Fiction: Aimless and Feckless
Title: Aimless and Feckless
Author: brightly_lit
World: tricycleman
Rating: PG
Characters: Antoine, Frank, Angel Man, minor characters
Genre and Warnings: gen, some angst, some humor, teens on their own, self-destructive tendencies, grief, light violence
Word Count: ~3,600
Summary: Antoine and Frank were just elementary schoolers when the Cataclysm hit. Now teenagers, they have free run of downtown Detroit, but losing everything they knew and everyone they loved has taken a toll. Frank blames Angel Man.
Antoine stood at the foot of his old apartment building downtown, which was now rubble, holding flowers he’d programmed into existence to look like lilacs, his grandmother’s perennial favorite. He used to bring her lilacs every spring, and she never failed to respond with delight, even when she suspected he’d nabbed them from somewhere he shouldn’t. Well, all those lilac bushes were long gone now, buried under piles of crumbled cement, or blasted away in the Cataclysm. People said lots of plants just up and disappeared, same as people, especially the trees, but Antoine had never believed any of it.
He was right downtown, six blocks away from the Lifehack building, when it happened, just a kid who didn’t know enough even to be scared enough to close his eyes. He saw the way the people sort of got wider and transparent before disappearing completely, like a ship going into warp in a movie. This girl on the playground was looking right at him, and the look on her face ... it was like she was watching him disappear at the same moment. There were those who said it was the people still around who were the ones who had disappeared, that their loved ones were still back in Detroit like they’d always been. They said they even had evidence that it was so, but Antoine had watched everyone he ever knew vanish before his very eyes. At least they didn’t seem to be in any pain as it happened. He’d run around the playground, looking for everyone, calling for them, screaming for them. He ran through the halls of the school, and there was no one, no one at all, until he found Frank crying in a classroom, ranting about how it was his punishment for being bad, some distant and terrible consequence his mom had always said would someday come to him, for being a bad little boy who never did as he was told.
Frank was still half-convinced this was hell, Antoine was pretty sure, even though they didn’t talk about that day, ever. If it was hell, though, Antoine thought they could do a lot worse. He’d been nobody then, one of thousands of poor black kids with some kind of dim future no one believed he could escape, in a town already as apocalyptic as any in America. He was doomed from the day he was born. Turned out doom wasn’t so bad, palling around with your best bud, getting up to whatever you felt like in a town with no laws and no consequences, able to create whatever you wanted out of garbage and a few lines of code. Antoine sometimes secretly wondered if it was some strange version of heaven ... until he was standing outside the shell of his old apartment building, looking at clothes and appliances strewn among crumbled cement and PVC pipes. He laid the bouquet at the northeast corner where their apartment had been, saying, “Happy spring, grammy. I did my best, but they smell like pine trees.”
He heard Frank calling for him, already cackling, and Antoine turned, managing to work up a smile. Frank always had a smile on his face. Antoine would do pretty much anything to keep it there.
Frank’s hooting ricocheted among the broken hulls of buildings strangely. If you followed the sound, you’d invariably end up right where you began. People said it was just echoes, but it only happened right around here, by the epicenter. Antoine headed toward the home they shared, a perfectly preserved, fancy-as-hell penthouse apartment that had somehow simply relocated to ground level. They’d found it one day while engaging in their favorite pastime of spelunking the rubble.
He climbed up the path they’d worn upon the twisted cement and rebar, ducked down through a hole, scrambled over somebody’s old dresser, and already saw a light from their kitchen.
Frank turned expectantly as Antoine came in, that manic grin plastered all over his face. “I got the motherlode, Tony!” he was saying. “I spent the afternoon buttering up Mrs. Owen and programming her some stuffed animals, and she paid me this!” Antoine came around the counter and saw what he was talking about: a bushel of potatoes.
Antoine took a step forward, then lunged at them, grabbing one out of the basket. “You mean real potatoes?” Antoine demanded.
“Real is a state of mind,” Frank insisted. “But if you’re asking did they come out of the ground where they grew, then hell yes, buddy.”
Antoine sniffed it suspiciously. It was a potato. A potato! “Do you realize what this means??”
“Yeah! It means we can program the fries for our McDonald’s booth out of actual potatoes for the market this Saturday instead of out of weeds.” They’d been getting complaints about that. Actually, they’d always gotten complaints about that, which lately had escalated to threats of bodily harm.
Antoine shook his head in disbelief. “It means we can actually make the french fries, fool. Out of potatoes and oil.”
