Dark Advent

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Book: Dark Advent by Brian Hodge Read Free Book Online
Authors: Brian Hodge
blossoming nation, bustling with steamships and rivermen, merchants and whores and thieves who’d slit your throat for the change in your pocket. But then came the railroads, and like the country, the city had never been the same. Now? Now you had cars and buses farting their fumes into the air of a city populated by folks hard-pressed to know their heritage, looking forward and never backward. You had land to the near west poisoned by dioxin. Progress? The city had grown up but had lost its peculiar innocence of those long-ago days. Jason wondered what it would be like to step back in time and see it as it had once been. Those grimy days of yesteryear.
    He found his diner, ate his bacon and eggs, paid, and left. Took a shortcut through an alley, passing a long building that looked like a dormant warehouse. The mouth of the alley and the view to the other end reminded him of a gauntlet, but he figured it was probably safe enough during the day. And maybe it would’ve been, had he been dressed in something other than tan slacks, a brown shirt, and a tie. The clothes had pegged him from the word go, and he stood out like a lone beacon.
    It happened when he was three-quarters of the way through the alley. He heard nothing more than a single footstep grinding down on gravel, and before he could turn to see what was coming, he felt his shoulders seized in a pair of strong hands. They shoved him into the bricks of the warehouse, where his head smacked hard enough to open a gash up the right side of his forehead. His knees buckled and his hands clutched at the crevices between bricks for support. His ears rang with the sickening crunch his skull had made.
    The alley swam into view as his eyes cleared, as he straightened with his back to the wall. His attacker was younger by maybe a couple of years, wearing a faded denim jacket with the arms ripped away; his cratered cheeks were ravaged with acne. The switchblade came out then, handled as easily as if it were the first thing the guy had ever found in his crib.
    “The wallet,” he said flatly.
    Just like being around an animal, Jason told himself. Don’t let him know you’re afraid. He felt blood matting his hair, oozing down his cheek to his chin, dripping onto his shirt.
    The knife flickered nervously. “Hand it over, asshole.”
    Jason stared into his eyes, feral eyes. “I left it in my car.”
    “ Lying motherfucker!” the mugger yelled, launching himself forward, the knife leading the way in a wide sideways arc.
    Jason didn’t know he’d even moved until he found himself a yard away, watching that blade slash across the space where his stomach had been a second before, and then dig into the brick wall. The blade snapped off at the hilt, glittering as it fell to the alley. He stared at it, realizing that if he’d been any slower, he would by now be curling into a fetal ball, trying to hold in his guts.
    The mugger was as quick as a jaguar. Jason caught his booted foot in the stomach, and at least a pair of two-fisted blows came slamming down on his upper back. He tasted the alley and felt his wallet yanked from his hip pocket, heard the pocket rip as the mugger tore it half away, leaving it hanging in a flap. Fading footsteps.
    Jason got to his knees and lost his breakfast beside the wall. He winced and swore as he moved so as to sit with his back to the wall, waiting for the outrage in his ribs, his head, his back to quiet down.
    He wiped blood from his eye, remembering what he’d thought of less than an hour earlier, the days of the steamboats, and cutthroats who’d carve you like a ham for whatever was in your pockets. People weren’t much different now as then, it seemed. A city, a nation, a world can grow as sophisticated as a society debutante, but human nature wasn’t going to change.
    A few minutes later, he watched a scroungy little mutt come sniffing down the alley, tail wagging when it saw Jason and wandered over. Dopey little thing. Its coat was brown

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