Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 14

 

  To start with, they had their sheriff. A fiery girl from the down deep who seemed every bit as confident and inspiring as Marnes had intimated. Jahns saw her kind as the future of the silo. People who thought long term. Who planned. Who got things done. There was precedence of sheriffs running for mayor. She thought Juliette would eventually make a fine choice.

  And speaking of running, the trip had fired up her own goals and ambitions. She was excited for the upcoming elections, however unopposed she might be, and had even come up with dozens of short speeches during the climb. She saw how things could run better, how she could perform her duties more diligently, and how the silo could have new life breathed into old bones.

  But the biggest change was whatever had grown between herself and Marnes. She had even begun to suspect, just in the last hours, that the real reason for him never taking a promotion was because of her. As deputy, there was enough space between them to contain his hope, his impossible dream of holding her. As sheriff, it couldn’t happen. Too much conflict of interest, too much his immediate superior. This theory of hers contained a powerful sadness and an awe-inspiring sweetness. She squeezed his hand as she thought on this theory, and it filled her with a deep hollowness, a cramp in her gut at all he had silently sacrificed, a massive debt to live up to no matter what happened next.

  They approached the landing to the nursery, and had no plans for stopping to see Juliette’s father, to urge him to receive his daughter on the way up, but Jahns changed her mind as she felt her bladder beg for release.

  “I’ve got to go pretty bad,” she told Marnes, embarrassed as a child to admit she couldn’t hold it. Her mouth was dry and her stomach churning from so much fluid, and maybe from a little fear of the journey being over and done. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Juliette’s father, either,” she added.

  Marnes’s mustache bent up at the corners with the excuse. “Then we should stop,” he said.

  The waiting room was empty, the signs reminding them to be quiet. Jahns peered through the glass partition and saw a nurse padding through the dark corridor toward her, a frown becoming a slight smile of recognition.

  “Mayor,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry not to have wired ahead, but I was hoping to see Doctor Nichols? And possibly use your restroom?”

  “Of course. ” She buzzed the door and waved them through. “We’ve had two deliveries since you last stopped by. Things have been crazy with this generator mess—”

  “Power holiday,” Marnes corrected, his voice gruff and louder than theirs.

  The nurse shot him a look, but nodded as if duly noted. She took two robes from the racks and held them out, told them to leave their stuff by her desk.

  In the waiting room, she waved toward the benches and said she would find the doctor. “The bathrooms are through there. ” She pointed at a door, the old sign painted on its surface nearly eroded clean away.

  “I’ll be right back,” Jahns told Marnes. She fought the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand, as normal as that dark and hidden habit had lately become.

  The bathroom was almost completely devoid of light. Jahns fumbled with an unfamiliar lock on the stall door, cursed under her breath as her stomach churned noisily, then finally threw the stall open and hurried to sit down. Her stomach felt like it was on fire as she relieved herself. The mixture of welcomed release and the burn of having held it too long left her unable to breathe. She went for what felt like forever, remained sitting as her legs shook uncontrollably, and realized she had pushed herself too hard on the climb up. The thought of another twenty levels mortified her, made her insides feel hollow with dread. She finished and moved over to the adjoining toilet to splash herself clean, then dried herself with one of the towels. She flushed both units to cycle the water. It all required fumbling in the darkness, unable to see and unfamiliar with the spacing and location that were second nature in her apartment and office.

  She staggered out of the bathroom on weak legs, wondering if she might need to stay one more night, sleep in a delivery bed, wait until the morning to make the climb to her office. She could barely feel her legs as she pulled open the door and returned to Marnes in the waiting room.

  “Better?” he asked. He sat on one of the family benches, a space left conspicuously beside him. Jahns nodded and sat heavily. She was breathing in shallow pants and wondered if he’d find her weak to admit she couldn’t go any further that day.

  “Jahns? You okay?”

  Marnes leaned forward. He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking toward the ground. “Jahns. What the hell happened?”