Frank’s rictus grin faltered, for just a moment. “Yeah, didn’t get the oil. And, stove doesn’t work. You know. But, potatoes!” Frank went on as he produced their dinner from a bag, which Antoine also sniffed carefully. Usually Frank managed to hustle them a real dinner, but when he couldn’t, he programmed something that looked and tasted delicious, whatever it smelled like. Usually he managed to make it out of something vaguely food-like, but not always. Smell would dictate whether Antoine would go to bed feeling like he had a belly full of weeds.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t weeds, but it also wasn’t the juicy steak it appeared to be. Better not to sniff too hard. Antoine sat down, made himself forget about it, and shot the breeze with Frank for hours, listening to his stories of who he met and what he hustled that afternoon. None of them sounded true, but later, his most unbelievable stories were usually somehow corroborated. It didn’t matter, anyway; the stories were better than Netflix any day.
Frank interrupted himself. “Ooh, it’s almost seven.”
They scrambled out the door, over the dresser, up the hole, and on top of the pile of rubble, where they found their usual perches and watched the sky. A giant winged creature buzzed them, right on schedule, and they shrieked and laughed hysterically. Frank jumped to his feet. “Angel!” Frank hollered. “Angel Man! If you can end the world, can’t you bring it back? Bring it back, Angel Man! You owe us, freak!” Frank catcalled him like this every single night. He didn’t really have anyone else to blame, anyone else to beg, anyone else to pray to. Frank got a little crazy any night Angel Man didn’t make an appearance. Any other guy would have picked a different route home (especially as Frank often tried to peg him with crumbled cement and whatnot), but not the angel.
They sat out there after Angel Man had flown on past, now that it was spring, and talked about this and that until the night got chilly. Climbing back down the hole, Frank said, “If angels from heaven grant wishes, what do hell’s angels bring you?”
At the market, Frank was busily trying to sell the best-looking damn french fries you ever saw, glistening in the morning sunlight, and still, perpetually, steaming. Even Antoine, who helped him program them to look like this, kept sneaking some.
Apparently word had gotten around that their booth was a scam, because despite the amazing spread, they got hardly any customers. Old Mrs. Watson stopped and eyed their table suspiciously. “Rubble again?”
“No, ma’am,” Antoine spoke up, “we don’t do that anymore. Edibles only, ever since the, uh ....”
She of course knew the incident to which he referred. “Weeds, then?” she suggested coolly.
“Nah, baby! Real potatoes!” Frank protested. “Have a whiff!”
She did, and was bewilderingly twice as mad. “Get your hands on some real potatoes and you won’t so much as cook ’em up! You boys are so lazy, if your mamas suddenly came back to town, you couldn’t be bothered to get up and give ’em a hug! That’s why you’re like this,” she went on, evidently not noticing that the smile was suddenly, catastrophically absent from Frank’s face. “Raising each other, like a couple of little wild animals, aimless and feckless and up to no good. I oughta come down to whatever hole in the ground you call home and whup you into shape.” Not willing to wait, apparently, she suddenly reached across the table and smacked them both upside their heads. Antoine grabbed his head and protested, but Frank only stared, blank. “Get yourselves some goddamn oil and fry up these goddamn potatoes!”
“We couldn’t find oil,” Antoine said, sounding small, and she marched away, tsking disgustedly. Anyway, one look at Frank proved he was down for the count ... but they couldn’t afford to go a whole week without making any money.
Antoine got up, leaving Frank with the fries, and did some hustling himself, though he didn’t like it; Frank was the expert at that. Antoine preferred scavenging in the rubble. He was a better programmer than most, so he helped people with this and that and made some trades and some money that way, which allowed him to trade for better things ... including some collected lamb fat and a big pan. Back at their booth, he built a little fire in the dirt beside their table and started cutting up the potatoes he hadn’t let Frank program into fries.
This was getting them some attention. People often stopped to watch before shaking it off and moving on, but after he’d been at it a while, the people manning nearby booths couldn’t seem to help themselves. “Real potatoes?” Skeet asked suspiciously.
“Smell ’em,” Antoine said coolly.
He did. “How much for the first batch?” Skeet asked, licking his lips and gulping.
Antoine considered. He and Frank had never sold real food at their booth before, but from the looks on the faces of the gathering customers, he could ask for a car and someone would probably pay it. “Dollar a fry.”
Skeet scoffed with disgust. “You little--you could rebuild Detroit for that by the time you’ve sold all those fries!”
“Got any good trades?”
