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