I quietly opened the door of the car I was crouched next to and searched inside for a gas can or a tube to use for siphoning. Nothing. I popped the trunk. Nothing. I went to the next car, and the next, and the next. Nothing. Ten minutes passed of this fruitless search.
I traveled down the onramp from Scotia, checking each car along the way. I hid from more groups of Blanches bleach-blond and dressed in vintage clothing. I was soaked through, despite my rain poncho, and frustrated. There wasn’t one work truck among the parked vehicles. Did Blanche have some kind of aversion to them?
Despair crept into my mind. Even if I managed to start a fire, would that change anything? I imagined the world as I knew it ending. I imagined Blanche preserving the charred remnants of my feeble rebellion as an art installation, something inspired by her greatness, something for her to cherish—a monument.
But I had to do something. I couldn’t give up.
The longer I kept rifling through the cars, the more I risked being discovered. I had already had one close call.
Scotia had a gas station. If the pumps didn’t work, they also had a market.
Scotia’s Main Street started where the bridge ended. It was packed for several blocks with rows of parked cars. Christmas lights, glowing dimly in the gloomy half-light of the storm, hung from the facades of the businesses that lined both sides of the street. Green and red garlands were wrapped around every lamppost.
Knees bent, back hunched, head bowed, I shuffled down the middle of Main Street, keeping below the car hoods, out of sight of the infected.
The sidewalks were congested with them, all dressed like they had traveled through time from the early sixties: suits and fedoras, tucked-in white shirts and jeans, brown wool skirts and collared long sleeve shirts, high heels, horn-rimmed glasses, crew cuts, pipes, cigarettes, more cigarettes. Some men wore dresses. Some women wore suits. They opened and closed umbrellas as they traveled in and out of storefronts pointed to by A-frame signs.
The signs closest to me read: “Sounds of the Flood: A Marimba Remembrance,” “Quilt Deluge,” “Flood Scenes: A Diorama Spectacular,” “Flood Fashion.” The whole thing reminded me of Arampom, but instead of creating art in Blanche’s honor, these people were creating it to better graft to the flood.
I came to a narrow stretch where the cars were parked too close. Afraid of bumping into one a little too hard and setting off an alarm, I flattened my body and was sidestepping along when I heard someone whisper, “In here.”
Startled, I flinched and banged my head against a fender, then froze and held my breath, terrified an alarm would go off, but no horn sounded, no lights flashed.
“In here.”
I looked up. A woman with her head and one arm out the back window of an SUV was waving me over. “Hurry,” she whispered. Her tone sounded conspiratorial, like she wasn’t one of the others, like she hadn’t been infected by Blanche. But then why was she here, in the middle of this? And why did she have bleach-blond hair?
I thought about running, but that would attract the whole town’s attention. At the least, the woman was being discrete, and if she turned out to be another Blanche, she had already seen me and the option of running would still be available.
The woman cracked the door and scooted over while I squeezed in out of the rain. She wore a blue wool dress with a collar and large black buttons.
Two men sat in the front seat, also dressed from the fifties or early sixties. Three small screens, one embedded in the back of each front headrest, and one hanging from the roof over the rearview mirror played the opening credits of a movie. The title appeared: “The Thousand-Year Flood.”
“It just started,” the woman said. ‘“You didn’t miss anything. I wish we could see this in the theater. I personally don’t think this was the best way to handle the overflow.”
She didn’t appear to recognize me. “Why are you here?” I said.
“To celebrate the forty-ninthanniversary of the 1964 Christmas Flood,” she said, a little confused by my question. “What part of the documentary do you identify with the most so far?”
“Uh,” I said, scanning the sidewalks to see if anyone outside had noticed me in here. If Blanche was inside this woman, she hadn’t come to the surface yet for whatever reason, and I didn’t want to raise her from the depths. I answered the question: “The font choice?”
The two men in front turned in their seats and grinned at me. “How exciting,” one said.
“I identify most with the picture of the house,” the other said. “It reminds me of my grandma’s house.”
The woman slid close to me so that our bodies were touching, and she placed a hand in mine. “I like your answer the best,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said, taking my hand away. “I’ve actually seen this movie before, so I’m going to go. Goodbye.” I cracked open the door and slipped out into the rain, then almost shut the door on the woman who was scrambling out behind me. As I crouched down, she opened up her umbrella. “Go back inside,” I said. “You’re going to miss the movie.”
“I find you stimulating,” she said. “An estimated seven thousand head of cattle met their demise in the 1964 flood. What part of that do you identify with the most?”
“The part where you get back in the car.”
“Interesting.”
“No, wait.” I remembered the other guy’s answer that she’d found so unremarkable. “My grandma’s house. It reminds me of my grandma’s house.”
“Oh wow.” She opened her eyes wide and let her chin drop. “You’re the performance artist, aren’t you?” She turned and shouted at her fellow umbrella-toting revelers on the sidewalk, “Hey everyone. The performance artist has finally arrived.” She pointed down at me, and I peered through the windows of an empty car to