Skeet shook his head and stormed off. Antoine soon realized he wasn’t going to get a dollar a fry, but he did manage to sell them for about half that--ten bucks for a small, which was only about twenty fries. Then there was Skeet, coming back, bearing boxes of things he’d brought that day and traded for. Antoine picked out some stuff he liked and handed him a large order of fries. Skeet grumbled as he walked away, but also let out a groan of pleasure as he bit into his first fry. Antoine only let his glee show at last when he counted out the take. He smirked at the unresponsive Frank. “We should go into farming.”
At least Frank could walk and pull a wagon in this state. Truth be told, he could pretty much be made to do anything when he was like this. Antoine loaded up one wagon for Frank and one for himself, and led them home, where they were sure to be in for a long night. When Frank finally started letting it out, it sometimes felt like the Cataclysm was happening all over again, like Antoine was stretching into transparency and finally invisibility when there was nothing left in the world except Frank’s rage and pain, exploding in his face. Antoine held on, though, because after abuse came self-abuse, then violent suicide attempts, and if Frank couldn’t deal with having lost everyone he loved before the Cataclysm, Antoine couldn’t deal with losing Frank.
Just now wrestling him away from the knife drawer, Frank interrupted his own babble to shout, “It’s seven!” He squirmed out of Antoine’s grasp and ran out the door, energetically climbing up through the hole. Antoine followed. Angel Man flew by overhead only seconds later, though Frank was already cursing him before he even came into view, flinging at him anything within reach. He picked up a big hunk of cement and chucked it at him before Antoine managed to tackle him, but Antoine looked up when Frank cheered maniacally, to see the angel veer and crash in the street. “Yes, direct hit!” Frank crowed, and scrambled down the pile of rubble toward where he lay crumpled on a little patch of earth. Antoine got to him just in time, plowing into him and knocking him off Angel Man, where Frank was trying to pin him down and pummel him, not that Angel Man was fighting back.
“Frankie, no! Jesus, you hurt him real bad!” Frank had that crazed look in his eye that meant he wasn’t hearing a word. Antoine almost never resorted to this, but there were a lot of rocks and cement around here, and Frank’s hands were finding them. Antoine slapped him, hard. Frank’s pale blue eyes filled with tears, outraged and disbelieving ... but then it was himself he started hitting, slapping his own head and wailing incomprehensibly.
“Frankie, come on, man, we don’t have time for this. Angel Man is bleeding; you got him right in the wing.” Oozing down the white feathers. Antoine got Frank to his feet and held onto him while he watched Angel Man bleed, because if he let him go, Frank would run to the top of the nearest tall building and jump. Maybe Angel Man wasn’t that bad off, though, because the wing wasn’t bleeding that much, and his eyes were open, just looking at the sky, for all the world as if he’d decided to lay down in the middle of Brush Street and watch the slow spring sunset. “Hey, man, can you walk? Angel, can you walk?”
Angel Man was as much trouble as Frank, Antoine soon discovered, requiring many exhortations before he even seemed to register his words, then several more before understanding and obeying them. Antoine was relieved to see him get to his feet without much difficulty, though one wing dragged worryingly behind him on the ground. Antoine manhandled Frank back to their place, shouting for the angel to follow, and finally had them safely ensconced down there, just as Frank was falling to the helpless weeping and cursing that meant his latest freakout was almost over. Antoine let him go and attended to the angel. He didn’t really know how to patch a giant wing, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped on its own, and feeling carefully at it, at least it didn’t seem to be broken. Antoine served everyone some of the food he’d traded for at the market, putting Frank’s in the refrigerator when he pushed it away like a sullen toddler.
“It’s been a long time since I saw this condo,” the angel remarked, the first words he’d spoken. Even Frank lifted his head at that.
“You’ve ... been here before?” Antoine asked uncertainly. He and Frank looked at each other.
“Yes. It was the top floor of the Lifehack building, the CEO’s on-site home.”
Antoine recoiled, looking around at the ritzy décor that he had come to take for granted. No wonder these digs were so sweet.
“It survived the Cataclysm because he made one of my colleagues program it to be able to withstand anything. It must have been Susie. She was the one who did the computer simulations that foresaw the Cataclysm, so she would have known what to guard it against,” he said impassively, surely the only guy in town who could talk without rancor about the greatest villain of the day. Voldemort, Hitler, Darth Vader--they had nothing on the Lifehack CEO.
Frank’s vulnerable face was all hurt and disgust. “You even knew it was going to happen, and you didn’t even care. You just let it come.”
“No. She was the first one who tried to stop it, but they made her into something that would be the kind of creature who would do something like that for the CEO.”
“Wait, what?” said Antoine. “Made her into what?”
