Red-Blooded Heart Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Red-Blooded Heart

  a psychological thriller

  by V. J. Chambers

  RED-BLOODED HEART

  © copyright 2019 by V. J. Chambers

  http://vjchambers.com

  Punk Rawk Books

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  CHAPTER ONE

  -juniper-

  He’s not what I imagined.

  I got a recommendation that if I wanted construction work done, Deke Rochester was the guy to ask. The person who told me this said that Deke lives out in the middle of nowhere in a house he built himself and that he lives off the land. So, obviously, that’s the kind of guy that I’d want to help me with my own off-grid homestead.

  Geez, I can’t believe it’s actually happening.

  Years of planning, years of dreaming, years of scrimping and saving and watching Youtube videos and pinning Pinterest pictures of goats and chickens and gardens, and now I’m finally here. I’m finally making this happen.

  When I pictured this Deke guy, I assumed he’d be middle-aged, maybe in his fifties? He’d have a beard, streaked with gray, and he’d be wearing a flannel shirt.

  Well, I got the flannel right.

  Deke is younger than middle-aged. Maybe his late twenties, maybe his early thirties. He’s my age. He’s hot.

  He’s got the facial hair thing going on, but it’s not a full-on beard. I get the impression he only bothers to shave when he thinks about it, and the growth on his chin—which is red while the curly hair on his head is brown—is scraggly, different lengths, and it travels down his neck to where his flannel shirt is open, and I can see that he has curly hair on his chest too. It’s reddish brown, sort of a mix of the color of his beard and the hair on his head.

  I like chest hair.

  Some girls don’t. I think they want their men to look like Ken dolls or something. I always want a man to look like, well, a man.

  His fingernails are dirty and so are his hands. He’s gesturing while he’s talking to me, and I can see the dirt in the grooves of his knuckles and the lines of his palms. The dirt is red, too. All the soil around here has that reddish tinge. He has a little bit of red hair growing on the back of his fingers.

  His thick, thick fingers.

  God, his hands are so wide and powerful and big. He’s got big shoulders and a tapered waist, and he’s hot.

  Maybe he’s hot in spite of himself. He shouldn’t be, because he’s so unkempt, but the unkempt thing really works for him. All the messy curly hair and the dirt and the muscles and he’s like a trapped beast in flannel or something.

  I keep crossing my legs and then uncrossing them. I’m trying to concentrate on whatever it is we’re supposed to be talking about, but he’s distracting.

  “…playing house out there. It gets brutal, especially in the winter. Sometimes we get deep snows, and it’s not like there’s a plow coming out here to clear the roads,” he says.

  I raise my eyebrows at him. Oh, well, I guess I expected this attitude from the middle-aged Deke of my imagination, but I had thought that this attractive Deke would be different. I think if he’d been old and ugly, I’d be angrier. But he’s young and hot, so I just smile at him. “You don’t think I can handle living out here?”

  “Well, no offense, lady, but a lot of grown men go running back to civilization with their tails between their legs after their first winter.”

  “Grown men?” I say, nodding. “And, of course, me being a teensy, weensy little girl, it would be twice as hard for me to handle it.”

  He spreads his hands. “No offense.”

  I laugh. There’s an edge to it.

  He sits back in his chair and fold his thick, thick forearms over his chest. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t guess it matters whether I can hack it or not,” I say. “I’m not here for your advice. I’m here to see if you can build this.” I slide the plans to my house across the table to him.

  He pages through it, furrowing his brow.

  “At first, I wanted to convert a shed,” I say. “You can get them pre-fabricated and delivered, and then all I’d have to do was the interior. But—”

  “No, you don’t want to do that.” He fixes me with penetrating dark eyes. “It’s a waste of money. They overcharge for those pre-fab sheds and the materials they use are subpar. It’s cheaper and better to start from scratch. More freedom too.”

  “Well, as you can see, I came around to your way of thinking.” I reach across the table to tap the plans. We are sitting in a restaurant in Daviston, the closest town to the patch of land that I have purchased here in the backwoods of West Virginia.

  Everyone I know thinks I’m insane. They don’t understand why I would leave the relative comforts of the city to come out into the middle of nowhere and live off the grid and off the land. I can’t explain it to them. All I can say to them is that the lives they live seem confining to me, like a prison. And I want open space and fresh air.

  “I thought about doing the work myself,” I say. “But I’ve got no experience, and this is going to be my home. I figure I’d rather have someone do it who knows what’s what. They tell me you’re the guy.”

  He looks up from the plans. “You did these yourself?”

