Empty

She had been lying on her side, facing the empty half of her bed. He had stared at her for some time, her parched and withered flesh stretched over shapely bones, fading hair still red and draped over her sunken face like coils of delicate copper thread. Her lips were drawn back over her white teeth. She'd been young.

Her night clothes were tossed to the floor, a lacy black bralette and cotton shorts webbed with dust. An empty prescription bottle had been turned upside down on the nightstand beside a lifeless smartphone and a coffee mug stained with wine residue.

A filthy and mouse-chewed pillow was tucked between her arms in a comfortable way that made him feel uneasy. Then he saw the chain in her skeletal hand.

Though he felt reverence, and had no desire to disturb the tomb-like room, he had taken it. On its length had been half of a silver heart-shaped locket, like an upside down teardrop. It was sealed shut, and though he tested the closed face with his knife, he didn't allow himself to pry it open. It was meant for the other half and was locked without it. He had stared at it a long time, then, compulsively, self-consciously, draped it around his own neck. He had glanced around the room as if the rest of the locket might just be lying there, but he knew it wasnt. Another pillow and disturbed blankets had lain opposite of her, and he'd wondered if someone else was supposed to have fallen asleep there for last time as well. Maybe the bearer of the other half.

He had turned away, stuffed an oversized blue hooded jacket he had taken from her closet into his dingy brown backpack, and had left the bedroom with a final look, closing the door behind him.

Now he sat staring into a small fire, wearing that same blue hoodie hidden beneath a heavy brown raincoat. He turned the locket over in his grimy fingers, then leaned back into a cheap armchair. The fire was burning inside a metal cooking pot in the middle of a small hotel room. The ceiling was sooted, and smoke drifted up and lingered above his head.

He glanced out the grimy third floor window at the dead town silhouetted against the dark blue sky of impending night. He watched as a final blood-red sliver of sun slid down behind the weed strewn roof of a burned out gas station.

He couldn't remember his own name. He thought he was from the town but maybe he had just drifted in. Every day had been part of a dreamlike cycle of scavenging, storing up for a cold winter, wandering the lonely small town ruins without any purpose outside of survival.

L

The canned food at the grocery store had mostly been cleared out and he had taken what was left. Then the convenience stores and gas stations were picked. Then he moved on to the houses. He saw no one but the dead. Some had died in their beds like the girl. Others were lying in shop floors, or in garbage bins, a few with bullet and knife holes in their skin. He found two lying in chains in a basement, and their skeletons were tiny and scarred, and when he hurried back to his hotel room he didn't sleep that night. He didn't go back into the basements until he ran out of food again.

He didn't go back into the basements until he ran out of food again.

He lived like this for a long time. Not knowing himself, why he was there or how long. Seasons came and went. Winters were hard and he became hard, and bitter and more confused. He became frugal with his supplies, and when he ran out of bottled water he drank from the river that he had learned to fish.



One spring he found a .308 rifle in a truck with two boxes of ammunition, but never had occasion to use it. He shot a cat once but there was wasn't much left of the obliterated creature for him to eat. He kept it hidden in his Rose River Hotel room and took it out occasionally only to hold the barrel in his own mouth, and rest a finger on the trigger.

He thought occasionally that he might leave the town, but it seemed as impossible and foolish as a goldfish leaving its own bowl. The dying world outside of this place, beyond the bodies he knew by name, beyond the dark basements and dusty attics, was a frightening and illusionary dimension, a concept beyond his own faded and tangled reality that he was only just unraveling for himself, in his crafting of a simple home to comfortably die within.

And then he found the girl, and the locket. It felt warm and comfortable around his neck after he put it on, and he hadn't taken it off since. It gave him a sense of connection, of humanity. He found himself wondering who's face might be inside. A boyfriend, a girlfriend, a pet, a grandmother. Each day he felt more compelled to find the other half, as if he had lost something of his own, and without it, without joining the halves and opening the locket, he wouldn't be content. More than that it became a purpose, and he thought less often of the world beyond, and of the rifle under the bed.

He found himself searching corpses more closely, peeling back rotted clothes and slipping his hands into pockets knobbed with bone. He started investigating every drawer in town, every glovebox, every jewelry box, even mailboxes and shoeboxes. It became his sole ambition for leaving his Rose River nest, and he began to gather fewer supplies. Winter was closing in and he would fish half-heartedly, or scrounge in places he'd already stripped clean, his mind absorbed by a mental checklist of places he hadn't found the locket.