But the angel didn’t answer, exactly. “We all tried to stop it, and we were all made into something ... not ourselves. I didn’t want to believe her, I remember ... but the simulations didn’t lie, and I saw it, too late.”
“My family,” Frank croaked, rising, and Antoine was afraid another freakout was going to start all over again. Antoine got between them. “My whole family is dead because of you.”
“Not dead. Elsewhere.”
“But they’re dead to me!” Frank shrieked. “They’re gone, they’re gone, they disappeared! They’re gone, and it’s all your fault!” He lunged for the angel, but he was so weakened from his freakout that Antoine was able to subdue him easily.
“My family is also gone,” the angel said easily. “And all my friends. My coworkers. The only ones sure to have perished were the ones in the building at the time. Their bodies lie beneath your home.” Antoine tried to lift his feet, but evidently there was nowhere here where he could escape walking on someone’s grave. “I miss them,” Angel Man said, sounding almost wistful, though it seemed like his voice could no longer evince emotion. “We’re all alone here in this new world, making families of the ones left behind.”
Antoine felt the energy leave Frank’s body as he fell to weeping. Usually he struggled against Antoine’s embrace when he was freaking out, but for the first time, he turned and clutched Antoine tight. “Yeah,” Frank choked out.
Angel’s phone rang. Angel took it out and stared at it uncomprehending for a moment, then pushed send and held it up to his ear, curiously, as if he had no idea what would happen next. “Angel, honey, where are you?” came a female voice. “Supper’s on.”
Angel Man got up. “I’ll return to dig a hole in your floor. I’ve been wanting to search the catacombs. Now I know where they are.”
Most people were scared enough of Angel Man, who with the wings towered five feet over everyone else, that they would vacate their home without another word at an announcement like this, just leave it to the otherworldly being who wandered these downtown streets like some god of the apocalypse, but Antoine no longer wanted to be anywhere near this place for his own reasons. “It’s all yours,” he said.
From the street outside their new house, Antoine could hear Frank cackling. Must have been a good day hustling. Antoine went in the front gate--a straight-up white picket fence--and up the walk to their humble little two-story with the peeling paint on a deserted block of identical houses, far from the city center. Antoine had said goodbye to his old haunts the day they left, leaving flowers at his aunt’s house, the corner store where his brother used to work, the park where Antoine used to play. Frank had drawn a picture and scrawled a big goodbye message on the chalkboard of the classroom where Antoine found him that fateful day. They hadn’t been back since.
“Look what I got,” Frank ranted as soon as Antoine came through the door. “Seeds. Seeds! Billions of them! Well, couple hundred. Bilson said it’s not too late to plant ’em. Just like you said! We can go into farming.”
Antoine froze for a second as he set down his own haul. So Frank registered it when he said that after all. Frank grinned up at him, and Antoine remembered what that grin would have looked like before, all crazed and frantic, where now his eyes sparkled and there was genuine joy there ... even though, yeah, he still looked pretty crazed. Frank hadn’t had a freakout since the day the angel visited them. Antoine stood beside him at the counter and had a look at the seeds. “I don’t know anything about farming, man.”
“Me neither,” Frank said, sounding excited, like they were about to embark on a marvelous adventure. “My old family would’ve tossed these out like trash, but I got a new family now,” he said, slapping Antoine’s back, “and we make french fries. We’ll start a new McDonald’s! It’ll be ‘Frank and Tony’s Eats’,” he declared, sweeping his hand grandly across his imaginary marquee sign. “Our specialty’ll be real french fries in lamb fat ... with--” he consulted the labels on some of his seed packets “--tomato sauce and carrots.”
Antoine chuckled, shaking his head. “I think you need to work on your business plan.”
“It’ll work,” Frank chanted. “It’ll work, you’ll see. And look! Lilac seeds.” He waved them at him. Their eyes met, and there was a warmth there, in Frank’s pale eyes, a presence, like he was finally fully here, like the part of him that left with everybody else during the Cataclysm had come home at last. “We won’t be aimless and feckless anymore then,” Frank went on, examining the rest of the seed packets.
How had Antoine never known that Frank heard and remembered every word someone said when he got silent and unresponsive? Not that he had any more recent experiences to draw from, thank heaven. “We should call it Aim and Feck, then,” Antoine suggested, and Frank punched the counter in triumph.
“Yes, Aim and Feck, Aim and Feck’s Fresh Fried Food!” He did a weird little jig in the middle of the living room. “That’s what it’ll be. That’s perfect. How dare she call us that! What’s feckless mean, anyway?”
