The Chronicles of Riddick
Prologue
September 1, 2465
Stardie, Taurus 3, Taurus SystemThe young woman wore a long cloak, an odd piece of clothing even in the downtown, grimy areas of Stardie. The hood was draped over her head, blocking out the rain, the light, and the world. She moved quickly, holding a wet, brown paper bag in the crook of one arm. Something rustled within it, making an old, decrepit man heading the other way down the sidewalk do a double take, and walk faster away from her. Her hands, the only parts of her body that were bare, were pale and stark white against the black filth of Lower Stardie.
Everywhere around her, she saw groups and gatherings of homeless crowding around trashcans with small fires burning in them; the flames leapt no higher than the rim of the cans, and let out no warmth worth trying to use as a shield from the fierce cold. The lower hemisphere of Taurus 3 got no warmth during August or September. The planet was so far out in its orbit that even during the warmer months, one had to wear pants and a sweater to be comfortable. As the woman looked up from her paper sack bundle, she saw the neon sign she had kept one eye open for.
It advertised 'The Boiler Room – Specializing in the Exotic and Erotic,' in the bold colors of orange, red, blue, green, and purple. No self-respecting woman would be caught dead in these parts of town, but this one was willing. She had to leave her bagged treasure behind; to her, it was no more than a burden. The girl – for she really was no more than just a slip of a girl – flitted down the alleyway next to the club, down to the other end, to another block. There was a Buy-Rite liquor store there; the place never threw their trash into the bins, just left it outside the door for the disposal crews to pick up each morning. Leaving her package there would ensure that no one would find it for at least a few weeks, possibly not for months… unless the stench got too overwhelming.
Carefully bending over and setting the paper bag shrouded bundle in the bottom of one of the dented cans, the girl looked through lowered eyes out of her hood, carefully observing the traffic on the street. She wanted to be inconspicuous, to not be seen until the last minute. There were some ancient autos rumbling down the street, held up at traffic signal. She noted that it was about to turn green, some hundred meters away. The moment the colors changed, the two cars in the lanes headed towards the young woman roared out, street racing their little hearts out. They were seventy-five meters away…
Fifty meters… she stepped out of the alleyway and onto the dimly lit sidewalk; the fizzling streetlamp just above the young girl's head made her look like something out of a B-rated horror film.
The two racers were only twenty-five meters from her, speeding up as they went, whooping over their roaring engines, and cat calling at the dancers leaving a bar farther up the road. They were ten meters away… five… the girl let out an anguished cry.
She picked up her feet, and ran for it – the racer never knew what hit him. Or, rather, what he hit. The squeal of the tires as he screeched to a halt, the sickening crunch he had felt as he ran over the girl's body and left it crumpled in the roadway behind him. He jumped out of the car, just a nameless killer on a nameless street, with a nameless corpse laid out before him, covered in scarlet blood, gray matter shattered across the pavement and bones broken and breaking through the soft, white skin.
Someone in the Buy-Rite liquor store was sober enough and had sense enough to call the cops; by the time they reached the scene ten minutes later, the racer's friend had cleared out, taking with him some of the dancers they had been calling to. The drunkards in the Buy-Rite had left, taking with them as much liquor as they could hide on their bodies. The storeowner and his clerk were standing outside on the sidewalk observing quietly. And through it all, there had been a whimpering from the alleyway that no one had heard.
The cops came, took pictures, arrested the racer. He was a dashing young man with his whole life ahead of him; a smart kid going to a small branch of the Newtonian Graduate School in the next town over. He had been street racing for a month to rise tuition money, knowing full well that his part time job at Trupia's Fine Italian Restaurant wouldn't support him. But no pleading look from his soft green eyes would save the kid now; he had been caught street racing. That was enough to sentence a person to minimum security Slam for a few months… but to commit manslaughter on top of it, no matter how accidental would easily put one in the Slam for a few years. And that was his sentence – three and a half years, community service for six months and he would be the one paying for the girl's funeral. And still, no one heard the whimpering from the alleyway, not even as it grew into soft cries and innocent pleas.
The ambulance came to take the body to the morgue; the young man was loaded into a cop car; ten gallons of water was thrown onto the street to wash the coppery liquid into the sewers. The smell still permeated the air; thick enough that one could nearly taste it upon his tongue. It was a sick taste, made the Buy-Rite owner's wife hurl up her dinner that night. And as she hung over the edge of the toilet, the bathroom window opened a crack for fresh air, opened to the alleyway below, she heard a noise. Not of a stray dog or cat fishing through the garbage. Not of an old homeless man looking for a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. No, this was a different sound.
It was the soft cry of a muffled baby, a hungry, exhausted and tired baby that was too uncomfortable to sleep. Afraid she was hearing things, the woman woke up her husband and together they listened through the bathroom window, two stories up. He assured her, softly, that he heard it as well, and would go check it out in the morning. But the woman was adamant. If it really was a baby, it could not live out there in the freezing cold. By morning it would be dead; it was a wonder it wasn't already. And did her husband want to be a baby killer? He shook his head no, and told her he'd get dressed and go out to check. Five minutes later, she watched him rooting through the garbage cans in the alleyway, finally coming to the last one right next to the dumpster. He pulled out a paper bag, and suddenly the crying was a bit louder. The woman gasped and ran back to the bedroom, grabbing her robe before rushing down the flight of stairs to the store floor.
