Wool (53 page)

She’d survived. Clinging to the dry treads above her, neck bent, gasping and wheezing, her legs numb, she tried to cry out that she’d made it, but it escaped as a whimper. She was cold. She was freezing. Her arms shivered as she pulled herself up the quiet steps, no rattle from the compressor, no arms reaching to assist her.

“Solo … ?”

She crawled the half-dozen treads to the landing and rolled onto her back. Some of her tools were caught on steps below, tugging at her where they were tied to her pockets. Water drained out of her suit and splashed down her neck, pooled by her head, ran into her ears. She turned her head—she needed to get the freezing suit off—and found Solo.

He was lying on his side, eyes shut, blood running down his face, some of it already caked dry.

“Solo?”

Her hand was a shivering blur as she reached out and shook him. What had he done to himself?

“Hey. Wakethefuckup.”

Her teeth were chattering. She grabbed his shoulder and gave him a violent shake. “Solo! I need help!”

One of his eyes parted a little. He blinked a few times, then bent double and coughed, blood flecking the landing by his face.

“Help,” she said. She fumbled for the zipper at her back, not realizing it was Solo who needed
her
.

Solo coughed into his hand, then rolled over and settled once again on his back. The blood on his head was still flowing from somewhere, fresh tracks trickling across what had dried some time before.

“Solo?”

He groaned. Juliette pulled herself closer, could barely feel her body. He whispered something, his voice a rasp on the edge of silence.

“Hey—” She brought her face close to his, could feel her lips swollen and numb, could still taste the gasoline.

“Not my name …”

He coughed a mist of red. One arm lifted from the landing a few inches as if to cover his mouth, but it never had a chance of getting there.

“Not my name,” he said again. His head lolled side to side, and Juliette finally realized that he was badly injured. Her mind began to clear enough to see what state he was in.

“Hold still,” she groaned. “Solo, I need you to be still.”

She tried to push herself up, to will herself the strength to move. Solo blinked and looked at her, his eyes glassy, blood tinting the gray in his beard crimson.

“Not Solo,” he said, his voice straining. “My name’s Jimmy—”

More coughing, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head.

“—and I don’t think—”

His eyelids sagged shut and then squinted in pain.

“—don’t think I was—”

“Stay with me,” Juliette said, hot tears cutting down her frozen face.

“—don’t think I ever
was
alone,” he whispered, the lines on his face relaxing, his head sagging to the cold steel landing.

The pot on the stove bubbled noisily, steam rising off the surface, tiny drops of water leaping to their freedom over the edge. Lukas shook a pinch of tea leaves out of the resealable tin and into the tiny strainer. His hands were shaking as he lowered the little basket into his mug. As he lifted the pot, some water spilled directly on the burner; the drops made spitting sounds and gave off a burned odor. He watched Bernard out of the corner of his eye as he tilted the boiling water through the leaves.

“I just don’t understand,” he said, holding the mug with both hands, allowing the heat to penetrate his palms. “How could anybody—? How could you
do
something like this on
purpose
?” He shook his head and peered into his mug, where a few intrepid shreds of leaf had already gotten free and swam outside the basket. He looked up at Bernard. “And you knew about this? How—? How could you
know
about this?”

Bernard frowned. He rubbed his mustache with one hand, the other resting in the belly of his overalls. “I wish I
didn’t
know it,” he told Lukas. “And now you see why some facts, some pieces of knowledge, have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.” He looked down at his boots. “I pieced it together much as you did, just knowing what we have to know to do this job. This is why I chose you, Lukas. You and a few others have some idea what’s stored on these servers. You’re already prepped for learning more. Can you imagine if you told any of this to someone who wears red or green to work every day?”

Lukas shook his head.

“It’s happened before, you know. Silo ten went down like that. I sat back there”—he pointed toward the small study with the books, the computer, the hissing radio—“and I listened to it happen. I listened to a colleague’s shadow broadcast his insanity to anyone who would listen.”

Lukas studied his steeping tea. A handful of leaves swam about on hot currents of darkening water; the rest remained in the grip of the imprisoning basket. “That’s why the radio controls are locked up,” he said.

“And it’s why
you
are locked up.”

Lukas nodded. He’d already suspected as much.

“How long were you kept in here?” He glanced up at Bernard, and an image flashed in his mind, one of Sheriff Billings inspecting his gun while his mother had visited him. Had they been listening in? Would he have been shot, his mother too, if he’d said anything?

“I spent just over two months down here until my caster knew I was ready, that I had accepted and understood everything I’d learned.” He crossed his arms over his belly. “I really wish you hadn’t asked the question, hadn’t put it together so soon. It’s much better to find out when you’re older.”

Lukas pursed his lips and nodded. It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried-out destruction of the entire world.

Lukas bent his head and breathed in the smell of the steeping leaves. The mint was like a direct line through the trembling stress, a strike to the calm pleasure center in the deep regions of his brain. He inhaled and held his breath, finally let it out. Bernard crossed to the small stove in the corner of the storeroom and started making his own mug.

“How did they do it?” Lukas asked. “To kill so many. Do you know how they did it?”

Bernard shrugged. He tapped the tin with one finger, shaking out a precise amount of tea into another basket. “They might still be doing it for all I know. Nobody talks about how long it’s supposed to go on. There’s fear that small pockets of survivors might be holed up elsewhere around the globe. Operation Fifty is completely pointless if anyone else survives. The population has to be homogenous—”

“The man I spoke to, he said we were
it
. Just the fifty silos—”

“Forty-seven,” Bernard said. “And we
are
it, as far as we know. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else being so well prepared. But there’s always a chance. It’s only been a few hundred years.”

