by Hugh Howey
21
“I have seen the day
that I have worn a visor
and could tell a whispering tale.”
Bernard woke to shouting, to his eyes burning from the smoke, his ears ringing with a long-ago blast.
Peter Billings was shaking his shoulders, yelling at him, a look of fright in his wide eyes and soot-stained brow. Blood stained his coveralls in a wide rust-colored pool.
“Hrm?”
“Sir! Can you hear me?”
Bernard pushed Peter’s hands away and tried to sit up. He groped about his body, looking for anything bleeding or broken. His head throbbed. His hand came away from his nose wet with blood.
“What happened?” he groaned.
Peter crouched by his side. Bernard saw Lukas standing just behind the sheriff, rifle on his shoulder, peering toward the stairwell. There was shouting in the distance, and then the patter of gunfire.
“We’ve got three men dead,” Peter said. “A few wounded. Sims led a half dozen into the stairwell. They got it a lot worse than us. A lot worse.”
Bernard nodded. He checked his ears, was surprised they weren’t bleeding as well. He dotted his sleeve with blood from his nose and patted Peter on the arm. He nodded over his shoulder. “Get Lukas,” he said.
Peter frowned but nodded. He spoke with Lukas, and the young man knelt by Bernard.
“Are you okay?” Lukas asked.
Bernard nodded. “Stupid,” he said. “Didn’t know they’d have guns. Should’ve guessed about the bombs.”
“Take it easy.”
He shook his head. “Shouldn’t have had you here. Dumb. Could have been us both—”
“Well it was neither of us, sir. We’ve got ‘em running down the stairwell. I think it’s over.”
Bernard patted his arm. “Get me to the server,” he said. “We’ll need to report this.”
Lukas nodded. He seemed to know just the server Bernard meant. He helped Bernard to his feet, an arm around his back, Peter Billings frowning as the two of them staggered down the smoky hallway together.
“Not good,” Bernard told Lukas, once they were away from the others.
“But we won, right?”
“Not yet. The damage won’t be contained here. Not today. You’ll have to stay below a while.” Bernard grimaced and tried to walk alone. “Can’t risk something happening to us both.”
Lukas seemed unhappy about this. He entered his code into the great door, pulled out his ID, wiped someone else’s blood off it and his hand, then swiped it through the reader.
“I understand,” he finally said.
Bernard knew he’d picked the right man. He left Lukas to close the heavy door while he made his way to the rearmost server. He staggered once and fell against number eight, catching himself and resting a moment until the wooziness went away. Lukas caught up before he got to the back of the room, was pulling his copy of the master key out of his coveralls.
Bernard rested against the wall while Lukas opened the server. He was still too shaken up to notice the flashing code on the server’s front panel. His ears were too full of a false ringing to notice the real one.
“What’s that mean?” Lukas asked. “That noise?”
Bernard looked at him quizzically.
“Fire alarm?” Lukas pointed up at the ceiling. Bernard finally heard it as well. He swam toward the back of the server as Lukas opened the last lock, pushed the young man out of the way.
What were the chances? Did they already know? Bernard’s life had become unhinged in two short days. He reached inside the cloth pouch, grabbed the headset, and pulled it over his tender ears. He pushed the jack into the slot labeled “1” and was surprised to hear a beep. The line was ringing. He was making a call.
He pulled the jack out hurriedly, canceling the call, and saw that the light above “1” wasn’t blinking. The light above “17” was.
Bernard felt the room spin. A dead silo was calling him. A survivor? After all these years? With access to the servers? His hand trembled as he guided the jack into the slot. Lukas was asking something behind him, but Bernard couldn’t hear anything through the headphones.
“Hello?” he croaked. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Hello,” a voice said.
Bernard adjusted his headphones. He waved for Lukas to shut the fuck up. His ears were still ringing, his nose bleeding into his mouth.
“Who is this?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” the voice said. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Who the fuck is this?” Bernard sputtered. “How do you have access to—?”
“You sent me out,” the voice said. “Is this Bernard? You sent me to die—”
Bernard slumped down, his legs numb. The cord on the headphones uncoiled and nearly pulled the cups from his head. He clutched the phones and fought to place this voice. Lukas was holding him by the armpits, keeping him from collapsing to his back.
“Are you there?” the voice asked. “Do you know who this is?”
“No,” he said. But he knew. It was impossible, but he knew.
“You sent me to die, you fuck.”
“You knew the rules—!” Bernard cried, yelling at a ghost. “You knew—!”
“Shut up and listen, Bernard. Just shut the fuck up and listen to me very carefully.”
Bernard waited. He could taste the copper of his own blood in his mouth.
