Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 55

 

  Her teeth chattered violently. Juliette eyed the stairs, this new fear coursing through her that boots could rumble down at any moment, that she was trapped between these other survivors and the freezing water. She retrieved her knife, held it in front of her with both hands, tried to will herself to not shiver so violently.

  Glimpses of her face in the blade caused her to worry more. She looked as pale as a ghost. Lips purple, eyes ringed dark and seeming hollow. She nearly laughed at the sight of her lips vibrating, the clacking blur of her teeth. She scooted closer to the fire. The orange light danced on the blade. The unburnt fuel dripped and formed silvery splashes of color below.

  As the last of the gas burned and the flames dwindled, Juliette decided to move. She was still shaking, but it was cold in the depths of the shaft so far from the electricity of IT. She patted the black underlinings she’d stripped off. One of them had been left balled up and was still soaked. The other she’d been lucky to have dropped flat, hadn’t been thinking clearly or she would’ve hung it up. It was damp, but better to wear it and heat it up than allow the cold air to wick her body temperature away. She worked her legs in, struggled to get her arms through the sleeves, zipped up the front.

  On bare, numb, and unsteady feet, she returned to Solo. She could feel his neck this time. He felt warm. She couldn’t remember how long a body stayed that way. And then she felt a weak and slow thrumming in his neck. A beat.

  “Solo!” She shook his shoulders. “Hey—” What name had he whispered? She remembered: “Jimmy!”

  His head lolled from side to side while she shook his shoulder. She checked his scalp beneath all that crazy hair, saw lots of blood. Most of it was dry. She looked around again for her bag—they had brought food, water, and dry clothes for when she got back up—but the satchel was gone. She grabbed her other undersuit instead. She wasn’t sure about the quality of the water in the fabric, but it had to be better than nothing. Wrenching the material in a tight ball, she dripped what she could against his lips. She squeezed more on his head, brushed his hair back to inspect the wound, probed the nasty cut with her fingers. As soon as the water hit the open gash, it was like pushing a button. Solo lurched to the side, away from her hand and the drip from the undersuit. His teeth flashed yellow in his beard as he hissed in pain, his hands rising from the landing and hovering there, arms tensed, still senseless.

  “Solo. Hey, it’s okay. ”

  She held him as he came to, his eyes rolling around, lids blinking.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re gonna be okay. ”

  She used the balled-up undersuit to dab at his wound. Solo grunted and held her wrist but didn’t pull away.

  “Stings,” he said. He blinked and looked around. “Where am I?”

  “The down deep,” she reminded him, happy to hear him talking. She felt like crying with relief. “I think you were attacked—”

  He tried to sit up, hissing between his teeth, a powerful grip pinching her wrist.

  “Easy,” she said, trying to hold him down. “You’ve got a nasty cut on your head. A lot of swelling. ”

  His body relaxed.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Juliette said. “What do you remember? How many were there?”

  He closed his eyes. She continued to dab at his wound.

  “Just one. I think. ” He opened his eyes wide as if shocked by the memory of the attack. “He was my age. ”

  “We need to get up top,” she told him. “We need to get where it’s warm, get you cleaned up, get me dry. Do you think you can move?”

  “I’m not crazy,” Solo said.

  “I know you’re not. ”

  “The things that moved, the lights, it wasn’t me. I’m not crazy. ”

  “No,” Juliette agreed. She remembered all the times she had thought the same thing of herself, always in the down deep of this place, usually while rummaging around Supply. “You aren’t crazy,” she said, comforting him. “You aren’t crazy at all. ”

  21

  • Silo 18 •

  Lukas couldn’t force himself to study, not what he was supposed to be studying. The Order sat flopped open on the wooden desk, the little lamp on its thousand-jointed-neck bent over and warming it in a pool of light.

  But Lukas stood before the wall schematics instead. He stared at the arrangement of silos, spaced out like the servers in the room above him, and listened to the radio crackle with the sounds of distant warring.

