Twelve
“We don’t know when it’s going to happen so panicking about it is stupid, Carolyn.” Johns tried to sound positive as he walked with Fry towards the skiff, but he couldn’t even convince himself. “The wings are almost fixed, and Shazza’s nearly finished with the sandcat. We get the power cells here, and then we’re off this rock.” His head started to hurt again, and he knew he would have to tread carefully. Twice in one day was all that he needed; any more than that and he would start to get sloppy and too much had already happened for that to be a wise move.
Johns took one more look around as they approached the skiff. He couldn’t see Imam and his boy, or Paris; Shazza and Jack crawled over the sandcat. He looked at Shazza with nearly the same contempt he had for Riddick. Of Riddick, there was no trace, and that really concerned him. Because he could feel him and he knew he was close, he just couldn’t see him. He told himself he was cold for other reasons as he followed Fry into the skiff.
“We have another problem, Johns.” Fry had changed over as much as she could in the skiff, she had tried one configuration after another and no matter what she had tried it all came out the same. There was only so much weight she could get rid of, any more and there wouldn’t be enough food or water to survive whatever happened in space until they got picked up. Her voice lowered as she spoke to Johns. “This skiff won’t take all of us, no matter how many different ways I try to wire it; it’s just not going to work.”
Johns sat silently, shaken to the core by what she had said. She ran over what she had tried so far. The skiff was ancient, and it was a struggle to adapt the system to accept the new power cell as it was. She had thought that if they had more than the five cells they needed, that the extra power would get the skiff off the ground with all of them. It would, but it would also fry every electrical system and they would plummet back to the surface of the planet.
Her voice took on a sarcastic bitter tone as she mentioned that if they were lucky they would at least clear enough air so that when they came back down again they would actually die this time and it wouldn’t be such a big deal to get eaten. Every scenario left her more and more desperate, and the panic in her voice really started to grate on Johns’ nerves. He held his hands in fists to stop the shakes. Three times a day. He swore he would never do that and that he could handle it if he only needed it twice a day.
He looked out of the back hatch at Shazza as she bent over the sandcat. It had already turned over once, whatever else Shazza was, she was a hell of a mechanic. It didn’t change the fact that he would be happy to see her die, to do it himself, if it came down to it. Preferably right in front of Riddick. “We need them right now, Fry. We need them to go along, to make it as easy as possible until we can ditch whoever we have to in order to get this beast off the ground. We can’t get the cells here ourselves, we either need Shazza to fix the sandcat, or we need Riddick, to carry the cells.” In his mind Johns had already started to run through scenarios of who they could get rid of. The thought that he might get to shoot Shazza had turned him on, and that began to scare even him a little.
Johns told Fry that they would have to be especially careful of Riddick, who could pilot the skiff. If Riddick thought he didn’t need them, he would be more than willing to kill them in order to secure his own escape. Johns leaned back against the skiff’s bulkhead and took great joy in his effort to frighten Fry into doing what he wanted her to do. That he used Riddick to do it made it even better.
It didn’t even take much effort, he just told her of Riddick’s escape the last time, where he had slit the pilot’s throat and stole the transport ship. “So we wait until Shazza fixes the sandcat, we take everyone with us back to the crash ship to get the cells. We deal with it when the cells are hooked up and we know we don’t need them for anything anymore.”
Fry felt herself break inside at the sound of his words. ‘Deal with it.’ Johns would kill the rest of the survivors. No, they would both kill the rest of the survivors, right out there outside the skiff once they were assured that they had the power cells and that they wouldn’t have a fight on their hands with the rest of the survivors. There was a part of her, deep inside, that screamed ‘no! This is wrong, Carolyn, you can’t do this.’ She knew she was truly lost when that was the part she tried to silence, because she wanted to survive. Above everything else she wanted to survive, and she would do anything, anything at all, to see that it happened.
But still that moment dragged out, as if to let her see clearly how far she had fallen. She wanted to scream, to swear, anything, but that’s not what happened, and she was damned for it. “What happens if the eclipse happens in the meantime, Johns?”
Johns grinned to himself. He had been worried at first; he thought she had been about to back out, for just a moment. Her face had paled and her hands shook, and then that grim resolve was back; she would do anything to survive, and that’s what he would use against her, to get her to do what he wanted.
“Then we’ll need Riddick even more. Not only can he see in the dark, but he’s strong enough to pull the cells; neither of us can do it. We get everyone back to the crash ship, and shoot the rest there. Riddick will go along if it means his own survival; he doesn’t really give a shit about anything else. This thing with Shazza and Jack is a sham, a way to divide and conquer to make it easier on himself. He’s just doing what we’re doing now. When it comes down to it, he’ll probably end up killing them himself if it means he goes free. If he goes along, maybe we don’t shoot him. The skiff can carry three, can’t it?” Johns didn’t tell Fry the real reason he would prefer to keep Riddick alive if he could. Even if he was dead, he would be on the skiff anyway. Half was better than nothing.
“Do we have a deal, Carolyn?” Johns voice had taken on a slippery quality when he asked her, and she knew she was about to make a deal with the devil. She also knew that if she didn’t, that Johns would in all likelihood kill her. After all, he had a pilot already, in Riddick; it wasn’t as if she was the only choice he had. Riddick would go along with it to survive, anyone would.
Fry looked out the back hatch at Shazza, and wondered if Johns would let Shazza live if he had to kill Fry instead. She wasn’t sure at the end what made her mind up; the pure need to survive, or jealousy that Shazza would survive and she wouldn’t. She leaned back and closed her eyes, sold her soul, and stepped into the abyss. “We have a deal Johns.”
She had managed not to cry, but with great difficulty, as Johns walked out the back hatch of the skiff. If she got out of this she was going to settle somewhere and change her name, so no one would ever know about what she had done. Fry would have prayed for it, but she knew she was damned to whatever hell existed for people like her so she put it aside.
Survival was everything, it was the only thing she cared about, and once she had set her mind on it there was no going back. If she was going to be damned, then she would be damned all the way. Her eyes closed and she got back to the business at hand, the hull integrity check, all she had to do was close the back hatch, and let the system run.