The Empty Heart: A Collection

by Derek Murphy

  Finished with the sandwich, he swallowed the last of the beer and shoved the empty bottle back into the bag beside its full brother. Without thinking, he tapped a cigarette from its box and lit it, relishing the taste of it after the small meal. What was he going to do now? He supposed he could retire. He certainly had enough money to do so. Being forced off the board had come with a hefty payout and he had the option of selling his shares of the business back to the company. That would fill his pockets even more. But what would he do with all of it? Leave it for the children who had forced him out of the business? Leave it for the grandchildren? Yes. That was what he would do. They still loved him.

  The sound of a woman clearing her throat behind him made him turn his head. Surprise made him start up, his pant-legs sliding back down to drag in the water.

  "Reina!"

  Dressed in stretch pants and a sweater against the slight chill, her hair was still black except for a few strands of grey here and there and her eyes still reminded him of winter skies. Though she stood at the top of the terraced area, a foot or more higher than he, the top of her head still didn’t reach much higher than his chest. Moving suddenly, she moved toward him until she stood in the stream with him, her arms around him and her face pressed against his chest. He felt wetness where her tears soaked his shirt.

  The feelings of betrayal disappeared from his mind and heart as though they had never been and Bram felt a deep sense of love that had been missing from his life always. Except for the times he had spent with her, that is. It was as though a part of him had been removed and suddenly returned to him, whole and well, as though it had never been gone.

  His fingers went under her chin and he lifted her face to look down into her eyes.

  "I’ve missed you."

  Still crying, she said, "And I’ve missed you! You’re coming with me this time! We won’t ever be apart again!"

  Dumbly, he sat back down and replaced his socks and shoes, rising to walk hand in hand with her to the hill. The road had been resurfaced with asphalt and the trees had been cut away from the sides of it. Coming clear of the line of trees, he saw the house, not as it had been the one time he had seen it, but as it must have been when it was new. The roof was whole and there was no sign of fire damage. He wondered how someone could have rebuilt the place without him knowing about it. Such an extensive job would have garnered the attention of people all over town. But he had heard nothing about it.

  There were a few changes though, the house seemed bigger and had grown a second story. The porch covered the three sides he could see and the whole thing gave the impression of having been there forever. It didn’t seem new at all.

  As they stepped up on the porch, she hugged him again and looked up into his face, pulling him down by a shoulder to kiss him as she stood on tiptoe. Her eyes shined at him as though she had never been happier and she seemed suddenly younger. The grey was gone from her hair and the telltale lines around her eyes that he had barely noticed earlier were gone as well. His hand came up to caress her face and he saw that the ropy veins in the back of his hand had sunk back into his flesh. The three small, age-spots on the back of the hand; things that he had seen for several years, were no more than freckles.

  Reina said, "I couldn’t bring you back with me before. You didn’t belong in my world, as I didn’t belong in yours. But we are both much older now and the walls between our worlds are much thinner. We will never be lonely again."

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  The Flume

  Straightening after his long hike up the nearly perpendicular trail, Alec lifted a hand to his forehead and wiped the sweat from it. Though the wind at this height was stiff and cold as a day-old dead man, the hike had been long and strenuous. The images of his cousins and their families, laid out around the town where they died haunted him and made him regret his thoughts of dead men. He squinted his eyes against the wind and looked around him at the bare rock and low-growing weeds and moss. The sun was just then lowering itself to bed behind the tallest crag and the shadows stood out on the weeds and bare rock as though drawn there in stark black against the brown growth. Here was where the wind and storm walked naked; completely at home in a place that seemed blasted by God and shunned by His angels.

  As he thought that, he wondered briefly if he had the courage to brave a place where he fancied that angels feared to walk. But he wasn’t the only person who would walk here. Bloody Gavin Carney also walked here. He and his men. Judging from the fight his cousins had given them and the tracks that split off from the party, there could only be a few left. Though the rocks held few telltales of where any had passed; he estimated that there could be no more than three left. Gavin and two others. There could be more, but no more than one or two. The wounded man he had found on the trail had gasped out that he and the others had found Gavin’s orders to be more and more erratic. The man had attempted to kill Gavin with a blow from behind and been nearly butchered for his trouble. Since then, Alec had seen more and more tracks leaving the group and thought that some of the others were taking whatever opportunity they found to desert their leader.

  Alec didn’t delude himself into thinking that he could best even three, but if he died in the attempt, he would kill Gavin for what he had done to the town. That and the carrying off of Kensey George. Alec was to marry Kensey next month and he knew that Gavin had attacked the town specifically to hurt him by taking something precious from him. As a brother, Gavin left a lot to be desired and Alec regretted not killing him long before now.

  Alec had never been able to pinpoint when Gavin had turned against him. It seemed that there had always been this feeling of animosity between them. His first memory of Gavin was crying as the older boy took a toy from him when he was just a toddler. From there, things had simply escalated to the point where their parents were as happy to see Gavin leave as he was to be going. He had flunked out of college and embarked on a career of hell-raising in another state with a biker gang that seemed to become more of a menace to society as his influence among them grew. Up until the polar shift of five years earlier, Alec and his parents had heard nothing but bad of Gavin and counted themselves lucky that he was gone before he started trouble for them in their home town. Alec had supposed his brother to be dead along with the millions of others who had not survived the earthquakes, floods and sudden winter that followed close on the heels of the polar shift.