  “Lower your voice,” she whispered.

  He screamed, instead.

  “Doctor!” he yelled. “Nurse!”

  A form moved beyond the dusky glass of the nursery. Jahns laid her head back against the seat cushion, trying to form the words on her lips, to tell him to keep it down.

  “Jahns, sweetheart, what did you do?”

  He was holding her hand, patting the back of it. He shook her arm. Jahns just wanted to sleep. There was the slapping of footsteps running their way. Lights turned up forbiddingly bright. A nurse yelled something. There was the familiar voice of Juliette’s father, a doctor. He would give her a bed. He would understand this exhaustion—

  There was talk of blood. Someone was examining her legs. Marnes was crying, tears falling into his white mustache, peppered with black. He was shaking her shoulders, looking her in the eye.

  “I’m okay,” Jahns tried to say.

  She licked her lips. So dry. Mouth, so damned dry. She asked for water. Marnes fumbled for his canteen, brought it to her lips, splashing water against and into her mouth.

  She tried to swallow, but couldn’t. They were stretching her out on the bench, the doctor touching her ribs, shining a light in her eyes. But things were getting darker anyway.

  Marnes clutched the canteen in one hand, rubbed her hair back with the other. He was blubbering. So sad for some reason. So much more energy than her. She smiled at him and reached for his hand, a miraculous effort. She held his wrist and told him that she loved him. That she had for as long as she could remember. Her mind was tired, loosing its grip on her secrets, mouthing them to him as his eyes flowed with tears.

  His eyes, bright and wrinkled, peering down at her, then turning to the canteen in his hand.

  The canteen that he had carried.

  The water, and poison, meant for him.

  9

  The generator room was unusually crowded and eerily silent. Mechanics in worn coveralls stood three deep behind the railing and watched the first shift crew work. Juliette was only dimly aware of them; she was more keenly aware of the silence.

  She leaned over a device of her own making, a tall platform welded to the metal floor and arrayed with mirrors and tiny slits that bounced light across the room. This light shined on mirrors attached to the generator and its large dynamo, helping her get them in perfect alignment. It was the shaft between the two of them that she cared about, that long steel rod the size of a man’s waist where the power of combusting fuel was transformed into the spark of electricity. She was hoping to have the machines on either end of this rod aligned to within a thousandth of an inch. But everything they were doing was without precedent. The procedures had been hurriedly planned in all-night sessions while the backup generator was put online. Now, she could only concentrate, could only hope the eighteen hour shifts had been good for something, and trust in plans made back when she’d had some decent rest and could soundly think.

  While she guided the final placement, the chamber around her stood deathly quiet. She gave a sign, and Marck and his team tightened several of the massive bolts on the new rubber floor mounts. They were four days into the power holiday. The generator needed to be up and running by morning and at full power that next evening. With so much done to it—the new gaskets and seals, the polishin
g of cylinder shafts that had required young shadows to crawl down into the heart of the beast—Juliette was worried about it even starting up. The generator had never been fully powered down during her lifetime. Old Knox could remember it shutting itself down in an emergency once, back when he was a mere shadow, but for everyone else the rumble was as constant and close as their own heartbeats. Juliette felt inordinate pressure for everything to work. She was the one who had come up with the idea to do a refit. She calmed herself with reassurances that it was the right thing to do, and that the worst that could happen now was that the holiday would get extended until they sorted out all the kinks. That was much better than a catastrophic failure years from now.

  Marck signaled that the bolts were secure, the lock nuts tightened down. Juliette jumped off her homemade platform and strolled over to the generator to join him. It was difficult to walk casually with so many eyes on her. She couldn’t believe this rowdy crew, this extended and dysfunctional family of hers, could be so perfectly silent. It was like they were all holding their breath, wondering if the crushing schedule of the last few days was going to be for naught.

  “You ready?” she asked Marck.

