TRUST ME WHEN NIGHT FALLS 9

Nine

It had pissed her off that Johns had called him out like a dog; he had slapped his thigh and whistled before he said ‘here, boy, yer missin the party, come on’.

Jack laughed out loud at Riddick’s perfect imitation of Johns’ voice. “Yer missin’ the party, come on.” Riddick offered his hand as Jack made her way down the side of the coring room roof, and it was at that point that Jack knew that Riddick knew. Knew she wasn’t a boy, and that it was no use to hide it anymore, at least not from Riddick.

“Your secret’s safe with me, Jack. Like the hair.” Riddick ran his hand over Jack’s newly shaved head; she had found the clippers in one of the brighter rooms she had passed. The roof had been torn open it seemed, and the beams of light had filtered across a child’s toys, pictures, and then the pair of clippers. She couldn’t really explain why she had done it; she had found a pair of broken goggles earlier, and when she saw the clippers, her head was half shaved before she had time to think about it.

She was worried he might be mad and think she was just a stupid kid and that was the last thing she wanted. She felt so safe with Riddick, both Riddick and Shazza. Just then Riddick had smiled down at her, a real smile that lit up his whole face. It was as if for that one moment he let her see him, really see him, and she knew nothing else could ever mean so much. She would keep his secret too.

The survivors gathered in the large communal room in the middle of the compound. “He’s the winner of the look-alike contest.” Paris was half cut, but he was drinking his fill of water, like everyone else, when Jack walked in just ahead of Riddick. Johns and Fry rolled their eyes at his shaved head, but stayed quiet. Shazza looked at Jack and then at Riddick and grinned quietly, unable to help herself at the tiny spark of what had looked like pride that had flickered momentarily across Riddick’s face.

Imam poured water for Riddick and offered a blessing as he handed the glass to him. He wasn’t used to thanking people, or having reason to, and the words sounded strange even to his own ears. Imam smiled at him and held his elbow for a moment before he poured a glass for Jack.

“These people didn’t leave. Come on.” Riddick’s voice held the attention of everyone in the room; he said what nobody wanted to say out loud, what they had all noticed as they had walked around the settlement.

Jack and Riddick had come into the room in the middle of a conversation between Johns, Fry and Paris about just why the emergency ship was there at all. If the people were gone, the ship should have been gone.

Paris, who had quickly switched back to alcohol, pointed his now empty glass at Riddick and practically dared him. “Maybe they had a bigger drop ship take them off planet, there’s no way you can know that!” He was drunk enough to actually shout at Riddick, and Shazza felt a flicker of fear at the thought of what Riddick might do to him for it. She didn’t like Paris, but seeing him beaten to death hardly seemed an apt punishment for being a drunken fool.

Riddick took another careful sip of his glass of water; he had drunk several already as he had lost a lot of water when he pulled the supplies through the canyon. Now he seemed to drink it more because he wanted to enjoy it than because he desperately needed it.

“With their clothes on the hooks, photos on the shelves?” Shazza watched his graceful, almost feline movements as he leaned in the doorway and used the last of his glass of water to carefully wash the grime and dust from his goggles.

She tried not to stare but it was difficult. She had seen shined men before; miners and ex-convicts that tried to grab a bit of peace as free settlers, but she rarely saw them this close. The room was dim enough for Riddick to leave the goggles off and it was hard for her not to watch him; the mercurial silver seemed to glint with a light of its own.

“Maybe they had weight limits.” Even Johns didn’t seem so sure when he said it, it was more a sort of wishful thinking; he didn’t look at Riddick when he spoke.

Paris seemed almost desperate at this point and nodded vigorously and he spilled some of whatever it was he was drinking, “that’s right!”

“I know you don’t prep your emergency ship unless it’s a fucking emergency.” He smiled as he said it, his head tilted to the side as he watched the fear take hold a little deeper. The fear was the one lever he knew he always had, and he loved to use it, especially with Johns.

Jack stood in the doorway closer to Riddick and muttered under her breath, “he’s fucking right,” which earned her a dirty look from Johns, but Johns seemed to know where the lines were being drawn and didn’t say anything more.

To Shazza it seemed as if the only two people in the room were Riddick and Johns, as they were the only two left standing, everyone else had sat down at some point during the conversation. “So tell me what you think happened, Riddick.” Johns almost spat the words out, and Shazza realized that everyone had been waiting for Riddick to do just that, to say what everyone else was too afraid to say.

Riddick looked once at Shazza and for a moment she saw a flicker of something in his eyes, compassion. It was so unexpected that she froze, then it was gone as he slipped his goggles back on and his face became hard and soulless again. “They’re all dead. Whatever got Zeke got them.”

Johns took a step closer to Riddick, his eyes cut to Shazza almost dramatically, and his voice dropped. “You bastard Riddick!” Shazza didn’t care; it was a hard thing to say, and a hard thing to hear, but she was in no way a weak woman. And Riddick had apologized from the depth of his soul, with just a look before he had even said a word.

The two boys had quickly grown bored of the talk of the adults, especially as they couldn’t understand anything of what was being said. Hassan had found more of the solar powered toys that he and Ali had discovered in the canyon, as the two younger boys had ran ahead of the others. There were toys and treasures everywhere, just left behind for them to find.

There were longer buildings where there was room after room of bedrooms and play areas. Even a small room that they quickly recognized was a schoolroom and they had both laughed and ran out after they had pushed the teachers’ desk over.

From where they stood they could see just the very top of the solar powered machinery that ran the coring room and they were fascinated. The dome on the roof was almost exactly like the ones on many of the toys they had already seen, but this was much larger.

Hassan knelt down to help his brother Ali up onto a torn part of the roof where they could get into the building, before he pulled himself up to follow.

The room was dark, and dusty, and far scarier than the canyon had been. Hassan was reminded of one time when a bird had gotten into the house; this was like that, a little, but he didn’t see any birds. The two boys could hear them though. Ali panicked and backed up towards the wall, where the bank of switches was located. He couldn’t read the small tags underneath so he began to randomly flick switches in the hopes that one of them would make the lights come on so the room wouldn’t be so scary. There was a rusty clank, and the screech of metal, before the louvers in the ceiling began to slowly open, and the solar powered machinery started to whir to life.

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