Wool Omnibus

“Eleven,” he said. He turned to Shirly, who had been saying something, he wasn’t sure what. “And I don’t think we’ve found ours yet.”



“Ours? Walk, this is freaking me out. Where are these voices coming from?”



He shrugged. “The city? Over the hills? How should I know?” He started spinning the knob slowly, listening for more chatter. “Eleven besides us. What if there’s more? There has to be more, right? What’re the chances we’ve found them all already?”



“That last one was talking about a cleaning. Do you think they meant? Like—?”



Walker nodded, sending his magnifiers out of whack. He readjusted them, then went back to tuning the dial.



“So they’re in silos. Like us.”



He pointed to the tiny green board she’d helped him wire the potentiometer to. “It must be what this circuit does, modulates the wave frequency, maybe.” Shirly was freaking out over the voices; he was more fascinated in these other mysteries. There was a crackle of static; he paused in turning the knob, scrubbed back and forth across it, but found nothing. He moved on.



“You mean the little board with the number eighteen on it?”



Walker looked at her dumbly. His fingers stopped their searching. He nodded.



“So there’s at least that many,” she said, putting it together quicker than he had. “I’ve got to find Jenkins. We’ve got to tell him about this.” Shirly left her stool and headed for the door. Walker bobbed his head. The implications made him dizzy, the bench and walls seeming to slide sideways. The idea of people beyond these walls—



A violent roar rattled his teeth and shook the thought loose. His feet slipped out from underneath him as the ground trembled, decades of dust raining down from the tangle of pipes and wires crisscrossing overhead.



Walker rolled to his side, coughing, breathing the musky mildew drifting in the air. His ears were ringing from the blast. He patted his head, groped for his magnifiers, when he saw the frame lying on the steel decking before him, the lens broken into gravel-sized shards.



“Oh, no. I need—” He tried to get his hands underneath him, felt a twinge in his hip, a powerful ache where bone had smacked steel. He couldn’t think. He waved his hand, begging Scottie to come out of the shadows and help him.



A heavy boot crunched what remained of his magnifiers. Strong, young hands gripped his coveralls, pulling him to his feet. There was shouting everywhere. The pop and rattle of gunfire.



“Walk! You okay?”



Jenkins held him by his coveralls. Walker was pretty sure he would collapse if the boy let go.



“My magni—”



“Sir! We’ve gotta go! They’re inside!”



Walker turned toward the door, saw Harper helping Shirly to her feet. Her eyes were wide, stunned, a film of gray dust on her shoulders and in her dark hair. She was looking toward Walker, appearing as senseless as he felt.



“Get your things,” Jenkins said. “We’re falling back.” He scanned the room, his eyes drifting to the workbench.



“I fixed it,” Walker said, coughing into his fist. “It works.”



“A little too late, I think.”



Jenkins let go of his coveralls, and Walker had to catch himself on his stool to not go tumbling back to the ground. The gunfire outside drew nearer. Boots thundered by, more shouting, another loud blast that could be felt through the floor. Jenkins and Harper were at the doorway shouting orders and waving their arms at the people running past. Shirly joined Walker at his workbench. Her eyes were on the radio.



“We need this,” she said, breathing hard.



Walker looked down at the glittering jewels on the floor. Two month’s wages for those magnifiers—



“Walk! What do I grab? Help me.”



He turned to find Shirly gathering up the radio parts, the wires between the boards folded up, tangled. There was a single loud pop from one of the good guns right outside his door, causing him to cower, his mind to wander.



“Walk!”



“The antenna,” he whispered, pointing to where the dust was still drifting from the rafters. Shirly nodded and jumped up on his workbench. Walker looked around the room, a room he promised himself he would never leave again, a promise he really had meant to keep this time. What to grab? Stupid mementos. Junk. Dirty clothes. A pile of schematics. He grabbed his parts bin and dumped it out on the floor. The radio components were swept in, the transformer unplugged from its outlet and added. Shirly was yanking down the antenna, the wires and metal rods bundled against her chest. He snatched his soldering iron, a few tools; Harper yelled that it was now or never.



