The Siege Read Online Free PDF

get over Natalie’s death. So many memories, now spiked with pain and loss.
    As Dale stared down at his meager breakfast, his eyesight began to waver. At first everything on the tabletop blurred and smeared, but then, starting in the middle of his vision, a swirling black hole began to form. Dale was barely conscious of his attention as it funneled down into the spinning void before his eyes, but his body reacted. His shoulders and arms began to tremble, as if embraced by an icy wind; his neck and throat pulsed in time with his heart, and each pulse grew louder and louder, until hard-hitting hammer blows thumped his inner ears; his throat felt squeezed shut, as though bony fingers— hands reaching from the grave! —were slowly choking him.
    “God. Why are you up so early?” a voice said from behind him.
    Dale let out a scream as he spun up and out of his chair. The chair flew over backwards. His knee hit the underside of the table and his coffee slopped onto the plate, soaking his uneaten toast. A jolting pain darted up his leg, but he barely noticed it in his flood of panic as he tore his awareness back into the kitchen.
    “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Angie said. The expression on her face twisted back and forth between surprise and laughter. To break the awkwardness, she bent down and righted her father’s chair.
    Dale tried to soak up the spilled coffee with a napkin, but when he saw that the toast was doing a good enough job of it, he went to the sink and scooped the whole mess into the garbage disposal. He flicked the switch and the disposal whirred loudly. He wanted more than anything just to stand there with his back to Angie and lose himself in the whining sound of the disposal. Anything if he wouldn’t have to turn to face her.
    As soon as she saw his face, he thought, she’d know something was very wrong.
    When the throat of the disposal was clear, Dale pulled out the plug and then slowly turned around to face Angie. Already he could see it there on her face. He could see the thin lines of concern and questioning that, in mere seconds, would crumble down like a poorly built brick wall.
    “I thought I’d better practice getting up for school, so I set my alarm for early,” Angie said. There was a forced brightness in her voice that cut Dale to the quick.
    Sunlight, pouring in through the kitchen window, backlit her, giving her dark hair a wispy nimbus. Her blue eyes sparkled, and her skin was a deep nut brown from an entire summer at the shore with friends. She’s the perfect picture of a healthy, happy, twelve-year-old girl , Dale thought , and when I tell her what I have to tell her, it’ll put lines in her face that will never go away!
    “Hey, Dad,” Angie said, when Dale didn’t speak to her right away. “Are you all right?”
    “No—I’m not,” Dale stammered, “I’m afraid I’ve got some terrible news.”
    She could read from his face that he meant it this was a bad one. With a trembling hand, she drew out her chair from the table and lowered herself into it. Not once did she break eye contact with him as he came over and sat down next to her, pulling his chair close.
    He told her about Larry—everything Nichols had told him in his pre-dawn call, and he sat there and let her pitch forward, burying her face into his chest as her tears spilled, hot and wet, soaking into his shirt.
    She cried for more than fifteen minutes. Sobs shook her entire frame, making it difficult for her to take anything more than shallow, halting breaths. Before long, her throat was raw, and her crying took on a ragged wheeze that worried Dale; but he let her cry it all out: to cry for Larry, to cry for her mother, to cry for anyone and everyone whoever suffered the loss of a close friend. She cried and moaned until her body was as wrung out as a tattered washcloth.
    When it was over, although Dale knew it would never really be over , but when her crying had subsided, he went to the counter, got a box of