  Their home town had not come out of the ‘troubles’ unscathed; half the people in town died of exposure, hunger and disease in the first year until Alec and his cousins had ranged the surrounding area for supplies. One small town they visited had been nearly empty of people, but those that remained had objected to them mining the crushed remains of the grocery store for supplies. Though few in numbers, they had been well-armed and Alec’s offer of shelter for them in exchange for the food had been the only thing that prevented a firefight.

  Since then, the town had grown considerably with the influx of people from other small towns. Each of them had brought the few supplies they had to offer; recognizing that there was safety in numbers. A few roving bands of scroungers had raided some of the towns previously and made things difficult for them; hence the willingness to join with Alec’s town. When the group of Rangers, representing the government, found the town, bringing supplies and equipment with them, most people had supposed that the world was about to return to a semblance of normalcy. After a year, that idea was shaken when Alec returned from guiding a band of Rangers to another town to find that Gavin had raided the town just the day before.

  Seething with anger and concern for Kensey’s safety in Gavin’s hands, Alec had set out on their trail instead of waiting for a messenger to fetch the squad of Rangers. Now he found himself on the new highlands with the bowl of crags left by one of the numerous earthquakes surrounding it, with no one to help him.

  His view of the highland crags was obscured by fog but he could still see many of the trees that once adorned the
land; twisted and fallen by the strong winds, many of them uprooted by the earthquakes. The town had built a flume up the side of the mountain to carry logs down to the river near the town. It had been necessary to divert a creek that, for a wonder, still flowed at the top of the mountain, to float them down the flume. The head of the flume was only a short distance away from the trail and Alec was willing to bet that Gavin and the others had taken refuge in the little cabin the flume-building party had built there. They needed the trees not just for the many cabins they built for the refugees from other towns, but for firewood. The winters here had been bad before the shift, but were brutal afterwards.

  He set out for the cabin, going as quickly and quietly as he could in the fog until he reached the ridge that overlooked it. Once at the top, he crept into position behind the stub of a fallen tree, the trunk long since stripped of its limbs and sent down the flume to the waiting hands below. The flume was only a few miles long, but with the precipitate slope, the logs made the trip to the river in less than an hour. He remembered riding just such a flume at a water-park when he was just a kid and shivered at the thought of riding this one; there were no bends in it to send the logs over the sides, but with the slope, the speed of descent was something he hadn’t experienced since the last time he drove a car.

  The view below was spotty at best; the fog was even thicker in the little vale that held the cabin and he knew he would have to get closer to even see the cabin, much less see any guards that Gavin would have set. Creeping slowly from behind the stump, he brought his feet and legs in front of him and half-slid partway down the ridge until his grasping hands found purchase among the bushes and dead grass on the ridge to slow his descent. Once at the bottom, he moved toward one side where he knew a dugout had been built to shelter tools from the elements. Once the thing was dug into the side of the ridge, a lean-to had been built on the front to close it off from the wind, snow and rain.

  Reaching it, he looked toward the cabin and could barely discern its lines in the fog. It seemed that he could see a man standing to one side, moving a few steps back and forth to keep warm in the wind. The man seemed to be very tall; there wasn’t any rise in the ground there for him to stand on.

  Alec moved further to the side so he could come up behind the guard and as he neared him, he slid his hunting knife from its sheath, determined to cut the man’s throat before he could give warning to those within the cabin. Getting closer, he noticed something strange about the man’s feet; they didn’t touch the ground. Was he sitting on something and dangling his feet? Closer still, he saw the man’s feet were bare and straightened up as he saw that they seemed lifeless.

  Grasping the man by one leg, he plunged his knife into the man’s back at the kidney level and attempted to drag the man down where he could clutch a hand over his mouth. Feeling unnatural resistance to his pull, he looked up at the man in consternation, sure that he was about to be given away and saw the man’s body turn in his grasp. The eyes bulged from their sockets above the protruding tongue and it was then that Alec saw the rope around the man’s neck. Looking up into the fog, he followed the line of the rope to the crosspiece that jutted out from the roof of the cabin and knew that Gavin had hanged one of his own men. With the cold and fog deadening his sense of smell, he hadn’t smelled the pool of offal that congealed below the man’s feet. With disgust, he saw that he had stepped in it and moved backwards, angrily scraping his feet as noiselessly as possible on the tall grass.

  A chuckle brought him around, staring and tense, ready to plunge the bloody knife into whoever might attack him. Surprised at not being attacked, he sought for, and found the source of the almost silent laughter. A man sat on the ground, his hands clutching at the guts that bulged out from a horrific wound in his belly.

  Drawing near, he held the knife so that he could slice the man’s throat if he tried to warn Gavin inside the cabin.

  The man whispered, "No need of that. I’ll be dead soon enough."

