Wool Omnibus

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 wounded 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 guns like 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 hands 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?”



Shirly set her teeth and jerked her head at the door, which was two-deep with yellow coveralls. “Don’t think we’re wanted,” she said, her voice raised so he could hear. “I’ve got to clean this wound. I think some of the bomb is in you.”



“I’m fine,” he insisted. “I’ve just been looking for you. I’ve been worried sick.”



He saw that his wife was crying, unbroken tear tracks standing out amid the beads of sweat.



“I thought you were gone,” she said. He had to read her lips to make it out. “I thought they had—that you were—”



She bit her lip and stared at him with uncharacteristic fear. Marck had never seen his wife fazed, not by a sprung casement leak, not by a cave-in deep in the mine that trapped several of their close friends, not even when Juliette was sent to cleaning. But heaps of dread were locked up in her expression now. And that scared him in a way the bombs and bullets couldn’t.



“Let’s hurry after the others,” he said, taking her hand. He could feel the exposed nerves on the landing, the gazes begging them to be off.



When shouts rang down from above once more and the members of Supply retreated to the safety of their doorway, Marck knew this brief moment of respite was over. But it was okay. He’d found his wife. She was unharmed. There was little anyone could do to him now.



• • • •



When they reached one-thirty-nine together, Marck knew they’d made it. His legs had somehow held out. His blood loss hadn’t stopped him. With his wife helping him along, they passed the last landing before Mechanical, and all he could think about was holding the line against those bastards who were taking shots at them from above. Inside Mechanical, they would have power, safety in numbers, the advantage of home turf. More importantly, they would be able to bandage wounds and get some rest. That’s what he sorely needed: Rest.



He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to. As his knees buckled, and Shirly caught him, he finally noticed the jam of people at the security station leading into Mechanical.



The crew that had stayed behind while the rest marched up to fight had been busy. Steel plates had been welded solid across the wide security entrance. The diamond-studded sheeting stood from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Sparks hissed along one edge as someone worked to complete the job from the inside. The sudden flurry of refugees and wounded amassed in a crowd desperate to get in. Mechanics shoved and jostled against the barrier. They screamed and beat on the steel plates, mad with fear.



“What the hell?” Marck cried. He followed Shirly as she pressed into the back of the crowd. At the front, someone was crawling on the floor, wiggling on their belly through the tightest of gaps, a rectangle left open below the security turnstile wide enough to slide through, easy enough to defend.



“Easy! Wait your turn,” someone ahead of them shouted.



Yellow coveralls were mixed in with the others. Some were mechanics who had donned disguises—some seemed to be from Supply, helping the wounded, mixed up in the wrong crowd or not trusting their own level for safety.



As Marck attempted to usher Shirly toward the front, a shot rang out, the thwack and clatter of a hot ball of lead striking nearby. He changed directions and pulled her back toward the stairs. The crush around the impossibly small entrance grew frantic. There was a lot of yelling back and forth through the hole, people on this side shouting that they were being shot at, those on the other side yelling “One at a time!”



Several were on their bellies, scrambling for the tiny hole. One got his arms inside and was pulled through, sliding across the steel grating and disappearing into the dark space. Two others tried to be next, jostling for position. They were all exposed to the open stairwell above. Another shot rang out, and someone fell, clutching a shoulder and screaming “I’m hit!” The throng dispersed. Several ran back to the stairs where the overhang of the treads protected them from the gunfire. The rest were in chaos, all trying to fit through a space expressly designed to allow no more than one at a time.



Shirly screamed and squeezed Marck’s arm as another person was shot. A mechanic fell to the ground and doubled over in pain. She yelled at her husband, asking him what they should do.