Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 10:19:29 -0500
From: XH4M <xhuge4muscl@hotmail.com>
Subject: BIG IS BETTER 19

BIG IS BETTER

By XH4M

This story is a fantasy.  All characters in this story are fictional with
no resemblance to any real persons implied.  Any reader with objections to
graphic descriptions of sexual encounters between males, who may not have
reached the legal age of consent, or whose local, regional, state or
national jurisprudence prohibits such descriptions, should NOT read
further.  Copyright (c) 2002 XH4M.  All rights, implicit or implied, except
for distribution by this archive and personal use by the individual
downloading the file, are reserved.  Inquiries regarding publishing rights
for this story should be directed to: xhuge4muscl@hotmail.com


PART 19 - INTO THIN AIR

The kitchen door suddenly creaked, nudged by a sudden gusty breeze that
came through an open kitchen window.  It was a crystal-clear Fall day with
the concomitant northwesterly wind.  That loud sound momentarily distracted
me.  Glancing over at the wide-opened door, I recalled that the State
Police had failed to shut it behind them when they'd left abruptly.  Then I
remembered that whole surreal scene, too, had only happened a few minutes
ago.

They'd unexpectedly arrived at my door only moments after I'd returned to
the apartment.  I'd walked down to the town police station earlier in the
morning to meet the lawyer and get Sam bailed out of jail.  I was so out of
breath from having finished my first ever cross-town marathon that I could
barely utter a word when the police walked in and began firing questions at
me.  I'd run at least 7 miles, I reckoned.  I reckoned?  Reckoning was one
of Sam's expressions I'd assimilated.

The State Police were deadly serious and intimidating.  They expected both
fast and detailed answers from me, and I could offer them neither.  I was
still gasping for air, and I knew nothing anyway.  Well... practically
nothing.  At least I'd had the common sense not to divulge a couple of
items of information.  These were just little things that I'd randomly
stumbled across - things that were, to me, only Sam's personal business
anyway.  By themselves, they'd never made much sense to me.  They seemed
insignificant and unrelated at the time I'd first become aware of them.
These were little things that, taken individually, would not have caused me
to ask Sam more about them.  But given everything that had happened in the
past 24 hours, some of these now seemed possibly of importance.  I wondered
if they might be somehow all tied together, however unfathomably.

The 'Staties' were irate when I wasn't able to give them any useful
information.  As they departed, they left me a verbal list of "do's &
don't's" that I was sternly warned to follow to the letter.  I'd
instinctively kept my mouth shut.  There was no sense throwing more
potential fuel on the already blazing 5-alarm inferno that suddenly erupted
very early that morning when I'd gone to the police station to bail Sam
out.

I'd decided to walk down to the station.  After such a restless night, I
needed a long walk just to clear my head.  It was one of those last
gorgeous, lingering warm 'Indian Summer' mornings before the weather would
turn sharply colder and the snow would inevitably begin to fall.

As soon as I entered the station's small lobby, I looked for my lawyer.  He
wasn't there yet, so I took a seat near the duty desk to wait for him to
arrive.  It was shift change time, and a few officers were hanging around
in the vicinity of the front desk.  It was a moment later that I heard
someone yelling.  The sound was coming from the cellblock.

Suddenly a very excited cop raced out of the block hollering, "We've got a
big problem!  Come here quick!  You are NOT going to believe this," as he
urged the other cops with frantic waves of his arms to follow him back into
the cell block.

The commotion reminded me of a Three Stooges movie at first, and I watched
the antics with mild amusement.  Seconds later, however, a cold chill
suddenly shot through my entire body.  I had this really awful feeling.
Impulsively, I jumped up and quickly followed behind the last cop heading
back towards the jail.

There was complete pandemonium inside - hollering and yelling everywhere.
My immediate impression was that a bomb had been detonated.  I looked
instantly for Sam.  I didn't see him in his cell.  In fact - I didn't even
see his cell anymore.  It was only an opened area now between the two other
cells on either side of where it had once been.  A large pile of twisted
steel now laid precariously against the opposite wall, so mangled that it
wasn't immediately recognizable as the entire intact front of the jail cell
- bars, door and all - still encased in a horrifically-distorted thick
steel frame that originally had held everything in place.  As I looked at
it more closely, I saw that the solid welds all around the fractured frame
had been literally ripped apart.

I heard another voice, distinct from the rest, calling out, "Get me down!
Jesus, my balls!"

