Fast Food Furries Book 1

Chapter 1: The Aftermath

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"I hope you won't mind if I think of you as a friend." - Solanum from Outer Wilds.

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Five Years Earlier

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking one. Alba had just picked up her daughter Ned for an optometrist appointment, and was eyeing up the school building in her rear-view mirror as she waited for a break in traffic to pull out into the street.

The school was an ugly, brutalist, insult to the eyes and soul. Alba could never help but notice the way it darkened the sky—a black hole of architecture gobbling the sunlight right out of the air. The bland, concrete facade was tall in the front, before the building tapered down to a more reasonable height in the back, broken up only by large, geometric buttresses and just-too-small windows. It was boastful, aggressive, and worse yet, K-12. But don't fret—rather, rejoice! For it had a green roof! How utopian! Yeah... it was terrible.

A gap in the traffic gave Alba a chance to swerve out onto the street, glancing at Ned. Despite all Alba had done to live a peaceful, unassuming life, Ned just stood out like a sore thumb among everyone else. Miles ahead of her kindergarten class, a sense of morals and ethics more robust than most adults (although Alba didn't agree with most of her convictions, they were still convictions), and enough curiosity to wipe the Earth of felines. Her teachers were noticing. Damien—her stepfather—was noticing. Even strangers on the street could tell.

"Hey," Alba said as she wove through traffic, "You might've noticed I picked you up early. We're going to stop at Stinky's Sandwich Shop for lunch before your appointment."

Ned lit up. "Really? Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!"

Alba smiled, glad that Ned liked the idea. They were coming up on it now, and Alba had to cut someone off to get into the parking lot. They shared a quite uncouth gesture that shall remain undescribed. Alba cringed, having not meant to bother them, but shrugged it off. They were here.

Stinky's Sandwich Shop was one of the last few small businesses on the continent. The power structures that existed earlier in the century had ultimately found strength in the attempts to tear them down, and the country was worse than ever. Not that Alba much cared, as long as she could live a quiet and comfortable life, but it was impossible not to notice the corporations buying every inch of usable land to throw up their ugly towers, or the fact that the government didn't even have the dignity to pretend to be democratic anymore—the "Supreme Leader President Captain?'' What on Earth was that?

And the worst part was that Alba was far from innocent of it all, and from her guilt, among other things, came her perpetual anxieties that hung over her head like a thin, plastic bag full of smelly fish, ready to burst at any moment and ruin her hair and make her smell like fish.

Anyway, Stinky Jr., the guy in charge of the restaurant, had refused multi-billion dollar buyouts from every "development" corp in the United States, and so now sat Stinky's Sandwich Shop, unchanged in about seventy years; its tasteless curvy style and bright neon sign stood out like a tesseract in three-dimensional space among the brutalist dystopian reality of America on all sides of it.

The parking lot was packed but Alba found a spot and pulled in, then they both got out of the car and went towards the front doors, just as a space much closer to the diner opened up, inciting an eye roll in Alba.