Super Meals: Part Thirty Five

It had been twenty minutes since Walter had polished off the Suicidal Rodeo Clown and nothing was happening. He was getting flustered, and Mimi was getting pissed.

“Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked her.

“I don’t know, what happened the last couple of times?”

“Well,” he said, then paused to think. “I mean, the first time, I just ate my lunch and felt this heavy feeling in my stomach, like I’d swallowed a brick or something. The next thing I knew, I was ripping the door off my piece of shit car and sprinting down the highway.”

“How about this morning?”

“That one was different, I needed…I dunno, a jump start or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember? I had to get pissed off before something would happen – and even then I couldn’t really control it. It just sort of…slipped out.”

“So it’s like a mutation,” said Mimi.

Walter took a step back from her, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you ever read X-Men comics?”

He kicked at the dirt and mumbled, “No, not really.”

“Jesus Christ, what kind of shit childhood did you have that you never read X-Men comics? How about the movies?”

“Never really got around to seeing them,” he admitted.

“The first one redefined the very genre of comic book movies! It was, like, the number one movie of the year back in 2000.”

“Yeah, great,” said Walter. “I’ll rent it tonight, Jesus.”

“Look, this is just wrong,” Mimi continued. “I mean, this is practically criminal,” she said, stepping back around him.

“Well what the fuck do you want me to do about it? We’re in the woods on the back-end of a college campus. I don’t see a RedBox around here anywhere, and unless you happen to have a copy on your phone, I don’t really see how this conversation is going to get us anywhere!”

“Don’t yell at me!” shouted Mimi.

“I wasn’t yelling!” screamed Walter.

“Will both of you please shut the fuck up!” shouted Adam.

Mimi really did scream, then, and fell off of the rock she was standing on because Adam had climbed up the bank of the stream and was leaning on it. The following events played out in slow motion:

Mimi drew her service pistol from the hide-a-holster in the small of her back and fired in Adam’s general direction as she fell. Walter jumped to catch her, holding his arms out and lunging forward. The force of the gunshot spun Adam around and he clutched at the side of his head as he fell. Mimi landed in Walter’s arms and her weight buckled his legs, sending them both sprawling to the ground to the side of the boulder. Adam pulled his hand away from his head and saw it covered in blood, dropping him to his knees.

Adam screamed.

His skin caught fire.

A bubble of flame erupted around him, expanding outward.

Walter, seeing this, rolled himself on top of Mimi.

The wave of heat and fire washed over them both, and though the force of the blast skidded them across the ground, neither of them were burned.

At this point, time began to move at normal speed again.

Mimi and Walter were panting and Walter’s shirt was smoking, but he felt like he had just put on a shirt fresh from the dryer. Mimi elbowed him off of her.

“Fuck off,” she said. “I’m alright.”

Walter backed away from her a bit and propped himself up on an elbow. “What just happened?”

“That guy exploded.”

“You shot him!”

“He shouldn’t have snuck up on me like that!”

“So you shot him!?”

“I’m a cop! What do you think would happen?”

Walter narrowed his eyes at her and said, “You know, it’s cops like you that are the reason people protest cops…like…you.” His voice trailed off.

Adam moaned from down in the creek bed, startling them out of their argument. “Holy fuck, he’s alive?” said Walter.

“Good,” said Mimi, picking herself up. “I don’t need the paperwork.” She held her hand out to Walter, who took it, and she hauled him up. “Come on, let’s go have a look.”

“You want to go down there?” asked Walter.

“Yeah, moron, I’m a cop, remember? The kind that people protest?”

“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that. I was…angry.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that, dick. Now come on.”

She eased her way down the embankment, moving in a zigzag pattern to avoid slipping on the burned and blackened grass. Walter moved up behind her and gazed down into the little gully.

Adam was laying facedown in the mud, which was dry and cracked. He was the epicenter of the blast, and the ground closest to him rippled out in waves from the force of the explosion. He was naked again (the ashes of the lab coat were somewhere on the ground around him, but indistinguishable from the rest of the destruction. His skin was still dirty from the mud bath he had taken earlier, but it had dried into dust. “He looks kind of like PigPen from the Charlie Brown comics,” said Mimi as she walked up to him.

“Is he okay?” asked Walter from the top of the embankment.

Mimi didn’t answer at first. She watched, and saw Adam’s back rise and fall as he breathed. There was blood oozing from his head still. “He’s still breathing,” she called up to Walter.

“That looks like a fuckload of blood, though. Is he gonna be okay?”

Mimi poked at the wound and rolled Adam’s head to the side. “Yeah,” she said. “Head wounds always bleed like crazy, but it’s just a scratch. Must have just grazed him.”

“Well, that’s good to hear!” said Walter. “What now?”

“Come on down, we gotta get him out of here.”

Walter began making his way down to where Mimi was hunched over Adam’s body. “You sure that’s a good idea?” he asked.

“Yeah. Besides, I need you to check something out for me.”

Walter, about halfway down the hill, said, “Me? What do you need from me?”

Mimi drew her gun again. “Confirmation,” she said, and shot him.

The bullet hit Walter and knocked him off his feet, causing him to tumble the rest of the way down the hill and roll to a stop at Mimi’s feet. He lay there, groaning, and clutching at his stomach, which woke up Adam, who also started groaning and rolling in the dirt.

“The fuck did you do to my head, bitch?” he asked. “Did you fucking shoot me?”

Mimi pulled her badge from her pocket and squatted down, holding it in Adam’s face. “Yes, I did.”

This shut Adam up.

“You fucking shot me, too!” said Walter, behind her.

“Oh, quit complaining, you’re fine,” said Mimi over her shoulder at him. “You’re not bleeding, and now we know what the Suicidal Rodeo Clown does to you…sort of.”

Walter stopped rolling long enough to lift his hands away from his stomach and while his shirt was torn, there was, indeed, not even a scratch on his belly underneath. “So I’m bulletproof?”

“Apparently. But I think it’s more than that – you absorbed the entire blast when this guy went nuclear, too. So maybe…I dunno. It was called the Suicidal Rodeo Clown burger. Maybe you can just take a lot of punishment?”

“Excuse me,” asked Adam. “But can I please get some help here? I have had a really shitty twenty-four hours.”