After the Fall

A journalistic reporting of Post-Apocalyptic Park Rangers in Yellowstone

Bill’s Journal
=March? 2046?

We got a call down at the campgrounds that someone was selling human meat, un-iced and un-licensed. So we got on our horses and rushed down there, Old Lou was doing the siren sounds with his mouth the best he could. He was my deputy, assistant, he was a little bit retarded, born all fucked up from the radiation, mostly he ran along the side of the horse but on his birthday and in an emergency I let him double up with me.


He would make engine sounds too, like an old race car when he was riding, like I said, he was retarded, he was a shit cop, but he made us laugh, most the campers liked him and he helped defuse situations, unless it was with another like him, he Hated them.

“My daddy was a cop” Old Lou would say with a line of drool, I’m like ‘whatever retard, your dad was an insect farmer’, but we’re sweet to him mostly. Tell him to cover his eyes when we see a body that had really been gone at, or time had made rotten and misshappen, or give him a ‘Oh they were just wrestling’ when we came across the most unnatural scenes of sex. We took care of him.

Anyway so we get this call on the radio and we’re heading down there. When we get there it’s a California gypsy woman with some kids, we don’t know whose kids, they don’t always whore out their own children. Sometimes they kidnap, is what I've heard. People from California are sick. She’s got no license I said. There’s melting snow on the ground and a fog in the air. So I shoot her in the head and the kids are crying and screaming and Old Lou is trying to chase them down like stray dogs.

I promoted him to made-up Assistant Deputy class 11-B5 that day, because he catches half of them, but we don’t know what to do with them, so we radio’d CPS in Old Jackson and they said to just let them go outside the park, they didn’t have anyone heading over here anytime soon. So like I said the snow was melting so I don’t think it was bad to let them go. They’ll take care of each other, like we all do.