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

“ 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 cautioned a 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 waved 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 coveralls. 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 1, wondering just who in the hell was in charge of all this and whether they too could rationalize their actions as having been foisted upon them, as not really being culpable but just going along with something they’d inherited, a crooked game with ratshit rules and most 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.

“If this works,” Walker grumbled, fiddling with one of the transmitters, “we can ask Jules herself.”

Shirly turned and peered through the control room’s observation window. She lowered her sleeve away from her face. “What’s Karl and them doing with the exhaust feed?” she asked.

“They’ve got some plan to reroute it,” Courtnee said. She got up from the floor while Walker started soldering something, the smell reminding her of his workshop. He grumbled about his eyesight while Courtnee joined her by the glass.

“Reroute it where?”

“IT. That’s what Heline said, anyway. The cooling feed for their server room runs through the ceiling here before shooting up the mechanical shaft. Someone spotted the proximity on a schematic, thought of a way to fight back from here.”