Warning: This chapter contains mildly vivid descriptions of torture and mention of rape.
The Fallen
Chapter Five: Landing
One Year Later:
It was the story that he'd resisted being told. A part of his life wrapped up and hidden, bottled away, almost forgotten. Pretending to be forgotten. His own version of Jekyll and Hyde. His sanity and the insanity it hid battling for supremacy in a mind that held no hope. Man and beast. The internal and eternal war.
His shield that had contained and tamed everything he feared within himself was gone and buried, a white marble angel in a field of stones marking where she lay. No flowers grew in that place, just the remnant of the ones new, faded, dying. Stems cut, promising inevitable decay.
Morbidity was his constant companion, bringing a deeper darkness to his thoughts and daily imaginings as it never had before. The sun shown and yet it was night. His eyes burned as they had after surgery; as he hadn't felt them burn in years.
A year. An hour. A minute. To him, she had just died a moment before. He could see her blood on his hands. Every woman had her face, her scent, her laugh. His head jerked back and forth in crowds, searching for the elusive that his mind knew wasn't really there.
Tempered, barely contained. The insanity was winning. Hyde was almost out.
Riddick no longer felt like he was falling. Rock bottom was beneath his feet and he knew he'd landed. Dazed and desensitized to the world around him. Everything passed him by in a swirl of dim, tainted color and horrifying reality, blurred with exhaustion. Incapable of humanity.
"Riddick?"
Imam, sitting across from him at a tiny kitchen table. A mug of coffee sat before Imam, steaming gently. Riddick clasped his own between his hands, the burning hot porcelain scorching his palms, reminding him he was alive. It wasn't pleasant to remember. He prayed for death, but hadn't the courage to end his life himself.
"Hm?" he answered finally, forcing the stark, grotesque thoughts that pounded his mind aside. He fed them to the beast.
"You've been sitting there, without blinking, for five minutes," Imam answered.
Riddick looked down into his coffee, blinked as he realized his eyes were dry. Over the past year his grip on reality had become rather tenuous, threatening to become lost completely. He would have drifted over the edge by now if not for Imam's stable presence in his life and total acceptance. Despite his guilt and his inadequacies. Riddick didn't realize Imam didn't blame him. He didn't realize Imam didn't believe he should blame himself. Riddick believed Imam accepted him despite these things, not just despite Riddick's belief in them.
He stayed in an apartment not far from Imam's. His career as a widely sought killer-for-hire the ten years previous to Jack's murder had paid more than the bills. In the end he hadn't really needed to work anymore, it had just been a release of the tension that built up in his mind if he didn't free it on occasion. A necessary evil.
Jack had never been disgusted, she had merely accepted that side of him as a part of the man she loved above all else. Now his funds were more than in order; Riddick was extremely wealthy. But his apartment was tiny, almost completely devoid of any furniture and felt empty and dead, even to himself. He would know. He'd been the bringer. The cause. Now he was dead. Death. Dead. One once, the other now. He hadn't killed since Clark. His blood boiled while his mind remained blank.
Sometimes he felt stupid. As if his brain were starting to atrophy like the legs of a cripple unable to walk. Limp and lifeless, merely there for show, not for function. But while he felt blank most of the time, it wasn't the truth. His mind was rushing, wind swept and tortured, his chest in knots, his stomach a nauseas pit.
Riddick suddenly wanted to throw up. His eyes narrowed and he stood up without a word and stalked into the bathroom, flipped the cover on the toilet up, leaned over and vomited. A repeating pattern for most days, Riddick didn't even flinch as the small bit of food he'd forced down that day came up. He just opened his mouth, let it pour out. He tried not to think about the way his clothes were too big now. The muscles Jack had dragged her fingers over were much weaker, less defined. He was still bigger than most men and yet he was only a shadow of his former self. One small meal a day and constant nausea had his weight down eighteen kilos. He'd gone from a hulking ninety-eight kilos to a meager eighty.
Finished, Riddick stared at the contents of the toilet, saw the speckles of blood there, wondered how many times Jack threw up blood before he'd found her. He still remembered how many times she'd coughed it up while he held her; seven. Seven times he'd had to tip her to the side so she wouldn't drown in her own fluids. Seven times she hacked and vomited so hard she whimpered and cried with the torture of it all.
