Read Online Violence by Timothy McDougall - Free Book Online

car. Anderson pulled the car door shut, but didn’t put the key in the ignition. He stared straight ahead, trancelike, the heat of his breath fogging the windshield as an explosive clap of thunder rattled him into reverie:
     
    “We’ll remember you in our prayers,” he recollected her saying. Anderson was only seven-years-old when he was led by the faceless man to the waiting vehicle with the “State of Illinois” seal on its car door. She had no face either, the woman who called after him from the doorway of the house. It wasn’t that they literally had no features, it was simply Anderson, as a child, never saw them. Ever. It was more a survival instinct and easier if he made it a point to not become too attached. They weren’t bad people. None of them were to this point. It was usually an issue of survival for them, too. The children inside the house he was leaving were crying, that much was vivid. They cried because they thought or knew they were next. The suitcase was bigger than he was that the young Anderson had to drag into the back seat with him. The faceless man moved around and got behind the wheel of the car with the seal and drove off with the young Anderson who never looked back.
     
    The rain was really coming down now, like tears from weeping. Maybe God was crying. Karen would have said something like that. Maybe “He” didn’t exist as Anderson always suspected, or rather insisted. Karen was the spiritual one. Tristan, too. With them gone the last piece of his soul was lost.
    Anderson looked over at the ribboned iPhone box on the passenger seat next to him. He buried his head against the steering wheel. He couldn’t drive away just yet. The wipers wouldn’t be able to keep up with the deluge. Anyway, he had no place to go.

CHAPTER 8
             A nderson was standing between the two gurneys that held the bodies of Karen and Tristan in the receiving room of the funeral home. The funeral director had given him some time alone with them, and was respectfully out of sight.
    Anderson had to pay an extra charge to view the bodies outside of normal business hours but he didn’t want to be interrupted. He wanted it to be quiet, too. He hoped being with the bodies they would somehow speak to him, one last time, that he could hear something in the ethereal, otherworldly dimension outside of the normal lines of life. Maybe some of Karen and Tristan’s nudging did seep into his DNA. They always looked for God’s presence and protection. They believed in it. He sure didn’t. Especially now. They even believed he was a gift from God to them. He felt like he personally poisoned them, their chance at happiness, by the mere fact that he ever crossed their paths. Karen would have found someone else if she never met him. He was sure of that. Tristan would have been born to Karen through that relationship or Tristan’s soul would have been born to another family, somewhere.
    He couldn’t set his eyes squarely on them at first. The guilt was too overwhelming, like black bile that was continually pushing up through his esophagus. He did finally look at them, first at Tristan with her perfect skin and angelic features ravaged by bloating and blotchy lividity, and then Karen with her decimated features and blood-soaked hair. It felt like his heart would burst even though he was barely breathing.
    All he could think of was the circularity in life, and how he hated coming back around to something because in his case it was usually something not very good. He knew what had been done to them in the autopsy. He had witnessed one in the Army when an Ordnance specialist in his unit had died in an accident. The kid was from a nice Jewish family in Nashville and his parents had asked Anderson to witness the post-mortem examination. The Army quickly alluded to it as being a suicide but the family was having no part of that explanation.
    The parents chose Anderson, he remembered, because he had met them briefly,