Four
Fry and Johns joined the rest of the survivors. They had moved a short distance away and climbed on top of a huge jutting shell of wreckage that afforded them a view of the area around them. A barren haunted landscape as far as the eye could see, with the livid scar of their undignified landing the only testament that anyone had ever been there at all.
Two suns lay close to the horizon as they made a path towards setting. Strange spires broke the monotony of the horizon in front of them, and the beginning of what looked like a canyon began some distance behind them. There was nothing else, for as far as the eye could see.
“Is anyone going to come for us?” Jack felt emptier than he ever had in his short life, as he looked out across the wreckage and wondered what would become of them. He was accustomed to hardship but there was something in being marooned on this dead world, being forgotten here, that made everything that had come before it pale in comparison.
Who would miss him? How long would it be before someone noticed? Was he forgotten? Jack wanted to cry, but wouldn’t, maybe he couldn’t anymore. ‘Fuck it‘, he was stuck here, alone.
The hand on his shoulder brought Jack back. Shazza. The way she had looked at him had him wonder if the woman had read his thoughts. “You’re gonna scare the children, Jack.” Her face was hard, and her voice was hard. The hand on her shoulder was hard, but there was something else in her eyes, and she hadn’t called Jack a child either.
Imam led the three boys off the wreckage down onto the dusty ground below, to pray. Jack didn’t know if the boys could even speak English or not, past a word or two. Everything they had said so far had been in Arabic, and so far only to Imam, the only one that could understand them. There was no way to know if Jack had scared them at all.
Shazza squeezed Jack’s shoulder once more before she turned back to the others. Fry still hadn’t spoken; Shazza had waited for her to but Fry didn’t seem all that concerned. About anything. So Shazza took it upon herself to deal with a few necessities.
If they were going to be stuck here for a while, they would need shelter, and water. “Is anyone else having difficulty breathing?” They would need oxygen too, it would seem, the air on the planet was thinner.
Jack described it perfectly when he answered. “Yeah, like I’m one lung short or something.” Zeke, Paris, and Johns and Fry had all nodded in agreement. Imam and the boys were in prayer, but doubtless they also had difficulty breathing.
Zeke had rigged up some oxygen breathers that he had salvaged from the ship. Both Shazza and Zeke had nearly argued with Johns, when they had begun to put together a breather for Riddick. She had relented, but only for the moment, as she and Zeke shared a look. They had both been free settlers in some fairly rough places, and knew dangerous when they saw it. A breather was quietly set aside for Riddick, just in case. Neither of them mentioned it to Johns.
Paris had been delighted to find a cargo container with most of his possessions still intact, and was ‘busy’ setting up a chair and large parasol on top of the wreckage. Zeke had marked out a spot in the loose ground near the strange spires in the near distance, and had set about pulling bodies from the wreckage for burial.
Fry hadn’t seen the sense in it, and had instead stayed with Johns, to go see what else Paris had in that container; the three boys had followed out of a sense of adventure. Jack had stayed with Shazza, as she salvaged pieces of metal to seal up the large section of the main part of the ship.
Fry hadn’t really understood that either, she had no intention of staying, and so didn’t see the sense in burial or in making shelter. She had resented even the notion, but stifled it. It was easier to let Shazza and Zeke continue than to try to get them to stop. Johns, Fry and Paris had gone into the cargo container to see what could be salvaged.
Riddick remained still in the hold of the ship. He listened; occasionally he would hear a sharp raised voice but other than that, little could be heard of the others. Then there was that strange whisper that would die out suddenly, almost as if it knew that it had been heard.
He closed his eyes and made everything in him quiet, so that he could listen to it. It wasn’t the wind or some strange echo throughout the ship. It wasn’t cooling metal ticking in the sun. Something else was here.
The jitters from cryo had passed, leaving cold calculation in their wake. Riddick opened his eyes carefully in the near dark of the hold. He had torn a small hole in his blindfold in his struggle with Johns, and had some limited vision. Without his goggles he was still at risk however, and so he moved carefully until he could safely shield his eyes again.
The beam he was shackled to had been severed higher up by whatever had brought them down in the first place, leaving a ragged tear with just enough clearance for his restraints. It would hurt though, not that it mattered, if he could stay quiet.
Riddick listened again, before he stretched. His shoulders popped painfully as they dislocated at the top of their arc. They popped back in again as he moved past the break in the girder. Riddick eased the blindfold up as he listened again. No one had heard him.
