Wool (49 page)

“YOU OKAY?” Solo asked, his voice startling her again.

“I’m fine,” she said. She held her chin down against her chest, leaving the contact open. “I’ll check in if I need you. The volume is a little high down here. Scares the hell out of me.”

She released the contact and turned to see how her lifeline was doing. All along the ceiling, her overflow bubbles danced in the glow of her flashlight like tiny jewels—

“OKAY. GOTCHA.”

With her boots hardly leaving the floor, pushing forward on them one at a time, she slowly made her way across the main intersection and past the mess hall. To her left, if she made her way down the hallway and took two turns, she could reach Walker’s workshop. Had it always been a workshop? She had no idea. In this place, it might be a storeroom. Or an apartment.

Her small apartment would be in the opposite direction. She turned to peer down that hallway, her cone of light brushing away the darkness to reveal a body pressed up against the ceiling, tangled in the runs of pipe and conduit. She looked away. It was easy to imagine that being George or Scottie or someone else she had cared about and lost. It was easy to imagine it being herself.

She shuffled toward the access stairs, her body wavering in the thick but crystal-clear water, the weight of her boots and the buoyancy of her torso keeping her upright even though she felt on the verge of toppling. She paused at the top of the square steps leading down.

“I’m about to descend,” she said, chin down. “Make sure you keep everything feeding. And please don’t respond unless there’s a problem. My ears are still ringing from the last time.”

Juliette lifted her chin from the contact switch and took the first few steps, waiting for Solo to blare something in her ear, but it never came. She kept a firm grip on the wire and hose, dragging it around the sharp corners of the square stairwell as she descended into the darkness. The black water all around was disturbed only by her rising bubbles and the feeble cone of her sweeping, flashlit gaze.

Six floors down, the hose and wire became difficult to pull, too much friction from the steps. She stopped and gathered more and more of it around herself, letting the slack coil drift in the weightlessness of the water. Several of her careful splices in both the wire and tubing slid through her gloves. She paused and checked the taped and glued joints of the latter to see how they were holding up. Minuscule bubbles were trailing out of one joint, leaving a perforated and wavy line of tiny dots in the dark water. It was hardly anything.

Once she had enough slack at the bottom of the stairs to reach the sump basin, she turned and marched purposefully toward her work. The hardest part was over. The air was flowing in, cool and fresh and hissing by her ear. The excess streamed out through the other valve, the bubbles shooting up in a curtain whenever she turned her head. She had enough wire and hose to reach her goal, and all of her tools were intact. It felt like she could finally relax now that she knew she wouldn’t be going any deeper. All she had to do was hook up the power lines, two easy connections, and make her way out.

Being so close, she dared to think of getting free, of rescuing this silo’s Mechanical spaces, resuscitating one of its generators and then one of its hidden and buried diggers. They were making progress. She was on her way to rescuing her friends. It all seemed perfectly attainable, practically in her grasp, after weeks of frustrating setbacks.

Juliette found the sump room just where it was supposed to be. She slid her boots to the edge of the pit in the center. Leaning forward, her flashlight shone down on the numbers signifying how deep the waters had risen. They seemed comical under so many hundreds of feet of water. Comical and sad. This silo had failed its people.

But then Juliette corrected herself: these
people
had failed their
silo
.

“Solo, I’m at the pump. Gonna hook up the power.”

She peered down at the bottom of the pit to make sure the pump’s pickup was clear of debris. The water down there was amazingly clear. All the oil and grime she’d worked hip-deep in at the bottom of her own basin had been made diffuse, spread out into who knew how many gallons of groundwater seepage. The result was crystal-clear stuff she could probably have drunk.

She shivered, suddenly aware that the chill of the deep water was making its way through her layers and wicking away her body heat. Halfway there, she told herself. She moved toward the massive pump mounted on the wall. Pipes as thick as her waist bent to the ground and snaked over the edge of the pit. The outflow ran up the wall in a similarly sized pipe and joined the jumble of mechanical runs above. As she stood by the large pump and worked the knotted wires off her wrist, she remembered the last job she’d ever performed as a mechanic. She had pulled the shaft on an identical pump and had discovered a worn and broken impeller. As she selected a Phillips driver from her pocket and began loosening the positive power terminal, she took the time to pray that
this
pump had not been in a similar condition when the power had blown. She didn’t want to have to come down and service it again. Not until she could do it while keeping her boots dry.

