Wool Omnibus

10



Juliette showed up at Walker’s electronics workshop at five, worried she might find him asleep on his cot, but smelling instead the distinctive odor of vaporized solder wafting down the hallway. She knocked on the open door as she entered, and Walker looked up from one of his many green electronics boards, corkscrews of smoke rising from the tip of his soldering iron.



“Jules!” he shouted. He lifted the magnifying lens off his gray head and set it and the soldering iron down on the steel workbench. “I heard you were back. I meant to send a note, but—” He waved around at the piles of parts with their work order tags dangling from strings. “Super busy,” he explained.



“Forget it,” she said. She gave Walker a hug, smelling the electrical fire scent on his skin that reminded her so much of him. And of Scottie.



“I’m going to feel guilty enough taking some of your time with this,” she said.



“Oh?” He stepped back and studied her, his bushy white brows and wrinkled skin furrowed with worry. “You got something for me?” He looked her up and down for a broken thing, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.



“I actually just wanted to pick your brain.” She sat down on one of his workbench stools, and Walker did the same.



“Go ahead,” he said. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and Juliette saw how old Walker had become. She remembered him without so much white in his hair, without the wrinkles and splotchy skin. She remembered him with his shadow.



“It has to do with Scottie,” she warned him.



Walker turned his head to the side and nodded. He tried to say something, tapped his fist against his chest a few times and cleared his throat. “Damn shame,” was all he could manage. He peered down at the floor for a moment.



“It can wait,” Juliette told him. “If you need time—”



“I convinced him to take that job,” Walker said, shaking his head. “I remember when the offer came, being scared he’d turn it down. Because of me, you know? That he’d be too afraid of me bein’ upset at him for leaving, that he might just stay forever, so I urged him to take it.” He looked up at her, his eyes shining. “I just wanted him to know he was free to choose. I didn’t mean to push him away.”



“You didn’t,” Juliette said. “Nobody thinks that, and neither should you.”



“I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home.”



“Well, he was too smart for us. Don’t forget that. We always said that.”



“He loved you,” Walker said, and wiped at his eyes. “Damn, how that boy looked up to you.”



Juliette felt her own tears welling up again. She reached into her pocket and brought out the wire she’d transcribed onto the back of the note. She had to remind herself why she was there, to hold it together.



“Just don’t seem like him to take the easy way—” Walker muttered.



“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Walker, I need to discuss some things with you that can’t leave this room.”



He laughed. Mostly, it seemed, to keep from sobbing. “Like I ever leave this room,” he said.



“Well, it can’t be discussed with anyone else. No one. Okay?”



He bobbed his head.



“I don’t think Scottie killed himself.”



Walker threw up his hands to cover his face. He bent forward and shook as he started to cry. Juliette got off her stool and went to him, put her arm around his trembling back.



“I knew it,” he sobbed into his palms. “I knew it, I knew it.”



He looked up at her, tears coursing through several days of white stubble. “Who did this? They’ll pay, won’t they? Tell me who did it, Jules.”



“Whoever it was, I don’t think they had far to travel,” she said.



“IT? Goddamn them.”



“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he…well, before I think he was killed.”



“Sent you a wire?”



“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”



“Down to IT?”



She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”



“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”



“Well, you were right.”



Walker wiped at his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”



“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”



She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo to even use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears. And probably lonely and sad enough not to have cared anyway.



“But this wire he sent, it says something about P. X. L.’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.



“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”



“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”



“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles—” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”



He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”



Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”



“I think I remember something about that.”



“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped it in almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to.”



“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.



“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”



Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.



“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should set me to cleaning—”



Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—



Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.



“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”



Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.



“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”



He nodded.



“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they not had enough time to clean.”



Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”



Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”



“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”



“But we’re the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.



“You think they have us down here to be near the oil?” she asked Walker. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I think they’re keeping anyone with a lick of mechanical sense as far from them as possible. There’s two supply chains, two sets of parts being made, all in complete secrecy. And who questions them? Who would risk being put to cleaning?”



“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked.



Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill everybody.”



11



Juliette reported to first shift at six, the conversation with Walker playing over and over in her head. There was a sustained and embarrassing applause from the handful of techs present as she entered dispatch. Knox just glared at her from the corner, back to his gruff demeanor. He had already welcomed her back, and damned if he’d do it again.



She said hello to the people she hadn’t seen the night before and looked over the job queue. The words on the board made sense, but she had a difficult time processing them. In the back of her mind, she thought about poor Scottie, confused and struggling while someone killed him. She thought of his little body, probably riddled with evidence but soon to feed the roots of the dirt farms. She thought of a married couple lying together on a hill, never given a chance to make it any further, to see beyond the horizon.



She chose a job from the queue, one that would require little mental exertion on her part, and thought of poor Jahns and Marnes and how tragic their love—if she had been reading Marnes correctly—had been. The temptation to tell the entire room was crippling. She looked around at Megan and Ricks, at Jenkins and Marck, and thought about the small army of tight brotherhood she could form. The silo was rotten to the core; an evil man was acting Mayor; a puppet stood where a good sheriff had been; and all the good men and women were gone.



It was comical to imagine: her rallying a band of mechanics to storm the upper levels and right a wrong. And then what? Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Is this how it begins? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?



She kept her mouth shut and made her way to the pump room, riding the flow of morning mechanics, thinking more about what she should be doing above than on what needed repairing below. She descended one of the side stairwells, stopped by the tool room to check out a kit bag, and lugged the heavy satchel to one of the deep pits where pumps ran constantly to keep the deep silo from filling halfway up with water.



Caryl, a transfer from third shift, was already working near the pit basin patching rotten cement. She waved with her trowel, and Juliette dipped her chin and forced herself to smile.



The offending pump sat idle on one wall, the backup pump beside it struggling mightily and spraying water out of dry and cracked seals. Juliette looked into the basin to gauge the height of the water. A painted number “9” was just visible above its murky surface. Juliette did some quick math, knowing the diameter of the basin and it being almost nine feet full. The good news was they had at least a day before boots were getting wet. Worst case, they replace the pump with a rebuilt one from spares and deal with Hendricks bitching at them for checking it out instead of fixing what they already had.



As she began stripping the failed pump down, pelted with spray from its smaller, leaking neighbor, Juliette considered her life with this new perspective provided by the morning’s revelations. The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the first team to drill past 10,000 feet and hit new oil reserves. She had a sense of the size and scope of the world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with its phantom-like sheets of smoke they called clouds rolling by on miraculous heights. She had even seen a star, which Lukas thought stood an inconceivable distance away. What God would make so much rock below and air above and just a measly silo between?