He had to stretch to reach the cutting torch the woman had left on the deck when she cut the passengers out of their cryo lockers, and then he was loose. Riddick left his restraints where he knew Johns would find them, and had circled the wreckage to listen to the survivors.
“Booze? This is what you have to drink?” Fry didn’t seem all that impressed with the contents of Paris’ container, and was unable to completely hide the bitter edge from her question. Not that it mattered; like so many things, Paris was oblivious to the sarcasm.
Paris seemed more concerned about making sure he got receipts for the things they would need to survive than survival itself. Imam stood in the doorway and turned down the offer of alcohol, as it was not permitted by his faith.
“You do know what happens if we don’t find water.” Johns didn’t intend it as a question so much as a show of derision, as he took a pull from a dusty bottle of something called Jack Daniels. The burn of the alcohol helped him deal with his shakes somewhat.
“All deserts have water; it only waits to be found.” Imam had no doubt they would find water; Allah would provide. This also made no impression on Paris, who took a bottle of wine and a small tin of crackers and waited outside for Fry and Johns to follow.
Riddick watched and waited until the three of them had left before he slipped into the container to ease his own hunger. He ate some stale crackers that tasted like dust. ‘Water crackers’ they were called; he chewed slowly and quietly at the side of the container while he watched Johns. Knowing he hadn’t eaten in a while, he fought against the urge to wolf the crackers. All he had was alcohol to wash it down with.
Johns’ curse rang out, with nothing in the landscape to muffle the sound, which brought everyone running. He threw the restraints down on the ground, and looked around him. There was no way to tell how much of a lead Riddick had on him, but there only looked to be a few places he could go anyway.
The restraints had been tossed in the direction of the two setting suns and Johns had looked that way for a moment before he turned the other way towards sunrise. Fry believed him when he said that Riddick would have gone towards sunrise.
It had been a month or so since Riddick had even touched a woman, so he found himself interested in the two women’s reactions to Johns. Fry had stood close to Johns as Johns handed his sidearm to Zeke; she hadn’t questioned him, not even once. That was interesting.
Shazza, the darker woman, made no effort to hide her disdain for Johns’ actions. Her arms were crossed and she looked around at the other survivors as though she was waiting for someone to say how crazy it all was. She distanced herself from both Johns and Fry, while putting herself in front of the young boy Jack.
Something about that kid intrigued Riddick but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The survivors had already started to break into different factions. He had hoped to divide them, to separate Johns from them in order to kill him but this proved interesting as well.
Riddick believed Johns made a serious error when he dismissed the dark-haired woman, but he knew from previous dealings with Johns that this was something else that could be relied on. Shazza was the strong one here. Right now the survivors followed Johns and Fry because they believed that they were an authority. He wondered if they would still feel that way if they knew what Johns was? If they knew that Fry had nearly killed all of them to save herself?
Riddick watched Shazza put her arm around Jack and the two had walked back into the crashed ship, where the repair continued. The jagged tears in the side of the hull were now a patchwork of metal salvaged from the wreckage around them. He didn’t know if she heard the whispers too, if she knew they might not be alone, or if she simply knew that shelter would be needed.
The Arab and the three boys examined the area in widening concentric circles, the wreckage always in plain sight. Imam didn’t seem to buy into John’s scare tactics either, or he would have stayed closer to the others.
Riddick waited in the shadow of the container until Johns was out of sight before he slipped closer to what had really caught his attention. He watched as Zeke pulled another body close to the hole he had dug near the spires. The whispers had come from there.
The knife that he had found in the container was old, and not one he would normally have carried, but it had fit in his hand perfectly as he crouched behind the container to watch Zeke as he made his way back towards the wreckage. Riddick crouched lower still as the whispers sharpened, a sound that could almost be felt through the ground. They were underground.
Paris, who still sat in the chair just above him, made his way down and scurried to the safety of the wreckage. Riddick had watched as an obviously injured man made his way through the trail of debris. He had lurched and stumbled before he reached the open doors of the ship, and a bloom of blood splattered Shazza, as Zeke shot the man with Johns’s sidearm.
“I thought it was him! I thought it was Riddick!”
“It was just somebody else from the crash!”
Shazza had stood covered in the man’s blood. She didn’t scream or cry out. She never dropped the length of pipe she held gripped in her hands, and she stood protecting the kid, Jack, the entire time. For one brief second he had watched her, and felt…something. It wasn’t something Riddick could define, he didn’t even want to try; it brought up too many other questions he had no answers for. He didn’t know how to answer them.
copyright © july 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx