I’m not proud of this. In general the longer my flash the less time I spent thinking about it. It’s typing against the clock. I always attribute to Mark Twain a quote that goes something like --- I didn’t have time for a short note so I wrote a long letter. It’s really from some famous dead attorney about not having time for a brief. Either way, one considers brevity, verbosity is like a shotgun; a thousand pieces of grapeshot in a hundred directions and you should manage to hit something. I’m flexing my fingers for Flash Ghoul week.
In London you can tell the locals by their umbrellas; in Portland only the tourists use umbrellas. Travel east from London and you are in the channel; East from Portland and you travel past bear country to cactus country.
These are important distinctions. Even if the umbrellas didn’t cover the mad eyes, the rotting dead flesh or the bone-dulled canines, there was only so far you could run. I suspect, too, that the infamous British stoicism was a problem. E.g. Oh do stop chewing on my skull won’t you?
The cultural milieu of Portland probably had a victim or two as well. E.g. Dude, that whole zombie thing is so not cool, you see anyone trying to eat your Brain? No. But the zombies had less ways to hide and living more places to hide. The smug Oregonian thought this was natural selection. Ok, one smug Oregonian thought so.
It was maybe three weeks after all hell broke loose, we were around a small fire in the Van Duzer corridor, the ground and air cover was thick enough to risk it. Earlier that day two of the girls had pushed a friend of theirs down some high rocks. The friend kept talking about god’s vengeance on sinners. Once the skull of civilization has been gnawed on the first casualty is suffering fools.
“It’s natural Selection, man,” the guy said. He had a name. Who cared. He had a knit rasta cap with snake like blonde dreds poking out too. He was my first pick as my own casualty of civility, my sloughing off of the chains of civilization.
“Shhh,” I said, pouring a bit of water on a branch so green it was popping, “You hear that?”
The girls listened. The guy said “What?”
“Water.”
The girls relaxed,
“What about it?” the guy said.
“It all goes down to Columbia,” everyone nodded.
“So?”
“So, in the Columbia are sturgeons. They are fucking dinosaurs. They haven’t changed in millions of years. They are spiky and weird, hard to eat. They live in fresh and salt water, they …”
“I know. My old man used to get us licenses when I was a kid. Killing them is not cool. You know if it’s under three foot or over six you have to throw it back?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“I hated my old man.” “I hate him too,” one of the girls snarked.
“You know why there are dinosaur fish in the Columbia? Because they didn’t need to adapt. Evolution is only an imperative if threatened. Otherwise the fittest already have what it takes. There isn’t any Sturgeon in the Thames. “
“That’s what I’m talking about,” the guy said, grasping smug like the tether of a parachute at four thousand foot.
“We’re heading east,” one of the girls said quietly, knit cap looked at the bumps where her tits were nestled under a T, a blouse and a down vest. “It means,” she went on, we’ll hit the Larch Mountain lookout by noon.”
He grinned at the place where her cleavage probably was.
“There’s a path up to this lookout point, a rock jutting out with a three sixty of the Cascades.”
“Cool”
“I’d like it if you’d go up there with me.”
He leered.
There was a thousand foot drop. I was of three minds; the first was envy, I wanted to remove him from the gene pool personally. The second was more practical; he’d make a good sacrifice if we were cornered, hobble him and give the zombies something to chew. And the last mind was divided between wanting to catch my last view of the cascades, the weeks ahead, if we had weeks, would be high sierra and desert, and the need to prove some half formed idea that with humans there was a cultural survival of the fittest; nature abhors a vacuum, humanity abhors the vapid.
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