Part One
Part One
VWOORP! VWOORP! VWOORP!
The Type-Z TARDIS, piloted by the Time Lord known multi-universally as the “Gladiator of Gallifrey,” dematerialized atop the roof of a building in the east side of Manhattan. The Gladiator, whose Gallifreyan birth name was “Neas,” stepped out of her module in her latest eighth incarnation: an athletic, tall blond Australian, physically in her early forties. Neas christened this incarnation with the name of “Lindy.” She was almost never without a warm smile on her attractive face.
Yet that smile faded a little as she observed how derelict the rooftop she landed on was. The district itself wasn’t as welcoming. Most of the neighboring residences were either in worse shape or completely torn down. The mechanical rumblings of construction machines built for demolition, including bulldozers and cranes hauling wrecking balls, ran across the mountains of rubble.
In between the rumblings, Lindy heard commotion down below. Looking over the edge, she spotted a group of hoodlums tossing an old man out through the front entrance of a café interconnected with the building’s first floor. By the faded neon sign, Lindy saw its name to be “Frank’s Café,” and Frank must’ve been the old man being hassled.
As soon as she noticed one of the hoodlums walking back into the café to vandalize it, Lindy moved into action. She exited the rooftop, rushing down several flights of stairs and, along the way, seeing other damages that had been done to other areas of the building. When she made it to the café, the hoodlums were gone, leaving the café in shambles.
Frank walked in, desolate and humiliated.
“Sir, are you alright?” Lindy asked him.
He hardly even noticed the towering Australian blonde standing there. “No, I’m not alright!” he snapped at her. Lindy found his anger justifiable. “I’ll never be alright. Not as long as Lacey keeps sendin’ in his goons to run us out.” He kicked at a banged-up toaster on the floor. “What a helluva way to spend Christmas.”
Hearing what time of the year she arrived in surprised Lindy. “It’s Christmas? I didn’t see any decorations anywhere.”
“Not much reason to celebrate with all this goin’ on,” Frank gestured to the construction happening right outside. “What’s even the point? Ain’t got any kids runnin’ around here…just a bunch of hopeless souls.”
As Frank sulked, Lindy detected someone at the corner of her eye. It was an elderly woman who looked just as old as Frank. Despite the dismal state of the café she walked into, she beamed once she saw Lindy. “Oh, you must be the new girl our Bobby’s been dating,” she said of Lindy, who couldn’t help but to feel a little confused.
“Faye,” Frank addressed the elderly woman, who Lindy assumed to be his wife. “She isn’t Bobby’s girlfriend. She’s…” He paused just as he realized about Lindy, “Who are you, young lady? Are you one of the tenants?”
Lindy loved it when the cover-up supplied itself. “Yes…yes, I am.”
“Well, I don’t suppose you’ll be stayin’ with us much longer,” Frank wretchedly presumed. “Most of everybody else has moved out or been forced out by Lacey and his lackey, Carlos.”
“Was this ‘Carlos’ the one who did all of this to your café?” Lindy motioned over the hoodlum’s handiwork.
Frank confirmed this with a gentle nod. “I don’t even know what to do anymore.”
Faye patted one side of her husband’s face. “You’ll think of something, Frank. I know you always do. Bobby knows it, too.” Her reference to “Bobby” only made Frank more depressed as she walked out of the café.
Taking notice, Lindy deduced, “Bobby’s your son?”
“Our dead son,” Frank emphasized. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he sat himself down at one of the booths. “Killed in car accident, fifteen years ago…he would’ve been thirty-six last week.”
“And your wife, Faye, hasn’t been able to accept that reality.”
Frank slowly shook his head. His sad, weary eyes looked to the heavens, and he pleaded, “Please…somebody…help us.”
Lindy’s hearts sank for the poor old man. He was begging…no, he was praying for a miracle. And she was going to give him one.
Later, she went back to her TARDIS on the roof. There, she consulted with her latest two companions – small, sentient extraterrestrial spaceships (one male, one female) that she called “The Fix-Its,” on account of their special gift of repairing anything in less than a microsecond.
She filled them in on the situation with Frank and the other residents of the building, until she reached the part where she shared her plan. “We’re gonna give all of them the Christmas miracle they deserve,” she declared. “And it’s gonna be so big, the whole city’s gonna know about it!”
The next morning, which just happened to have been Christmas Eve, Frank awoke to a scent of freshness in the air rather than the usual mold and mothballs that had always sent him in a coughing fit at the middle of the night. Faye woke up before he did, and he heard her outside, conversing with the few other tenants.
As he walked through their home, he noticed how everything looked repainted, reorganized, refreshed, and refurbished. The faded color of the walls and door frames received a new coat of paint and a new polish. These renovations weren’t just limited to Frank and Faye’s apartment; they spread throughout the entire building.
The floor tiles that Harry Noble, a brain-damaged ex-boxer and the landlord, painstakingly worked on had been all done for him, with fresh new ones instead of the discolored and rusted ones he kept in a jar.
To top it all off, various and extravagant Christmas decorations were strung up.
“Did someone hire a redecorator and didn’t tell us?” asked Marisa Esteval, an expectant single mother. “I didn’t know we could afford one.”
“We can’t,” Frank told her.
“Guys!” Mason Baylor, a young artist who lived a few floors above Frank and Faye, rushed in with great urgency. “You’ve gotta see what it looks like from the outside!” He led them right outside to get a look at the restored exterior of their apartment complex, looking exactly the way Frank and Faye remembered it decades ago. It stood out like a sore thumb from the rest of the demolished neighborhood.
When Frank saw the brand new neon sign of his café, it prompted him and the other tenants to examine that section of the building as well. Walking inside, they found Lindy sitting barefoot on the counter while sipping on some type of healthy beverage. “Morning, everyone,” she greeted, apparently oblivious to the miracle that had come over their building. “Anyone fancy a fresh cuppa celery juice?”
The entire city of New York caught wind of the “Miracle on 7th Avenue,” as several news stations and newspapers were calling it. It eventually reached the eyes and ears of Lacey, the property developer so hell-bent on demolishing the once-diluted apartment complex. He made a call to Carlos, belittling him on failing at his one job.
“I don’t know what happened, Mr. Lacey,” Carlos pathetically excused. “I had that place turned into Swiss cheese yesterday. I don’t know how the hell they got the whole building fixed overnight!”
“I don’t care how they did it! My plans for that district remain unchanged!” Lacey made clear to him. “I want them out of that building before Christmas morning! You hear me?!”
Carlos didn’t see any point. The building was restored to its original condition, which meant there were no longer any grounds for it to be demolished. But he knew better than to disobey a powerful man like Lacey. So, with no other choice, he staked out in an abandoned building across the street and spent all day contemplating while keeping watch over the activity within the restored apartment complex through a pair of binoculars.
By that evening, Carlos sat in the virtually skeletal structure of the building, freezing his butt off from the chilly winds that blew through the busted windows and crumbled walls. Meanwhile, there was a Christmas party the Riley couple was throwing in Frank’s Café that Carlos wished he could be a part of. And yet, there he was, wallowing in the cold without a single plan for putting those people out on the street.
Just as he considered abandoning his mission…
THUMP!
He heard heavy movement on the roof. Curiosity overwhelming him, he went there and was baffled to find some kind of man-sized creature with green fur, wearing a makeshift Santa costume.
As if Carlos’s night couldn’t have gotten any more complicated.
