I knocked into a hidden shelf that was covered from top to bottom with empty beer cans and the ensuing noise made my skin crawl. I kept expecting the guy attached to the screaming voice to show up, but there was no sound of movement as I continued to navigate my way through the mess. It made me tense and had me on high alert, but once I picked my way through the junk and entered what I assumed was the main living area of the house, everything became clear.
The guy was sitting on a sagging couch. I could barely pick him out among the empty food containers and empty bottles and cans. He was listing to one side and it was pretty clear that he only had full function and total mobility on one side of his body. One arm hung listlessly at his side and one side of his face didn’t react at all when he caught sight of me. The half of his face that did have mobility twitched and pulled tight in anger. It took a second but recognition slipped in, and all the bits and pieces that were missing from the puzzle started to click into place.
I lifted an eyebrow at the man as he continued to glare at me from the couch.
“You already destroyed my entire life, you foreign piece of shit. What are you doing here, Gates?”
I looked around at the mounds of stuff piled on top of more stuff and then glanced down at the floor, which literally seemed to move under my feet.
“If you had kept your hands to yourself, neither one of us would be here.” Sitting across from me, forever altered and forever trapped in a prison of his own making, was the man that I had pulled off of Key and beaten within an inch of his life all those years ago.
“Fuck you. Get out of my house.”
I could see how badly he wanted to get to his feet and confront me, but he lacked the strength to accomplish this.
“Where is your son?”
The man’s face pinched in a furious frown and his good hand curled into a fist.
“I don’t know. The little bastard took off weeks ago and I haven’t seen him.”
“You mean he didn’t want to stay here in these luxurious accommodations?” I let the sarcasm drip from my voice.
The man growled and finally clawed and lumbered his way to his feet. One arm was useless by his side and one leg was slower and limped more than the other as he shuffled toward me.
“My old lady bailed when I ended up in the hospital after you were done with me. Couldn’t really explain why I had my ass handed to me at a strip club, so the bitch got all uppity and took off, sticking me with the brats. I can’t hardly fucking move thanks to you and yet I’m supposed to raise kids and take care of this shithole?”
“From what I hear, the state took your kids, and apparently the things you were doing to them mean this pigsty is exactly what you deserve.”
One side of the man’s face twitched and his eyes narrowed. “We all get what we deserve in the end, so where does that leave you, Gates?”
It was a good question. The answer was: probably where I started—in hell.
“I need to find your boy. You messed him up good and he’s going to get himself in the same kind of trouble you found yourself in.”
“I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. He’s the one that called the state and had the girls yanked outta here. Now I don’t got anyone to help me out around here. I might as well die.”
The smell of the hovel was starting to get to me, and I could see the guy wouldn’t be of any help even if he did know where his kid was at. This was a broken, twisted human being, and I could understand why his son held me personally responsible for his awful home life. Before I had given the old man a beatdown, he had no doubt been a terrible man, but some of that evil had been taken out of the home and spread around the Point. When I crippled him, made him homebound, undoubtedly all that awfulness had been trapped in these walls and buried the poor kids here right along with the hoard. He couldn’t victimize the outside world so he kept all his deviant and violent tendencies right at home.
I met the man glare for glare. This was a time when the consequences of my actions were staring me right in the face and I had to be accountable for the things I had done. I was the one who put all this squalor in motion all those years ago by letting the monster I was trained to be off the leash. Showing my true colors had pushed Key away and had sent this man’s son on a path of vengeance I couldn’t blame him for choosing.
“Your family deserves better than you.”
He grunted and took another tottering step toward me. “Get out of my house, Gates. I’ll see you in hell.”
That made me grin at him as I kicked my foot back so that it connected with a cluttered entertainment center piled high with garbage and other junk. The TV was the old tube kind that weighed a good couple of hundred pounds. I stepped out of the way just as the unit fell forward and landed right on the other man.
He screamed and went down to the grotesquely dirty floor with a thud, his entire lower half caught under the weight of the unit and the old television. He gazed up at me with unfiltered hatred as I bent over and put my hands on my knees to look at him with disgust.
“I bring perdition with me wherever I go, so you won’t have to look far. Maybe while you lie there, hungry, scared, worried if someone will find you in your own filth before you die, you can think about the fact that maybe if you had taken care of your own instead of perverting it, corrupting it, you would have had someone here to save you. You would have had someone around who cares if you live or die. Our actions define us and every move you’ve made from the start has been the wrong one.”
With his good arm he was shoving at the furniture trapping him to the floor. He was huffing and puffing in exertion but that didn’t stop him from telling me he wanted to kill me, and swearing vengeance and revenge with every other breath.