~The End~
If you are interested, this story serves as a bit of a prequel to this one.
Author: brightly_lit
World: tricycleman
Rating: PG
Characters: Antoine, Frank, Angel Man, minor characters
Genre and Warnings: gen, some angst, some humor, teens on their own, self-destructive tendencies, grief, light violence
Word Count: ~3,600
Summary: Antoine and Frank were just elementary schoolers when the Cataclysm hit. Now teenagers, they have free run of downtown Detroit, but losing everything they knew and everyone they loved has taken a toll. Frank blames Angel Man.
Antoine stood at the foot of his old apartment building downtown, which was now rubble, holding flowers he’d programmed into existence to look like lilacs, his grandmother’s perennial favorite. He used to bring her lilacs every spring, and she never failed to respond with delight, even when she suspected he’d nabbed them from somewhere he shouldn’t. Well, all those lilac bushes were long gone now, buried under piles of crumbled cement, or blasted away in the Cataclysm. People said lots of plants just up and disappeared, same as people, especially the trees, but Antoine had never believed any of it.
He was right downtown, six blocks away from the Lifehack building, when it happened, just a kid who didn’t know enough even to be scared enough to close his eyes. He saw the way the people sort of got wider and transparent before disappearing completely, like a ship going into warp in a movie. This girl on the playground was looking right at him, and the look on her face ... it was like she was watching him disappear at the same moment. There were those who said it was the people still around who were the ones who had disappeared, that their loved ones were still back in Detroit like they’d always been. They said they even had evidence that it was so, but Antoine had watched everyone he ever knew vanish before his very eyes. At least they didn’t seem to be in any pain as it happened. He’d run around the playground, looking for everyone, calling for them, screaming for them. He ran through the halls of the school, and there was no one, no one at all, until he found Frank crying in a classroom, ranting about how it was his punishment for being bad, some distant and terrible consequence his mom had always said would someday come to him, for being a bad little boy who never did as he was told.
Frank was still half-convinced this was hell, Antoine was pretty sure, even though they didn’t talk about that day, ever. If it was hell, though, Antoine thought they could do a lot worse. He’d been nobody then, one of thousands of poor black kids with some kind of dim future no one believed he could escape, in a town already as apocalyptic as any in America. He was doomed from the day he was born. Turned out doom wasn’t so bad, palling around with your best bud, getting up to whatever you felt like in a town with no laws and no consequences, able to create whatever you wanted out of garbage and a few lines of code. Antoine sometimes secretly wondered if it was some strange version of heaven ... until he was standing outside the shell of his old apartment building, looking at clothes and appliances strewn among crumbled cement and PVC pipes. He laid the bouquet at the northeast corner where their apartment had been, saying, “Happy spring, grammy. I did my best, but they smell like pine trees.”
He heard Frank calling for him, already cackling, and Antoine turned, managing to work up a smile. Frank always had a smile on his face. Antoine would do pretty much anything to keep it there.
Frank’s hooting ricocheted among the broken hulls of buildings strangely. If you followed the sound, you’d invariably end up right where you began. People said it was just echoes, but it only happened right around here, by the epicenter. Antoine headed toward the home they shared, a perfectly preserved, fancy-as-hell penthouse apartment that had somehow simply relocated to ground level. They’d found it one day while engaging in their favorite pastime of spelunking the rubble.
He climbed up the path they’d worn upon the twisted cement and rebar, ducked down through a hole, scrambled over somebody’s old dresser, and already saw a light from their kitchen.
Frank turned expectantly as Antoine came in, that manic grin plastered all over his face. “I got the motherlode, Tony!” he was saying. “I spent the afternoon buttering up Mrs. Owen and programming her some stuffed animals, and she paid me this!” Antoine came around the counter and saw what he was talking about: a bushel of potatoes.
Antoine took a step forward, then lunged at them, grabbing one out of the basket. “You mean real potatoes?” Antoine demanded.
“Real is a state of mind,” Frank insisted. “But if you’re asking did they come out of the ground where they grew, then hell yes, buddy.”
Antoine sniffed it suspiciously. It was a potato. A potato! “Do you realize what this means??”
“Yeah! It means we can program the fries for our McDonald’s booth out of actual potatoes for the market this Saturday instead of out of weeds.” They’d been getting complaints about that. Actually, they’d always gotten complaints about that, which lately had escalated to threats of bodily harm.
Antoine shook his head in disbelief. “It means we can actually make the french fries, fool. Out of potatoes and oil.”