The positive power line came free more easily than she had hoped. Juliette twisted the new one into place. The sound of her own breathing rattled in the confines of her helmet and provided her only company. As she was tightening the terminal around the new wire, she realized she could hear her breathing because the air was no longer hissing by her cheek.

Juliette froze. She tapped the plastic dome by her ear and saw that the overflow bubbles were still leaking out, but slower now. The pressure was still inside her suit; there just wasn’t any more air being forced inside.

She dipped her chin against the switch, could feel the sweat form around her collar and drip down the side of her jaw. Her feet were somehow freezing, while from the neck up she was beginning to sweat.

“Solo? This is Juliette. Can you hear me? What’s going on up there?”

She waited, turned to aim her flashlight down the air hose, and looked for any sign of a kink. She still had air, the air in her suit. Why wasn’t he responding?

“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”

The flashlight on her helmet needed to be adjusted, but she could feel the ticking of some silent clock in her head. How much air would she have starting
right then
? It had probably taken her an hour to get down there. Solo would fix the compressor before her air ran out. She had plenty of time. Maybe he was pouring in more fuel. Plenty of time, she told herself as the driver slipped off the negative terminal. The damn thing was stuck.

This, she didn’t have time for, not for anything to be corroded. The positive wire was already spliced and locked tight. She tried to adjust the flashlight strapped to her helmet; it was aimed too high: good for walking, horrible for working. She was able to twist it a little and aim it at the large pump.

The ground wire could be connected to any part of the main housing, right? She tried to remember. The entire case was the ground, wasn’t it? Or was it? Why couldn’t she remember? Why was it suddenly difficult to think?

She straightened the end of the black wire and tried to give the loose copper strands a twist with her heavily padded fingers. She jabbed this bundle of raw copper into a cowling vent on the back, a piece of conducting metal that appeared connected to the rest of the pump. She twisted the wire around a small bolt, knotted the slack so it would hold, and tried to convince herself that this would work, that it would be enough to run the damn thing. Walker would know. Where the hell was he when she needed him?

The radio by her neck squawked—a burst and pop of static—what sounded like part of her name in a faraway distance—a dead hiss—and then nothing.

Juliette wavered in the dark, cold water. Her ears were ringing from the outburst. She dipped her chin to tell Solo to hold the radio away from his mouth, when she noticed through the glass window of her helmet’s visor that there were no more bubbles spilling from the overflow valve and rising in that gentle curtain across her vision. The pressure in her suit was gone.

A different sort of pressure quickly took its place.

Walker found himself shoved down the square stairs, past a crew of mechanics working to weld another set of steel plates across the narrow passage. He had most of the home-built radio in the spare-parts tub, which he desperately clutched with two hands. He watched the electrical components rattle together as he jostled through the crowd of mechanics fleeing from the attack above. In front of him, Shirly carried the rest of the radio gear against her chest, the antenna wires trailing behind her. Walker skipped and danced on his old legs so he wouldn’t get tangled up.

“Go! Go! Go!” someone yelled. Everyone was pushing and shoving. The rattle of gunfire seemed to grow louder behind him, while a golden shower of fizzling sparks rained through the air and peppered Walker’s face. He squinted and stormed through the glowing hail as a team of miners in striped overalls fought their way up from the next landing with another large sheet of steel.

“This way!” Shirly yelled, tugging him along. At the next level, she pulled him aside. His poor legs struggled to keep up. A duffel bag was dropped; a young man with a gun spun and hurried back for it.

“The generator room,” Shirly told him, pointing.

There was already a stream of people moving through the double doors. Jenkins was there, managing the traffic. Some of those with rifles took up position near an oil pump, the counterweighted head sitting perfectly still like it had already succumbed to the looming battle.