Shirly grabbed Walker by the arm and pulled him along, toward the door.



And Walker realized it wasn’t going to be never.



10



• Silo 17 •



The panic she felt from donning the suit was unexpected.



Juliette had anticipated some degree of fear from slipping into the water, but it was the simple act of putting on the cleaning suit that filled her with a hollow dread, that gave her a cold and empty ache in the pit of her stomach. She fought to control her breathing while Solo zipped up the back and pressed the layers of velcro into place.



“Where’s my knife?” she asked him, patting the pockets on the front and searching among her tools.



“It’s over here,” he said. He bent down and fished it out of her gear bag, out from under a towel and change of clothes. He passed her the knife handle first, and Juliette slotted it into the thick pocket she’d added on the suit’s belly. It was easier to breathe, just having it within reach. This tool from the upper café was like a security blanket of sorts. She found herself checking for it the way she used to check her wrist for that old watch.



“Let’s wait on the helmet,” she told Solo as he lifted the clear dome from the landing. “Grab that rope first.” She pointed with her puffy mitts. The thick material and the two layers of undersuit were making her warm. She hoped that boded well for not freezing to death in the deep water.



Solo lifted the coils of spliced rope, a large adjustable wrench the length of his forearm knotted at the end.



“Which side?” he asked.



She pointed to where the gracefully curving steps plunged into the green-lit water. “Lower it over steady. And hold it out so it doesn’t get caught on the steps below.”



He nodded. Juliette checked her tools while he dropped the wrench into the water, the weight of the hunk of metal tugging the rope straight down to the very bottom of the great stairwell. In one pocket, she had a range of drivers. Each one was tied off with a few feet of string. She had a spanner in another pocket, cutters behind pocket number 4. Looking down at herself, more memories flooded back from her walk outside. She could hear the sound of fine grit pelting her helmet, could sense her air supply running thin, could feel the clomp of her heavy boots on the packed earth—



She gripped the railing ahead of her and tried to think of something else. Anything else. Wire for power and hose for air. Concentrate. She would need a lot of both. She took a deep breath and checked the tall coils of tubing and electrical wire laid out on the deck. She had flaked them in figure-eights so they would be impossible to tangle. Good. The compressor was ready; all Solo had to do was make sure everything fed down to her, didn’t get caught up—



“It’s on the bottom,” Solo said. She watched him knot the line to the stairway railing. He was in good spirits today. Lucid and energetic. This would be a good time to get it over with. Shifting the flood to the treatment plant would’ve been an inelegant, temporary solution. It was time to get those big pumps down below churning through that water properly, pumping it through the concrete walls and back into the earth beyond.



Juliette shuffled to the edge of the landing and looked down at the silvery surface of the foul water. Was this plan of hers crazy? Shouldn’t she be afraid? Or was it the years of waiting and doing this safely that was more terrifying to her? The prospect of going mad, inch by inch, seemed the greater risk. This would be just like going outside, she reminded herself, which she had already done and had survived. Except—this was safer. She was taking an unlimited supply of air, and there was nothing toxic down there, nothing to eat away at her.



She gazed at her reflection in the still water, the bulky suit making her look enormous. If Lukas were standing there with her, if he could see what she was about to do, would he try to talk her out of it? She thought he might. How well did they really know each other? They had what, two, three encounters in person?



But then there were the dozens of talks since. Could she know someone from just his voice? From stories about his childhood? From his intoxicating laughter when everything else in her day made her want to cry? Was this why wires and emails were made expensive, to prevent this kind of life, this kind of relationship? How could she be standing there, thinking of a man she hardly knew rather than the insanity of the task before her?



Maybe Lukas had become her lifeline, some slender thread of hope connecting her to home. Or was he more like a tiny spot of light seen occasionally through the murk, a beacon guiding her return?



“Helmet?” Solo stood beside her, watching her, the clear plastic dome in his hands, a single flashlight strapped to its top.



Juliette reached for it. She made sure the flashlight was securely fastened and tried to clear her head of pointless ruminations.



