Name: Elliot Watts
Age: 24
Occupation: cook
I was working the Iowa State Fair as part of a crew running a food truck called “Mama Peron’s.” It’s operated by a restaurant with the same name in Saint Paul and let me tell ya, there isn’t another place I’ve had so much fun cooking for. The owners are wonderful, the pay’s great and I’d be hard pressed to find friendlier co-workers.
I’m prattling aren’t I? Sorry.
We were on our way back to the restaurant and had to travel on some stretches of long, empty road. Our truck reeked of mozzarella and parmesan cheese, tomato sauce, burnt bread and everything you’d think if you had to pick out the smells that gave away an Italian restaurant. You could’ve picked us out from a mile or so off if the wind was right.
Which is how I think the shitrats found out where we were in the first place. It was windy all day and the scent of our truck must’ve been blown their way. I was in the back of the truck chewing the fat with Craig, another one of the cooks, when all of a sudden I smell something like a burst sewer pipe. My first thought is ‘oh god, the grease trap is leaking.’ But a quick check showed that there was no breach.
Our driver Latrelle lets out a ‘what in the son of a bitch’ and we ask what’s wrong. But before we can finish asking we hear what sounds like thousands of kindergartner’s shouting “sketties” and “nummies” at the same time. All of a sudden we start swerving and I’m struggling to stay up. I manage to hold on long enough to look out the window and my jaw dropped so hard it could’ve punched through the floor. There was an endless tide of those midget ponies surrounding us and trying to keep pace with the truck. Shelby, our third cook, got splashed with fluffy blood that made its way through the open window.
We kept on swerving and every so often I could see the blood spraying from a fluffy that found its way under our tires. Eventually, we killed enough fluffies and splattered enough blood on the road that we hydroplaned and fell down a small hill. I hit my head against the wall when we flipped over. Hard. Things were still hazy for a few minutes but I could see the shitrats start climbing into the kitchen section through the now open rear door. The last thing I remember before blacking out was a mare with three foals on her back talking to me, asking me to give her spaghetti because she ‘ne’ make da bestest miwkies fow bestest babbeh." She had a fucking smile on her face and everything. She didn’t even notice I was flat on my ass and bleeding from a head wound.
I came to at a hospital early the next morning. From what I’d heard, the owners of the restaurant in town feared the worst when they got news that ‘mega herd’ was sighted to be congregating on the road we were traveling on. When they called both the phone in the truck and our personal phones without getting a response, they called the police who’d already been alerted to our situation by some fairgoers. Apparently, they were driving back to their motel when they saw our truck flipped over and covered in fluffy shit. Paramedics arrived on scene not long after. There were still a lot of fluffies trying to make their way into the truck and the paramedics had to chase out the ones who didn’t immediately flee upon hearing the ambulance’s siren and seeing its lights.
None of us died, thank fucking god. But we needed to go to the hospital because of our injuries from the crash on top of making sure we didn’t get any infections from any of the germs the fluffies had. The truck was covered in piss and shit. Latrelle nearly got an infection when a fluffy panicked and ‘made bad poopsies’ on a deep gash in his arm.
The incident was reported on the local news and the fair set aside enough money for Mama Peron’s to get a brand new truck. The herd made its way out of the county over the next few days. I’ve been told that what we ran into was just a splinter group of the main ‘megaherd’ that’d set out from Illinois and was spreading through the Midwest. That ‘splinter group’ still numbered over twenty thousand. If we ran into the main portion, we’d have died before help could reach us. I’m sure of it.