“What is that?” Jenkins asked as they approached the door. He jerked his chin at the bundle of wires in Shirly’s arms. “Is that … ?”

“The radio, sir.” She nodded.

“Fat lot of good it does us now.” Jenkins waved two other people inside. Shirly and Walker pressed themselves out of the way.

“Sir—”

“Get him inside,” Jenkins barked, referring to Walker. “I don’t need him getting in the way.”

“But, sir, I think you’re gonna want to hear—”

“C’mon, go!” Jenkins yelled to the stragglers bringing up the rear. He twirled his arm at the elbow for them to hurry. Only the mechanics who had traded their wrenches for guns remained. They formed up like they were used to this game, arms propped on railings, long steel barrels trained in the same direction.

“In or out,” Jenkins told Shirly, starting to close the door.

“Go,” she told Walker, letting out a deep breath. “Let’s get inside.”

Walker numbly obeyed, thinking all the while of the parts and tools he should have grabbed, things a few levels overhead now that were lost to him, maybe for good.

“Hey, get those people out of the control room!”

Shirly ran across the generator room as soon as they were inside, wires trailing behind her, bits of rigid aluminum antenna bouncing across the floor. “Out!”

A mixed group of mechanics and a few people wearing the yellow of Supply sheepishly filed out of the small control room. They joined the others around a railing cordoning off the mighty machine that dominated the cavernous facility and gave the generator room its name. At least the noise was tolerable. Shirly imagined all these people being stuck down there in the days when the roar of the rattling shaft and loose engine mounts could deafen a person.

“All of you, out of my control room.” She waved the last few out. Shirly knew why Jenkins had sealed off this floor. The only power they had left was the literal kind. She waved the last man out of the small room studded with sensitive knobs, dials, and readouts and immediately checked the fuel levels.

Both tanks were topped up, so at least they had planned
that
properly. They would have a few weeks of power, if nothing else. She looked over all the other knobs and dials, the jumble of cords still held tightly against her chest.

“Where should I … ?”

Walker held his box out. The only flat surfaces in the room were covered with switches and the sorts of things one didn’t want to bump. He seemed to understand that.

“On the floor, I guess.” She set her load down and moved to shut the door. The people she’d hurried outside gazed longingly through the window at the few tall stools in the climate-controlled space. Shirly ignored them.

“Do we have everything? Is it all here?”

Walker pulled pieces of the radio out of the box, tsking at the twisted wires and jumbled components. “Do we have power?” he asked, holding up the plug of a transformer.

Shirly laughed. “Walk, you do know where you are now, right? Of course we have power.” She took the cord and plugged it into one of the feeds on the main panel. “Do we have everything? Can we get it up and running again? Walk, we need to let Jenkins hear what we heard.”

“I know.” He bobbed his head and sorted the gear, twisting some loose wires together as he went. “We need to string that out.” He jerked his head at the tangled antenna in her arms.

Shirly looked up. There were no rafters.

“Hang it from the railing out there,” he told her. “Straight line, make sure that end reaches back in here.”

She moved toward the door, trailing the loops out behind her.

“Oh, and don’t let the metal bits touch the railing!” Walker called after her.

Shirly recruited a few mechanics from her work shift to help out. Once they saw what needed doing, they took over, coordinating as a team to undo the knots while she went back to Walker.

“It’ll just be a minute,” she told him, shutting the door behind her, the wire fitting easily between it and the padded jamb.

“I think we’re good,” he said. He looked up at her, his eyes sagging, his hair a mess, sweat glistening in his white beard. “Shit,” he said. He slapped his forehead. “We don’t have speakers.”

Shirly felt her heart drop to hear Walker swear, thinking they’d forgotten something crucial. “Wait here,” she told him, running back out and to the earmuff station. She picked one of the sets with a dangling cord, the kind used to talk between the control room and anyone working on the primary or secondary generators. She jogged past the curious and frightened-looking crowd to the control room. It occurred to her that she should be more afraid, like they were, that a real war was grinding closer to them. But all she could think about were the voices that war had interrupted. Her curiosity was much stronger than her fear. It was how she’d always been.