Hey, Cope, I guess you probably heard about the latest pandemic. It’s popping as we speak, and it makes Covid look like a soft little mushy round cheese cake with teensy red white and blue stars on it. Right now, the new one seems to be occurring mostly at rest stops along the I-5 corridor from about near Eugene north to Portland. People are coming out of public restrooms up there–mostly tourists, I guess–walking out to their cars, and just flat dropping dead, either right by their cars or just after they get in. A few of them manage to drive a few miles before passing out behind the wheel, then crashing their cars. If there’s other people in the car with them, they either die or survive the crash. But if the driver stayed in the car while others got out to walk around or take a piss, then luckily, the car didn’t crash, but you still got passengers keeling over somewhere up the road, which must be pretty disconcerting. Luckily, it’s a divided highway up in there, so no head-on collisions thus far. I think that’s actually how it first got reported–state troopers noticing a surge of unexplained wrecks along the I-5.
Around the same time, believe it or not, some hick radio newscaster up in there must have heard about all those cars crashing and people keeling over, and put out a report—maybe half joking or maybe dead serious—that it was the End Times or the Rapture, at which point, hundreds of local yokels listening in, just walked out of their houses or left their cars on the side of the road and started walking down the I-5 in a kind of trance. Some of them were seen looking skyward with their arms upraised–I guess trying to persuade the Deity to beam them up. A helicopter spotted a horde of these goof-balls just north of Junction City. The pilot estimated their number at between 1,500 and 2,000, if you can believe that. He said they were just ambling along State Highway 99 like a herd of zombies.
Meanwhile, an undisclosed number of people died in a Creationist theme park just south of Beaverton. Some old lady–a retired school teacher, I think–found a nine-year-old kid slumped over the horns of a triceratops in the dinosaur diorama; a little gathering of fiberglass cavemen appeared to be looking on with appropriately horrified faces. I know it sounds like I’m joking, but I swear to God it’s all true. Just look it up, if you don’t believe me. It must be all over the net by now.
State health inspectors were dispatched to the area to do some preliminary investigating to see what might be happening in those restrooms and what it could have to do with people going in there–just going in there to pee, or whatever, or just take a shit, you know. And what they found, or at least the theory they’re working with now–well, you won’t believe it. They’re saying they found a mutant strain of Coronavirus in the urine in one of the public toilets right outside Eugene. From there, they started taking samples from all the public toilets along the I-5, mostly concentrating on rest stops. And it looks like a brand new strain, all right, unlike anything we’ve seen before. And it’s a real motherfucker. Initially, they were calling it the I-5 Virus, but pretty soon they rechristened it the Salmon Virus, and maybe, if you think about it, you can guess why. But if you can’t, I’ll tell you. This little fucker gets into people literally by swimming up the pee-stream. That’s right. And this is no joke. Apparently, it works like this: One person–a carrier–goes in, unzips or drops her dress and takes a piss, leaves the virus in the commode. Next one comes in, takes a piss, and voila! Walks out with the virus! Think about it: Your pee stream–male or female–makes a perfect unbroken line from the toilet right back up into your bladder. From there, it’s just an express passenger train through the blood stream to every major organ. It’s like the bladder is Penn Station to this spawn of Satan.
And they looked at it in the microscope and found that the knobs on your typical Covid virus appear now to have evolved into something like ten-thousand powerful little paddles, so these demonic little shits can literally swim (or paddle, I guess) up the pee-stream, like salmon going upriver to spawn. Hence, the name. Nor does it matter if you flush the toilet. Turns out this mutant has a super-sticky coating on it, similar to that found on the bellies of snails, only this coating is about 500 times stickier, to the point where it can cling to the inside of the toilet bowl–it’s almost like it knows when someone’s about to finish and flush–and it just fuckin locks down, so even the most powerful hydraulic flush is too weak to suck it out. They’ve never seen anything like it, and, as you can guess, it’s already spreading like wildfire. Nobody seems to know where it originated or if it just all of a sudden mutated in that first rest-stop outside Eugene and began its northward migration.
Meanwhile, the Oregon Health Department has issued a statewide warning, telling people to start carrying bottles of 70% ethyl alcohol to pour into any public toilet before using it. They’re saying it takes a whole 16 oz bottle to kill these beasts. But we know how that’s going to go over, don’t we. You can’t get half these nimrods to wear masks or go get the goddamn shot. Good luck telling Jubal or Elrod to go spend money to keep cases of ethyl alcohol in his car in addition to all the bags and baggage, the food, the bottled water, the gimcracks purchased at Cracker Barrel Restaurants every hundred miles, and the assault rifle, to pour in the toilet bowl every time he or the wife or little Junior or little Miss Priss or old grannykins wants to pull over and take a whiz.
Yeah, good luck with that, all right. Just one more encumbrance on his so-called “Freedom.”
Crossroad Vertigo (Mirror) 