The days ran together like bottles of spilled ink, swirling into a gray timeless cycle, one of wandering and opening drawers and breaking glass and holding the closed locket in a filthy gloved hand and looking out passively at the dark wooded hills beyond the town, like staring into the empty abyss of death.

Then came a cold morning with a pale sun, and he stood by the back brick wall of Hermon's Tire and Oil, digging through sagging and frost laced cardboard boxes. He stood with a rusted oil can in his hand.

The brick exploded in a stinging dust beside his head, and he heard the thunderous crack of a rifle from across the road, from inside the grocery store.

He dropped with his hand against his face and crawled behind a flat-tired pickup truck. The sound echoed away and all was silent again except for his own jagged breaths and his heart pounding in his cold ears. He listened and when he heard nothing he stood to a crouch and fled around the corner.

Another living person in his town felt as foreign and dangerous to him as something crawling around inside his guts, and he ran for the hotel, with fear and fury. He lunged up the stairs four at a time and when he got to his room he locked the door behind him and looked out the window.

The sun shone down on wind rustled wild growth, on brown vines creeping across streetlights and leafless trees growing up from potholes, but nothing else moved. He took out the rifle, checked the slim 4-round magazine and slid it into place with a click. He drew back the bolt and chambered a round, then made for the door. He turned the dead bolt and stepped out onto the balcony. A shot rang out and the metal banister popped and a sharp pain tore across his leg. The stranger knelt in the parking lot, beside the burned out husk of a station wagon and the blackened remains of a skeleton named Mr. Belt Buckle.

Hands shaking, the lord of Rose River returned fire, numb and disbelieving. The rifle sounded like the roar of God as it exploded against the pink stucco, and he nearly fell back. He looked into the lot and the figure below was writhing in it's own blood, and with his ears ringing the world felt truly to be a dream.

He limped down the stairs carefully, stopping at the second floor to raise the rifle uneasily at the dying stranger. The figure still moved, but slowly, and the blood was spreading.

As he crossed the cold and sunny parking lot, he began to hear moans. He could see steam rising from the blood, and he kept his rifle to his shoulder. Then silence. He shuffled up to the cracked and blackened asphalt surrounding the burned car, and looked down.

A man lay there, bearded and dirty. He had died, and blue eyes stared out from pale skin, skin that looked so fresh and strange. The side of his neck had been torn away by the shot. A well-worn rifle, lever-action, lay by his feet. Mr. Belt Buckle's tarnished and melted namesake lay in the cooling blood.

He carefully knelt, still shaking, still terrified by this presence of man that would now join the others that kept him company in town. He rifled through filthy pockets, the satchel that was slung low at the man's hip. The man wore a heavy coat that was soaking in the blood.

As he pulled the coat back to see what else he could salvage, he froze, caught in a fresh wave of shock that trapped his clouded breath in his throat.

The other half of the locket lay against the man's chest, a drop of silver against a curtain of blood. It was hanging from a zipper clasp, a makeshift repair to the man's shirt.

At first he felt elation and disbelief. Then a sense of rage as he took it in his fingers and pulled it free. How long had this man, this trespasser been in his realm? How had this man found it? How long had he been feverishly searching in vain because of him?

He stood and felt the pain in his leg, hot and bitter. He turned and limped back to his room, not looking back at the body.

He sat on the bed, nude except for the rough cloth bandage on his leg. A bucket of bloody water sat by the door. The cookpot fire burned at his feet and grey light faded in through the dirty glass of his window.

In each freshly cleaned hand he held the locket halves. He held them closer, then looked out over his town. The sun had been overtaken, and snow now fell in slow heavy flakes, resting over the dark and overgrown houses and churches and stores, and all their eternally sleeping denizens resting in the dark and hidden places, and all was silent.

He pushed the flat inner edges of the halves together, and they snapped tight with magnets, forming the heart, and the clasped lids released. He shivered and looked at them, then slowly lifted the face of the one he had found on the stranger.

There was the red haired girl, smiling and pale faced and bright with life. He recognized her. His head swam and he tried to remember her, and the withered form he left in the bedroom seemed more pitiful to him now.

Then, hesitantly, he slipped his fingernail under the other silver lid. Had he murdered her lover? Had that stranger left her for dead so long ago, slipping out of the bed as she faded away? Or had he simply been a scavenger? With those dead blue eyes in his mind, he lifted the lid.

The fresh faced young man in the locket photo had brown eyes, and a wide innocent smile crossed his smooth cheeks.

And he wore a hooded blue jacket.