Super Meals: Part Eighteen

Walter went to bed hungry, so he had hungry dreams.

He rarely remembered what he dreamt. The typical mishmash of showing up naked to a date with a calculus test being given by a monstrous clown just wasn’t within the bounds of his imagination to come up with, usually. He slept, he rested, he recovered, he woke up, he continued his life.

This night he dreamed of food.

At least, it included food. Food was in the dream. Food composed the dream.

He dreamt of a young woman with a hamburger for a head who vomited up burgers onto sheets of waxed paper that she wrapped up and slid onto a conveyor belt that led out of the kitchen, around a counter, and into a large mouth that seemed to be built into the floor. It gulped with every burger that landed in its maw, and the sound echoed through Walter’s brain.

A voice to his left said “C17H20N4O6?”

He turned to look and there was a figure behind the counter now, wearing a lab coat in the obnoxious Technicolor hues of the fast food restaurant and a matching plague mask.

“Excuse me?” asked Walter.

“C6H5COONa,” came the voice from the plague mask. “C6H7KO2?”

“I…I don’t know what you’re saying,” said Walter, who began to back away from the counter. “I don’t know what that is,” he continued. He looked around the restaurant and realized that he wasn’t alone – there were patrons at nearly every table all around him now, frozen in mid-bite, staring at him.

They were all made out of food.

There was an ice-cream cone in a onesie sitting in a high-chair being spoon-fed by a…woman? It was hard to tell at first. All Walter saw was short noodle-hair, but then the figure turned and he could see bulbous cup-lid breasts. Walter turned again, looking for the door, but he ran into a tall…man? Yes, this one had to be a man. He had spiky blond hair made of French fries and wore glasses made of actual Coke bottles perched on a chicken nugget nose above thick lips. He, too, was dressed in the garish colors of the fast food chain, as well as a visor that encircled his head and had a light dusting of salt that rained from his French-fry hair when he moved his head.

“What’s going on?” asked Walter.

The food-man, whose nametag read MISTER MANAGER said “C6nH(10n+2)O(5n+1)?” and held out a handful of sauce packets. Instinctively, Walter reached out to take them and MISTER MANAGER dumped them into his open hand. Then he reached into a pocket and took out more packets, dumping them into Walter’s hand. Then another handful of packets, causing Walter to cup his hands together to hold them all and failing as several slid onto the floor and popped, like bloody bubbles.

“Wait,” said Walter. “I don’t want these. Here, take them back,” he said, thrusting them towards MISTER MANAGER, who ignored him and kept shoveling handful after handful of packets out of his pockets and dropping them at Walter’s feet.

Walter backed away from MISTER MANAGER and spotted a faux-wood-paneled trashcan. He moved to throw the packets into it and the opening slammed shut with lips and teeth that nearly took Walter’s hands off. He yelped and leapt back away from it, throwing the packets at it. Some went in, some splattered against the side.

The trashcan belched.

Walter looked for the door, but there wasn’t one. Just floor-to-ceiling windows covered in film that let light in but didn’t let you see out. Around the restaurant, the other patrons were standing up from their tables and moving towards him. Dozens of people were advancing on him like zombies, offering him foodstuffs with grossly outstretched appendages.

A man with literal sausage fingers held out a slab of meat that looked like ribs and said “C10H12O5?”

“W-what?” said Walter, backing into the conveyor belt.

On another side, a woman with stringy iceberg-lettuce hair blew her nose into a small sauce cup and held it out, saying “C6H8O2?”

“No…No, I don’t want that,” said Walter, edging along the counter, trying to escape.

From over his shoulder came a chicken patty and a voice in his ear whispered “C10H12CaN2Na2O8…”

Walter yelled, this time, and fell onto the conveyor belt running down the counter. As it rolled him through the restaurant he saw more plague masked register workers punching keys on their computers, more restaurant patrons lined up along the conveyor, offering him vague, food-like items and babbling unrecognizable words. As he approached the hole at the end of the conveyor belt, MISTER MANAGER stood by, grinning and holding out a steaming single-serving pie and loudly proclaiming “C12H17N4OS+!”

Walter couldn’t escape the conveyor belt. Whenever he tried to roll off, he was buffeted back by cashiers on one side or food-patrons on the other. The yawning mouth got closer and everybody was shouting at him and the voices melded together into one, repeating chant that called out “HCl+NaHCO3:NaCl+H2CO3…” over and over again.

As he was rolled over the edge into the mouth of the floor the voices stopped.

He fell.

He saw white light above him and nothingness below.

A multicolored plague mask popped over the edge of the hole, and a voice that whispered directly into his brain said “…+Bi[C6H4(OH)CO2]3.”

And then Walter Elliot woke up.