The gulls depart as suddenly as they arrive. They leave behind a damp, musty smell and hundreds of feathers pinwheeling the air and the body of a man with hollowed eyes and bones glimpsed through the many holes in his skin.
They hurry on, down gravel roads, past rows of houses, until they push into the moss-furred woods and then find the bay beyond. Lewis feels suddenly uncollared as he escapes the town, able to breathe better with every step he takes, distancing himself. With the dangerous attraction of Burr so close, he cannot help but think about the black hole at the heart of every galaxy, and how the biggest grow out of elliptical galaxies, where black holes merge and become one, forming antimatter more powerful and dangerous than any other force in existence. He cannot allow himself to be taken again.
They splash along the beach until the cliffs fall away, replaced by sand dunes that roll into a hillside choked with rubber-leaved salal and bony manzanita. They find a cedar with a kink of roots hanging over a shallow gully and they settle beneath it to rest.
Lewis looks to Gawea and says, “You came back for me.”
“All this time you’ve been following me. I decided it was time to follow you.”
“We need to find who set off those explosions. Can you help?”
She nods and looks to the sky, where the cloud of gulls spins. At that instant they break apart and spread in every direction.
*
The sewage-treatment facility is north of Astoria, on a peninsula that reaches like a mandible across the mouth of the Columbia. There are massive open-air cauldrons, walled in by concrete, with metal walkways reaching across them. This is where they find the sisters, who dip long poles with screened scoops into the sludge beneath them and splat it into one of many five-gallon buckets they have lined up on the walkway. Their rifles are strapped across their broad backs, and when Lewis calls out to them, they drop the poles and quickly arm themselves.
“I’m a friend,” he says.
They do not ask him what he wants, but they do not fire either, when he approaches them with his hands up. The rest of his party remains below. The seagulls whirl overhead and dapple him with shadows.
At the museum, in his office, there was a section of his desk worn smooth and discolored from where he always rested his arm. It was the best kind of polish, shabbied over time, earned. That is what their faces remind him of. The women resemble each other, broad figures, short graying haircuts that look like tweed caps set on their heads. They both wear denim pants, canvas coats. If he didn’t have a rifle pointed at his chest, he might notice more about them, but for now, one is in front, the other in back, and that is what distinguishes them.
“What do you think?” one says.
“Don’t know,” the other says.
“I don’t think he’s one of them.”
“You one of them?”
“No,” Lewis says.
“What about the rest of them. The ones down below?”
“They’re good.”
“They’re good, huh?” The women look at each other. Some sort of unspoken communication seems to pass between them. “I don’t know.”
“Weird,” the other one says. “There’s something weird about you.”
Lewis lowers his hands and they tense their rifles. “We want to help you,” he says.
“Help us?”
“You mean you want to harvest some algae?”
He can’t tell if they’re joking. Everything they say comes across as a gruff bark. “You set off the explosions earlier today?”
“You bet we did.”
“We blew the shit out of them.”
“Well,” Lewis says. “We want to help. We want to join your army.”
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.