A Perfect Circle- Part 2
AUTHOR: evilgrrl
Content/Safety Level for children: CAUTION
Riddick was killing time -- trying to calm down from his encounter with Johns. He had found a very nice hunting knife in one of the dead settlers' quarters, and had sharpened it up until the edge would cut paper. Now he smeared some liquid soap onto his head and began shaving it with the knife. This was a show of bravery, both to himself and to the other survivors. He could not -- *would* not -- let Johns get the upper hand with him again.
In any kind of a fair fight, Riddick would win over Johns. Of course, neither Riddick nor Johns particularly liked fair fights, so Riddick's superior physical condition and fighting skills really weren't that big of a factor. Johns had his own ways of evening up the odds too. But Riddick knew he could come out on top, and, telling himself that, he finished shaving his head without even a nick.
Riddick had expected nothing less. He liked knives -- always had, even as a kid. His real relationship with them, however, had begun at the age of 12 when bigger kid in juvie had tried to stick it up Riddick's ass. Riddick had cut it off for him, and the guy bled to death. Later in his life -- when he was sent to an adult prison at the age of 17 -- this murder conviction would matter a great deal. What mattered *then,* however, to 12-year-old Richard, was that he had established to his fellow inmates that he wasn't anybody's bitch and he never would be. If castrating a guy who'd tried to rape him didn't instill some respect into them, nothing would. Even then, though, Riddick had known he would have to keep proving himself time and again as the years progressed. His skill with knives not only gained him a dangerous reputation, but it also gave him a big advantage over almost any opponent, even guys much bigger and stronger than he was. Of course, by the time he was 18 or 19, there *wasn't* anybody bigger and stronger than he was.
He still liked knives though. He liked the power that they gave him, and he liked their elegance and beauty. What he liked best about them, though -- and Riddick himself would not have been able to articulate it -- was the way a knife felt like a natural extension of his hand, his arm. After he had gotten to know a particular knife -- its heft, the feel of its handle, the sharpness of its blade -- he didn't have to think about how to use it anymore, no more than he had to think about walking. Riddick had a gift for finding the best way to wield a particular weapon, for using just the right finger pressure to make it do exactly what he wanted. He could kill, or just nick. It was his decision. The knife just became a part of him, one more extension of the killing machine Riddick had become.
Riddick thought of the little bone knife he'd made when he'd first escaped on this world -- the one that was now tucked into his boot. Of course, he no longer really needed it, now that he had the hunting knife, but he still liked it never the less. He'd always preferred the shivs he'd made himself to manufactured knives. Manufactured knives were impersonal, but when Riddick made a shiv himself, he felt like he had put a part of himself into it.
He was distracted from his reverie when Johns emerged from the main crew compartment, doubtless where he had been planning their heroic escape.
Johns glanced at him and blanched at the hunting knife. "Hey, I thought I said no shivs!"
Riddick didn't bother to explain the difference between shivs and knives to a man like Johns. He just calmly cleaned the residue of soap from his scalp, and then from his knife. "You mean this?" he asked when the knife was clean. "This is just a personal grooming appliance."
"Don't press your luck."
Outwardly Riddick remained relaxed, but inwardly he tensed, ready to spring if Johns chose to make it an issue. Johns didn't, so Riddick put the knife away and wiped his head again. He had no doubt that Johns wasn't going to just let him go, but he didn't know how Johns was going to get him back into the shackles. He wanted Johns to make the first move. Maybe if the others saw Johns provoke him into a fight, they would believe Johns' death was self-defense, which it would be, since Riddick thought he would probably die if he had to go back to Slam City. Give me liberty or give me death, he thought absently.
The cast aways made their way toward the deserted settlement single file or in groups of two. Riddick walked alone, bringing up the rear of the group. Sarah stayed near the mourning Shazza, who didn't want conversation, but seemed to need the presence of a friend. Ever so often, the boy, Jack, would try to drop back and talk to Riddick, but Johns or Fry always kept him from it. The young boy had shaved his head now too and now wore makeshift goggles in imitation of Riddick, whom he seemed to fear and idolize equally.
Riddick's slow advance to the front of the group was so gradual that Sarah didn't realize he was there until he was right up on her. Reacting to his appearance in her peripheral vision, she turned to glance at him, and he greeted her with a small nod.
She couldn't explain why she was so drawn to him any more than she could explain why he seemed drawn to her. She had told herself that she'd taken him the water out of simple human decency, but none of her fellow passengers -- decent or not -- had done anything for him at all.
