The Bubonic Plague Squirrel in Colorado

Oh man where to begin on this one?  Before we start I want you to Google (or whatever it is you people use now) what a “rat king” is.  Go ahead I’ll wait.  See that ugly sucker?  That’s a bad omen, and whenever one appears we get an alert for it to investigate because they’re usually plague related.

Now I want you to understand the “black plague” isn’t as scary as it sounds.  What you consider to be modern antibiotics can pretty much knock it out.  But these things can mutate, and when you take out half of Europe you don’t need a coordinated marketing campaign to tell you how bad it could get.  Couple that with the current pandemic already in progress they pretty much shoved me into the time machine to check it out.

The information I received was pretty vague but as far as we could tell Morrison is just southwest of Denver where roughly 12 biopharmaceutical companies reside.  Any one of which could potentially be the origin of the plague.  All it takes is one careless janitor to throw the wrong bag of medical waste in the trash rather than the incinerator, and whatever critter that happens to be dumpster diving that day gets exposed to god knows what.

Once a colleague of mine had to deal with a pack of wild raccoons that got into some experimental steroids during the year 1993.  Now imagine a whole gang of really buff trash pandas literally launching garbage cans into the street.  I mean these furry little bastards were jacked, and just terrifying.  They looked like Rocket the Raccoon did CrossFit.  Anyway where was I?  Oh yeah plague squirrels.

It wasn’t just the squirrels.  By the time I got there several other forms of vermin had contracted the disease and were spreading it quickly.  The playbook for this particular situation says to enact plan “Disneyland 57”.  Which implies that there are 56 other plans of the “Disneyland” contingency, most of which I’m guessing are above my pay grade.

Here’s the deal.  Disneyland has a rodent problem, and not of the cartoon variety.  Every time your kid drops a churro that becomes fodder for mice no matter how well the staff cleans the park.  But not long after the mice took up residence so did the stray cats.  And cats are nature’s ninja.  They disappear during the day never bothering the guests, and only come out at night to hunt Mickey’s unwanted cousins.  What I’m trying to say is this plan mostly involves just flooding the town with felines until the afflicted animals in question either die off due to the disease, or get picked off by the claw.

So someone found one squirrel leftover from the rampage.  Big deal.  Don’t freak out about it.  It’s not like we’re talking about alligators that can walk upright.  Damn do I hate any frigging job involving Florida.