Wool

4

Holston sat on the lone steel bench in the airlock, his brain numb from lack of sleep and the surety of what lay before him. Nelson, the head of the cleaning lab, knelt in front of him and worked a leg of the white hazard suit over Holston’s foot.

“We’ve played around with the joint seals and added a second spray-on lining,” Nelson was saying. “It should give you more time out there than anyone has had before.”

This registered for Holston, and he remembered watching his wife go about her cleaning. The top floor of the silo with its great screens showing the outside world was usually empty for cleanings. The people inside couldn’t bear to watch what they’d done—or maybe they wanted to come up and enjoy a nice view without seeing what it took to get it. But Holston had watched; there was never any doubt that he would. He couldn’t see Allison’s face through her silver-masked helmet, couldn’t see her thin arms through the bulky suit as she scrubbed and scrubbed with her wool pads, but he knew her walk, her mannerisms. He had watched her finish the job, taking her time and doing it well, and then she had stepped back, looked in the camera one last time, waved at him, then turned to walk away. Like others before her, she had lumbered toward a nearby hill and had begun climbing up, trudging toward the dilapidated spires of that ancient and crumbling city just visible over the horizon. Holston hadn’t moved the entire time. Even as she fell on the side of the hill, clutching her helmet, writhing while the toxins first ate away the spray-on linings, then the suit, and finally his wife, he hadn’t moved.

“Other foot.”

Nelson slapped his ankle. Holston lifted his foot and allowed the tech to bunch the rest of the suit around his shins. Looking at his hands, at the black carbon undersuit he wore against his skin, Holston pictured it all dissolving off his body, sloughing away like flakes of dried grease from a generator’s pipe while the blood burst from his pores and pooled up in his lifeless suit.

“If you’ll grab the bar and stand—"

Nelson was walking him through a routine he’d seen twice before. Once with Jack Brent, who had been belligerent and hostile right up to the end, forcing him as sheriff to stand guard by the bench. And once with his wife, whom he had watched get ready through the airlock’s small porthole. Holston knew what to do from watching these others, but he still needed to be told. His thoughts were elsewhere. Reaching up, he grabbed the trapeze-like bar hanging above him and pulled himself upright. Nelson grabbed the sides of the suit and yanked them up to Holston’s waist. Two empty arms flapped to either side.

“Left hand here.”

Holston numbly obeyed. It was surreal to be on the other side of this—this mechanical death-walk of the condemned. Holston had often wondered why people complied, why they just went along. Even Jack Brent had done what he was told, as foul mouthed and verbally abusive as he’d been. Allison had done it quiet, just like this, Holston thought as he inserted one hand and then the other. The suit came up, and Holston thought maybe that people went along because they couldn’t believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.

“Turn.”

He did.

There was a tug at the small of his back, and then a noisy zipping sound up to his neck. Another tug, another zip. Two layers of futility. The crunch of industrial Velcro over top. Pats and double-checks. Holston heard the hollow helmet slide off its shelf; he flexed his fingers inside the puffy gloves while Nelson checked over the dome’s innards.

“Let’s go over the procedure one more time.”

“It’s not necessary,” Holston said quietly.

Nelson glanced toward the airlock door leading back to the silo. Holston didn’t need to look to know someone was likely watching. “Bear with me,” Nelson said. “I have to do it by the book.”

Holston nodded, but he knew there wasn’t any “book.” Of all the mystic oral traditions passed through silo generations, none matched the cult-like intensity of the suit makers and the cleaning techs. Everyone gave them their space. The banned might do the physical cleaning, but these were the people who made it possible. These were the men and women who maintained the view to that wider world beyond the silo’s stifling confines.

Nelson placed the helmet on the bench. “You got your scrubbers here.” He patted the wool pads stuck to the front of the suit.

Holston pulled one off with a ripping sound, studied the whorls and curls of the rough material, then stuck it back on.

“Two squirts from the cleaning bottle before you scrub with the wool, then dry with this towel, then put the ablating films on last.” He patted the pockets in order, even though they were clearly labeled and numbered—upside down so Holston could read them—and color-coded.

Holston nodded and met the tech’s eyes for the first time. He was surprised to see fear there, fear he had learned well to notice in his profession. He almost asked Nelson what was wrong before it occurred to him: The man was worried all these instructions were for naught, that Holston would walk out—like everyone in the silo feared all prisoners would—and not do his duty. Not clean up for the people whose rules had killed him. Or was Nelson worried that the expensive and laborious gear he and his colleagues had built, using those secrets and techniques handed down from well before the uprising, would go away and rot to no purpose?

“You okay?” Nelson asked. “Anything too tight?”

Holston glanced around the airlock. My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight. He just shook his head. “I’m ready,” he whispered.

It was the truth. Holston was oddly and truly very much ready to go. And he remembered, suddenly, how ready his wife had been as well.