Wool Read Online Free Page B

it meant. He knew it was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard. His wife had signed her own death certificate.
    The room spun around Holston as he begged Allison to be quiet. It was like he had arrived at the scene of some horrible accident—some mishap in the machine shop—to find a person he loved wounded. Arrived to find them alive and kicking, but knowing at a glance that the injury was fatal.
    Holston felt warm tears streak down his cheeks as he tried to wipe the hair from her face. Her eyes finally met his, stopped their fevered swirling and locked on to his with awareness. And for a moment, just a second, before he could wonder if she’d been drugged or abused in any way, a spark of calm clarity registered there, a flash of sanity, of cool calculation. And then it was blinked away and her eyes went wild again as she begged to be let out, over and over.
    “Lift her up,” Holston said. His husband eyes swam behind tears while he allowed his dutiful sheriff-self to intervene. There was nothing for it but to lock her up, even as he wanted no more than room enough to scream. “That way,” he told Connor, who had both hands under her twisting shoulders. He nodded toward his office and the holding cell beyond. Just past that, down at the end of the hall, the bright yellow paint on the great airlock door stood out, serene and menacing, silent and waiting.
    Once in the holding cell, Allison immediately calmed. She sat on the bench, no longer struggling or blabbering, as if she’d only stopped by to rest and enjoy the view. Holston was now the writhing wreck. He paced outside the bars and blubbered unanswered questions while Deputy Marnes and the mayor handled his procedural work. The two of them were treating Holston and his wife both like patients. And even as Holston’s mind spun with the horror of the past half hour, in the back of his sheriff brain, where he was always alert for the rising tensions in the silo, he was dimly aware of the shock and rumors trembling through walls of concrete and rebar. The enormous pent-up pressure of the place was now hissing through the seams in whispers.
    “Sweetheart, you’ve gotta talk to me,” he pleaded again and again. He stopped his pacing and twisted the bars in his hands. Allison kept her back to him. She gazed at the wallscreen, at the brown hills and gray sky and dark clouds. Now and then a hand came up to brush hair out of her face, but otherwise she didn’t move or speak. Only when Holston’s key had gone into the lock, not long after they had wrestled her in and shut the door, did she utter a single don’t that had convinced him to remove it.
    While he pleaded and she ignored, the machinations of the looming cleaning gyred through the silo. Techs rumbled down the hallway as a suit was sized and readied. Cleaning tools were prepped in the airlock. A canister hissed somewhere as argon was loaded into the flushing chambers. The commotion of it sporadically rumbled past the holding cell where Holston stood gazing at his wife. Chattering techs went dreadfully silent as they squeezed past; they didn’t even seem to breathe in his presence.
    Hours passed and Allison refused to talk—behavior that created its own stir in the silo. Holston spent the entire day blubbering through the bars, his brain on fire with confusion and agony. It had happened in a single moment, the destruction of all that he knew. He tried to wrap his brain around it while Allison sat in the cell, gazing out at the dismal land, seemingly pleased with her far worse status as a cleaner.
    It was after dark when she finally spoke, after her last meal had been silently refused for the final time, after the techs had finished in the airlock, closing the yellow door and retiring for a sleepless night. It was after his deputy had gone for the night, patting Holston on the shoulder twice. What felt like many hours after that, when Holston was near to passing out in fatigue from his crying and