Frank’s rictus grin faltered, for just a moment. “Yeah, didn’t get the oil. And, stove doesn’t work. You know. But, potatoes!” Frank went on as he produced their dinner from a bag, which Antoine also sniffed carefully. Usually Frank managed to hustle them a real dinner, but when he couldn’t, he programmed something that looked and tasted delicious, whatever it smelled like. Usually he managed to make it out of something vaguely food-like, but not always. Smell would dictate whether Antoine would go to bed feeling like he had a belly full of weeds.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t weeds, but it also wasn’t the juicy steak it appeared to be. Better not to sniff too hard. Antoine sat down, made himself forget about it, and shot the breeze with Frank for hours, listening to his stories of who he met and what he hustled that afternoon. None of them sounded true, but later, his most unbelievable stories were usually somehow corroborated. It didn’t matter, anyway; the stories were better than Netflix any day.
Frank interrupted himself. “Ooh, it’s almost seven.”
They scrambled out the door, over the dresser, up the hole, and on top of the pile of rubble, where they found their usual perches and watched the sky. A giant winged creature buzzed them, right on schedule, and they shrieked and laughed hysterically. Frank jumped to his feet. “Angel!” Frank hollered. “Angel Man! If you can end the world, can’t you bring it back? Bring it back, Angel Man! You owe us, freak!” Frank catcalled him like this every single night. He didn’t really have anyone else to blame, anyone else to beg, anyone else to pray to. Frank got a little crazy any night Angel Man didn’t make an appearance. Any other guy would have picked a different route home (especially as Frank often tried to peg him with crumbled cement and whatnot), but not the angel.
They sat out there after Angel Man had flown on past, now that it was spring, and talked about this and that until the night got chilly. Climbing back down the hole, Frank said, “If angels from heaven grant wishes, what do hell’s angels bring you?”
At the market, Frank was busily trying to sell the best-looking damn french fries you ever saw, glistening in the morning sunlight, and still, perpetually, steaming. Even Antoine, who helped him program them to look like this, kept sneaking some.
Apparently word had gotten around that their booth was a scam, because despite the amazing spread, they got hardly any customers. Old Mrs. Watson stopped and eyed their table suspiciously. “Rubble again?”
“No, ma’am,” Antoine spoke up, “we don’t do that anymore. Edibles only, ever since the, uh ....”
She of course knew the incident to which he referred. “Weeds, then?” she suggested coolly.
“Nah, baby! Real potatoes!” Frank protested. “Have a whiff!”
She did, and was bewilderingly twice as mad. “Get your hands on some real potatoes and you won’t so much as cook ’em up! You boys are so lazy, if your mamas suddenly came back to town, you couldn’t be bothered to get up and give ’em a hug! That’s why you’re like this,” she went on, evidently not noticing that the smile was suddenly, catastrophically absent from Frank’s face. “Raising each other, like a couple of little wild animals, aimless and feckless and up to no good. I oughta come down to whatever hole in the ground you call home and whup you into shape.” Not willing to wait, apparently, she suddenly reached across the table and smacked them both upside their heads. Antoine grabbed his head and protested, but Frank only stared, blank. “Get yourselves some goddamn oil and fry up these goddamn potatoes!”
“We couldn’t find oil,” Antoine said, sounding small, and she marched away, tsking disgustedly. Anyway, one look at Frank proved he was down for the count ... but they couldn’t afford to go a whole week without making any money.
Antoine got up, leaving Frank with the fries, and did some hustling himself, though he didn’t like it; Frank was the expert at that. Antoine preferred scavenging in the rubble. He was a better programmer than most, so he helped people with this and that and made some trades and some money that way, which allowed him to trade for better things ... including some collected lamb fat and a big pan. Back at their booth, he built a little fire in the dirt beside their table and started cutting up the potatoes he hadn’t let Frank program into fries.
This was getting them some attention. People often stopped to watch before shaking it off and moving on, but after he’d been at it a while, the people manning nearby booths couldn’t seem to help themselves. “Real potatoes?” Skeet asked suspiciously.
“Smell ’em,” Antoine said coolly.
He did. “How much for the first batch?” Skeet asked, licking his lips and gulping.
Antoine considered. He and Frank had never sold real food at their booth before, but from the looks on the faces of the gathering customers, he could ask for a car and someone would probably pay it. “Dollar a fry.”
Skeet scoffed with disgust. “You little--you could rebuild Detroit for that by the time you’ve sold all those fries!”
“Got any good trades?”