  He nodded, wiping his hands on a filthy rag that always seemed to be draped over his shoulder. Juliette checked her watch. The sight of its second hand ticking around in its constant path comforted her. Whenever she had doubts about something working, she looked at her wrist. Not to see the time, but to see a thing she had fixed. A repair so intricate and impossible—one that had taken years of cleaning and setting parts almost too small to see—that it made her current task, whatever it was, feel small by comparison.

  “We on schedule?” Marck asked, grinning.

  “We’re doing fine. ” She nodded to the control room. Whispers began to stir through the crowd as they realized the restart was imminent. Dozens of them pulled sound protection from their necks and settled the muffs over their ears. Juliette and Marck joined Shirly in the control room.

  “How’s it going?” Juliette asked the second shift foreman, a young woman, small but fiery.

  “Golden,” Shirly said as she continued to make adjustments, zeroing out all the corrections that had built up over the years. They were starting from the ground up, none of the patches and fixes of old to disguise any new symptoms. A fresh start. “We’re good to go,” she said.

  She backed away from the controls and moved to stand near her husband. The gesture was transparent, leaving the controls. This was Juliette’s project, perhaps the last thing she would ever try and fix in the down deep of Mechanical. She would have the honor, and the full responsibility, of firing the generator up.

  Juliette stood over the control board, looking down at knobs and dials that she could locate in utter darkness. It was hard to believe that this phase of her life was over, that some new one was about to begin. The thought of traveling to the up-top frightened her more than this project could. The idea of leaving her friends and family, of dealing with politics, did not taste as sweet to her as the sweat and grease on her lips. But at least she had allies up there. If people like Jahns and Marnes were able to get by, to survive, she figured she’d be okay.

  With a trembling hand, more from exhaustion than nerves, Juliette engaged the starter motor. There was a loud whine as a small electrical engine tried to get the massive diesel generator moving. It seemed to be taking forever, but Juliette had no idea what normal sounded like. Marck stood by the door, propping it open so they could better hear any shouts to abort. He glanced over at Juliette as she continued to hold the ignition, creases of worry in his brow as the starter whined and groaned in the next room.

  Someone outside waved both arms, trying to signal her through the glass.

  “Shut it off, shut it off,” Marck said. Shirly hurried over toward the control panel to help.

  Juliette let go of the ignition and reached for the kill switch, but she stopped herself from pressing it. There was a noise outside. A powerful hum. She thought she could feel it through the floor, but not like the vibration of old.

  “It’s already running!” someone yelled.

  “It was already running,” Marck said, laughing.

  The mechanics outside were cheering. Someone pulled off their ear protection and hurled the muffs up into the air. Juliette realized the starter motor was louder than the rebuilt generator, that she’d been holding the ignition even as it had already started and continued to run.

  Shirly and Marck hugged one another. Juliette checked the temps and pressures on all the zeroed gauges and saw little to adjust, but she wouldn’t be sure until it warmed up. Her throat constricted with emotion, the release of so much pressure. Work crews were leaping over the railing to crowd around the rebuilt beast. Some who rarely visited the generator room were reaching out to touch it, almost with reverent awe.

  Juliette left the control room to watch them, to listen to the sound of a perfectly working machine, of gears in alignment. She stood behind the railing, hands on a steel bar that used to rattle and dance while the generator labored, and watched an unlikely celebration take place in a normally avoided workspace. The hum was magnificent. Power without dread. The culmination of so much hurried labor and planning.

  The success gave her a new confidence for what lay ahead, for what lay above. She was in such fine spirits and so fixated on the powerful and improved machines that she didn’t notice the young porter hurry into the room, his face ashen, his chest swelling with the deep gulps of a long and frantic run. She barely noticed the way the news traveled from mouth to mouth throughout the room, spreading among the mechanics until fear and sadness registered in their eyes. It wasn’t until the celebration died completely, the room falling into a different sort of quiet, one studded with sobs and gasps of disbelief, of grown men wailing, that Juliette knew something was amiss.