Riddick didn't whimper. He wished for oblivion, wanting to cough up his lungs, his stomach... his heart, which ached most. Most whenever he saw a woman about her height and coloring walk down a street, laughing and smiling. Alive.
Flushing and then turning away from the toilet, Riddick headed back into the kitchen, his mouth tasting bitter and hot like overheated metal. He sat at the table, across from Imam who hadn't moved from his seat. Imam knew where he'd gone. He knew exactly what had just happened in the bathroom.
Imam didn't bother to ask him if he was okay. Instead he tilted his head and opened his mouth, as if to say something. He paused, closed his mouth, looked down into his coffee, making a little sighing hmm noise in the back of his throat. He looked up, tried again. Failed.
"What?" Riddick asked finally. He tried to feel annoyed. He tried to feel something. His voice and emotions were blank. Numb and desensitized. He couldn't even work up interest let alone annoyance.
"There has been a family at the shelter for the past three months. In transit to a colony in the next system the ship they were traveling on was attacked by pirates. All the cargo, including passenger possessions, were stolen. Unfortunately, the family had spent all of their remaining money on their ship fare and a place to stay once they got to the colony. When they did not show up, they lost their home and now have no money and no belongings."
"What's this got to do with me?"
"Nothing. Not really. Except, someone murdered them all two nights ago. There were two parents, a ten year old son and a fourteen year old daughter. The mother and daughter were strangled, but the father was tortured. Even raped. We can't find the boy's body."
"No."
"No? Whatever do you mean?"
"I mean 'no.' No, I won't go lookin' for a kid. I won't. I know that's what you're workin' up to, Holy Man."
"For some strange reason, Riddick, children trust you. If this boy is alive, he might come out to you, if only you will look for him."
"No."
"You won't even consider it?"
"No."
"Because you are frightened that you will become attached as you did to Jack or because there really is nothing left within you anymore? Jack wouldn't believe that. Jack wouldn't recognize the man you have become. Jack would not even like you."
Riddick knew Imam was trying to get a rise out of him. Trying to make him feel something. He knew he should get up, deck the holy man, make him regret is unfair words. His true words. Instead he reached for his coffee, the mug now cool to the touch, and stared at his reflection in the murky liquid. "Jack is dead," he said quietly. "And so am I."
"I do not believe that."
"Don't matter, Imam."
"You are scared, and I see you losing the battle. I see it in the way you go to the bathroom and vomit, the way you do not eat, or interact with the world outside of your apartment or mine. Riddick, I am afraid you are going crazy."
One Day Later:
Riddick stood in a dark alleyway. People rarely talked about what alleyways in large cities were really like. They often described the way there were dumpsters, bags of trash, and litter. They talked about rusty pop cans and rats. Mice nibbling away at cardboard. Stray cats and dogs. They didn't talk about the reeking stench of garbage. The strong scent of urine and human feces. Carcasses of the same rodents and strays they described digging for scraps. Syringes and tourniquets from drug usage. Used, slimy condoms from back alley rendezvous and bloody handprints from rapes and murders.
All of that was in the alley Riddick stood in, and then some. Yellow police tape marked off where the murder had occurred. The details of the murder and the motives were hazy and theoretical to say the best, but for Riddick's purpose they were unimportant. He merely needed the boy. The police didn't really care what had happened to a drifter family with no where to go and from no where important.
Imam had given him a piece of the boys shirt, smeared with blood, for a reference. His senses were bombarded with the shriveling scents permeating the air, but Riddick could still pick up a faint trace of the kid. The alleyway smelled of fear and death. Locked anticipation. Riddick could feel anxiety building up in his stomach, whether from a remnant of the emotion still filling the air or from his own fear of finding the boy.
Mutilated or alive, Riddick was regretting his decision to help. Mutilated, Riddick would be sacrificed to the sight of yet another dead child. Another murdered innocent. Allison Lambert's angelic face flashed before his eyes. Allison's mouth caked and bleeding, one tooth knocked out by a vicious hand. Tortured, tortured, tortured. All of them. Everyone. She'd been eleven years old.
Alive, he'd have to deal with another lost child, staring at him with wide, hopeful eyes. Eyes that trusted actions not reputations.