“Hook up my air first,” she said. “And turn on the radio.”



He nodded. She held the dome while he clicked the air hose into the adapter she’d threaded through the collar. There was a hiss and spit of residual air from the line as it locked into place. His hand brushed the back of her neck as he reached in to flick on the radio. Juliette dipped her chin, squeezing the handmade switch sewn into her undersuit. “Hello, hello,” she said. There was a strange squeal from the unit on Solo’s hip as her voice blared out of it.



“Little loud,” he said, adjusting his volume.



She lifted the dome into place. It had been stripped of its screen and all the plastic linings. Once she’d scraped the paint off the exterior, she was left with an almost completely transparent half-sphere of tough plastic. It felt good to know, clicking it into the collar, that whatever she saw out of it was really there.



“You good?”



Solo’s voice was deadened by the airtight connection between the helmet and the suit. She lifted her glove and gave him a thumbs up. She pointed to the compressor.



He nodded, knelt down by the unit, and scratched his beard. She watched him flick the portable unit’s main power, push the priming bulb five times, then yank the starting cord. The little unit spat out a breath of smoke and whirred to life. Even with its rubber tires, it danced and rattled the landing, sending vibrations up through her boots. Juliette could hear the awful acoustics through her helmet, could imagine the violent racket echoing up through the abandoned silo.



Solo held the choke an extra second, just like she’d shown him, and then pushed it all the way in. While the machine pattered and chugged, he looked up at her, smiling through his beard, looking like one of the dogs in Supply staring up at its faithful owner.



She pointed to the red can of extra gas and gave him another thumbs up. He returned the gesture. Juliette shuffled toward the steps, her gloved hand on the railing for balance. Solo squeezed past and went to the railing and the knotted rope. He held out a hand to steady her while she lumbered down the slippery treads in the suit’s clunky boots.



Her hope was that it would be easier to move once she was in the water, but she had no way of knowing, just an intuitive feel for the physics of it all, the way she could gauge a machine’s intent simply by poring over it. She took the last dry steps, and then her boots broke the oily surface of the water and found the step below. She waded down two more, anticipating the frigid cold to seep through, but it never came. The suit and her undergarments kept her toasty. Almost too warm, in fact—she could see a humid mist forming on the inside of her helmet. She dipped her chin into the radio switch and told Solo to open her valve to let the air in.



He fumbled at her collar and twisted the lever to allow the flow of air. It hissed by her ear, quite noisily, and she could feel the suit puff out around her. The overflow valve she’d screwed into the other side of the collar squealed as it opened and let out the excess pressure, preventing her suit—and her head, she suspected—from bursting.



“Weights,” she said, clicking the radio.



He ran back to the landing and returned with the round exercise weights. Kneeling on the last dry step, he strapped these below her knees with heavy velcro, then looked up to see what was next.



Juliette struggled to lift one foot, then the other, making sure that the weights were secure.



“Wire,” she said, getting the hang of working the radio.



This was the most important part: the power from IT would run the lifeless pumps below. Twenty-four volts of juice. She had installed a switch on the landing so Solo could test it while she was down there. She didn’t want to travel with the wires live.



Solo unspooled a dozen feet of the two-connector wire and tied a loop around her wrist. His knots were good, both with the rope and the wire. Her confidence in the endeavor was growing by the minute, her discomfort in the suit lessening.



Solo smiled down through her clear plastic dome from two steps above, yellow teeth flashing in his scraggly beard. Juliette returned the smile. She stood still while he fumbled with the flashlight strapped to her helmet, clicking it on. The battery was freshly charged and would last a full day, much longer than she possibly needed.



“Okay,” she said. “Help me over.”



Releasing the radio contact with her chin, she turned and leaned against the railing, worked her belly up onto it, then eased her head over. It was an incredible sensation, throwing herself over that rail. It felt suicidal. This was the great stairwell; this was her silo; she was four levels up from Mechanical; all that space below her, that long plummet only madmen dove into, and she was going just as willingly.