He Didn't Come

The merc had returned, his arm on the shoulder of a young woman—girl, really. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and was obviously far more intoxicated than the other two. Riddick didn’t like killing women, but he would if the situation demanded it. Besides, if she was a merc (though he doubted it) she deserved to die on general principle. If that were the case, he had no qualms whatsoever about doing her in.

Riddick barely breathed. He knew that he should be sensible, that he should wait for them to drop off and finish them that way, smoothly, cleanly, and then he could just jettison them when he hit space.

“Ahh,” the captain- for the man who stayed aboard was obviously in charge- sighed, with a sense of anticipation in his voice.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Russell?” the second merc asked him.

“No. Remember when I told you I was getting sick of him? He’s fucked up too many times. I can’t have him on my crew anymore. I drugged his drink and paid the bartender to take care of him."

The merc looked troubled, but hesitantly nodded. “Well, what about her?” he asked. “You’re not taking her with us, are you?”

“Haven’t decided yet. We have some fun now, and then when she wakes up we’ll figure out what to do. She won’t remember a thing. We’ll talk to her and tell her that she passed out somewhere, and that we took her in for the night. Maybe she can take Russell’s place as the official pansy-ass of the ship. If not, we’ll kill her, plain and simple.”

Riddick watched impassively as the red-haired young woman staggered and began to fall. The second merc caught her and supported her in his arms.

“Boss, look at her. Is this really a good idea?”

The captain snarled, “Don’t make me regret keeping you around, Curry.”

Curry gulped and nodded. At that moment, the girl- for that’s what she truly was, Riddick realized, an underage girl all dressed up to sneak into a club- giggled and tried to say something, but it was unintelligible.

“Shit, Boss, what did you give her?”

“Lower dose of the same thing I gave Russell. Put her down.”

“But-“

“Put her down, Curry. Lock up. Lights to dim,” he called out. The ship obliged immediately.

The merc took the girl from Curry and shoved her to the floor. He tried to undress her, but she was still partly conscious and finally began to react to what was going on around her. She beat at his face feebly, and he slapped her.

“Behave,” he warned her. In response she began screaming. “Shit,” the merc muttered. “Shut up. Shut up, bitch!”

When she didn’t comply, he clapped his hand over her mouth and with the other, hit her harshly on the side of the head.

Riddick contemplated intervening, but as he said, he was no hero. If it was Jack it would be different, but as it was-

Shit. Jack. It was the worst possible time to think about her. The only choice he had was to believe that she would stay with the holy man, but he doubted it. She was like him, stubborn to a fault.

Somehow the merc had managed to strip the girl naked and shut her up with a wad of cloth stuffed into her open mouth. Her eyes were wide open and terrified, and the man had thrown himself down on top of her and was raping her furiously. He had her hands pinned down by her head and was gripping her wrists. Eventually she stopped struggling and just lay there with dull eyes as the merc continued ripping her in half.

Finally he rose and refastened his pants. She lay deathly still, save for the trembling that shook her body. “Your turn,” he said to Curry, jerking his head toward the silent girl. Curry took a step forward from where he had been standing, about ten feet away, and then another. They were hesitant, despite the evident bulging in his pants.

“Shit, Curry, you want her or not?”

Curry shrugged and said, sounding guilty, “Yeah.”

“Then take her, you wimpy fuck. Take her or I’ll just kill her now.”

Curry protested, “But I thought that you said that in the morning-“

“Look at her, Curry! You think I was actually serious about keeping her around? No way in hell.”

Riddick watched impassively throughout the whole affair. When Curry still hesitated, his boss rolled his eyes and grasped her by the hair, angling her face towards Curry. “Last chance, Curry,” the captain growled.

Curry shook his head and tried to mask his involuntary wince when the merc placed both hands around her throat and squeezed. The bruised and broken girl gasped and bucked her naked body as she thrashed for air, but she was still drugged and he was invigorated by her helplessness. For the second time, she stopped fighting back, but this time her dull eyes were glazed in death.

Riddick had had enough. His normal detachment in the face of violence and injustice had disappeared. His emotions were beginning to whirl around inside of him and he needed release. He didn’t know how to control these emotions, and found that he really needed to learn how to do so, and fast. He was going to get careless if he acted the way he wanted to at the moment.