The boy he was searching for, Hyun-Shik Chang, was just a year younger than Allison had been. Riddick wondered if the boy had a nickname. Imam said the boy's name meant clever in Korean. It didn't matter. While the name might be good for a grown man it was a mouthful for a boy and it didn't roll off Riddick's tongue quite right. His Korean was a language in which he was sadly lacking.
With a sigh born from disappointment in himself for giving in to Imam's pleas for help, Riddick closed his eyes and threw himself into the scene that lay cold and empty around him. He could feel the hate in that place. He had enough physical details of the positions the bodies had been found in to know what had happened.
Four assailants, armed with bats and piano wire. The small family of four, scrounging for something maybe useful in the trash. People believed that all oriental people knew Kung Fu. Soo Chang did not. He didn't even know Korea's traditional martial art, Hwarang, or the more modern and less traditional form, Tae Kwon Do.
His wife and daughter were beaten with the bats, finished off with piano wire around the throat. The girl's head had been nearly severed. Riddick pushed the remembered images from the photographs to the back of his mind.
Strangely, the women hadn't been raped, but Soo had been. Riddick wasn't exactly surprised, as the police obviously had been. He'd spent a good portion of his life in the slam. Man-to-man anal rape, and even oral, had been quite common place. It didn't make the rape, of a man or a woman, any less revolting to him.
All that was left of the boy, however, was a piece of his shirt. Perhaps torn off by an assailant, perhaps caught on something sharp as he fled the scene of his family's murder.
Preternatural senses led Riddick to the boy. He was hiding in a drain, sitting in freezing water, huddled in a ball. Riddick laid on his stomach in the street and reached down into the drain.
"Hyun-Shik?" he called quietly, trying to keep his voice from rumbling too much. He didn't want to alarm the kid. The kid's skin was white with cold. Riddick hoped he didn't have hypothermia, wondered how long he'd been sitting down there without food or water. "Hyun-Shik," Riddick called again when the boy didn't react.
When the kid still didn't move Riddick swore under his breath and slid his upper body as far into the drain as he could. He wouldn't have been able to fit at all if he hadn't lost so much weight over the past year. With a grunt and sheer strength, Riddick snagged the kid's shirt at the shoulder and started to pull. The shirt tore and Riddick almost lost him, but he worked his fingers farther into the thin, dirty material and pulled him up to the drain. Using both hands, Riddick maneuvered the kid into a better position and pulled him out of the sewer.
He wasn't breathing and Riddick swore under his breath again. He checked Hyun-Shik's pulse with two fingers under his jaw, felt the flutter of a faint heartbeat. Alive. "C'mon, kid," Riddick encouraged, tilting Hyun-Shik's head back and pinching his nose shut. He took a deep breath and blew into the kid's mouth, felt the tiny chest rise and fall with forced air. He did it a few times, checked for breath, then pumped the kids chest, hoping to push up the water that must be in his lungs.
Riddick repeated CPR on the kid a few more times before the boy finally responded, turning his head and coughing up water, sucking in lungfuls of precious air. He coughed, clenching his eyes shut and moaned quietly.
When he opened his eyes and saw Riddick he tried to desperately scrabble away backwards, found his limps too weak and useless, sat with his back against the curb, whimpered in fear.
"I'm not gonna hurt you, Hyun-Shik," Riddick assured the child, holding out one massive palm. "If I'd wanted to do that you'd be a goner already. You were more than half drowned a minute ago."
Slanted, black eyes regarded Riddick with fear and suspicion. "How do you know my name?" he asked.
"Imam, at the shelter. You remember him?"
Hyun-Shik nodded. "Where are my parents? Where's Yon?" Yon was Hyun-Shik's older sister.
Riddick could see in the boy's eyes that he already knew the answer to those questions. That he had seen the tragedy happen.
"Hyun-Shik-"
"Seven."
"What?"
"My family, they call me Seven."
"Okay. Seven, they're gone. You know that."
The boy stared at him in defiance for a moment, his teeth clenched and his lips pursed, as if he would deny the facts.
"Where do I go now?" he finally asked in a small voice, his chin dropping to his chest. His dark eyes gazed up at Riddick through thick black lashes.
Riddick surprised himself more with his answer than he could ever surprise the kid. "You go with me."
FINIS
