IC: A Bombed out street

The street is empty. Looking in any direction there's nothing but fog,
growing thicker the farther away you get from this particular spot. The only
way to tell that it's even a street is the fact that there's a band of
concrete and a curb. Next to this particular spot on this random street that
could be anywhere are the remains of a building. Broken concrete, drywall,
glass, wood.

"Looks like a bomb went off here" said the old man as he chewed on his
cigar.

He was alone on the street, standing on the sidewalk and looking at the
remains of at one point had been a bar. He walked through the rubble where
the front door may have once been and began kicking bits of concrete and
kipple, trying to make some sort of sense of what had happened. It looked to
him as if the place had just collapsed under it's own weight.

He took a pull off of the cigar, looked at it and tossed it out into the
roadway. He sighed, then shrugged off his trenchcoat and laid it across the
back of the only thing that seemed unaffected by the building's collapse; a
Coat Rack.

The old grey-haired man began sorting through the rubble. Though his face
was wrinkled and his hair nearly bone-white, he had the build of a much
younger man. He wore black Military-Spec BDUs, and had a pair of Baretta
pistols in a holster strapped to the small of his back.

The old man grinned as he pulled something out of the rubble. Though it was
obviously artificial and had been ravaged by years of decay, it looked like
a mangled human head and spinal column. He stood as he checked it out,
turning it over in his hands and examining every minute detail.

"Damn Phil, what happened to you?"

The head did not respond.

The old man pulled a knife from his pocket and began prying at various
panels on the artificial head. After a few moments he got one open. He
pulled a pair of wires from the rat's nest of plastic-coated copper. He
touched one to his index finger, the other to his middle finger. His eyes
began to glow a soft shade of orange. Electricity sparked to the wires, and
the eyes of the destroyed automaton's head flicked open. The voice was
strained and filled with static, but it spoke as best it could, given it's
condition.

"{Phil001 ready to serve. What do you wish to
have?}"

The old man chuckled to himself, then released the wires and set the head
down. "I'll need parts... dunno if I can rebuild you from what's left here."

Finally, the old man walked back to where he stepped onto the property. Once
again searching, but this time the results came much faster. An ancient neon
sign, all of the tubes broken. The old man showed strength that was
impossible for a man in his twenties, let alone a grizzled old coot like
this. He lifted the sign out of the rubble, dusting off the debris. He
picked it up and moved it to the front, seeing if it was still readable.

Though there was no neon tubes, no electricity, the name of this pile of
rubble was now revealed, and Caleb went back to work cleaning up the
destruction. Propped up next to the sidewalk, sat the sign that once
illuminated this foggy stretch of street in the middle of nowhere.

"Rick's Cafe Americain"

~Caleb Archer