Still silent, still controlled (though that was only physical control- he had no control over the way he felt at the moment), he stepped out of the shadows that loomed in the ship’s main cabin and waited a moment, to see if they noticed him. As he slunk up behind the closest one, he made no noise.

Riddick, used to seeing things others missed, had picked up a certain detail which had slipped the merc’s attention. That girl was pregnant. Not very far along, but pregnant, all the same.

Curry didn’t notice him as he stood at the merc’s back, silent and deadly. “Why’d you turn the lights down, Boss?”

“They get scared when they can’t see you,” Riddick answered for him. “That’s what you wanted though, right? Her fear?”

Curry had whipped around as soon as Riddick’s voice touched his ears. Riddick acted like he was ignoring him, and appeared to focus on all of his attention on the ‘boss.’ He was fully aware of every move that Curry made, however, and when the merc pulled his gun Riddick said, not even looking at him as he walked forward smoothly, “Don’t even try it.”

The man Riddick accused took a close look at him. “Holy fuck!” he whispered. “It’s Riddick!” Riddick did not respond. “But… you’re dead.” Riddick knew what was going through the merc’s mind. He saw it all the time. The merc couldn’t believe his luck. The most wanted criminal in the galaxy, at his fingertips! His sluggish brain would be attempting a slow jog through the alcohol he had earlier consumed, casting about for a way to capture the dangerous man in front of him.

“I don’t like mercs,” Riddick began. “Especially mercs who rape and kill pregnant girls.”

“She wasn’t pregnant,” the merc spluttered as Riddick advanced, menacing and cold. “Was she?” Riddick nodded once, tapping his shiv against his muscular thigh thoughtfully. “Well, shit,” the merc said, looking at the girl’s battered body.

“Only about three months along, I’d say,” Riddick said. “She’s only, oh, sixteen, and even that’s stretching it.”

The merc looked shocked, and stared at the body. Riddick took advantage of his distraction and, before anyone was aware that he had moved, the merc’s throat was spouting blood from a deep gash, courtesy of Riddick’s shiv.

Curry had stood still throughout the entire exchange, but when his boss began to die, he slowly pointed the gun at Riddick.

“Bad move,” Riddick said sympathetically in a sarcastic, easy drawl. He made the shiv disappear and sprang for Curry. The man was disarmed in an instant. One, two, three slams of his powerful fists to the unfortunate man’s gut, and Curry sank painfully to his knees.

“Don’t kill me,” he whispered, a pleading whine in his voice. Riddick rolled his eyes and slowly knelt down until he was eye-level with Curry. He curled his upper lip in distaste. “How’d you ever make it as a merc?” he murmured. Curry didn’t answer. Instead, he died as Riddick reached out and turned his head a clean 180 degrees.

The sickening crack reverberated throughout the ship as Riddick shook his head. This was why Jack couldn’t come with him. Some ‘rats or mercs would nab her and turn her into the dead girl on the floor, or she’d get him caught. Mostly, though, he didn’t want her to see him kill. She had an inexplicable adoration of him, and he didn’t want to witness it fade. He didn’t want to see it replaced with what everyone else he came across felt for him- fear and hatred.

Sighing, he considered the third merc, the one that had been left behind, and dismissed his relevance quickly. Either he was already dead or he would come to the ship before Riddick left, in which case he would die anyway.

He squatted next to the girl’s body and surveyed the damage the merc had inflicted. She was truly a girl, only a few years older than Jack. He suddenly pictured Jack’s face on the body of the nameless girl on the ground, lying still. He envisioned Jack with a sophisticated haircut, hot party clothes, and a face painted to make her look like a woman, and not the child she really was.

She’d do it, too, Riddick mused. True, as a boy it was much safer for her, but even so, he knew it took guts to pull off such a convincing masquerade. She would have no problems whatsoever putting on another disguise.

The dead girl was wearing a disguise, too. It would have worked for most people. The thrill of partying was too much for some young people, and they would sneak out, disguised as someone much older than they truly were. He thought that the girl must have been out for a good time after sneaking out and met with more fun than she could handle. Or was she? On second thought, she looked more like a hooker than a girl sneaking out to a party. Maybe she really had been a whore.

Shit, if this had been Jack, he wouldn’t have just killed those two mercs, he would have butchered them slowly. Of course, he reflected, if that had been the case, he would have saved her in the first place.

Why hadn’t he saved this girl?

“Not my fight,” he murmured in the dark stillness of the merc ship. Then, louder, “Not my fucking fight!”