Now she felt his presence behind her like a bed of coals. Riddick was impossible to ignore, striding muscularly through the sand. He made her feel self-conscious in a way she hadn't in years. Buried in with her excitement, however, was a low flame of fear. Riddick hadn't hurt her when he was all chained up, but what would he do now that he was free? What would he do to her if he caught her alone? She had been playing with fire and she knew it.
Now she did her best to stifle her alarm and concentrate on getting to the settlement. She relaxed after a moment or two, only to find Riddick taking his place at her side -- as if by unspoken agreement -- and then they walked together.
Jack and the Muslim boys called from the top of the nearest hill that the settlement lay just beyond. Sarah spoke no Arabic, but she could tell from the boys' wild cries and pointing what they were trying to say. The others all rushed up the hill to see the settlement, even the ones who had already been there. Riddick took the opportunity to put his hand on Sarah's neck and squeeze the muscles there. When he pulled away, she felt his handprint like a brand on her skin.
The thing was, Sarah thought to herself as she trudged up the dune, she knew better than to even *consider* a flirtation with such a man. She had known a good number of men like Riddick before, and every one of them had met bad ends. She imagined that Riddick would too, even if Johns freed him. She thought of Riddick burning like a red giant until he imploded gloriously into a white dwarf. Sarah could not imagine anything in his future that could turn his path. The best course of action for her would be to break free from his orbit of gravity entirely. Sometimes, though, the best course of action wasn't possible.
She saw the settlement for the first time as she crested the peak of the hill, feeling the wind blow across her face and billow her hair out behind her. The settlement was as plain and washed out as everything else under the light of the blue sun. But . . . Fry had said there was a skiff here, and the wind was cool, so Sarah tried to keep her spirits up.
It was hard to do, though, as her eyes took in objects in a seemingly random pattern in the settlement. Was that cloth there a tarp hung up for shade, or was it laundry left to dry on the line? Hard to tell. Windows and doors had been left open in some of the buildings. Several metal tools lay in the middle of the path, half-buried in the dirt.
Soon enough she heard the Muslims calling out that they had found water. They seemed to be big ones for shouting, the Muslims did, or maybe it was just because they were still kids. The boys had knelt down to pray by the time Sarah got to the pump, and Paris was filling his own containers like a greedy child. Sarah shrugged it off; they were all going to share and share alike unless or until they got off-planet, and Paris was stupid if he hadn't realized that by now. Hell, even Johns had recognized it when he released Riddick; they needed to pool every resource they had if they wanted to live.
Sarah broke away from the others and ducked into a building with no door at all. It was an office of some kind. She looked in vain for communications equipment or records of any kind. There were a few notebooks scattered on the desks, but their pages were blank and crinkly now, their content erased by the wind and blowing dust. They could tell her nothing.
She came out of the little building just in time to see Riddick moving away from something called a "Coring Room," which at least told Sarah the settlers had spoken English. It looked like Riddick had been doing a little reconnaissance of his own. He looked over at her for just a moment before he obeyed Johns' command to come join the party, and he smiled just a little as he pulled a dusty cloth mat off the roof, revealing Jack hidden underneath. "C'mon, boy!" Riddick mocked Johns' accent. "You're missing the party."
Imam had set out glasses of water for everyone on what looked like a conference table. He and the boys had taken it as a good sign that they had found the water pump -- it had to mean that God favored them. Sarah thought to herself that if there *was* a god, and he was showing them any favor whatsoever right now, it still didn't make up for the rogue comet, or meteor shower, or whatever it was that had destroyed the Hunter-Gratzner.
Riddick himself was also contemplating God at that moment, as he stared at the water in his glass. God seemed to have a strangely black sense of humor, but Riddick's was much the same. Rather than making God in his own image, Riddick wanted to make himself over in the image of a god. To him, God was just another prison screw, another unreasoning authority that inflicted random pain and suffering on him. If he could become like a god, however, maybe the tide would turn.
Or, he thought, he could try to live on borrowed power, like Johns did. He wore that nickel-slick badge as if it meant something to him. But Johns' respect for the law extended only as far as it coincided with his own plans. The reason he had become obsessed with Riddick, was that Riddick wouldn't accept the authority of Johns' position. Johns wanted to *make* his prisoner respect him. But in Riddick's world, you established your own power or you lived under the power of others. Johns couldn't expect Riddick to respect him just on somebody else's say so, even the law's.
Sarah saw Riddick join the little group at the end of the table that was making plans to get the skiff running well enough to leave. She moved a little closer to hear what they were saying better.
"I don't see how that little pissant thing can get us anywhere," Shazza objected. "It's barely big enough for all of us."
