[femmeInterrupted]

Flash Fiction

She had been travelling with the Creature for 118 days.

Her sense of absurdity was ripe and eclipsed only by her startle response. Despite suffering from a raging case of PTSD, she entertained herself with idioms made ridiculous in these bizarre times. Like “Zombies of a feather flock together” or “ Never look a gift Zombie in the mouth”. Her travelling companion was another problem. She understood that the Vampire was helping her like a cattle farmer might ‘help’ cows back from pasture and into the abattoir.

She’d sometimes glance sideways at the Vampire sitting in the captain’s chair and think ‘Odd to be interacting with a creature that see’s me as simply a step above poultry on the food chain’.

Now she existed in the hollow steel bowels of a Winnebago. Once she would have refused on moral grounds; road trips supported the burning of fossil fuels and were bad for the environment. Turns out, there was something way worse than emissions lurking around sharp corners of the future.

The Vampire clichéd the sunniest of days away locked in the coffin like upper bunk of the RV. Often while alone in the solitude offered by sunshine she’d fall back into the “This Ain’t Happening” game she tortured herself with.

“This can’t be happening…. I’m a kindergarten teacher!”
“This can’t be happening! Why did no one ever describe how Vampires smell?”

Vampire’s smell wet. Like the sodden earth of wine soaked bodega and cellar floors. Vampires carry top notes of rot, sweet undercurrents of tainted meat and decayed fruit. When the first olfactory assault is over, a second battery is volleyed as they exuded ambered middle notes: a sickly saccharine animalic perfume of ambergris and fecal odor.
Once desperate to escape the cloying stink of her travel companion, she had it use hand sanitizer. Then it smelled like a dead martini.
She had learnt to control her gag reflexes.

Vampires were self-serving, which apparently, in Vampire culture is perfectly O.K. The undead didn’t rise to the occasion until almost too late. Turns out, on that whole food chain deal, Vampires can’t suck the blood of the violent animated dead.
Imagine that.
So humans became to Vampires what clubbing baby seals, saving the Iberian Lynx of Europe or the Big Pocket Gopher were for humans before.
They became humanitarian activists.

Zombies weren’t really “zombies” in the full grindhouse understanding of things. Vampires couldn’t feed on them, something her malodorous companion explained to was because of whatever ‘it was’ that ran virally rampant and viciously through their raging bodies. Then add that Zombies couldn’t stop gorging on us, the ‘flock’.

There was a lot of hunger in the world now. And not the kind of hunger that some Feed the World type musicians could rally around and fix with a jingle that tugs at the heart an guilt strings of the psyche. Aid organizations like UNICEF and OXFAM had literally been devoured into oblivion as the plague swept the planet. Humanities next best hope was now the blood sucking undead, which now roamed around like pale nocturnal Green Peace agents, collecting and saving the last vestiges of civilization.

Problem was, they were really saving humanity for dinner.