Skeet shook his head and stormed off. Antoine soon realized he wasn’t going to get a dollar a fry, but he did manage to sell them for about half that--ten bucks for a small, which was only about twenty fries. Then there was Skeet, coming back, bearing boxes of things he’d brought that day and traded for. Antoine picked out some stuff he liked and handed him a large order of fries. Skeet grumbled as he walked away, but also let out a groan of pleasure as he bit into his first fry. Antoine only let his glee show at last when he counted out the take. He smirked at the unresponsive Frank. “We should go into farming.”
At least Frank could walk and pull a wagon in this state. Truth be told, he could pretty much be made to do anything when he was like this. Antoine loaded up one wagon for Frank and one for himself, and led them home, where they were sure to be in for a long night. When Frank finally started letting it out, it sometimes felt like the Cataclysm was happening all over again, like Antoine was stretching into transparency and finally invisibility when there was nothing left in the world except Frank’s rage and pain, exploding in his face. Antoine held on, though, because after abuse came self-abuse, then violent suicide attempts, and if Frank couldn’t deal with having lost everyone he loved before the Cataclysm, Antoine couldn’t deal with losing Frank.
Just now wrestling him away from the knife drawer, Frank interrupted his own babble to shout, “It’s seven!” He squirmed out of Antoine’s grasp and ran out the door, energetically climbing up through the hole. Antoine followed. Angel Man flew by overhead only seconds later, though Frank was already cursing him before he even came into view, flinging at him anything within reach. He picked up a big hunk of cement and chucked it at him before Antoine managed to tackle him, but Antoine looked up when Frank cheered maniacally, to see the angel veer and crash in the street. “Yes, direct hit!” Frank crowed, and scrambled down the pile of rubble toward where he lay crumpled on a little patch of earth. Antoine got to him just in time, plowing into him and knocking him off Angel Man, where Frank was trying to pin him down and pummel him, not that Angel Man was fighting back.
“Frankie, no! Jesus, you hurt him real bad!” Frank had that crazed look in his eye that meant he wasn’t hearing a word. Antoine almost never resorted to this, but there were a lot of rocks and cement around here, and Frank’s hands were finding them. Antoine slapped him, hard. Frank’s pale blue eyes filled with tears, outraged and disbelieving ... but then it was himself he started hitting, slapping his own head and wailing incomprehensibly.
“Frankie, come on, man, we don’t have time for this. Angel Man is bleeding; you got him right in the wing.” Oozing down the white feathers. Antoine got Frank to his feet and held onto him while he watched Angel Man bleed, because if he let him go, Frank would run to the top of the nearest tall building and jump. Maybe Angel Man wasn’t that bad off, though, because the wing wasn’t bleeding that much, and his eyes were open, just looking at the sky, for all the world as if he’d decided to lay down in the middle of Brush Street and watch the slow spring sunset. “Hey, man, can you walk? Angel, can you walk?”
Angel Man was as much trouble as Frank, Antoine soon discovered, requiring many exhortations before he even seemed to register his words, then several more before understanding and obeying them. Antoine was relieved to see him get to his feet without much difficulty, though one wing dragged worryingly behind him on the ground. Antoine manhandled Frank back to their place, shouting for the angel to follow, and finally had them safely ensconced down there, just as Frank was falling to the helpless weeping and cursing that meant his latest freakout was almost over. Antoine let him go and attended to the angel. He didn’t really know how to patch a giant wing, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped on its own, and feeling carefully at it, at least it didn’t seem to be broken. Antoine served everyone some of the food he’d traded for at the market, putting Frank’s in the refrigerator when he pushed it away like a sullen toddler.
“It’s been a long time since I saw this condo,” the angel remarked, the first words he’d spoken. Even Frank lifted his head at that.
“You’ve ... been here before?” Antoine asked uncertainly. He and Frank looked at each other.
“Yes. It was the top floor of the Lifehack building, the CEO’s on-site home.”
Antoine recoiled, looking around at the ritzy décor that he had come to take for granted. No wonder these digs were so sweet.
“It survived the Cataclysm because he made one of my colleagues program it to be able to withstand anything. It must have been Susie. She was the one who did the computer simulations that foresaw the Cataclysm, so she would have known what to guard it against,” he said impassively, surely the only guy in town who could talk without rancor about the greatest villain of the day. Voldemort, Hitler, Darth Vader--they had nothing on the Lifehack CEO.
Frank’s vulnerable face was all hurt and disgust. “You even knew it was going to happen, and you didn’t even care. You just let it come.”
“No. She was the first one who tried to stop it, but they made her into something that would be the kind of creature who would do something like that for the CEO.”
“Wait, what?” said Antoine. “Made her into what?”