  The final push was being made. Sims’s team had lost a few men in an awful explosion, something about a stairwell—but not the great stairwell—and now they were in a fight they hoped would be the last. The little speakers by the radio hissed with static as the men coordinated themselves, as Bernard shouted orders from his office one level up, always with the crackle of gunfire erupting behind the voices.

  Lukas knew he shouldn’t listen, and yet he couldn’t stop. Juliette would call him anytime now and ask him for an update. She would want to know what had happened, how the end had come, and the only thing worse than telling her would be admitting he didn’t know, that he couldn’t bear to listen.

  He reached out and touched the round roof of silo 17. It was as though he were a god surveying the structures from up high. He pictured his hand piercing the dark clouds above Juliette and spanning a roof built for thousands. He rubbed his fingers over the red X drawn across the silo, those two slashes that admitted to such a great loss. The marks felt waxy beneath his fingers like they’d been drawn with crayon or something similar. He tried to imagine getting the news one day that an entire people were gone, wiped out. He would have to dig in Bernard’s desk—his desk—and find the red stick, lash out another chance at their Legacy, another pod of buried hope.

  Lukas looked up at the overhead lights, steady and constant, unblinking. Why hadn’t she called?

  His fingernail caught on one of the red marks and flaked a piece of it away. The wax stuck under his fingernail, the paper beneath still stained blood red. There was no taking it back, no cleaning it off, no making it whole again—

  Gunfire erupted from the radio. Lukas went to the shelf where the little unit was mounted and listened to orders being barked, men being killed. His forehead went clammy with sweat. He knew how that felt, to pull that trigger, to end a life. He felt an emptiness in his chest and a weakness in his knees. Lukas steadied himself with the shelf, palms slick, and looked at the transmitter hanging there inside its locked cage. How he longed to call those men and tell them not to do it, to stop all the insanity, the violence, the pointless killing. There could be a red X on them all. This was what they should fear, not each other.

  He touched the metal cage that kept the radio controls locked away from him, feeling the truth of this and the silliness of broadcasting it to everyone else. It was naïve. It wouldn’t change anything. The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

  His hand drifted across the metal grating. He peered inside at one of the dials, the arrow pointing to the number “18. ” There were fifty numbers in a dizzying circle, one for each silo. Lukas gave the cage a futile tug, wishing he could listen to something else. What was going on in all those other distant lands? Harmless things, probably. Jokes and chatter. Gossip. He could imagine the thrill of breaking in on one of those conversations and introducing himself to people who weren’t in the know. “I am Lukas from silo eighteen,” he might say. And they would want to know why silos had numbers. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.

  He left the radio alone, left it to its war, and walked past the desk and its eager
pool of light spilling across that dreary book. He checked the tins for something that might hold his attention. He felt restless, pacing like a pig in its pen. He should go for another jog among the servers, but that would mean showering, and somehow showering had begun to feel like an insufferable chore.

  Crouching down at the far end of the shelves, he sorted through the loose, un-tinned stacks of paper there. Here was where the handwritten notes and the additions to the Legacy had amassed over the years. Notes to future silo leaders, instructions, manuals, mementos. He pulled out the generator control room manual, the one Juliette had written. He had watched Bernard shelve the papers weeks ago, saying it might come in handy if the problems in the down deep went from bad to worse.

  And the radio was blasting the worse.

  Lukas went to his desk and bent the neck of the lamp so he could read the handwriting inside. There were days that he dreaded her calling, dreaded getting caught or Bernard answering or her asking him to do things he couldn’t, things he would never do again. And now, with the lights steady overhead and nothing buzzing, all he wanted was a call. His chest ached for it. Some part of him knew that what she was doing was dangerous, that something bad could’ve happened. She was living beneath a red X, after all, a mark that meant death for anyone below it.