“I’m coming for you. I’m coming home, and I’m coming to clean.”
•
“The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law.
Villain and he be many miles asunder.
And all these woes shall serve
for sweet discourses in our time to come.
He that is strucken blind cannot forget
the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.
One fire burns out another’s burning,
one pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.”
- The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliet.
Wool 5 – The Stranded
1
• Silo 18 •
Marck stumbled down the great stairway, his hand sliding against the cool railing, a rifle tucked under his arm, his boots slipping in blood. He could barely hear the screams all around him: the wails from the wounded as they were half-dragged down the steps, the horrified cries from the curious crowds on every landing who witnessed their passage, or the shouts of promised violence from the men chasing him and the rest of his mechanics from level to level.
The ringing in his ears drowned out most of the noise. It was the blast, the god-awful blast. Not the one that had peeled open the doors of IT—he had been ready for that one, had hunkered down with the rest. And it wasn’t the second bomb, the one Knox had lobbed deep into the heart of their enemy’s den. It was the last one, the one he didn’t see coming, the one that spilled from the hands of that small gray woman from Supply.
McLain’s bomb. It had gone off right in front of him, had taken his hearing as it took her life.
And Knox, that stout and unmovable head of Mechanical—his boss, his good friend—gone.
Marck hurried down the steps, wounded and afraid. He was a long way from the safety of the down deep—and he desperately wanted to find his wife. He concentrated on this rather than the past, tried not to think of the explosion that had taken his friends, had wrecked their plans, had engulfed any chance at justice.
Muffled shots rang out from above, followed by the piercing zing of bullets striking steel—only steel, thank God. Marck stayed away from the outer railing, away from the aim of the shooters who hounded them from the landings above with their smoothly firing rifles. The good people of Mechanical and Supply had been running and fighting for over a dozen levels; Marck silently begged the men above to stop, to give them a chance to rest, but the boots and the bullets kept coming.
Half a level later, he caught up to three members of Supply, the one in the middle wo
unded and being ported, arms draped over shoulders, blood dotting the backs of their yellow coveralls. He yelled at them to keep moving, couldn’t hear his own voice, could just feel it in his chest. Some of the blood he was slipping in was his own.
With his injured arm tight against his chest, his rifle cradled in the crook of his elbow, Marck kept his other hand on the railing to keep from tumbling headfirst down the steep stairwell. There were no allies behind him, none still alive. After the last shootout, he had sent the others ahead, had barely gotten away himself. And yet they kept coming, tireless. Marck would pause now and then, fumble with the unreliable ammunition, chamber a shot, and fire wildly up the stairwell. Just to do something. To slow them down.
He stopped to take a breath, leaned out over the railing, and swung his rifle toward the sky. The next round was a dud. The bullets buzzing back at him weren’t.
Huddling against the stairwell’s central post, he took the time to reload. His rifle wasn’t like theirs. One shot at a time and difficult to aim. They had modern things he’d never heard of, shots coming as fast as a frightened pulse. He moved toward the railing and checked the landing below, could see curious faces through a cracked doorway, fingers curled around the edge of the steel jamb. This was it. Landing forty-two. The last place he’d seen his wife.
“Shirly!”
Calling her name, he staggered down a quarter turn until he was level with the landing. He kept close to the interior, out of sight from his pursuers, and searched the shadowed faces.
“My wife!” he yelled across the landing, a hand cupped to his cheeks, forgetting that the incredible ringing was only in his ears, not theirs. “Where is she?”
A mouth moved in the dark crowd. The voice was a dull and distant drone.
Someone else pointed down. The faces cringed; the cracked door twitched shut as another ricochet screamed out; the stairway shook with all the frightened boots below and the chasing ones above. Marck eyed the illicit power cables draped over the railing and remembered the farmers attempting to steal electricity from the level below. He hurried down the stairs, following the thick cords, desperate to find Shirly.
One level down, positive that his wife would be inside, Marck braved the open space of the landing and rushed across. He threw himself against the doors. Shots rang out. Marck grabbed the handle and tugged, shouting her name to ears as deaf as his own. The door budged, was being held fast with the sinewy restraint of unseen arms. He slapped the glass window, leaving a pink palm print, and yelled for them to open up, to let him in. Eager bullets rattled by his feet—one of them left a scar down the face of the door. Crouching and covering his head, he scurried back to the stairwell.
Marck forced himself to move downward. If Shirly was inside, she might be better off. She could strip herself of incriminating gear, blend in until things settled down. If she were below—he needed to hurry after her. Either way, down was the only direction.
