Page 37 of Dark Side of the Cloth

He took a moment to look around the stairwell. The stench of body odor, old grime, and rotting food was plentiful while graffiti covered every wall. On the ground, Dean saw dirt, cardboard, and a slue of random items. He couldn’t take a step without crushing some form of garbage.

Pulling the knife from his vest, he spun it in his hand as he picked the least obstructed way to enter. He knew that Jeremy was in the building, but he had no idea which one of the dots was his target.

Deciding to check the left first, he headed straight for the person sitting in the hall on some cardboard. As he drew closer, it wasn’t difficult to determine that this woman wasn’t going to notice him. The female was alive, but her eyes stared blankly at the wall, and a band was wrapped around her arm, with a needle sticking out of her vein.

Dean stared down at the young woman and shook his head.

He’d seen a lot of this. His father loved keeping the women that serviced his guards and workers very compliant. Force-feeding them drugs was an easy way to make them dependant and coming back for more, even if the men treated them like a slab of meat to abuse.

Moving on, Dean looked into the next room, and there was a man lying on his side facing the door, but his face was too old, and the beard was a giveaway that he was not who Dean was seeking.

Room after room was the same, people high and staring blindly at nothing or rocking back and forth as they came down off their high. Either way, none of these individuals were able to think clearly enough to remember him being there. So, Dean jogged up the stairs to the top floor, where the last heat signature in the building was located.

Unlike the other people he’d found so far, this individual was moving around. He could hear the distinct sounds of mumbling and shuffling of feet. Dean leaned in closer to the entranceway and saw this person’s shadow on the hallway wall.

“What have I done? What have I done?” a male voice moaned.

Dean watched and waited until this person's shadow stopped moving and peered around the doorway into the room. There Jeremy was in the same black hoodie and ripped jeans, smacking himself on the head. “What have I done? Oh god, what have I done?”

Quickly assessing the space, Dean spotted the gun Jeremy had used to rob Mabel. It was lying on an old sleeping bag. Unfortunately, Dean had no way of knowing if it still had rounds in it from earlier or if Jeremey had reloaded the weapon.

Jeremy stopped pacing, and Dean held his position. When he turned his back to Dean, he grabbed the rotting frame around the window and continued ranting. “What have I done?”

Like a shadow of death, Dean stepped into the room and again stood perfectly still. Jeremy’s fist slammed into the wall beside the window, causing small bits of rotted drywall to scatter around the floor, and Dean pounced. He grabbed Jeremy around the waist and lifted his thin frame easily, slamming him onto the sleeping bag.

Jeremy grunted with the explosive impact as Dean quickly pinned him with his knee on his chest and one boot on his arm. His wide, bloodshot eyes stared up at Dean and then glanced toward the gun.

“Do it, and I will slit your throat before you can even get a grip on the gun.” Jeremy’s hand shook, but he laid it flat on the floor. “Good choice. Considering you’ve made some very terrible ones this evening.”

Jeremy’s eyes blinked, and then his mouth dropped open a little. “You’re the-the p-priest,” Jeremy stuttered. “But you look like a super-soldier in a movie.”

“What I am is the man that is holding your life in my hands. What you choose to do next is going to determine if you live or die tonight. Do you understand me?” Jeremy licked his lips and nodded. “Very good. Let me be clear with you, so we don’t have any mixed signals. I want to kill you.” The body under his knee shook a little harder. “And if it weren’t for the sweet old woman you stabbed and robbed tonight, we would be having a very different conversation right now.”

“Wait, Mabel’s alive?”

“No thanks to you, but yes, she pulled through the surgery and seems to be heading in the right direction.” What Jeremy did next shocked him more than anyone had in a long time.

“Thank you, God!” Jeremy’s eyes found his, and tears spilled down his dirty cheeks. “Kill me, please just end this. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t be this person. Mabel was the only person that treated me with any kindness, and I hurt her, I…” Jeremy looked away from him. He no longer was tense beneath his knee, and he seemed to have resided himself to his fate.

“My only friend and I tried to kill her when she tried to give me food instead of her money.” Jeremy slowly looked back up at him, and the pain he saw was too familiar.

Only a soul that has seen horrific abuse for far too long had a look like that—a bottomless pit of true despair, so death becomes the best option.

At one point, before Dean escaped the prison that was his father’s compound, he felt like that, and he knew the look on the young man’s face all too well because it had been on his own. Now, he understood what Mabel saw in Jeremy. He wasn’t a malicious person by nature—he was a product of his circumstance. The question was, what would Jeremy do if he was given a better choice?

Taking a chance, Dean slowly rose and stared down at Jeremy. Predictably, Jeremy grabbed the gun, and his hand violently shook as he pointed it up at Dean.

“You need to kill me! You can’t leave me to live like this anymore. I’m worse off than the rats that come in at night to steal my food. Please.” Jeremy’s bottom lip quivered as much as the gun.

“With your hand shaking like that, you may kill me before I can kill you.” The young man looked at the weapon in his hand and then tossed it down on the floor.

“I have no more bullets. I couldn’t kill you if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to? If you had one bullet in there, what would you do with it?”

Eyes, as lost as a ship stranded at sea, looked up to him. “I’d put it in my mouth.”

“Stand up,” Dean ordered.