Picking Up A Hitchhiker [FICTOID]

“Put me down, you crazy bimbo!”

“No!  I must save you!” the huge woman yelled.  She stood nearly seven feet tall and weighed 300 lbs, all of it muscle.  She did not look very feminine despite her short pink dress.

The doors to the hospital’s emergency room slid open as she charged in, the squirming hitchhiker held high above her head.  “Hurry!” she yelled, throwing him down on the mattress of a hospital bed.

The ER staff rolled their eyes; they’d been through this before.  “Not another one,” the senior nurse muttered.

“This crazy lady saw me hitchhiking and kidnapped me!”

“Yes, yes, we know, we know,” said the senior nurse.  “Just play along and we’ll have you out of here in nothing flat.”

“I’m gonna sue!”

“Yes, I’m sure you will, but right now let’s check your vital signs.”

The ER staff ran through a series of pointless feigned examinations, then the senior nurse said, “He has a discombobulation of the frimmit of the frammit.  Take him up to ICU.”

In reality, they wheeled him out into the corridor while the senior nurse tried to reason with the giant woman.  

“Now, honey, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.  We can’t have you going around kidnapping people.”

“But he’s hurt!  Dying!”

“No, sweetie, he’s not.  He’s perfectly hale and hearty.

“You, however, have problems.  You’re a lab technician exposed to an experiment that went awry.  A beaker with a new chemical compound broke and…well…it put the zap on you.  You grew and mutated and became obsessed with helping people.”

The giant woman blinked.  “No, that’s not true…”

“It is, dearie,” said the senior nurse.  She wished she had a computer interface that could interpret what she was saying into something the giant woman could understand.

The giant woman stared at the ER walls as if trying to visualize the city skyline on the other side.

“No, that’s not true!” she said decisively.  “Those people are hurt, they need my help!”

“I defer judgment on that,” said the senior nurse.

© Buzz Dixon