Turning my head, I saw Sam's stout cellmate hanging suspended by the belt
on his pants high up the side of one of the remaining cells, hung like a
coat on a hook with his feet well off the floor.  He was semi-lethargic, as
if he might have been hit and knocked out, and was only now beginning to
move his arms and legs about.  There was blood on his face coming from a
real ugly-looking gash on his head that was still bleeding a little.  That
'hook' on which he was hung appeared to have been custom-manufactured right
on the spot.  A steel bar had been snapped cleanly immediately above
cross-brace, and then bent down to form a very crude - but effective -
hanger.  Another cop was unsuccessfully trying at the moment to lift the
heavy guy up enough to get him down from his crotch gallows.

I looked back at the mangled frame of steel bars again, studying it more
carefully this time.  I could see where two bars on opposite sides of the
door had been either pushed out or pulled in, not being sure which side of
the frame I was actually looking at.  It was obvious though that the thick
bars had also been pulled violently in towards each other as well, snapping
some of the horizontal cross braces in the process.  These two bars were
more twisted than the others, and to my eyes anyway, were apparently the
handholds used.  When I bent over for a closer look, I could even make out
precisely were a hand had obviously gripped each one.  There were ridges in
the compressed steel showing where each finger had been distinctly placed
as if squeezing a cylinder of clay.  But beyond that, the entire wall of
steel bars had been deliberately crushed even further, giving the whole
outer encasement it's now wracked three dimensional hourglass appearance.
I backed away as some officers began struggling to lift the twisted steel
wreckage in an attempt to unblock the corridor.

Amidst the ongoing confusion, I continued to just look around.  The other
prisoners were still inside their crumpled, but still relatively intact
adjacent cells.  They just stood there rather quietly, looking a bit dazed
and bewildered.  The one closest to me caught my eye.  He was pointing his
finger towards a gaping breach at the far end of the cellblock that I
hadn't even noticed yet.

Speaking quietly just to me, he said, "Your friend went that 'o way...."

Only twisted pieces of the steel hinges remained where I remembered seeing
a solid steel rear door the night before.  Then I spotted the actual door
itself through the hole in the wall.  It laid outside on the ground in the
rear parking lot, many feet from the back of the building.  Even at this
distance I could see that the door was incredibly bowed out.  It looked as
if it had been hit roughly in the middle by an artillery shell that had not
only blown it right off it's hinges, but also taken out a goodly portion of
the cement wall around it as well.

My attention moved back inside when I caught one of the cops saying over
and over again excitedly, "You should have seen this guy.  Man, was he
BIG!"  The implication was immediately, of course, that at least this cop
thought Sam was responsible for this bomb-like devastation.  "You should
have SEEN him, Sarge!  The guy was a MOUNTAIN!"

The sergeant in-charge, having heard quite enough of this nonsense, decided
to squash this preposterous notion entirely before it got any more
attention.

"Well, I don't give a damn HOW big he was.  This guy had help.  It's
obvious that there were other accomplices.  Call the state police and put
out an A.P.B.  We've got a manhunt on our hands."  He barked out the names
of a few of the cops and, pointing outside, ordered, "Get going.  Fan out
and nail the bastard...."

In all of this non-stop pandemonium, it didn't seem that any of the cops
had really noticed me yet, or at least they weren't paying any attention up
to that point.  But the word 'manhunt' was all that I needed to hear.
Pivoting on my heels in a full-blown panic, I ran out the front door of the
station at flank-speed.  With my adrenaline now in full control, I
continued at a full gallop all the way across town until I finally reached
my apartment again.  That was only moments before the State Police had
arrived.

"So where the HELL ARE YOU now, Sam." I hollered out one more time in
frustration, as if I'd hear his voice suddenly answering me now from the
bathroom. "And Why the HELL did you DO THIS?"  Still no answer.  "And where
HELL are those GOD DAMNED keys!  This place is a fuckin' pig sty!"

Lashing out in anger, I nearly put my foot through the door as I kicked it
shut.  I apparently couldn't even do that right, the door hitting the jam
so hard that the latch didn't have time to catch before the recoil swung it
wide open again.  I could never find anything in the apartment; the irony
was that Sam could always put his finger on anything, and at any time.

I knew that the police, and even the Staties, probably wouldn't catch Sam -
well, at least not right away - especially if he'd thought to head off the
beaten path somewhere.  But I was worried that he wouldn't necessarily have
thought to do that.  Sam wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed - only the
biggest.  The events of this morning had only reconfirmed that for me once
again.  However, I knew the big lug could really move with some serious
speed when he wanted to - exactly like a freight train building up
momentum.  The police would no doubt underestimate his top running speed -
and rather dramatically so.  When Sam got that gargantuan physique of his
rolling, he was astonishingly fast for his immense size - for ANY size,
actually.