  “Well, it took a lot of research to get to this point, so it’s not as if I can take all the credit for all the ideas, but—”

  “It’s smart not going for a sleeping loft,” he interrupts. “A lot of people do that because of the space-saving measures. Little houses like this, people think that’s the way to go. But in the summer—”

  “Yeah, really hot,” I say. “And I’m not going to live out in nature to be using my solar panels to try to power an air conditioner. That’s not my idea of getting away from it all.”

  “Exactly.” He nods at me. There’s respect in his expression now. “You could still do a loft, though. For storage or some extra space.”

  “If you look at the last page…” I reach over and page through the plans I handed him. “There’s an alternate drawing of that?”

  He looks at it, nods. “Yeah, I’d go for this.” He pokes one of his meaty fingers on the paper. “This is good.”

  �
�Well, does that mean that you can do it?”

  He gives me a lopsided smile. “Oh, sure, I can do it. But something like this, it isn’t going to be cheap.”

  “I’ve got the money,” I say. “I’ve been saving up. From what I understand, it takes a lot to get going, but then it takes a lot less to keep it up.”

  “That’s true,” he says. He leans back. “So, uh, where are we building this little homestead?”

  “It’s out Fisher’s Road, but past where it turns to a dirt road, up the mountain. It might be hell to get supplies out there.”

  “Huh,” he says, cocking his head to take me in. “We’re going to be neighbors.”

  * * *

  -deke-

  At first, I don’t feel especially good about finding her attractive. I don’t always have a tendency to be attracted to the right kind of girl. Not that I’m attracted to trashy girls or anything, because I’m not, but I do tend to fall for girls who don’t have any real sense of what things are worth. Girls who value all the wrong things.

  But then this Juniper Gilbert person starts to win me over. She’s smart, and she knows what she’s talking about. She’s done her research, and she seems pretty serious about what she wants. She wants a modest house with an area nearby to keep chickens. She says she’ll start that right away, and then if that goes well, she might move in some goats as well, for milk. Her first year, she says she’ll need to rely on food that she’ll be bringing with her, but that’s okay, because she’s been buying up shelf-stable food for the past several years.

  She’s more ready than other people who I’ve seen try to do this. A lot of people romanticize the idea of living off the land, disconnected from everyone else. It sounds real Little House on the Prairie. But they don’t have any idea how soft they’ve become, how destroyed by all the living they do that is easy and safe and dulled.

  I respect her.

  I like her.

  She’s pretty, but not in that overstated way. She’s not wearing lots of makeup and she hasn’t used products on her hair. She’s got an earthiness to her. She has freckles on her nose. And when she gets annoyed with something I’ve said, she smiles in this way that tells me that she’s got a hidden toughness to her.

  She might make it out here.

  She might actually make it.

  This part of West Virginia doesn’t have much going for it. There isn’t even coal here. Not too many people live in West Virginia to begin with. It’s not really an attractive destination. But even less people live out here. And where she wants to build, well, the population is practically zero.

  I came here precisely because I didn’t want to be around anyone. I’m not interested in advertising where the hell that I am. I’m a private person.

  Thus far, it’s worked out pretty well for me.

  Partly because there aren’t cute girls like her to distract me or make me do stupid things.

  See, I’ve done some stupid things for women that I cared about in my time. Really stupid things. And are women ever grateful for that shit? No, they are not.

  Women don’t tend to be like this Juniper woman. They don’t want solitude, and they don’t want to work with their hands. At least not the women I tend to be entangled with.

  Those kinds of women, they want a connected group, people to talk to. They want comfort, not hardship. They don’t want to work for anything that can be given to them. They want soap and boxes of cake mix and hair spray. They want civilization.

  All of that—everything people build—it’s fake in some ways. It’s built on top of nature, and it hides the brutal and beautiful truths that are the world around us. The more that people build, the less that anyone even knows about the world that we live in. They don’t know where their food comes from or what it’s like to be uncomfortably hot or cold. They live in a blind, bland world made by human hands.

  Of course, you could argue it the other way. You could say that humans are the pinnacle of nature, that we take all of our environment and make it into the image that we want to, and that our creation is the only thing that is truly real, that everything else is just a raw material to be used and twisted to our will. We are the masters of the earth, we have the right to do what we wish to it.

  I don’t know which way it is.

  I don’t want to live in a city, though. I need space to breathe. I don’t want civilization. I want primitiveness. I want barbarism. I want savagery.

  “Neighbors?” Juniper’s saying. “But the whole point of this is to not have any neighbors.”

  I chuckle. “Well, don’t worry. We’re a good half a mile down the road from each other. I won’t be able to see in your windows at night or anything.”

