Hugh Howey - Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

Juliette blew out her last breath and coughed, wiping at her face, her head still trapped below the next step. She wheezed and laughed and pushed herself away, banging her head on the sharp steel edge of the stairs. She was free. She briefly bobbed below the surface as she swam around the railing, her eyes burning from the oil and gas floating on top. Splashing loudly, crying for Solo, she made it over the railing. With her padded and shivering knees, she finally found the steps.

She’d made it. Clinging to the dry treads above her, neck bent, gasping and wheezing, her legs numb, she tried to cry out that she 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 off 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 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 to 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 the color 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 hissing 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 burnt 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 coveralls. “I wish I didn’t know it,” he told Lukas. “And now you see why some facts, some bits 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 he visited with his mother. 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 it, 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—”