Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

had built an incredible tolerance to the substance; he could drink the better half of a handle of whiskey and still function reasonably. He tucked his chin to his chest and walked on, his step quickening as he thought of the fact that the last alcohol he had was in his pocket.

His resources were drained. If there had been a way to obtain liquor in the city, he would have stayed. But there was nothing.  The liquor stores had long been raided. The city of runners and alcoholics was drained dry of alcohol, and he could do nothing about it.

He also knew that his name was on the list of people to be killed. Whoever was behind all of this, they had not spared civilians and they would stop at nothing to exterminate him like a pesky fly on the wall. It would be wise to leave before they found him, to disappear into the great expanse of quiet land.

His feet took him northwards. He walked past quiet buildings and dark windows with a heightened sense of alertness, watching and listening. They towered above him like great forlorn shells, dark ghosts of the life that had used to exist. He wondered how many people were cowering inside, caught between sleep and alertness, praying for daylight to come.

Soon the residential area of southern Maryland presented itself, with its suburban brick buildings. He kept along the main streets, weaving in and out of the shadows cast by the moon. Empty cars lined the streets--cars that suited men would have driven every day to work, would have spilled coffee in, would have stored paperwork in, would have played their favorite songs in. Empty now, and rather unalive--looking. Quite spooky, to be honest, and Jack thanked whatever vague deity he could think of, that he was not a timid or superstitious person.

There was no one on the streets. By now, an unspoken social code had emerged, that the only people who would dare leave their houses at night were murderers and thieves. By day, everyone minded their own business, ignoring each other as they passed on the street, restrained by the fact that survival was more important than war. Water-gathering was done by day, animal hunting, cooking over fires—all of this happened in the daylight. And as the last rays of sun disappeared each day, families would bar themselves inside their houses, apartment mates would lock their doors, and the nightly sentry shifts would take place. For at night, those who did not have the knowledge or resources to survive would prowl, looking for those who did. Many had moved away from the cities anyway, recognizing that the lesser the concentration of people, the higher the chance of survival.

Jack had been trained to survive, and he had been trained to kill. If he had not been an alcoholic, he would have been one of the individuals in the country who was least affected by the attack. He knew every plant, every animal, he knew how to find water and create shelter. He could fight off an assailant with the tenacity and skill of a professional—indeed, he had much practice oversees in this department, with men much more dangerous than suburban prowlers.

In the early hours of the morning, his head began to hurt as the cushion of liquor from the night before started to wear off. He pulled the small bottle reluctantly from his pocket. His hands trembled and his skin, pale and clammy, showed beads of perspiration. Twisting open the lid, he held it to his lips and felt the burning in his throat as he swallowed.

As he drained the contents, his headache diminished and he knew he needed to find a place where he could suffer through the symptoms that would start in the next twenty four hours. It would need to be dark and protected from view. If his body could survive the withdrawal, he would need water and food for recovery.

He would be best situated near a stream, he thought. He veered to the west, into the woodlands near Rockville, and followed the terrain downhill. There would always be water at the lowest point; after less than an hour, he found it—a little babbling brook, gushing peacefully over a bed of stones. It sounded pleasantly in his ears.

He gathered branches from the ground, a variety of sizes. The two largest ones he laid adjacent to each other at their ends, so that they created a sixty degree angle. He layered more branches above, stabilizing the walls by placing a cross-branch every now and then across the top of the angle. When his shelter had reached three feet in height, he placed branches along the top as a roof, and covered them with a bed of leaves.

Tearing up patches of moss from the ground around the shelter, he laid them carefully inside to create the most comfort possible. He then took the empty bottle from his pocket, and filling it with water from the brook, laid it next to where his head would rest.

He could bear any fight; the desperate movements, the pain, the exhilaration and adrenaline, the grotesque nature of death—but as he stood and surveyed this little bunker, his eyes welled with helpless tears. How savagely unfair, that having won so many fights, he might be killed now not in a glorious show of bravado but slowly and quietly by his own body, turning in on itself. This made him very angry, and he spat on the bunker. It was the cruelest of ironies, that he would be robbed even in death. To escape a thousand bullets, live through a stabbing, fight in hand to hand combat, bear the brutal heat of the desert and the despair of loneliness,--he had flirted with death, daring it to come fight him. And now, he faced it while the forest breezes cooled his brow and the sweet chirping of the crickets