“When I was a young man, the parliament of Sweden hired me. We did not have a president or king; we were a lost people.” Karl held the rag to his lips for a moment, uncertain it was the right thing to do.

“The Socialists, liberals, wanted to take control of our country. Most of us wanted to live in peace but for the bombings and attacks by the liberal anarchists. So, they hired me to help get rid of the liberals. We beat them, broke bones, and backs to make them stop hurting the people. I did this.” Karl held a hand to his chest.

“I became a monster with no mercy for men who cried out for me to stop. I lived in the lie that I was doing a good deed for all and teaching the anarchists a lesson.” Karl looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time, studying the offending flesh.

“This man bombed a café and killed more than a dozen people. We knew it was him from the reports of witnesses that had seen him arrive and place a bomb, then light the fuse, so we went to his home. I do not know what I was expecting. The home of a rich elite bastard, maybe, but he lived in a partially collapsed building in a district of Stockholm that was almost abandoned. He was living in the barest poverty.”

The memory of that place remained vivid in Karl’s mind; collapsed walls along a narrow street with fallen timbers and roof tiles making walking treacherous. The man had found a home in the back room of a tenement ready to fall at any moment; the wife and children dressed in rags taken from refuse piles, cowering before twenty men in black uniforms with leather accouterments.

“But we marched in there, into his home, and took his family prisoner. We beat them while demanding his location. The wife, the children, knew nothing, but we could not stop; these were the family of a monster, a murderer of innocents.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I held the son up, a five-year-old boy and shook him.” Karl held his hands out and repeated the movement he made on that day so long ago.

The anguish on the engineer’s face took Silas aback. Karl looking to Silas for mercy as a child had once looked to him.

“I screamed for his father. The boy was squealing as I crushed his chest, then he plunged a long sliver of wood into my eye.” Karl touched a hand to the cheek, still stained by blood. “Blinded, I threw him at the mother, I thought. With the wood in my eye, the tears, the pain, I was uncertain, and I did not care about the bastard son of an anarchist.”

The swaying of the train, the gauges, and the coal were all lost on Silas as he focused on the man he once feared. Then he understood the answer to his own question; what drove Karl to be the man he was? Fear drove everything.

“I broke his back.”

In his mind Karl saw the boy laying astride a fallen roof beam, his mother kneeling at the boy’s side keening as the child gasped his last breaths. “Then I understood what I had become, what the elite and what my country had wanted me to become. I was the monster. The father did what he could to fight people who did not care and were living in luxury as he fought for crumbs to feed his loved ones.”

“He was dead before we ever went to that building, destroyed by his own explosives. He acted out of fear for his family. My country acted out of fear of change. We all acted out of fear.”

“This is truth; I became what I feared.” Karl looked at Silas, then reached across the cab and touched the fire-man on the chest, the thick coat making the tap hardly noticeable. “The longer you see the color of your skin as the meaning of your life, the more you will become like me, imprisoned by what we think is the truth. No one can place limits on us unless we accept the decree.”

“When we live a lie, we become monsters.” Karl turned away from Silas, the hand lowering to the engineer’s side as he looked out his window with tragic eyes, a man lost in his own judgment.