Super-Meals: Part Four

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 Picture, if you will, Walter Elliot; a man so average that people frequently assume his name is “Joe,” and more than once they forget his real name in favor of it.

So there he is, this completely normal, average man, standing in the parking lot of the world’s most popular fast food chain in small-town America, dangling his car door from his hand, and wondering, to quote him directly, “What the fuck just happened?”

First he tried to put the door back on, which was foolish because he’d wrenched the bolts out of the hinges when he tore it off, but he didn’t notice that. He just knew that the door wasn’t on his car anymore, and he thought to rectify that.

He started mashing the door up against the frame harder and harder, until the metal began to bend and buckle under his hands, and while he finally got it to stay on, it looked more like a piece of chewed bubblegum wedged into a hole.

Then he ran.

He was afraid, and understandably so. After all, how would you feel if you walked out of a fast food joint afraid you were going to poop your pants and, the next thing you know, you’re ripping a steel door off a car with the same amount of force you use to twist off a bottle cap?

So he ran.

Most people don’t realize how much muscle and strength goes into running – you see a cheetah or gazelle and you think of lithe grace and smooth strides. But underneath the fur or skin is always pure, lean muscle. The same kind of muscle that Walter Elliot has underneath his skin.

The same kind of muscle that was now amplified in strength roughly 20 to 30 times.

So when he took off running, his first few strides caused him to overshoot the sidewalk he was aiming for and propelled him into the street, and oncoming traffic.

The first car swerved and missed, but the car behind that one didn’t react as quickly and hit Walter Elliot, wrapping the bumper and a good section of the hood around his waist. Luckily, Walter Elliot wasn’t hurt, but his fear levels shot through the roof.

He ran again.

Realizing that he wasn’t entirely in control of his own bodily functions, he sought privacy, isolation; a place where he was sure to avoid other people (or, at least, any people that anybody would care about, he thought), so he ran for the industrial section of town where he figured the only people he’d have to worry about were some hobos or runaways.

(What? Just because he had super strength doesn’t make him a nice person.)

The industrial district was three miles away, but Walter sprinted it in just over four minutes.

Four minutes is a long time to just think; most people don’t realize it because, honestly, when was the last time you just sat in silence for four minutes? So along the way, Walter Elliot started to wrap his mind around his newfound powers, and when he saw the fences surrounding “Pete’s Pick-N-Pull” auto yard, he leapt, and cleared the 8 foot fence by a good 18 inches.

He landed and skidded to a stop up against a pile of flattened cars, dropping to his hands and knees, panting.

Then he realized he wasn’t actually out of breath, and he stopped panting.

And that’s when he heard the dogs.

He didn’t want to know what kind of dogs Pete had guarding his yard, he just up and ran again. He only made it six blocks before he thought he was safe again, taking refuge up against the wall of a highway overpass, and around the corner from where a pair of EMTs had found a dead transient quite recently.

A transient who had just finished having an autopsy performed on him, wherein the medical examiner had found some irregularities in his stomach contents and called Detective Mimi Spatchcock to come down to her office to discuss them.

Super-Meals: Part Three

Mimi Spatchcock had been a police officer for ten years, a detective for three, and an alcoholic for one. When she was on-duty, she kept a snubnosed .357 in her shoulder holster. Off-duty, she kept a pint of scotch.

            Except today. Today she was at her desk with her eyes watering and fighting at headache because of the mound of paperwork before her and her holster was empty.

            The bottle was in a drawer in her desk, and her gun was in another. More than once she reached for the bottle and grabbed the gun.

            More than once she considered putting it in her mouth.

            Mimi became a cop because she watched a lot of movies as a child and genuinely wanted to help people. At the academy her classmates made fun of her because she genuinely believed in doing the right thing and helping everybody equally. Her instructors appreciated it at first, but began to worry about her as graduation approached and she still thought that way. Most recruits got over their idealism by graduation and were properly ready to hit the streets and see the inevitable horrors of a life on the streets. Those that didn’t either washed out of the program altogether, or made stupid mistakes within their first couple of years on the streets.