And over time, I'd learned some other things about Sam that the police
didn't know yet either.  Granted, I didn't understand them all - but
regardless, they were undeniable, at least to me.  For awhile, I'd even
believed that possibly no one else knew but me.  But now, I couldn't be so
sure about that anymore.

One of them concerned Sam's stamina and endurance.  It was beyond anything
the police could - or more importantly at the moment - WOULD ever imagine.
Sam could move like a locomotive.  He also had a few other characteristics
in common with a locomotive, too - and those, at least I hoped, the police
were still not fully aware of.  But for the time being, I didn't think the
police would honestly buy that Sam, even being a very big guy, could even
remotely possess the strength needed to make case-hardened thick steel
yield to his will.  We're not talkin' about bending some little 'ol piece
of steel rebar, here - and even then, I'd only seen one of the big regulars
at the 'Big IS Better' who could even do that!

But it remained however that the police might consider this a wild
possibility at some point, and that worried me right out of my mind.  I
wondered if anyone had actually seen anything.  Maybe the drunks in the
other cells were still passed out when it'd happened.  I remembered that
Sam's cellmate certainly looked as if his lights had been turned out
intentionally.  Although the thought that Sam might have assaulted anyone
also upset me greatly, for the moment I chose to overlook it.  So
maybe... there might be no actual witnesses.  I simply didn't know.  Beyond
the fact that Sam had clearly busted out of jail and was currently a
fugitive from the law, I didn't understand why he had fled, what the
circumstances were around his arrest, or whether - heaven forbid - he was
even dead or alive.

So there I sat, helplessly glued to the kitchen chair by incapacitating
fear - feeling like a mushroom in the dark, firmly rooted deep in shit.  I
had no viable ideas of who I could possibly turn to, or what to even do
next.

My thoughts began to quickly wander off.  That old fail-safe mechanism in
my brain was once again activated, turning on like a safety-valve to
automatically prevent me from reaching critical mass.  My mind drifted
farther away from this current nightmare, slowly but surely transporting me
to a place that felt far more safe and secure.  I began to retreat into my
memories where time itself became benevolently suspended - and I began to
remember and then relive in vivid detail every single event over the entire
past year.  At least for me, such intense 'daydreaming' had always been my
time-tested ultimate escape.

I found myself genuinely marveling at how very much my life had changed,
almost from the moment that Sam and I had met.  A short-lived smile spread
across my face as I acknowledged again to myself how unbelievably wonderful
it had really been - how having Sam in my life had become a joy I could
never have even imagined.  My eyes even got a little misty momentarily as I
recalled that it also had been much the same for Sam - how much he loved
me, too.  For me, these special feelings were something of a miracle, for
Sam dwelled in my heart now.  Perhaps it was merely chance, though Sam
always maintained that it was our destiny all along.  Given who we both
were, perhaps it simply could have been no other way.  But whatever the
reasons, the bond between us was almost immediate - and magical.

Through Sam, it seemed that I'd found and then slowly reclaimed a large
piece of my soul.  Although it had taken time, eventually I'd learned to
'let the genie out of the bottle.'  However, for me it was not a single or
one-time event, as perhaps I'd rather naively thought at that time.  It was
not something that, done once, was completed forever.  For me, learning to
'let go' had been a process - and a slow and difficult one.  It was
something that I had to willfully choose to do, over-and-over again, quite
consciously.  For me, it had not come easily.  I thought of how Sam had
been infinitely patient and understanding, as if he somehow implicitly
understood in his own way my struggle was about 'self and soul' - and
eventually, I learned.

And that journey began on the very first night we'd met - my birthday too,
I remembered.  I'd thought about it many times in these months that
followed.  Every moment of that first night with Sam I could still recall
in vivid detail.  It will always be, for me - unforgettable.  I thought
about Samson and how genuinely pleased he was to be able to 'do some
liftin' for me just to fulfill a birthday wish; moreover, I remembered how
I'd struggled to even ask him directly - the pain of embarrassingly
expressing that to him aloud.  I thought about that giant barbell that he'd
curled, and how he'd done that just for me.  I recalled how the ground
literally shook when it hit the floor.  I remembered how thrilled Sam was
when I told him that, yes - his biceps were 'big enough' for me.  I
pictured those utterly-engorged, rock-hard, planet-sized Titan's once
again, and what it felt like to touch them for the first time, recalling
anew their salty taste, and the erotic cataclysm that followed.

My whole Earth had moved forever, and I'd thought that experience was the
real birthday cake - the delicious dessert - and that nothing could ever be
hotter.  But in retrospect, that was only the appetizer for what followed.
The party had only just begun.