Super-Meals: Part Four

-->

 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.