            But something about Mimi kept her safe. She made the same, stupid, idealistic mistakes that other starry-eyed young cops made, but she survived; her convictions shielded her from the evils of the world she faced on the beat. When she was eligible, she took the detective’s test and passed (with one of the highest scores in the history of the department, which surprised no one), and took her idealism to a new level. Now she wasn’t just trying to prevent crime, she was bringing justice to those she couldn’t save on the streets. She felt like she was getting a chance to make up for everything she couldn’t accomplish as a patrolman.

            Her commanders got tired of her shit.

            She was annoying as a patrolman, she was a pain in the ass as a detective.

            Luckily, she was astonishingly good at her job, and when you’re good at something, they make you do it more.

            Get good enough, and you end up doing other people’s jobs for them.

            Get really good at it, and they make you do the absolute worst jobs available.

            During her first year as a detective, Mimi had a 75% close rate on her cases (again, a new record for the department). In her second year, they gave her harder cases, more gruesome cases, some involving children.

That was when she started drinking.

In her third year her caseload was heavier than ever and she drank all the time, so it was actually out of pity that her lieutenant gave her a simpler case: a hobo had been found dead under an overpass. The medical examiner hadn’t completed his report yet, but the word around the precinct was that he’d simply died from exposure. They were ready to close this case almost as soon as it opened, and Mimi needed a boost, so when the file was created they gave it to her so she could get another successful case on her record.

She was waiting for the medical report and autopsy to arrive and reading over the inventory for the fifth time:

Name: John Doe

Age: Unknown

Cause of Death: Unknown pending medical examination

Items Retrieved from Corpse: One coat, wool, green; One pair pants; One pair shoes; One wool sweater; One paper bag from local fast food restaurant, contents include several empty food wrappers, receipt, coupons, and gift card (balance unknown).

Mimi had all but memorized the incomplete report by now, so it was a tremendous relief for her when the phone rang and she saw the caller ID was the county coroner. She picked up the phone, grateful to finally get the coroner’s findings on file so she could close this case.

“Jane!” she said after picking up the phone. “What’s the word on that transient case? Exposure? Natural causes? Can I put this one to bed?”

The coroner didn’t respond at first, and the pause was pregnant enough that Mimi’s hand found itself on her bottle without thinking. “Jane?” she asked. “Please tell me this is an easy one.”

“You’d better come out to the morgue, detective. I found some chemical combinations in his stomach that are rather baffling.”

Super-Meals: Part Two

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The fast food chain was worldwide, incorporated, franchised, and, on paper, a 96 year old woman residing in Togo. Their actual offices were in Illinois; that’s where all of their actual office employees worked. The CEO, CFO, and other acronym’ed bosses all spent eight to twelve hours a day there, and a single 22 year old woman manned a lonely desk in a nearly empty room on the other side of the planet in case anybody ever called or sent a fax.

            She spent most of her time surfing the Internet and taking online classes. On the rare occasion the phone rang, she answered it and transferred the call back to the Illinois offices. On the even rarer occasion that a fax came through, she checked it and either dropped it directly into the shredder, or re-faxed it (again, to the Illinois offices).

            She knew enough English to know what words to scan for on faxes and determine whether to shred or forward them. Words like “FDA,” and “Investigation” and “Safety” always gave her pause, but unless the message also contained a keyword like “Lawsuit” or “Unsafe,” the faxes went into the shredder.

            This is why the following fax was read (poorly), and ultimately shredded.

From: FDA Scientific Analysis Team

To: [Unnamed fast food chain]

Re: Safety Testing and Research Findings

            Dear Sir or Madam,

In conjunction with US Federal Safety Standards, we have completed our latest analysis of your ingredients and related food-preparation materials and can find no measurable carcinogens or additives, which would pose a serious health risk to your patrons. There were a number of other potential side effects found, as our test subjects showed a variety of radical physiological changes when fed certain combinations of your materials, but they do not (yet) appear to be physically harmful, and, as such, we will not be pursuing further actions against you at this time.

            Thank you for your time and attention in this matter, we trust that you will pull any potentially harmful or unstable materials from your product lines until further testing can be conducted.

            Sincerely,

            Patricia Cronin, PhD

            Chief Scientific Advisor, Federal Food and Drug Administration

            On the other side of the world, back in the Illinois office, on the 23^rd floor, there was a very important meeting going on.