But the angel didn’t answer, exactly. “We all tried to stop it, and we were all made into something ... not ourselves. I didn’t want to believe her, I remember ... but the simulations didn’t lie, and I saw it, too late.”
“My family,” Frank croaked, rising, and Antoine was afraid another freakout was going to start all over again. Antoine got between them. “My whole family is dead because of you.”
“Not dead. Elsewhere.”
“But they’re dead to me!” Frank shrieked. “They’re gone, they’re gone, they disappeared! They’re gone, and it’s all your fault!” He lunged for the angel, but he was so weakened from his freakout that Antoine was able to subdue him easily.
“My family is also gone,” the angel said easily. “And all my friends. My coworkers. The only ones sure to have perished were the ones in the building at the time. Their bodies lie beneath your home.” Antoine tried to lift his feet, but evidently there was nowhere here where he could escape walking on someone’s grave. “I miss them,” Angel Man said, sounding almost wistful, though it seemed like his voice could no longer evince emotion. “We’re all alone here in this new world, making families of the ones left behind.”
Antoine felt the energy leave Frank’s body as he fell to weeping. Usually he struggled against Antoine’s embrace when he was freaking out, but for the first time, he turned and clutched Antoine tight. “Yeah,” Frank choked out.
Angel’s phone rang. Angel took it out and stared at it uncomprehending for a moment, then pushed send and held it up to his ear, curiously, as if he had no idea what would happen next. “Angel, honey, where are you?” came a female voice. “Supper’s on.”
Angel Man got up. “I’ll return to dig a hole in your floor. I’ve been wanting to search the catacombs. Now I know where they are.”
Most people were scared enough of Angel Man, who with the wings towered five feet over everyone else, that they would vacate their home without another word at an announcement like this, just leave it to the otherworldly being who wandered these downtown streets like some god of the apocalypse, but Antoine no longer wanted to be anywhere near this place for his own reasons. “It’s all yours,” he said.
From the street outside their new house, Antoine could hear Frank cackling. Must have been a good day hustling. Antoine went in the front gate--a straight-up white picket fence--and up the walk to their humble little two-story with the peeling paint on a deserted block of identical houses, far from the city center. Antoine had said goodbye to his old haunts the day they left, leaving flowers at his aunt’s house, the corner store where his brother used to work, the park where Antoine used to play. Frank had drawn a picture and scrawled a big goodbye message on the chalkboard of the classroom where Antoine found him that fateful day. They hadn’t been back since.
“Look what I got,” Frank ranted as soon as Antoine came through the door. “Seeds. Seeds! Billions of them! Well, couple hundred. Bilson said it’s not too late to plant ’em. Just like you said! We can go into farming.”
Antoine froze for a second as he set down his own haul. So Frank registered it when he said that after all. Frank grinned up at him, and Antoine remembered what that grin would have looked like before, all crazed and frantic, where now his eyes sparkled and there was genuine joy there ... even though, yeah, he still looked pretty crazed. Frank hadn’t had a freakout since the day the angel visited them. Antoine stood beside him at the counter and had a look at the seeds. “I don’t know anything about farming, man.”
“Me neither,” Frank said, sounding excited, like they were about to embark on a marvelous adventure. “My old family would’ve tossed these out like trash, but I got a new family now,” he said, slapping Antoine’s back, “and we make french fries. We’ll start a new McDonald’s! It’ll be ‘Frank and Tony’s Eats’,” he declared, sweeping his hand grandly across his imaginary marquee sign. “Our specialty’ll be real french fries in lamb fat ... with--” he consulted the labels on some of his seed packets “--tomato sauce and carrots.”
Antoine chuckled, shaking his head. “I think you need to work on your business plan.”
“It’ll work,” Frank chanted. “It’ll work, you’ll see. And look! Lilac seeds.” He waved them at him. Their eyes met, and there was a warmth there, in Frank’s pale eyes, a presence, like he was finally fully here, like the part of him that left with everybody else during the Cataclysm had come home at last. “We won’t be aimless and feckless anymore then,” Frank went on, examining the rest of the seed packets.
How had Antoine never known that Frank heard and remembered every word someone said when he got silent and unresponsive? Not that he had any more recent experiences to draw from, thank heaven. “We should call it Aim and Feck, then,” Antoine suggested, and Frank punched the counter in triumph.
“Yes, Aim and Feck, Aim and Feck’s Fresh Fried Food!” He did a weird little jig in the middle of the living room. “That’s what it’ll be. That’s perfect. How dare she call us that! What’s feckless mean, anyway?”
~The End~
If you are interested, this story serves as a bit of a prequel to this one.