Fifteen
He looked puzzled for a moment as he looked down at their hands, as though he had no idea how, or why, their hands were still linked. Shazza’s fingers didn’t clench on his anymore, but she didn’t pull her hand away either. It was as if she waited for him to decide; and he found that he wasn’t really ready to decide.
He didn’t really go in for hand holding; it was a gesture that seemed meaningless for most of his life, and his contact with women in the past ten years, since the age of fifteen, consisted of ‘get what you can, while you can’, because there was no tomorrow, there was only the moment.
He thought back to the last time he had held a woman’s hand, a girl’s hand, to be accurate. He was eleven, and it was one of the very brief stays that he had made at a foster home. It was different from the others in that they stay was longer, almost six months, and that he got to go to school. Where he met Jennifer, he had forgotten her last name.
He had never really noticed girls before, not as girls, but he noticed Jennifer. She had the most incredible red hair, and she was the first person to talk to him when he started school. They had held hands one day when he had walked her home after school; he was gone the next week. He hadn’t thought of her in fourteen years.
“If you two love birds are done holding hands, we ought to get inside.” Riddick’s flat glare had Johns look away first and they both let go at the same time.
Jack finally pulled free from Imam, who couldn’t have held her much longer anyway, and she flew at the both of them; as if to assure herself they were real. Riddick didn’t know what to do when Jack’s skinny arms wrapped around his waist, he just froze and looked for help from Shazza. He wasn’t used to being touched by people, and definitely not in an affectionate way. Being hit and beaten bloody he could understand, but he didn’t know what to do for Jack but ineffectually put his hand on her back while he silently pled with Shazza.
The rest of the adults pulled the massive bay doors closed while Riddick held Jack and watched, unsure of what to do with himself. Jack wasn’t about to let go and Riddick began to wonder if she even could or if she was frozen like that. Jack trembled in his arms and he realized that she had started to cry. He would never have known if her tears hadn’t soaked through his shirt; Jack cried silently; as though she was long used to the idea that no one cared if she cried or not.
Riddick looked for Shazza one last time, he couldn’t imagine anyone else would be able to comfort the girl; and then he realized that Shazza didn’t even know she was a girl. Jack had come to him, and he couldn’t turn her away, he couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t know what Jack had been through, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as Slam, but he knew hurt when he saw it, and Jack had taken enough. He didn’t know how to comfort her, but he did know how to hold her and let her know he wasn’t about to leave. His hand rested on her upper back for a moment, just at the spot where he could feel where she bound her chest, and he did the only thing he could think of, stroke her back. He didn’t know what to say so he stayed quiet; Shazza would have to help with that, he just didn’t know enough about it to do any good.
“Well now, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t of seen it with my own eyes. First her…” Johns thumb jerked in Shazza’s direction. “…And now the kid. You going soft now, Riddick?” Jack had been still in his arms for a moment; her tears had stopped and she pulled free from him and turned to the bulkhead to wipe her tear streaked face on her sleeve.
It was nearly full dark in the crash ship and no one would see her anyway, but it angered him that Johns had embarrassed her. Embarrassment was something he didn’t really feel anymore; dignity is one of the first things that gets taken in prison, but it didn’t mean he didn’t know what it felt like.
Riddick ignored what Johns said, and looked past him at Shazza who gave Johns a hard look as she passed him. He knew he would have to watch Johns carefully from this moment on, and Fry too, although he didn’t think Fry would do anything on her own there was no way to be sure.
Everyone’s nerves were on edge, and Riddick knew that when things got that tense, sometimes the regular rules didn’t apply. Johns didn’t seem as nerved up as he had before they left the settlement, so he knew he had shot up recently, but there was no way to know how long it would hold him, not under these conditions.
He watched for a moment as Shazza held Jack, her hands stroked Jacks’ back as his had, and Riddick wondered if Shazza knew, or suspected. If she did, she never let on. Johns sarcastic comments had been the only words anyone had said and now the darkened bay of the crash ship was silent.