  The pages of the manual were full of notes she’d made with sharp lead. He rubbed one of them, feeling the grooves with his fingers. The actual content was inscrutable. Settings for dials in every conceivable order, valve positions, electrical diagrams. Riffling the pages, he saw the manual as a project not unlike his star charts, created by a mind not unlike his own. This awareness made the distance between them worse. Why couldn’t they go back? Back to before the cleaning, before the string of burials. She would get off work every night and come sit with him while he gazed into the darkness, thinking and watching, chatting and waiting.

  He turned the manual around and read some of the printed words from the play, which were nearly as indecipherable. In the margins sat notes from a different hand. Lukas assumed Juliette’s mother, or maybe one of the actors. There were diagrams on some pages, little arrows showing movement. An actor’s notes, he decided. Directions on a stage. The play must’ve been a souvenir to Juliette, this woman he had feelings for whose name was in the title.

  He scanned the lines, looking for something poetic to capture his dark mood. As the text went by, his eyes caught a brief flash of familiar scrawl, not the actor’s. He flipped back, looking for it a page at a time until he found it.

  It was Juliette’s hand, no mistaking. He moved the play into the light so he could read the faded marks:

  George:

  There you lay, so serene. The wrinkles in your brow

  and by your eyes, nowhere seen.

  A touch when others look away, look for a clue,

  but only I know what happened to you.

  Wait for me. Wait for me. Wait there, my dear.

  Let these gentle pleas find your ear,

  and bury them there, so this stolen kiss can grow

  on the quiet love that no other shall know.

  Lukas felt a cold rod pierce his chest. He felt his longing replaced by a flash of temper. Who was this George? A childhood fling? Juliette was never in a sanctioned relationship; he had checked the official records the day after they’d met. Access to the servers afforded certain guilty powers. A crush, perhaps? Some man in Mechanical who was already in love with another? To Lukas, this would be even worse. A man she longed for in a way she never would feel for him. Was that why she’d taken a job so far from home? To get away from the sight of this George she couldn’t have, these feelings she’d hidden in the margins of a play about forbidden love?

  He turned and plopped down in front of Bernard’s computer. Shaking the mouse, he logged into the upstairs servers remotely, his cheeks feeling flush with this sick feeling, this new feeling, knowing it was called jealousy but unfamiliar with the heady rush that came with it. He navigated to the personnel files and searched the down deep for “George. ” There were four hits. He copied the ID numbers of each and put them in a text file, then fed them to the ID department. While the pictures of each popped up, he skimmed their records, feeling a little guilty for the abuse of power, a little worried about this discovery, and a lot less agonizingly bored having found something to do.

  Only one of the Georges worked in Mechanical. Older guy. As the radio crackled behind him, Lukas wondered what would become of this man if he was still down there. There was a chance that he was no longer alive, that the records were a few weeks out of date, the blockade a barrier to the truth.

  A couple of the hits were too young. One wasn’t even a year old yet. The other was shadowing with a porter. It left one man, thirty two years old. He worked in the bazaar, occupation listed as “other,” married with two kids. Lukas studied the blurry image of him from the ID office. Mustache. Receding hair. A sideways smirk. His eyes were too far apart, Lukas decided, his brows too dark and much too bushy.

  Lukas held up the manual and read the poem again.

  The man was dead, he decided. Bury these words.

  He did another search, this time a global one that included the closed records. Hundreds of hits throughout the silo popped up, names from all the way back to the uprising. This did not dissuade Lukas. He knew Juliette was thirty-six, and so he gave her a twenty year window, figured if she were younger than sixteen when she’d had this crush, he wouldn’t stress, he would let the envious and shameful burn inside him go.

  From the list of Georges, there were only three deaths in the down deep for the twenty year period. One was in his fifties, the other in his sixties. Both died of natural causes. Lukas thought to cross reference them with Juliette, see if there had been any work relations, if they shared a family tree perhaps.