The women laugh together, a single mean ha. “Army.”
“No army. Just us.” One of them shoulders her rifle and picks up her pole and returns to skimming the pond, glopping the buckets full.
Lewis says, “There’s no one else.” His words sound defeated, accusatory. He doesn’t know what he imagined, but not this, two women stirring a sewer. He cannot think of anything more to say. He is all out of words. But the second woman, with her rifle now propped on her hip, is staring at him expectantly.
“Why are you harvesting algae?” he says.
“For fuel.”
He looks around as though searching for an explanation.
“For our truck.” She motions with the rifle. “It’s parked right over there.”
“You have a truck?”
“Yeah, it’s right over there,” says the other sister, hoisting up a dripping scoop of sludge.
Chapter 59
HIS GUESTS HAVE already arrived, but Thomas remains in the bath. He will make his entrance soon. His costume is a cloak made from the scales of a massive snake speared outside the wall and presented to him by the rangers as a gift. He didn’t care for its rubbery meat, but the treated skin shimmers like jeweled chain mail.
For now, though, he splashes in the tub. There is nothing so pleasing as a hot bath. He immerses his head in the water and the sounds of the world muffle to a dribble and plop. The dust soaks from his skin, his every pore opens and eases the stress from him. He takes the water into his mouth, tasting the soap, tasting himself, and spurts it back out. He likes to pretend sometimes he is an infant, floating in his mother’s belly, not a care in the world, every need served by the larger body hosting him.
He wants his body like an infant’s too, so he asks to be shaved.
Vincent runs the razor along his cheeks, his chest, his belly, his groin. “Make me completely naked,” he says.
The windows are shuttered, blinding the sun and softening the noise outside the Dome. People have been gathering outside his gates the last hour. Their chants storm the air. Their feet stomp and shake the ground. They rattle the fence with their hands. A few, he knows, have climbed over it, only to be struck down by deputies, hacked by machetes.
He chanced a look outside earlier. His grounds are a black cluster of deputies — and the gates beyond a seething throng of people. The sun was high enough then to burn every shadow from the city except the blackness held in their open mouths.
The razor scrapes the top of his thigh. The soap and hair ooze from it when Vincent splashes a handful of water. “Can’t you just kill them?”
Thomas has his arms draped over the lip of the tub, his head pillowed by the rim. The rest of his body floats, suspended by Vincent’s grip. “Who? Who is them? Everyone is them. We can’t kill everyone.” He stares at the ceiling, where steam swirls, as though an atmosphere is forming, as though this room is a world of its own.
The door knocks open and Slade barges through it and Vincent slips his razor and draws a red line across Thomas’s lower belly. “What?” Thomas says at a shriek. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”
Slade pulls a towel off a hook and stands at the foot of the tub with it bunched in one hand. “Get out.”
“I’m not done.”
Slade goes to the windows and rips open the shutters and the sunlight shocks the room. The noise outside — the screaming, the chanting — grows fiercer.
Thomas rises from the tub, not yet shaved entirely, one of his legs hairy, the other pink and clean. He pats himself down with the towel and presses it hard against the razor slash, and the blood petals through the threading of the towel.
“Party’s over,” Slade says. “The gates have been breached.”
The guests are racing up the stairs as they race down. One has jewels encrusting her eyebrows. Another wears a dress of white feathers. Another is painted with swirling gold designs, maybe costumed as a sandstorm. They flail their arms and trip their feet, scurrying past, leaving behind tables stacked high with desserts, a stage empty except for its instruments. Broken glass and broken plates glitter the floor. Thomas wears only a robe, no shoes, and he bloodies his feet on a glass shard and cries out and sits down to nurse it, only to be snatched up by Slade and shoved down a hallway. “Hurry up, you fool.”
The air shakes with footsteps and screams. Thomas gets a glimpse of the rotunda, a mess of deputies bullied back by the tide of people surging forward, not pausing at the machetes that come down on them. They swing bricks and boards and pipes and fists, whatever they might make into a weapon. A glimpse is all he gets. Slade jostles him through a door, the door to the basement, instructing him to escape through the sewer.
“And then what?” Thomas hates the way his voice sounds, like one more broken glass.
“Then you live.”
With that Slade slams the door and leaves him in a darkness broken only by the lantern dangling from a nearby hook. He carries its glow down the stairs, limping with every step, his cut heel leaving behind bursts of blood.
He enters an open room full of coffins, the graves of the ruling class. He stumbles on his sore heel and rams into one and knocks it over and the lid opens and spills out a body with dust puffing from its open mouth. The body of Mayor Meriwether, his predecessor, Lewis’s father. His yellowed teeth seem to be grinning at Thomas. “No,” Thomas says and hurries away and knocks over three more coffins before he makes it through the doorway opposite him.
He enters the storage room stacked high with water barrels. The flame of his lantern partners the feeling inside him, a flaring of light in the face of impossible darkness. His hair remains wet from his bath and deep beneath the Dome he actually feels chilled.
He searches the room until he finds what he is looking for, the square black grate cut into the floor. He kneels and yanks at it. Then yanks again. And again. It barely moves, rattling in place. At first he believes it rusted shut. Then he spies the chain wrapped around its grating. He yanks and yanks and then a shiver runs through him and he says, “No, no, no.”
He can hear thumping above, feet pounding the floor, fists pounding doors. It is only a matter of time before they find him. He stands and feels the sharpness in his heel at the same time that he feels a sharpness at his back.
He spins around. He does not realize how deeply he has been stabbed until he sees the knife, a black blade, bloodied all the way to its hilt. His wife holds it in her hand, and as he turns to face her, she plunges it once more into his chest.
He hardly recognizes her. Her white hair is hidden beneath a wrap. Instead of a silk dress she wears denim pants, a brown shirt made of some coarse fabric. She looks ready for the streets. He almost says something to mock her, but blood gurgles from his mouth in the place of words.
He lurches toward her and she shoves him back and he wilts against a stack of barrels. One of them tips and falls with him to the floor. Its top cracks open. The water glugs from it, spilling across the floor, splashing his face. It feels good. It feels cleansing. He closes his eyes. He listens to his heartbeat, so fast at first like the footsteps drumming all through the Dome, and then slower, and then silent.
Chapter 60
BURR HAS A good view from the Flavel house. Way up high on a hill, he can see so much of his city and the bay beyond. He stands at an open window in the library. Lewis has escaped him but not for long. He can feel him out there, not far away. He will find him. He will seduce him and humble him and teach him. Once taught, he will be made into something wonderful, a great tool. He, like everyone else, will become an extension of Burr, a million-limbed monster.