            Doctor Ralph Quinlan was showing his latest creation to a selection of the board of directors. Doctor Quinlan’s official title was “Head Chef,” but he didn’t actually cook anything in the traditional sense, he spent his time mixing and matching assorted chemicals and compounds to create food-like foods to use at the restaurants. Real pickles were expensive, for example, but Doctor Quinlan had created a faux-pickle in his lab that had the vague texture and taste of pickles, while costing only a quarter of the real thing.

            He had also done this for their burgers, chickens, bacon, tomatoes, breads, mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise.

            The only ingredient offered by the fast-food giant that could still be called food (without having to put quotation marks around the word) was the lettuce, which was why lettuce was only used on their “premium” burgers. The premium burgers cost roughly three times as much as a regular burger to recoup the cost of having to use real lettuce (despite the fact that a single leaf cost the business less than a penny).

            Today he was showing them a gelatinous white orb containing a laundry-list of polysyllabic chemicals found nowhere in nature and entirely “grown” in his lab. When dried, it could be diced into flakes that were reminiscent of onions.

            “I even engineered it to induce tears, like a real onion!” he proclaimed to the board. “Best of all, this will cost us a tenth of what a genuine onion does.”

            The assembled members of the board nodded and made appreciative noises but didn’t actually say any words; they were already calculating the additional profits in their heads. When the head of the company was satisfied with his calculations, he said “Carry on, doctor,” then turned to leave, pulling the rest of the board into his wake.

Super-Meals: Part One

It was the pickles and mustard that pushed him over the edge.

            Walter Elliot had decided he wanted a bit of a snack on his way home from work, and since he wanted it “his way,” he ordered a cheerful meal of cheeseburger, fries, and a soda.

            The cheeseburgers’ default serving was bottom bun, patty, one slice cheese, one click of ketchup, two slices pickles, sprinkle of chopped onions, top bun.

            Walter didn’t like ketchup, the aftertaste lingered like tomato bubblegum.

            Walter ordered mustard, instead.

            The woman taking his order didn’t make a note of the special order. She was forty-six, looked fifty-six, and was tired from having to work six hours of unpaid overtime this week due to her manager clocking her out for lunch breaks she wasn’t allowed to take, but couldn’t get paid for because it would put the store over its hours budget.

            Instead, she took Walter’s money, handed him his change, then yelled back at the sixteen year old girl who had started putting the meal together.

            “Hey, Laney, no ketchup on that cheeseburger. Sub mustard.”

            “What?” asked the girl.

            The register worker sighed. “I said no ketchup, sub mustard on that cheeseburger.”

            Laney, who was sixteen, had two tests coming up, and was working a double shift because her younger brother needed braces, also sighed. Then she took the half-completed burger to a different prep station (which was literally 36 inches away, but, according to Laney, “It’s, like, WAY over there, and it’s SUCH a pain in the ass whenever I have to make something special.”), added the mustard, then rolled it up in a sheet of waxed paper.

            The burger was added to a paper bag, along with a sleeve of lukewarm French fries, and then a small soda was placed on top of it, dripping condensation onto the wrapper and making the French fries soggy.

            The bag passed from Laney to the register woman to Walter, who took it to a plastic and pressboard table next to a cloudy window and sat down on an inflexible plastic stool to eat.

            Walter wasn’t a big man, but the burger was almost comically small by modern standards, and it took more effort to take many small bites than to simply down it in four (and even that was probably one too many). He polished off the burger, shoved a handful of fries in his mouth, then tossed the paper in the trash while sipping his soda and walking to his car.

            He felt the burger hit his stomach like he’d swallowed a shot-put. His knees buckled and his eyes crossed, and he leaned against the bicycle rack (forever abandoned and untouched) outside of the front door, regaining his composure.

            When he stood up again, he failed to notice the handprint he’d gripped into the steel bars.

            His feet came back to him quickly and his eyesight sharpened once again, and he finished the short trek across the parking lot to his car as the last bit of soda slurped away. He took a quick glance around the parking lot to see if anybody was looking, and when he was satisfied that nobody could see him, he tucked the ice-filled cup behind the tire of the car next to his.

            He unlocked his door.

            He grasped the handle and prepared to wrestle with it. His ’87 Oldsmobile had a dent in the door that pinched the front seam and made it stick sometimes.

            He thumbed the door latch and gave a sharp yank.

            The door came off in his hands.