Wool (45 page)

“How’re things out there?” he asked, blowing on the corn.

“Things are shit,” Shirly said. “Jenkins and Harper are arguing over whether or not they should kill the power to the entire silo. But then some of the guys who were there, you know, when Knox and …”

She looked away, left the sentence unfinished.

Walker nodded and chewed his food.

“Some of them say the power in IT was up to the max that morning, even though we had it shut down from here.”

“Maybe it was rerouted,” Walker said. “Or battery backups. They have those, you know.” He took another bite but was dying to spin the potentiometer. He was pretty sure the static had changed when he’d made the second connection.

“I keep telling them it’ll do us more harm than good to screw with the silo like that. It’ll just turn the rest of them against us.”

“Yeah. Hey, can you adjust this? You know, while I eat?”

He turned the volume up on the static, needing two hands to work the potentiometer as it dangled from its bright wires. Shirly seemed to shrink from the noise crackling out of his home-built speakers. She reached for the volume knob as if to turn it down.

“No, I want you to spin the one we just installed.”

“What the hell, Walk? Just eat your damn food already.”

He took another bite. And for all her cussing and protests, Shirly began adjusting the knob.

“Slowly,” he said, his mouth full of food.

And sure enough, the static from the speakers modulated. It was as if the crunching plastic had begun to move and bounce around the room.

“What am I even doing?”

“Helping an old man—”

“—yeah, I might need you up here on this one—”

Walker dropped his fork and held out his hand for her to stop. She had gone past it though, into the static once more. Shirly seemed to intuit this. She bit her lip and wiggled the knob the other way until the voices returned.

“Sounds good. It’s quiet down here anyway. You need me to bring my kit?”

“You did it,” Shirly whispered to Walker, as if these people could hear her if she spoke too loudly. “You fixed—”

Walker held up his hand. The chatter continued.

“Negative. You can leave the kit. Deputy Roberts is already here with hers. She’s sweeping for clues as I speak—”

“What I’m doing is working while he does nothing!” a faint voice called out in the background.

Walker turned to Shirly while laughter rolled through the radio, more than one person enjoying the joke. It had been a long time since he’d heard anyone laugh. But
he
wasn’t laughing. Walker felt his brows furrow in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” Shirly asked. “We did it! We fixed it!” She got off her stool and turned as if to run and tell Jenkins.

“Wait!” Walker wiped his beard with his palm and jabbed his fork toward the strewn collection of radio parts. Shirly stood a pace away, looking back at him, smiling.

“Deputy
Roberts
?” Walker asked. “Who in all the levels is
that
?”

Juliette flicked the lights on in the Suit Lab as she hauled in her latest load from Supply. Unlike Solo, she didn’t take the constant source of power for granted. Not knowing where it came from made her nervous that it wouldn’t last. So while he had the habit, the compulsion even, of turning every light on to full and leaving it there, she tried to conserve the mysterious energy as much as possible.

She dropped her recent scavenges on her cot, thinking of Walker as she did so. Is this how he ended up living among his work? Was it the obsession, the drive, the need to keep hammering away at a series of never-ending problems until he couldn’t sleep more than a few paces from them?

The more she understood the old man, the farther away from him she felt, the lonelier. She sat down and rubbed her legs, her thighs and calves tight from the most recent hike up. She may’ve been gaining her porter legs these last weeks, but they were still sore all the time, the ache in them a constant new sensation. Squeezing the muscles transformed that ache into pain, which she somehow preferred. The sharp and definable sensations were better than the dull and nameless kind. She liked feelings she could understand.

Juliette kicked her boots off—strange to think of these scavenged things as
hers
—and stood up. That was enough rest. It was as much rest as she could allow herself to have. She carried her canvas sacks to one of the fancy workbenches, everything in the Suit Lab nicer than what she’d had in Mechanical. Even the parts engineered to fail were constructed with a level of chemical and engineering sophistication she could only begin to appreciate now that she understood their evil intent. She had amassed piles of washers and seals, the good from Supply and the leftover bad from the lab, to see how the system worked. They sat along the back of her main workbench, a reminder of the diabolical murderousness with which she’d been sent away.

She dumped the parts from Supply and thought about how strange it was to have access to, to
live
in this forbidden heart of some
other
silo. It was stranger still to appreciate these workbenches, these immaculate tools, all arranged for the purpose of sending people like her to their death.

Looking around at the walls, at the dozen or so cleaning suits hanging from racks in various states of repair, it was like living and working in a room full of ghostly apparitions. If one of those suits jumped down and started moving about on its own, it wouldn’t have surprised her. The arms and legs on each one were puffy, as if full, the mirrored visors easily concealing curious faces. It was like having company, these hanging forms. They watched her impassively while she sorted her finds into two piles: one of items she needed for her next big project, the other of useful tidbits she had snagged with no specific idea of what she might use them for.

A valuable rechargeable battery went in this second group, some blood still on it that she hadn’t been able to wipe off. Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials, like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There was more evidence of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the dead bolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.

She began her work on the air compressor and, as always, it felt good to be doing something with her hands.
Fixing
something. Staying distracted. The first few nights, after surviving the horrible ordeal of being sent to clean, of fighting her way inside this carcass of a silo, she had searched long and hard for someplace that she could actually sleep. It was never going to be below the server room, not with the stench of Solo’s debris piles pervading the place. She tried the apartment for IT’s head, but thoughts of Bernard made it impossible even to sit still. The couches in the various offices weren’t long enough. The pad she’d tried to put together on the warm server-room floor was nice, but the clicking and whirring of all those tall cabinets nearly drove her insane.