At the next landing, he caught up with the same three members of Supply. The wounded man was sitting on the decking, eyes wide. The other two were tending to him, blood on their sides from supporting his weight. One of the Supply workers was a woman Marck vaguely recognized from the march up. There was a cold fire in her eyes as Marck paused to see if they needed help.
“I can carry him,” he shouted, kneeling by the wounded man.
The woman said something. Marck shook his head and pointed to his ears.
She repeated herself, lips moving in exaggeration, but Marck wasn’t able to piece it together. She gave up and shoved at his arm, pushing him away. The wounded man clutched his stomach, a red stain ballooning out from his abdomen all the way to his crotch. His hands clasped something protruding there, a small wheel spinning on the end of a steel post. The leg of a chair.
The woman pulled a bomb from her satchel, one of those pipes that promised so much violence. It was solemnly passed to the wounded man, who accepted it, his knuckles white, his hands trembling.
The two members of Supply pulled Marck away—away from the man with the large piece of office furniture sprouting from his oozing stomach. The shouts sounded distant, but he knew they were nearby. They were practically in his ear. He found himself yanked backwards, transfixed by the vacant stare on the face of this doomed and wounded man. His eyes locked onto Marck’s. The man held the bomb away from himself, fingers curled around that terrible cylinder of steel, a grim clench of teeth jutting along his jawline.
Marck glanced up the stairwell where the boots were finally gaining on them, coming into view, black and bloodless, this tireless and superior enemy. They came down the dripping trail Marck and the others had left behind, coming for them with their ammo that never failed.
He stumbled down the stairwell backwards, half-dragged by the others, one hand on the railing, eyes drifting to the swinging door opening behind the man they’d left behind.
A young face appeared there, a curious boy, rushing out to see. A tangle of adult hands scrambled to pull him back.
Marck was hauled down the stairs, too far down the curving stairs to see what happened next. But his ears, as deadened as they were, caught the popping and zinging of gunfire, and then a blast, a roaring explosion that shook the great stairwell, that knocked him and the others down, slamming him against the railing. His rifle clattered toward the edge—Marck lunged for it. He grabbed it before it could escape and go tumbling into space.
Shaking his head, stunned, he pushed himself up to his hands and knees and managed to rise slowly to his feet. Senseless, he staggered forward down the shuddering steps, the treads beneath his feet ringing and vibrating as the silo around them all continued its spiral into dark madness.
2
• Silo 18 •
The first moment of true rest came hours later at Supply, on the upper edge of the down deep. There was talk of holding there, of setting up some kind of barrier, but it wasn’t clear how the entire stairway could be blocked to include the open space between the railing and the concrete cylinder beyond. This was the gap where the singing bullets lived, a place where jumpers were known to meet their ends, and where their enemy could surely find some way to scamper down.
Marck’s hearing had improved during the last leg of his run. Enough to grow weary of the rhythmic clomp of his own boots, the sound of his pained grunts, the noise of his exhausted pants for air. He heard someone say that the last explosion had wrecked the stairway, had impeded the chase. But for how long? What was the damage? No one knew.
Tensions ran high on the landing; the news of McLain’s death had unsettled the people of Supply. The wounded in yellow coveralls were taken inside, but it was suggested—and not gently—that Mechanical’s injured would be better off receiving treatment further below. Where they belonged.
Marck waded through these arguments, the voices still somewhat muffled and distant. He asked everyone about Shirly, several in yellow shrugging as if they didn’t know her. One guy said she’d already gone down with some of the other wounded. He said it a second time, louder, before Marck was sure he’d heard him.
It was good news, and he figured as much. He was about to leave when his wife emerged without warning from the anxious crowd, startling him.
Her eyes widened as she recognized him. And then her gaze fell to his wounded arm.
“Oh, God!”
She threw her arms around him, pressed her face against his neck. Marck hugged her with one arm, his rifle between them, the barrel cold against his quivering cheek.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She latched to his neck, her forehead finding his shoulder, and said something he couldn’t hear but could feel against his skin. She made room to inspect his arm.
“I can’t hear,” he told her.
“I’m fine,” she said, louder. She shook her head, her eyes wide and wet. “I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for any of it. Is it true about Knox? What happened? How bad was it?”
She focused on his wound, and her han
ds felt good on his arm. Strong and confident. The crowd was thinning as members of Mechanical retreated further down the stairwell. Several in Supply yellow treated Marck to cold stares, eyeing his wound as if worried it would soon be their problem.
“Knox is dead,” he told her. “McLain, too. A few others. I was right there when the blast went off—”
He looked down at his arm, which she had exposed by tearing away his ripped and stained undershirt.
“Were you shot?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It happened so fast.” He looked over his shoulder. “Where’s everyone going? Why aren’t we holding up here?”