  Nodding his head toward the hanged man, he said, "Billy there wanted to split. He told Gavin that he was going to get us all hanged. So, Gavin hanged him. When I tried to stop him, he gutted me."

  Gasping, the man stopped to catch his breath and looked back up at Alec with eyes that seemed to glaze over as he stared into them.

  "Harry slipped off as soon as we got into this fog and I wish to God that I had. There’s no one in the cabin but Gavin and the girl he carried off."

  Alec found his voice and whispered, "Did he…?"

  Shaking his head gently, as though he was afraid it would fall off, the man whispered back, "She offered. In exchange for letting her go so you wouldn’t follow him and get killed. He told her he didn’t care about that. He just wanted you."

  Unsure where to go from here; Alec didn’t know what to do. If he kicked in the door, Gavin would kill him before he could rescue Kensey. If he tried to wait his brother out, there was no telling what he would do to the girl. As though to ask the man what he should do, he grasped the man’s shoulder to shake him out of the swoon he had seemed to fall into and recoiled when the man fell sideways with a slow exhalation. He was dead.

  A faint smell of woodsmoke came to him, signifying that Gavin had a fire going in the little woodstove inside the cabin. An idea came to him then and he moved silently off to the dugout. Pulling the door open as quietly as possible, he crept inside and rummaged around inside until he found the small tub he wanted. The wood-cutting party had used it to wash their plates and cooking utensils after meals and it would work just fine for what he wanted it for.

  He climbed the ridge behind the cabin where it shouldered out almost to the edge of the roof and stepped quietly onto the slick wooden shakes. Being careful to stay on the line described by the central beam, he moved to the stovepipe that stuck up from the roof and quickly removed the cover from it, replacing it with the tub. Tying a length of cord to the handles of the tub, he secured it to the pipe and slid quickly off the roof to land crouching at one side of the cabin. He wasn’t sure if the tub would completely block the egress of the smoke, but it was the best he could do with such limited materials.

  The ever-present clouds began giving up their burden of moisture in the form of a light rain and he tugged the collar of his coat up tighter to his neck. The cold wind was one thing, the cold rain was another and he didn’t want to be wet in addition to being cold. Death by exposure could come even when you were dressed warmly, if you weren’t careful about staying dry. As luck would have it, he was on the windward side of the cabin and thus, not sheltered by it.

  A loud, cursing voice could be heard inside and the side of the cabin vibrated and shook for a moment as something was slammed against the interior wall. Alec tensed himself, readying for Gavin’s exit and hoped he could get off a shot before his brother was aware of him. His hand left the rifle slung on his shoulder and sought the pistol thrust under his belt. It was a heavy, Long Colt and he was sure his brother would recognize it just a moment before it took his life; it had been their father’s gun and a bone of contention between them as young men. Their father had promised it to Alec and Gavin, resentful at not receiving it since he was the elder son, had argued with them both on numerous occasions.

  The door slammed open, banging against the side of the cabin and a blurred figure leapt from the doorway, speeding across the small clearing in front of the cabin and diving behind a woodpile as Alec’s shot rang out. The slug chipped bark from the woodpile, setting several lengths of cut firewood rolling from the pile, but did no other damage. Cursing, Alec ran for the door of the cabin and dived inside as his brother’s shots threw splinters from the door-facing, just missing Alec by inches. He saw Kensey through the smoke that almost filled the cabin, bound on one of the bunks and moved to her side.

  Her eyes were wide above the gag that kept her quiet and he saw that the flesh around one of them was bluish-green where Gavin or one of the other men had hit her. She wasn’t dressed for this weather, having be
en in her classroom when abducted. Though she wore slacks and a blouse, they were light and intended for indoor wear, as were her shoes. He thrust the pistol back into his belt and drew his knife, slicing through the cords that bound her wrists and ankles. As he cut through the last of them, she jerked the gag from her mouth and coughed, wheezing for lack of air.

  "He’s an animal, Alec! He even killed two of the boys in my classroom because they tried to defend me!"

  His eyes on the door, he pulled her off the bunk, keeping low to the floor to avoid the worst of the smoke and moved her to one side at the back of the cabin.

  "I know! No one in town would come with me because he had too many men. If they’d known his men would desert him, I’m sure we could have captured him. But they didn’t, so I’m by myself."

  She clutched at his shoulder, "How are we going to get out? This smoke will kill us!"

  He heard Gavin’s voice, taunting him and stopped for a moment to listen.

  "…in the cabin now, Boy! You’re sure stupid! What are you going to do; smother yourself in the smoke? That’s some plan you had!"

  Struggling to inhale as little smoke as possible, Alec’s fingers worked desperately at a spot in the logs where two logs had peen pieced together with a short length of a trunk. Once he had the caulking and mortar scraped and pried away, he reversed his position and kicked heavily at the short log until it pivoted and fell out of the wall on the outside. Grabbing Kensey where she was almost doubled up, coughing, he pushed her through the hole and followed her, gasping at the clean, damp air. He could still hear Gavin’s taunts and curses on the other side of the cabin as he pushed Kensey bodily up the ridge. He trusted that they would be lost in the fog and rain by the time they reached the top.