Yellow Fucking Onions

Smoke coiled around his constable cap, running over the thinning sesame seeds atop his head. Officer Big Mac took another pull from his 1988 Olympic commemorative cup.

“Yellow fucking onions.”

The grizzled McDonaldland police chief muttered it again, shaking his oversized burger head. Forty-nine sick, and now one dead. What the hell even was this world anymore? he thought, stubbing out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray that sat on coffee- and smoke-stained police reports next to an overturned, dusty picture frame containing a photo of Birdie the Early Bird and the Fry Kids. He had turned it over the day they left.

Jumbo fucking onions.

Mac turned up the Mayor’s press conference replaying on TV.

“Effective immediately, we have pulled Quarter Pounders from all regions that may have potentially been impacted by this E. coli outbreak. We have tracked down the source of the outbreak, and we will not be returning the Quarter Pounder to the menu until Officer Big Mac and the police force has personally assured me it is safe to do so. That being said, we still have plenty of other delicious offerings at all locations, including those in impacted regions. We…”

Mac turned off the television, the only source of light in his filthy office.

The Mayor hadn’t reached out to him yet about the case. But he’d been all over TV, making promises that Mac’s ass would have to keep.

McCheese was a bastard. He’d tell you the same about Big Mac, too. Not always, but after Mac stopped helping the Mayor with some of his private parties and the transgressions that seemed to follow such events, he had fallen out of political favor. After years of being pro-police, McCheese had gone all ACAB and openly campaigned on a “defund the police” platform. It got him some youth votes, but Mac knew it was a big fuck you to him personally, and of course, the department had struggled since.

What are the facts, Mac? The veteran pulled out a pen and began jotting down what he knew he knew, an exercise that often helped him find what he thought he knew.

Taylor Farms had issued a recall on raw onions after preliminary data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration indicated the ingredient as "a likely source of contamination" in the E. coli outbreak.

Four different products were included in the recall: 30-pound bags of peeled jumbo yellow onions, 4–5 pound bags of 3/8-inch diced fresh yellow onions, 5-pound bags of fresh diced yellow onions, and 6–5 pound bags of whole, peeled yellow onions.

Taylor Farms, a multi-billion-dollar company and supplier of vegetables to hundreds of other restaurants and food chains, had only supplied tainted products to McDonald’s.

These products spanned ten states so far.

Forty-nine people were sick. One was dead… so far.

Mac fired up another cigarette and reached for the bottle in his desk to top off his commemorative cup. He had reached out to Taylor Farms but had yet to receive any substantive response—just PR bullshit from a team too busy for a small-town cop.

He longed for the days of simple policing. Cleaning up graffiti from the Happy Meal Gang, getting Grimace home when he’d had too much to drink, busting up a theft before it happened when he caught wind of a Hamburglar scheme.

But the Happy Meal Gang had grown up and left town. Grimace was sober now, and had become a baseball icon, and the Hamburglar was in prison for another five to ten. Mac had made sure of that. Even though the Clown had taken all the credit.

This was bigger than the burglar anyway. Whoever did this had to have some pull to get in with Taylor Farms. They had to have some motive to target the onions used on the QP. And they had to be one sick son of a bitch to carry out a biological attack on that scale.

Still, a trip to pick the brain of the most notorious criminal in his world felt like action, even if it was just motion.

Mac slung his worn trench coat over his holstered .22 and gulped down the last of his commemorative cup.

Yellow fucking onions.