It was surely a baby her husband carried in that bag. He came in through the front door, set down the bag on the cashier's counter, and went back to lock the front door against the street wanderers. One never knew who was out there. The woman opened up the bag, and pulled out a bundle of blankets; they were a soft baby wool, bright yellow in color… and stained in blood. The child started crying louder, yet his voice was strangely raspy, as though his esophagus was strained or tightened. The husband unwrapped the first blanket, only to come to a second one. This one was pastel blue, with small sailboats imprinted upon it. It, too, was wool, but a more scratchy fabric. The woman unwrapped this blanket, and upon seeing the baby naked, screamed in fright. She had never seen anything so horrific and terribly sadistic in her life. He wasn't deformed, nor was he injured; it was only that his umbilical cord was wrapped about his neck so tightly; it could only have been there for the reason of cutting off his air supply.
The husband quickly picked up his head, and told his wife to start unwrapping it. She couldn't bring herself to do it, and so instead they switched roles. While she held the child's head up, supporting him carefully, her husband unwrapped it, shuddering at the thought that someone could have done it in the first place. The umbilical cord was not needed, the woman told him, as she finally came to her senses. She ordered him to get the scissors, and her sewing kit, and she would cut it off and sew up the wound in his belly button.
He was appalled that such a thing would be done to a small baby, but the wife reassured him it was done in the hospital all the time. She was wonderful at sewing; and as long as the child was so young, they could give him a single shot of anesthetics in his abdomen to numb him. They had a regular medicine cabinet in the store office; bottles broke all the time and paying for doctor bills for the clerks was harder than sewing up their employees' wounds themselves. The husband went and got the supplies, and they quickly went to work. As soon as the umbilical cord was off and he was all sewn up, the woman put a bandage over his tummy, and took him upstairs to the bathroom. He was a bloody mess – literally. There was blood on his body and all over his face and in the small tuft of black hair that grew on his head.
The woman was sure she still had some baby shampoo from when her fully-grown boys were babies; she never threw anything out. Ever. Finding it under the sink, she drew some water up in the bath and quickly went to work. As soon as he was in the warmth, the little boy quickly settled down. Then woman was quite positive he was only about a week old. She told her husband to go down to the store and get out a pint of milk and warm it up, but she wasn't sure how she was going to feed him. Taking a towel she wrapped it around the babe like swaddling; she had no baby clothes because she had given them all to her sisters for their kids. She took the baby down to the store, and grabbed a clean latex glove out of a box they had for cleaning the floors with lye, and put a pin through one of the fingers, to make a hole for the babe to suck on. Once that was done, she poured the milk into the glove and took it and the baby up to bed.
Babies were not easy work, and the woman knew from experience that she would be up all night for a long time. As she dozed off with the garbage baby in her arms, the woman whispered to her husband.
"Richie, we're keeping him." Her voice was firm. "There's no where else for him to go and you know it." Richie agreed with her, and agreed that they would keep him, at least until he was old enough to go to a proper orphanage. Now the woman's voice was filled with glee. "What will we name him, Richie?"
Richie told her he didn't know, and that he trusted her to pick out a name. Her first son they had named Nicholas, after her grandfather. The second boy had been Charles, because Richie had been obsessed with Charles Dickens at the time. The woman knew that they should have the legacy live on, of Richies in the family. Her Richie was the fifth.
"Honey, he's going to be Richard. Richard Brenner."
"Meredith, it's beautiful," Richie said, an exasperated tone in his voice. "Now go to bed. You're going to be up in about two hours anyway."
Meredith sighed contentedly, glad Richie liked the name of their newest son. Richard Brenner would be around for a long time.
***
A few more Author's Notes to help explain a bit:
I've constructed a timeline based on the scattered information I've received from numerous sources, including PitcherBlacker (the most comprehensive and up-to-date Pitch Black fansite on the web), imdb.com, and pitch-black.com, just to name a few.
This timeline is set 500 years in the future, making the year (if you go by the time at which the movie was released) 2500, exactly. I've set Riddick's approximate age at 35; with cryo-deduction he's only 25—this results in his birth being in the year 2465. Hence, the prologue is set in this year. As for the date, I kind of just made that up; Riddick would have been about a week old at the time of his discovery in the trash bin, I believe. That makes his birthday seven days before, being August 24. (Which, incidentally, is my own birthday. *wink wink*)
This birth date also makes Riddick a Virgo, which suits his personality very well. For example, the polarity of a Virgo is negative, which is wonderful because hey, Riddick is a convicted murderer. Virgos are in the intellectual grouping, perfect because no cold-blooded serial killer can be…well, stupid. The key body part is the nervous system. If you remember, Riddick describes to Fry the feeling that overcomes him when he's about to slice through someone's spinal cord – their 'sweet spot' – the fourth lumbar down. The ruling planet of the Zodiac sign is Mercury, which is ironic, because Mercury was the god of healing and communications. However, the element Mercury is also known as quicksilver, for its liquid form is silvery, smooth, and swift moving—Silvery like Riddick's shine job, smooth like his feline reflexes, and swift moving like his motion.
Location-wise, I chose Taurus Three for the artistic license it merits. The only thing known about the planet is that it was the original destination of the Hunter-Gratzner; Paris mentioned selling his antiques there. The city's name, Stardie, comes from the Gaelic word for 'prison,' which foreshadows where Riddick will ultimately spend much of his time. I chose Gaelic because after researching the surname Riddick, it showed up with origins in Norse and Welsh backgrounds. The Norse, the Welsh and the language of Gaelic are all of the same time period, collectively (the early 1000's, or so), and therefore, it seemed appropriate to choose such a word.
Now that I've properly rambled, I'm out. Thank you bunches; please leave me a review… Hope you enjoyed it!
– star of light –