2.

Garrett scarcely visited libraries. He stole books from time to time to burn for fuel, but never from libraries. There was something sacred about library books, almost religious, that made burning them a sacrilege.  He felt empowered when he flipped through a library book, not only because of the words they contained, but for the knowledge that others before him had read what he was reading. He became part of an elite, with secret knowledge and sacred signs and rituals. Besides, libraries were poor and sorry looking, and he couldn’t help feeling like s**t whenever he stole from them -- but the big box bookstores and the capitalist bigots they stood for could be damned, for all he cared.
    There was, however, one article he had stolen from the library. It hung above his bed in a clear plastic bag, not a crease or stain added from the day he’d first laid eyes upon it. The page was torn from Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan.
    At times when Garrett doubted -- and he hated to doubt! There simply wasn’t room for it -- he would lie in his sleeping bag and stare at the words that marked the manifesto of his outrage.
    “The obligation of the subjects to the soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.”
    That power, as far as Garrett was concerned, had failed him. It had pulled back its oily tendrils from the ugliest stations of society and invested in those who had something to offer -- something with which they could pay their salvation off, piece by piece till they were drained of life.
    Garrett had never read the rest of Hobbes’s book, nor did he care to. The man was another spirit from beyond the grave preaching an irrelevant orthodoxy to strained ears; the passage proved whatever else The Leviathan had to say moot. No one had protected him. Innate order commanded that his nature return to a state of civil war.
    A surge of something overwhelming squeezed his heart. It was raw zeal, the rush of which sent adrenaline coursing to his brain and caused him to shudder with a pleasure that was almost -- no, not sexual -- but violent. Here was all the proof needed, the push required, to set his crusade in motion.