face.

  “Help,” she said. She fumbled for the zipper at her back, not realizing it was Solo who needed her.

  Solo coughed into his hand, then rolled over and settled once again to his back. The blood on his head was still flowing from somewhere, fresh tracks trickling across what had dried some time before.

  “Solo?”

  He groaned. Juliette pulled herself closer, could barely feel her body. He whispered something, his voice a rasp on the edge of silence.

  “Hey—” She brought her face close to his, could feel her lips swollen and numb, could still taste the gasoline.

  “Not my name—”

  He coughed a mist of red. One arm lifted from the landing a few inches as if to cover his mouth, but it never had a chance of getting there.

  “Not my name,” he said again. His head lolled side to side, and Juliette finally realized that he was badly injured. Her mind began to clear enough to see what state he was in.

  “Hold still,” she groaned. “Solo, I need you to be still. ”

  She tried to push herself up, to will herself the strength to move. Solo blinked and looked at her, his eyes glassy, blood tinting the gray in his beard the color crimson.

  “Not Solo,” he said, his voice straining. “My name’s Jimmy—”

  More coughing, his eyes rolling up into the back of his hea
d—

  “—and I don’t think—”

  His eyelids sagged shut, and then squinted in pain.

  “—don’t think I was—”

  “Stay with me,” Juliette said, hot tears cutting down her frozen face.

  “—don’t think I ever was alone,” he whispered, the lines on his face relaxing, his head sagging to the cold steel landing.

  18

  • Silo 18 •

  The pot on the stove bubbled noisily, steam rising off the surface, tiny drops of water leaping to their hissing freedom over the edge. Lukas shook a pinch of tea leaves out of the resealable tin and into the tiny strainer. His hands were shaking as he lowered the little basket into his mug. As he lifted the pot, some water spilled directly on the burner; the drops made spitting sounds and gave off a burnt odor. He watched Bernard out of the corner of his eye as he tilted the boiling water through the leaves.

  “I just don’t understand,” he said, holding the mug with both hands, allowing the heat to penetrate his palms. “How could anybody—? How could you do something like this on purpose?” He shook his head and peered into his mug where a few intrepid shreds of leaf had already gotten free and swam outside the basket. He looked up at Bernard. “And you knew about this? How—? How could you know about this?”

  Bernard frowned. He rubbed his mustache with one hand, the other resting in the belly of his coveralls. “I wish I didn’t know it,” he told Lukas. “And now you see why some facts, some bits of knowledge have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground. ” He looked down at his boots. “I pieced it together much as you did, just knowing what we have to know to do this job. This is why I chose you, Lukas. You and a few others have some idea what’s stored on these servers. You’re already prepped for learning more. Can you imagine if you told any of this to someone who wears red or green to work every day?”

  Lukas shook his head.

  “It’s happened before, you know. Silo ten went down like that. I sat back there—” He pointed toward the small study with the books, the computer, the hissing radio. “—and I listened to it happen. I listened to a colleague’s shadow broadcast his insanity to anyone who would listen—”

  Lukas studied his steeping tea. A handful of leaves swam about on hot currents of darkening water; the rest remained in the grip of the imprisoning basket. “That’s why the radio controls are locked up,” he said.

  “And it’s why you are locked up. ”

  Lukas nodded. He’d already suspected as much.

  “How long were you kept in here?” He glanced up at Bernard, and an image flashed in his mind, one of Sheriff Billings inspecting his gun while he visited with his mother. Had they been listening in? Would he have been shot, his mother too, if he’d said anything?

  “I spent just over two months down here until my caster knew I was ready, that I had accepted and understood everything I’d learned. ” He crossed his arms over his belly. “I really wish you hadn’t asked the question, hadn’t put it together so soon. It’s much better to find out when you’re older. ”

  Lukas pursed his lips and nodded. It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried out destruction of the entire world.

  Lukas bent his head and breathed in the smell of the steeping leaves. The mint was like a direct line through the trembling stress, a strike to the calm pleasure center in the deep regions of his brain. He inhaled and held it, finally let it out. Bernard crossed to the small stove in the corner of the storeroom and started making his own mug.

  “How did they do it?” Lukas asked. “To kill so many. Do you know how they did it?”

  Bernard shrugged. He tapped the tin with one finger, shaking out a precise amount of tea into another basket. “They might still be doing it for all I know. Nobody talks about how long it’s supposed to go on. There’s fear that small pockets of survivors might be holed up elsewhere around the globe. Operation fifty is completely pointless if anyone else survives. The population has to be homogenous—”

  “The man I spoke to, he said we were it. Just the fifty silos—”

  “Forty-seven,” Bernard said. “And we are it, as far as we know. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else being so well prepared. But there’s always a chance. It’s only been a few hundred years. ”

  “A few hundred?” Lukas leaned back against the counter. He lifted his tea, but the mint was losing its power to reach him. “So hundreds of years ago, we decided—”

  “They. ” Bernard filled his mug with the still-steaming water. “They decided. Don’t include yourself. Certainly don’t include me. ”

  “Okay, they decided to destroy the world. Wipe everything out. Why?”

  Bernard set his mug down on the stove to let it steep. He pulled off his glasses, wiped the steam off them, then pointed them toward the study, toward the wall with the massive shelves of books. “Because of the worst parts of our Legacy, that’s why. At least, that’s what I think they would say if they were still alive. ” He lowered his voice and muttered: “Which they aren’t, thank God. ”

  Lukas shuddered. He still didn’t believe anyone would make that decision, no matter what the conditions were like. He thought of the billions of people who supposedly lived beneath the stars all those hundreds of years ago. Nobody could kill so many. How could anyone take that much life for granted?

  “And now we work for them,” Lukas spat. He crossed to the sink and pulled the basket out of his mug, set it on the stainless steel to drain. He cautioned a sip, slurping lest it burn him. “You tell me not to include us, but we’re a part of this now. ”