“A few
hundred
?” Lukas leaned back against the counter. He lifted his tea, but the mint was losing its power to reach him. “So hundreds of years ago, we decided—”

“
They.
” Bernard filled his mug with the still-steaming water. “They decided. Don’t include yourself. Certainly don’t include me.”

“Okay,
they
decided to destroy the world. Wipe everything out. Why?”

Bernard set his mug down on the stove to let it steep. He pulled off his glasses, wiped the steam off them, then pointed them toward the study, toward the wall with the massive shelves of books. “Because of the worst parts of our Legacy, that’s why. At least, that’s what I
think
they would say if they were still alive.” He lowered his voice and muttered, “Which they aren’t, thank God.”

Lukas shuddered. He still didn’t believe anyone would make that decision, no matter what the conditions were like. He thought of the billions of people who supposedly lived beneath the stars all those hundreds of years ago. Nobody could kill so many. How could anyone take that much life for granted?

“And now we
work
for them,” Lukas spat. He crossed to the sink and pulled the basket out of his mug, set it on the stainless steel to drain. He took a cautious sip, slurping lest it burn him. “You tell me not to include us, but we’re a part of this now.”

“No.” Bernard walked away from the stove and stood in front of the small map of the world hanging above the dinette. “We weren’t any part of what those crazy fucks did. If I had those guys, the men who did this, if I had them in a room with me, I’d kill every last goddamned one of them.” Bernard smacked the map with his palm. “I’d kill them with my bare hands.”

Lukas didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

“They didn’t give us a
chance
. That’s not what this is.” He gestured at the room around him. “These are prisons. Cages, not homes. Not meant to protect us, but meant to force us, by pain of death, to bring about
their
vision.”

“Their vision for
what
?”

“For a world where we’re too much the same, where we’re too tightly invested in each other to waste our time fighting, to waste our resources guarding those
same
limited resources.” He lifted his mug and took a noisy sip. “That’s my theory, at least. From decades of reading. The people who did this, they were in charge of a powerful country that was beginning to crumble. They could see the end,
their
end, and it scared them suicidal. As the time began to run out—over decades, keep in mind—they figured they had
one
chance to preserve themselves, to preserve what they saw as their way of life. And so, before they lost the only opportunity they might ever have, they put a plan into motion.”

“Without anybody knowing? How?”

Bernard took another sip. He smacked his lips and wiped his mustache. “Who knows? Maybe nobody could believe it anyway. Maybe the reward for secrecy was inclusion. They built other things in factories bigger than you can imagine that nobody knew about. They built bombs in factories like these that I suspect played a part in all this. All without anyone knowing. And there are stories in the Legacy about men from a long time ago in a land with great kings, like mayors but with many more people to rule. When these men died, elaborate chambers were built below the earth and filled with treasure. It required the work of hundreds of men. Do you know how they kept the locations of these chambers a secret?”

Lukas lifted his shoulders. “They paid the workers a ton of chits?”

Bernard laughed. He pinched a stray tea leaf off his tongue. “They didn’t have chits. And no, they made perfectly sure these men would keep quiet. They killed them.”

“Their own men?” Lukas glanced toward the room with the books, wondering which tin this story was in.

“It is not beyond us to kill to keep secrets.” Bernard’s face hardened as he said this. “It’ll be a part of your job one day, when you take over.”

Lukas felt a sharp pain in his gut as the truth of this hit. He caught the first glimmer of what he’d truly signed on for. It made shooting people with rifles seem an honest affair.

“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it’s up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.”

“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”

“Wise words.” Bernard took another sip of tea.

“Yeah. I’m just beginning to appreciate them.”

Bernard set his cup in the sink and tucked a hand in the round belly of his overalls. He stared at Lukas a moment, then looked again to the small map of the world.

“Evil men did this, but they’re gone. Forget them. Just know this: they locked up their brood as a fucked-up form of their own survival. They put us in this game, a game where breaking the rules means we all die, every single one of us. But
living
by those rules, obeying them, means we all suffer.”

He adjusted his glasses and walked over to Lukas, patted him on the shoulder as he went past. “I’m proud of you, son. You’re absorbing this much better than I ever did. Now get some rest. Make some room in your head and heart. Tomorrow, more studies.” He headed toward the study, the corridor, the distant ladder.

Lukas nodded and remained silent. He waited until Bernard was gone, the muted clang of distant metal telling him that the grate was back in place, before walking through to the study to gaze up at the big schematic, the one with the silos crossed out. He peered at the roof of silo one, wondering just who in hell was in charge of all this and whether they too could rationalize their actions as having been foisted upon them, imagine themselves as not really being culpable but just going along with something they’d inherited, a crooked game with ratshit rules and almost everyone kept ignorant and locked up.

Who the fuck were these people? Could he see himself being
one
of them?

How did Bernard not see that
he
was one of them?

The door to the generator room slammed shut behind her, dulling the patter of gunfire to a distant hammering. Shirly ran toward the control room on sore legs, ignoring her friends and coworkers asking her what was going on outside. They cowered along the walls and behind the railing from the loud blast and the sporadic gunfire. Just before she reached the control room, she noticed some workers from second shift on top of the main generator toying with the rumbling machine’s massive exhaust system.

“I got it,” Shirly wheezed, slamming the control-room door shut behind her. Courtnee and Walker looked up from the floor. The wide eyes and slack jaw on Courtnee’s face told Shirly she’d missed something.

“What?” she asked. She handed the two transmitters to Walker. “Did you hear? Walk, does she know?”

“How is this possible?” Courtnee asked. “How did she survive? And what happened to your face?”

Shirly touched her lip, her sore chin. Her fingers came away wet with blood. She used the sleeve of her undershirt to dab at her mouth.