My only hope was to find Blanche’s portion of the sourdough totem and graft to it using Blanche/Em’s cackle deluge. I figured chances were good that the totem was nearby. It was Blanche’s link to Zaditor, and now that a lot of her Zaditorians were dead, she would want to send for more.
I told Blanche/Warren to lead me to Blanche’s nearest sourdough totem without giving us away, and she replied, “A powerful mothering instinct will express itself between species,” then walked off the road and waded into the flood.
I followed her, swimming part of the way to a frontage road. My clothes suctioned to my skin as I climbed out of the water. We crossed the road and entered a neighborhood with narrow gravel streets.
“Faster,” I said.
Blanche/Warren muttered something and began to jog, and I jogged after her. I had maybe twelve more minutes before the metaphor wore off. She led me south, above Main Street, four blocks from the festivities, where the streets were empty, where there was a view of the three bridges, now packed with people, the big brown water churning beneath them, all around them.
We turned a corner, and Blanche/Warren’s jog abruptly became a casual stroll. I almost ran into her back. A few houses down, a line of infected stood in front of a garage, holding umbrellas. They didn’t look over at us. They stared straight ahead and shuffled forward.
Stomach clenched, movements stiff, I followed Blanche/Warren to the back of the line, trusting she knew what she was doing, trusting the metaphor. I had no choice, really.
The line moved swiftly. At the head, inside the garage, a man in a white apron and chef’s hat stood behind a table ladling what looked like sourdough starter—gray, stretchy goop—from a giant stainless steel pot into mugs, which he handed to the next in line. A pile of short, black, leather cattail whips sat next to the pot. After the infected took a mug of goop from the chef, they exchanged their umbrella for a whip and filed into the house through the garage, holding the sourdough starter to their nose and whipping their own back.
Blanche was using the pain from the whips to implant whorls tied to the sourdough totem into the cackle of the infected, but to what end?
Three of the infected walked up from the direction of Main Street. I readied to make a dash for the pot, but they just took places behind me and Blanche/Warren in line and remained silent as we moved forward.
My command to tell Blanche I was dead had worked. Blanche didn’t appear to be actively searching for me. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t discover the ploy before the spell wore off if I did something to draw attention to myself.
Coming to the head of the line, I stepped just inside the garage, out of the rain. The chef slapped some totem in a mug and handed it to me. I lifted the mug to my nose, as the others had done, and I smelled the familiar yeasty fermentation of my family’s most precious heirloom, then I moved on, took a whip from the pile, and began pretending to whip myself with it.
After following Blanche/Warren, who appeared to be flagellating herself for real, around the table, I leaned forward and whispered, “Take me to Em.”
At a volume that made me want to shush her, she said, “The seagull with the loudest call is always at the center of things.” Then she broke from the line, and we walked out of the garage and toward Main Street. No one stopped us or even looked at us.
“Why are they making whorls with the sourdough?” I said.
“A single quack can have various meanings, depending on the tone,” Blanche/Warren said. “The Alocril invasion force requires special training.”
I asked where Em was, how far? Blanche/Warren made another remark about the loudest seagull, then answered, “The green bridge.”
That wasn’t far. The metaphor had around eight minutes of life left. I had time. I could still stop this. I stuffed the mug inside my coat, under my arm, to keep the starter from diluting in the rain, and said, “Faster.”
We ran downhill for two blocks before hitting the crowd. Not wanting to barrel through and attract Blanche’s attention, I instructed Blanche/Warren to slow down, be discrete, and we weaved through the bodies, careful not to bump anyone too hard. Following Blanche/Warren’s example, hoping to fit in, I occasionally tapped my back with the whip.
At first, we were surrounded by a group of what could only be interpretive dancers, moving like puppets made from wet noodles. We had to be light on our toes not to disrupt them. Blanche’s army was already grafting to the storm, entering the Nexus Whorl.
Further down, I passed young and old quilters sewing soggy patches together, bearded men with keening chainsaws carving sculptures out of burl, austere painters in front of easels painting with meticulous strokes only for the rain to run the colors. All grafted in the open, exposed to the storm. The scene was dreamlike, almost nightmarish. The faces of the infected were sincere, focused.
A thin film of blue scrill spread over my hand. A shanika must have been nearby. I briefly tried to graft to the storm, muttering a trio of Pictionary poems, but there wasn’t enough of the infected cackle to get past Craig.
The crowd was thickest on Main Street, slowing our progress even more. I had five minutes left. But I could see the green trusses of the bridge, where ravens, seagulls, pigeons, and ducks were perched, only twenty yards away.
A mad circus of self-expression swarmed around us, and I pretended to whip myself, pretended to participate. We walked by more sculptors—some molding clay, others welding steel—and more dancers—ballet, pop and lock, swing, salsa. We cut through a troupe of histrionic actors performing clashing soliloquies at