The Suit Lab, strangely enough, with the specters and ghouls hanging about, was the only spot where she’d won a decent night of sleep. It was probably the tools everywhere, the welders and wrenches, the walls of drawers full of every socket and driver imaginable. If she was going to fix anything, even herself, it would be there in that room. The only other place she’d felt at home in silo seventeen was in the two jail cells she sometimes slept in on trips up and down. There, and sitting behind that empty server, talking to Lukas.

She thought about him as she crossed the room to grab the right-size tap from one of the expansive metal tool chests. She pocketed this and pulled down one of the complete cleaning suits, admiring the heft of the outfit, remembering how bulky it had felt when she’d worn one just like it. She lifted it onto a workbench and pulled off the helmet’s locking collar, took this to the drill press and carefully bored a starter hole. With the collar in a vise, she began working the tap into the hole, creating new threads for the air hose. She was wrestling with this and thinking about her last conversation with Lukas when the smell of fresh bread entered the lab, followed by Solo.

“Hello!” he called from the doorway. Juliette looked up and jerked her chin for him to enter. Turning the tap required effort, the metal handle digging into her palms, sweat forming on her brow.

“I baked more bread.”

“Smells great,” she grunted.

Ever since she’d taught Solo how to bake flatbread, she couldn’t get him to stop. The large tins of flour that had been holding up his canned-goods shelves were being removed one at a time while he experimented with recipes. She reminded herself to teach him more things to cook, to put this industriousness of his to good use by having him mix it up a little.

“And I sliced cucumbers,” he said, proud as if it were a feast beyond compare. In so many ways, Solo was stuck with the mind of a teenager—culinary habits included.

“I’ll have some in a bit,” she told him. With effort, she finally got the tap all the way through the pilot hole, creating a threaded connection as neat as if it had come from Supply. The tap backed out easily, just like a fitted bolt would.

Solo placed the plate of bread and vegetables on the workbench and grabbed a stool. “Whatcha working on? Another pump?” He peered at the large wheeled air compressor with the hoses trailing off it.

“No. That was going to take too long. I’m working on a way to breathe underwater.”

Solo laughed. He started munching on a piece of bread until he realized she wasn’t joking.

“You’re serious.”

“I am. The pumps we
really
need are in the sump basins at the very bottom of the silo. I just need to get some of this electricity from IT
down
to them. We’ll have the place dry in weeks or months instead of years.”

“Breathe underwater,” he said. He looked at her like
she
was the one losing her mind.

“It’s no different from how I got here from my silo.” She wrapped the male end of the air hose coupler with silicone tape, then began threading it into the collar. “These suits are airtight, which makes them watertight. All I need is a constant supply of air to breathe, and I can work down there as long as I like. Long enough to get the pumps going, anyway.”

“You think they’ll still work?”

“They should.” She grabbed a wrench and tightened the coupler as hard as she dared. “They’re designed to be submerged, and they’re simple. They just need power, which we’ve got plenty of up here.”

“What will
I
do?” Solo wiped his hands, sprinkling bread crumbs on her workbench. He reached for another piece of bread.

“You’ll be watching the compressor. I’ll show you how to crank it, how to top it up with fuel. I’m going to install one of the portable deputy radios in the helmet here so we can talk back and forth. There’ll be a whole mess of hose and electrical wire to play out.” She smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you busy.”

“I’m not worried,” Solo said. He puffed out his chest and crunched on a cucumber, his eyes drifting to the compressor.

And Juliette saw—just like a teenager with little practice but great need—that Solo had not yet mastered the art of lying convincingly.

… boys from the other side of the camp. These results were closely observed by the experimenters, who were posing as camp counselors. When the violence got out of hand, the experiment was halted before it could run its full course. What began at Robber Cave as two sets of boys, all with nearly identical backgrounds and values, had turned into what became known in the field of psychology as an in-grouping and out-grouping scenario. Small perceived differences, the way one wore a hat, the inflections in speech, turned into unforgivable transgressions. When stones started flying, and the raids on each other’s camps turned bloody, there was no recourse for the experimenters but to put an end to—

Lukas couldn’t read any more. He closed the book and leaned back against the tall shelves. He smelled something foul, brought the spine of the old book to his nose and sniffed. It was
him,
he finally decided. When was the last time he’d showered? His routine was all out of whack. There were no screaming kids to wake him in the morning, no evenings hunting for stars, no dimmed stairwell to guide him back to his bed so he could repeat it all the following day. Instead, it was fitful periods of tossing and turning in the hidden bunk room of level thirty-five. A dozen bunks, but him all alone. It was flashing red lights to signal that he had company, conversations with Bernard and Peter Billings when they brought him food, long talks with Juliette whenever she called and he was free to answer. Between it all, the books. Books of history out of order, of billions of people, of even more stars. Stories of violence, of the madness of crowds, of the staggering timeline of life, of orbited suns that would one day burn out, of weapons that could end it all, of diseases that nearly had.

How long could he go on like this? Reading and sleeping and eating? The weeks already felt like months. There was no keeping track of the days, no way to remember how long he’d worn this pair of overalls, if it was time to change out of them and into the pair in the dryer. Sometimes he felt like he changed and washed his clothes three times a day. It could easily have been twice a week. It smelled like longer.

He leaned his head back against the tins of books and closed his eyes. The things he was reading couldn’t all be true. It made no sense, a world so crowded and strange. When he considered the scale of it all, the idea of this life burrowed beneath the earth, sending people to clean, getting worked up over who stole what from whom—he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far below, but unable to make it out before his senses returned and reality snatched him back from the edge.