Everyone had seen what had happened to Paris, had watched him ripped to pieces by the creatures but it was maybe hardest of all on Suleiman and Imam, as the two young boys’ deaths would hit them the hardest.
Fry stood apart from the others, close to the bulkhead, and held her arms against the chill they all felt now, a bitter cold that had to do with shock rather than temperature. If they didn’t move they would stay here, numbed inside and out by what they had seen.
Riddick took one last hard look at Johns before he spoke up, more to speak than anything else. “Is that bulkhead going to hold, Shazza?”
Shazza started at the question, as though she couldn’t quite make sense of the words. Slowly reason came back to her; the bulkheads, would they hold. She couldn’t see very well in the near dark of the bay but she knew her own work. Vanity wasn’t a trait she had much time for, but she knew she was good at what she did. “The welds will hold. Jack and I salvaged from other hull pieces out there.” She pointed outside, in the direction of the long slash of earth where the HG had made her ungraceful landing. “The only weakness I can think of is the nav bay up there.”
She pointed up towards the catwalk where she had been earlier, where she overheard Fry. “That window was massive, if there’s a weak point it will be there. We seem to have come up against bedrock, which is what stopped the ship right at this spot. I don’t know if the things can tunnel through that.” Her voice had gotten quiet at that. There really was no way they could know.
Everyone else, already quiet, seemed to get even quieter, and she realized they held their breath. The ship was deathly silent without even that sound. “W…We could, if we had to, retreat to the last bay. We would have enough metal in ship itself to seal ourselves in.” Everyone thought about the tunnel at the settlement.
“Food. Water. Light.” The words came out in short bursts, Riddick’s voice completely calm and in control. He had lifted his goggles to look about the interior of the ship; the catwalk to the nav bay, the welds along the side of the ship where Shazza and Jack had patched them. His esteem for her grew even more.
Johns, and to a lesser extent Fry, seemed to be unnerved by the authority in Riddick’s voice as he asked the questions, but they hadn’t seemed all that interested in actually doing anything. Panic would have set in at some point, and rational thought would have been impossible.
Jack’s voice shook when she first started to answer, before it leveled out. Shazza’s hand stayed on her shoulder. “Shazza and I brought what we could from P…” She faltered, she didn’t want to say Paris’ name. “The container. There wasn’t much to eat. Some crackers and tinned stuff, I don’t know what it was. P…He said it was French. All he had to drink was booze.” Jack looked up at Riddick, almost as if she asked for permission. It was another strange situation for him to be in, so he fell back on silence as the easiest course of action. “We managed to pull some lighting tubes from other parts of the ship out there; I don’t know what they’ll run on though.” Her voice trailed away. She hadn’t realized how much she had spoken, and now everyone looked at her. She swallowed hard and rested back into Shazza’s hand.
“We still have power cells here, there are eight left.” Johns finally spoke, and pointed in the direction of the nav bay, where the men had pulled the four power cells down earlier and brought them to the sandcat. “We could hook them up and then we’d have enough light.” He hated that his voice broke at the last, and he glared at Riddick.
The tables had turned, and Riddick knew Johns was afraid of the dark. It was bad enough that he knew, but would he say anything to the others about it? Right now Riddick seemed to make an effort to keep the survivors calm and grounded, if Riddick was about to fuck with him, it would be later, when he knew he had the luxury.
“Perhaps, if the room up there is not safe, we should prepare now, and move the supplies to the safest location, so that we will not have to do it in a rush when the time comes?” Imam stepped forward carefully as he guided Suleiman across the littered deck.
“Agreed.” With that last word from Riddick, the survivors began to move the crates and other supplies to the room at the very bottom of the crash ship and put them up against the bedrock. Everyone looked at that rock and silently prayed it would hold. Even Riddick, although no one else would have recognized the prayer; for a quick death if they had made a mistake.
They were almost finished when they first heard the clicks and scrapes against the hull.