  She smiles. The way she’s looking at me…

  I don’t smile. I look away.

  “You going to do this job for me or what?” she says.

  “Sure thing,” I say.

  She offers me her hand.

  When our fingers touch, it feels like the world is charged up.

  This Juniper? She might be trouble.

  CHAPTER TWO

  -deke-

  I am jacking off later and thinking about Juniper Gilbert. I don’t do that often. Well, the jacking-off part I do about as much as necessary. But the thinking-about-actual-people-while-doing-it part? That I don’t do. It’s weird, right, because then when I see them again, I remember that I thought about them naked, and I feel embarrassed. I blush, and it’s the worst to blush when you’re a guy.

  You know what people think about guys who blush? They think they’re weak. Maybe an endearing sort of weakness, but a weakness all the same, and that I can’t stand. I’m not weak.

  Anyway, it’s all going to be hell later when I see Juniper again, and I will see her, because I have agreed to build her house. It’s funny, because I never knew that summer job in construction that my stepdad forced me to take on was going to come in so helpful. Back then, I didn’t want anything to do with a job like that, and I told him so. I was going to college, and I was going to make my way in the world by my wits, not by my brawn.

  Incidentally, back then, I didn’t have any brawn. I was a skinny teenager, a weakling, and my stepdad knew it, and he made me take that construction job, and I spent the summer working my ass off, and I hated it.

  I hated him.

  My stepdad always was an asshole.

  But I have to admit that it helped me out, the construction gig anyway. When I had to take off for parts unknown and lay low, it was good to have some practical skills. And now, I can put them to use for Juniper, make some cash. It’s always nice to have a little cash.

  I’ve never built a whole house like this, but I have done some other work for people around town, though. Not whole houses, but sheds, repairs, new kitchen counters, that sort of thing.

  It’s good to lay low, but it helps for people to know you a little, and to like you. “Oh, yes, he’s a nice young man. He repaired our roof and charged us a very fair price,” they should say. Not, “Yeah, he’s a fucking recluse, and no one ever sees him and he’s probably got bodies buried on his property.” For example. That’s a thing you don’t want people to say.

  The first house I built on my own was this one, though, where I live. It’s a little rough around the edges, because I didn’t know what I was doing when I was setting it up, but it’s a pretty great little place and I’m proud of it.

  I originally just built a small, square cabin, and I had a wood stove in it and a sort of bed/couch thing. At the time when I first got out here, it was summer, and I could sleep outside with a campfire, but I knew that I would need shelter once winter came, so I spent all my time working on getting the house built and getting all the things I needed for it, like the insulation and the windows and things. I had some money my mother had given me, not a lot, but it was enough.

  I got the house built, the tiny cabin, before the winter came in, but then the issue was food. I could hunt, of course, and I did, but it was sometime
s hard to get food in the snow. That was when I started doing the odd jobs in town for cash. That helped me to buy things like rice and beans—stuff that I could store and eat on that would give me energy when I couldn’t get food myself.

  The next year, I planted a garden, and I learned how to can. This also necessitated building a better kitchen than I’d had before. I had a well dug, but I hadn’t bothered with any kind of plumbing, but now, it seemed like a good idea. So, I built the kitchen onto the front of the house, and then later, I also added the bathroom on the back, with a self-composting toilet that I saved up for.

  Later, I added a porch onto the house, and I built a hot tub on the back. The water for the hot tub is heated by burning wood, not electricity. I do have some electricity, mostly to run the well pump, but I also use it for other things like the internet and a few LED lights. I have a small solar array for that kind of stuff.

  I have internet because the phone line runs up the mountain, even though the electric doesn’t. Some people paid for the phone line to run all the way up here years ago. I don’t know who, but they used to live in this abandoned house a mile past mine. Anyway, they aren’t there anymore.

  This, of course, could mean that you could say I’m not technically off the grid, if you want to be a purist. But I’m not a purist.

  Juniper is planning for something much larger than what I have, and she says she has the money for it. She doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl who’s a rich kid, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes, trust-fund kids do stuff like this on a lark. “Oh, sure, I’m going to go live off the grid!”

  She isn’t a kid, but near as I can tell, the length of one’s adolescence corresponds exactly to how long one’s parents will pay for everything.

  I should find out if she’s rich or not. If she is, that’ll be a great inducement to stay away from her. Build the house and ignore her from then on. That’s definitely the smartest thing to do.

  I have a cell phone, which only gets service some of the time, and a laptop, and I settle onto my couch/bed, because it is still my biggest piece of functional furniture, and open the laptop to see what I can discover about Juniper Gilbert.