"We don't have to get anywhere but the regular shipping lane," Riddick stated flatly. "Then we just stick out our thumb and get picked up."
Sarah found herself being drawn in in spite of herself. "So why can't we just stick out our thumb down here?"
"Too far away," Riddick answered. "I'm guessing we went way off course before we crashed. All the communication equipment on the ship was totaled, and the stuff on the skiff has a pretty limited range. We'll have to get up there, get our bearings, and then navigate to the general vicinity of the trade route before we'll be close enough for anyone to hear us."
"Besides," added Johns, "who wants to stay here any longer than we have to?" She heard faint derision in Johns' voice that she hadn't heard in Riddick's.
"Exactly!" Paris agreed. "If I owned this place and Hell, I'd rent out the planet and live in Hell!" That got a laugh from almost everyone in the little party.
Fry and Johns continued their discussion about how many power cells they would need from the Hunter-Gratzner to run the skiff. Shazza said she thought she could get the solar-powered Sand Cat outside running, and they could use that to haul the power cells and their gear. She and Zeke must have made a formidable team, Sarah thought, if she could hold herself together at a time like this without him.
Imam suddenly noticed a full glass of water that had been left on the table. He glanced about quickly, accounting for his fellow pilgrims. "Ali?" He called quietly. "Has anyone seen Ali? The little one?"
Riddick remembered where Jack had been hiding. The two boys played together a lot. Jack didn't seem to know anything now though.
"Has anyone checked the Coring Room?" It was more of a suggestion of where to look than a question.
Just then they heard a faint cry that could have been the wind howling through the buildings, or a human scream.
The others set down their water immediately and hurried out to find the boy. Riddick, however, methodically walked around the table and drank the water they had left in their glasses. He toasted Sarah with the last one, then they went to the Coring Room together.
If anyone had not known what a "coring room" was, the equipment was self-explanatory. A huge metal drill depended from the ceiling, and Sarah could see different strata of rock in the core sample visible in the plastic shaft of the drill. The drill would dig down into the earth, then come back up with a sample of the rock and soil it had encountered, in the same order and condition it had been found.
"Musta been geologists or something," Shazza speculated. "Advance team, scouts out the planets ahead of the regular miners." She looked at the abandoned equipment all around the room. "Guess it didn't pan out."
Johns went off to the right looking for the boy, and Imam went left, continuing to call his name as he made his way through the dark rooms. A noise brought his attention to what looked like a supply closet. He called for the boy again, but received no answer. Slowly his face twisted into a mask of apprehension as he approached the door. Finally he steeled himself to open it, and a huge mass of large, bat-like creatures flooded out of the opening. They circled into the coring room and dived down into the shaft. Ali's ravaged body fell onto the floor. It was hardly recognizable as human.
It was Riddick that put everything together. Imam had taken thankfully Ali's body away, and everyone else had gathered around the well shaft.
"This is where the settlers are," he stated flatly, taking off his goggles to look down into the depths of the pit. Everyone else wanted to fool themselves into thinking the settlers had just left. Riddick woke them up. "They didn't leave here with clothes left in closets and pictures on the wall. Or eyeglasses on the tables, toothbrushes lying around. The same things that got Zeke got Ali, and those same things are what killed the settlers."
Paris and Shazza turned away from the mining shaft, unwilling to confirm with their eyes what their minds told them. Finally Johns took out one of his percussive flares, lit it, and dropped it into the well. It revealed dozens of human bones lining the shaft as it fell, until it finally came to rest in the middle of a group of skulls.
"This is where they came when it happened. No other place was secure. This building had the strongest doors. So they chained themselves inside and huddled in the dark, waiting for it to be over. But they forgot to lock the basement," he said, gesturing toward the shaft.
"And now they're going to get us too!" For the first time, Jack seemed young and vulnerable, his bravado shredded like Ali's body had been.
"Now let's just wait a minute," Johns interrupted. "Let's not panic. We still don't know exactly what happened. The only places these things have been have been dark -- the tunnel, the mineshaft, and the supply room, or whatever it is. The boy disturbed their nest before he even knew what he'd done. If we just keep to the light, we should be okay. And God knows there's a lotta light on this planet."
Fry still had a puzzled look on her face. "Okay, but if they don't like the light, why did the settlers come in here? Why didn't they stay outside? We've already seen that the suns never set all at the same time . . . " Her voice trailed off until suddenly her face lit up. "That's it! I *knew* there was something about that model!"
