Withdrawal: An American Horror Story

It started at exactly 6:00 AM Eastern Time. Somewhere in a damp, coffee-stained cubicle in New York, a bleary-eyed office worker reached for his morning espresso—and found nothing. Not an empty cup. Not a missing lid. Nothing. The entire concept of coffee had vanished.

Similar scenes unfolded across the country. From sea to shining sea, millions of groggy Americans stumbled into their kitchens, yanked open cupboards, and blinked at the void where their lifeblood had once been. Keurigs gurgled dry. Starbucks locations collapsed in on themselves like dying stars. Dunkin’ Donuts employees wandered into the streets, eyes hollow, whispering “But first… but first… but first…” before dropping dead on the sidewalk.

At 6:05 AM, reports came in that cigarettes no longer existed. Every last pack of Marlboros, every stray cigarette butt in a gas station parking lot—gone. Smokers clawed at their pockets, checking and rechecking their empty packs like desperate gamblers on a losing streak. Gas station clerks barricaded themselves behind registers as angry mobs demanded their goddamn smokes, even as their hands shook from withdrawal.

At 6:10 AM, things got worse. Alcohol vanished. Bars across America imploded. Every liquor store stood eerily vacant, shelves bare except for mocking little price tags that read “$0.00”. Irish pubs filled with the howls of the damned as men in tweed caps collapsed to their knees, clutching phantom pints of Guinness. In Vegas, thousands of bachelor parties devolved into feral tribes, tearing apart strip malls in search of even a single can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

By 6:15 AM, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol were nothing but a distant memory. Then the real panic set in.

Hard drugs? Gone. Cocaine? Nope. Meth? Vaporized. Even weed, that sweet, harmless comfort of the American everyman, had been ripped from reality. Every bong, every joint, every vape pen had turned to dust. Snoop Dogg stared at his empty blunt and let out a scream so powerful it shattered every window in Los Angeles.

At 6:20 AM, pharmacies were overrun. “WHERE’S MY OXY??” people shrieked, tossing elderly patients aside in a frenzied search for their prescription painkillers. But opioids, amphetamines—all gone. People clawed at locked cabinets, howling at pharmacists who could only shrug and say, “I don’t know, man… I just work here.”

Meanwhile, social media imploded. X (formerly Twitter) burned to the ground. Influencers posted videos of themselves screaming into their ring lights, shaking their empty energy drink cans in disbelief. On Reddit, a thread titled “WTF HAPPENED TO MY ADDERALL???” hit one million upvotes in three minutes, just before the entire site crashed under the weight of despair.

By 6:30 AM, America was on fire.

Wall Street traders threw themselves from skyscrapers, not because of the market crash—but because their overpriced oat milk lattes had ceased to exist. Truckers, cut off from their steady supply of gas station coffee and nicotine, veered off the highways en masse. Gas stations turned into makeshift battlegrounds, where desperate men wielded beef jerky sticks like medieval swords in the quest for one last can of Monster Energy.

By 7:00 AM, the streets belonged to the maniacs.

In Washington, the government scrambled to make sense of the catastrophe. The President, usually a calm and collected leader, had already gnawed through four pencils. Scientists at the CDC held emergency meetings while twitching uncontrollably. “This is an extinction-level event,” one expert muttered, watching as her colleagues attempted to brew coffee using dirt and rainwater.

By 8:00 AM, the only survivors were the Mormons, the Amish, and that one weird guy from HR who claimed he “never needed caffeine anyway.” They roamed the streets unscathed, watching with quiet amusement as society collapsed around them.

By noon, civilization had crumbled. New York was ablaze. San Francisco had been taken over by warlords in Patagonia vests. Florida, somehow, was fine.

By 3:00 PM, the first murmurs of a solution began to spread. Some claimed that deep in the Appalachian mountains, an ancient, untainted coffee bean still existed. Others whispered about a secret stash of nicotine hidden by the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson.

By nightfall, the most desperate among them had already begun their pilgrimage.

Some say they’re still out there, wandering the ruins of the old world, searching for a single sip of salvation. But for the rest of America, the age of vice was over.

And it was Hell.

THE END.