Foch was the very best meat surgeon there ever was; he could cut a steak with absolute surgical precision every time, cutting along the grain of the meat so it cooked better. He became famous in his own time, a legend of meat. But he was not happy as he wanted to practice his true calling, which was neurochemistry. He had had some small training in that back in his home country, and he would go on in America to obtain his doctorate, even though for a white male with a German accent to get a Ph.D. was difficult. He had to double major with Lesbian Feminist studies and his degree wound up being a Doctor of Education, which they handed out to people who knew how to operate overhead projectors.

But a doctorate is a doctorate. He went to work in research facilities but soon was dismissed by the big companies for his less than ethical experiments. Eventually he worked his way down the ladder to the lovely campus of the Big Fat Burger Company, located in Mudflap, Missouri.

BFB was a leader in innovation of what people sometimes rather mistakenly referred to as meat. In Foch's case he was doing research on ways to both preserve the patty forever (or at least until the sun left the Main sequence and turned into a red giant star) and to bulk the patties up. The company wanted to start with a pound of meat that was starting to turn and make it into ten pounds of "hamburger" that would never go bad. Dr. Foch was experimenting with nanobots, microscopic robots that would fundamentally change the structure of the dead tissue being used by the company. It was mixed with a series of chemicals which he named Generation H that would allow the mystery meat to draw nutrients from the air and water and soil.

It was during one test at his lab at the BFB corporation that he had his big breakthrough; a harmonic of electric shocks applied to the meat got the nanos to start working and his pound of test ground meat suddenly began creeping off the table, as if it were a slow, bloblike creature. It only lasted for a minute or two but Foch had to capture the escaping meat lest it break the lab's quarantine and trigger an emergency with the CDC and USAAMRID (the military's biological agency).

This discovery left the good doctor elated and he slapped his lab assistant Bob Ugor on the curved spine "we can build ourselves a man!" he exclaimed as Ugore's spittle flew all over the lab equipment "yth Mathta" he drooled with his characteristic lisp.

If this worked Foch could quit his position and get a permanent gig on CNN and he knew it. Or if things rally worked out he could take over for Jimmy Kimmel. There was a lot riding on this.

But he was going to have to move with great caution. He found an abandoned lead mine away from town, near where the Moonshine River poured into Lake Lfebegone in northern Arkansas. The place had a small office above it and a lookout tower so they could watch for mutant animals coming out of the swamp (which caught all of the Big Fat Burger Company's toxic sludge). Dr. Foch paid just a hundred dollars for it and a coupon book for free Big Fat Burgers for a month. Everything was shaping up.

Too bad about the former owners taking the BFB coupons. It was a trade secret that anyone who ate too many of those things generally suffered a series of cardiac incidents, and if not they generally developed colon cancer. Of course drunken teens often bought twenty packs of them when out cruising and boozing (the standard social activity in Mudflap) and if they did not wind up impotent or infertile they may well give birth to children with serious deformities, but whatta you gonna do?

At any rate Dr. Foch had a new lab, one buried in the abandoned coal mine, and that was just fine with him.

Ugore helped set up the equipment, even though Foch couldn't pay him; he promised him some stock options instead. Ugore and Foch remained ostensibly on leave from the Big Fat Burger Corporation and all it's affiliates.

When a body meats a body

The good doctor now needed material for his great experiment. He wasn't up to digging up dead bodies himself, and Ugore had an obvious bad back, so Foch drove over to the local Home Depot and hired a few illegal aliens to do the work Americans Just Won't Do. It was handy; they could buy the shovels at the same time. He sent the men off to their labors in the wee hours, hitting all of the graveyards within a hundred square miles.

He was very specific about what he wanted. In the interest of keeping the creature relatively monochromatic he asked for mostly Caucasian material, although he did ask for an African American lower appendage to appeal to the ladies in the market. And the brain! That was the true masterpiece! He knew the last resting place of Bubba Legum, the famous checkers champion and pie eating contest maestro! With a brain like Legum's the creature would be erudite and intellectual, a true Renaissance Man.

He assembled his creature with all diligence, even though his sowing skills were lacking. It was a bit jagged but then he was working with copper wire instead of thread so the electricity could move more easily through the creature's body when it was zapped.

Eventually he had a patchwork person, a body that did not match at all. To him it was a thing of exquisite beauty.

The time had come.

The Breath of Life

Given the amount of electricity he would need Dr. Foch couldn't afford to pay the electric company enough, and the solar farms around the area would be drained completely dry, so he resolved to obtain his own power, like a crazy data center. He decided the best way to do this was to capture a bolt of lightning and jolt the nanos awake - and start his creature's heart.

The doctor eagerly watched the weather reports and the U.S. weather bureau was predicting lots of rain for the whole month of October that year. Doctor Foch made a string of wire and sent Ugore up into the fire tower to fly a kite during a thunderstorm. Ugore went up and sent his kite to the autumn night skies but nothing happened. Nor did it the next night nor the next nor the one after that. Ugore wound up with serious string burns on his fingers and he went to the hospital, where the doctor, seeing he had an Obamacare medical plan, read his chart upside-down and amputated two of his toes. But Ugore always walked poorly anyway so he returned to the Mine and continued to fly the kite.

Then one night it finally happened; a storm blew in and thunder and lightning roared across the Ozark skies.

And one bolt hit the kite, stopping Ugore's heart but it restarted and in sinus rhythm at that (he had long suffered AFiB) and the electricity exploded in the lab, right into the two bolts Dr. Foch had inserted into the monster's neck. The smell of ozone was powerful in the depths of the coal mine, and coal gas did not explode, making it all the better.

Doctor Foch went to his monster and listened to the creature's heart. It was beating! It had worked.

The newly born monster began to grow, expanding like a sponge soaking up water. It grew and grew and eventually topped seven and a half feet from the top of it's head to the soles of it's enormous feet. And it weighed well over six hundred pounds, all muscle. It had become a giant with the strength of ten men plus two. And it's body couldn't be killed by most things.

"Eureka!" the crazed Kraut exclaimed in joy. He and Ugore then went to celebrate at the local strip club where you could get two for one jello shots, after thoughtfully tying the great creature down after dressing it with some home-made clothing sewn from a couple of car covers.

In the silence of the underground lab there was a stirring and a strangled cry of fear and anger, followed by a tearing sound as the great creature snapped it's bonds and sat up. Slowly, exquisitely slowly, the monster put it's enormous feet (shod in heavy boots made from whole tires by Ugore) onto the mine floor, and with great difficulty the behemoth began slowly but steadily moving towards the door, a door which couldn't possibly contain the unnatural thing that was seeking to escape into the great wide world.

The end.

Check back with us next week for episode two of the saga.

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