With no further explanation, Fry took them to the little model of the solar system she had found earlier in one of the other buildings. Stiff wires held up the several planets in this system, and rotated them around the three suns in the center. The model demonstrated perfectly why daylight lasted forever here, as one sun rose just as the other two set. Fry opened the control panel of the device, and began rotating the gears by hand until they finally came to rest in a most unusual position: with all three suns blocked by the planets that came between the suns and this planet. A perfect eclipse.
"God, that's bloody horrible!" Shazza shivered as she spoke. "Those little buggers came out of their hidey holes and no one could get away -- they don't have any artificial lights here."
"Reminds me of a story a read once," Sarah said softly.
Riddick completed the thought for her. "Nightfall. They burned their entire civilization in one night to keep away the darkness."
Sarah saw that, once again, they were in perfect synch, like the planets lined up during the eclipse. But how could she be on the same wavelength as a killer like Riddick?
"You can't know that's what happened!" Paris objected in an appalled voice. "It could have been . . . " He trailed off, unable to come up with an alternative story.
Riddick, goggles still on his forehead, turned his shining eyes on Paris and looked him straight in the face. "They prepped their escape craft, didn't they? You don't prep your emergency vehicle unless there's a fucking emergency."
"He's fucking right," Jack echoed, regaining a little of his spunk before Fry shushed him.
Sarah continued to stare at the model and the huge ringed planet that stood between their desert planet and the suns. "So when does it happen again?"
Imam, returned from burial duty, opened the shutters a little and the model began to rotate slowly. "It seems as if the planets are moving as one. I would think by looking at this that the eclipse would last for quite some time. But," said as he opened the shutters more so that the model turned more quickly, then checked the numbers in the little window on the model's base, "I think it will be some time before it happens again. A few years perhaps."
"Well, that's a goddamn relief," Johns sighed as he unshouldered his rifle and leaned back on the display table, turning his back on the model in the process. "We'd really be fucked if those things could come and go at will."
Fry once again was the wary voice of reason. "Still, we've got to be careful as long as we're here. They could be in any dark place."
Everyone nodded, eyeing each other nervously, then picked themselves up to return to the conference room. Sarah watched Riddick very deliberately open all the shutters before they left, filling the room with light.
Fry, on the other hand, neither lingered in the model building, nor joined the others in the conference room. She went directly to the escape skiff and began a systems check. Obviously she now wanted to get off this planet more than ever.
Sarah headed to the skiff herself, a few feet behind Fry. She hadn't been inside it yet and wanted to see. When she stepped up onto the entrance ramp, however, she heard Johns' voice and realized that somehow he had beaten both Fry and her to the vehicle. She heard them talking softly but intently. She inched forward silently on her rubber soled shoes until she could hear what they were saying and even see a little, without being seen herself.
"We should wait until we're almost ready to go before bringing over those power cells," Johns was saying.
Fry was preoccupied, checking the equipment. "Why? Then we'd have to make two trips back and forth to the Hunter."
Johns leaned over her shoulder. "Because if this thing is ready to go, and Riddick gets his chance, he'll take this skiff and leave us the fuck behind. He's a pilot -- did you know that?"
Fry only looked up at him for a second. "No, I didn't know. How could I?" She sounded both surprised and angry.
Sarah herself was a little surprised. Piloting wasn't something you could pick up on the fly. What? Had he taken a leave of absence from a killing spree to go to pilot's school for a couple of years?
"Did I ever tell you how he escaped?" Johns had his arm on Fry's shoulder, but Sarah couldn't tell how Fry was taking it. "Highjacked a prison transport. Slashed the pilot's throat. Killed a couple of his fellow prisoners too. Heard enough yet? No? He will do *anything* to escape. He'd leave all of us in a heartbeat."
"But why? I can see why he'd kill his police escort, but why would he kill us? We haven't done anything to him."
"Why do you think?"
Sarah suddenly felt as if she couldn't breathe. A heavy weight pressed down on her lungs for the few seconds Fry paused before replying. The answer came to her just as Fry spoke it. "Because you're not *going* to let him go like you said you would. You're going to chain him up and take him back in!"
Now Johns pulled away from her. "Hey, the law says he's gotta pay. It's not up to me to say any different."
Fry got up to face him. "But it *was* up to you to tell him you had a deal."
"I already know he's not going to keep his side of the bargain. Why should I?
"You know, Riddick hasn't hurt any of us, even though he's had plenty of opportunities. As far as I can tell, he hasn't even lied to us. But, hey, you just do whatever the fuck you want. You're the law, right?"
Johns just glared at her, until she pushed past him and pounded down the boarding ramp, scant seconds after Sarah did.
end part 2
go back to Part 1
go to Part 3
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