Take One With You
Oak Anderson
Author Bio
Oak Anderson is an author, artist, and marketing strategist. His imagination has taken him to places he couldn’t help but note down, eventually crafting his ideas into a thought provoking story. After stealing minutes here and there over the last few years, he eventually completed his first fiction novel, Take One With You.
Description
MURDER GOES VIRAL!
They meet in an online chatroom dealing with depression and soon hatch a plan to bring meaning to their lives by encouraging other despondent individuals to help eradicate the “scum of society”, such as pedophiles and rapists who have escaped justice. Anyone dead set on committing suicide is urged to first kill someone who “got away with it” before taking their own life. Why not, they ask, “take one with you?”
The idea goes viral and things rapidly spiral out of control. As they develop romantic feelings for each other, their worldwide followers begin to enact a very different version of the idea, perverting its original intent and threatening the thin line between civil society and criminal anarchy. Just as they find hope of happiness together, Charlie and Sarah must deal with the monster they’ve created, a global epidemic of murder-suicide that threatens the very core of their humanity.
Take One With You is a unique crime thriller/millennial love story that poses the question: If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, would you kill someone tonight? Someone who had done something terrible. Someone who deserved to die. If so, who would it be? If you couldn’t do it, what about your neighbor? Your friend? Your enemy? Who draws the line? Who decides who lives and who dies? And what if we all began to take justice into our own hands?
Book excerpt
A couple years before Melissa Williamson met her end in a roadside ditch about twenty minutes west of Fairview, or eleven minutes if you’re traveling over a hundred miles an hour, Charlie Sanderson, the person who unwittingly gave her the idea to kill Big Max, noticed his mother had started to hit the old Xanax even harder than before her breakdown.
It wasn’t even a serious breakdown, more like a series of bad days really, but that didn’t stop Charlie’s stepdad from insisting that she up her intake so that, in his words, “we can have a little peace around here,” which Charlie suspected was really just a way to both better control his mother and excuse his own indiscretions. The “we” was only his mom’s husband, who himself was exceptionally tense. There was not a drug yet developed that could cure that particular family of what ailed them.
In Charlie’s mind, the three of them would never be a family, anyway.
There had been other drugs before, all of them legal, which Charlie remembered even if his mother did not, and they had all been prescribed at the behest of Brad Connor, a man Charlie steadfastly refused to call Dad or Father or anything remotely warm and familial.
For all Charlie cared, Brad could fucking die.
Charlie’s real father had been a mid-level accountant, a somewhat boring but hard-working man who always had a smile on his face no matter what was happening around him. Charlie’s mom used to marvel at her husband as he handed over the last of their grocery money to the cashier at the local Safeway near the end of the month, cheerfully emptying his wallet a full week before payday.
They were never poor, exactly, just lower middle class, but there were many times his father had to pay the electric bill or other necessities with a credit card because his meager salary had not lasted a full month, usually because of an unexpected expense.
And it seemed there were always unexpected expenses.
Inevitably, the debt piled up, which became a source of tension between him and his wife that had not existed before. But that smile of his could usually melt her heart, and she was never able to stay mad at him for very long, regardless of their financial difficulties.
The Sanderson family always made do, and their little home never wanted for love and laughter. Neither Jim nor Anne ever let the sun go down on an argument, as Charlie’s father explained to his son, and Charlie was determined to follow the same practice when he grew up and got married.
If he got married.
Charlie was a nerd and a loner, the former being something easily overcome in the days of such rapid technological advancements, even to be desired, but the latter was more problematic.
“One of these days you’ll invent some code or website or something and make yourself a billion dollars,” his mother would say, “but right now I want you to go out and make some friends not on the computer.”
That was something Charlie had always found hard to do.