Author's Note: I do not own Riddick, more's the pity. I did not create Slam, merely this interpretation of it. I did not have any hand in the creation of Pitch Black. I did however create Spook, and the other characters not seen in Pitch Black.
He fidgeted.
The uniform wasn't the most comfortable, and he was bored. He'd been standing still or patrolling the same corridor for the last 5 hours. Nothing ever happened on this patrol; it was all guards or sleeping medical personnel.
And he wasn't even allowed a good break.
His light hair was eased back to a tight tail, and scented with some saccharine spice that was cloyingly sweet, laced through with the acrid, bitter reek of aged nicotine smoke. There was a sullen set to the deceptively soft mouth. He gave a heavy sigh through a thin, pointed nose, closing green eyes for a moment, blocking out the dull metal around him.
"God, I want a smoke right now..."
Then he saw the girl.
He had no clue where she came from; she had simply appeared where she hadn't been a moment before standing a few yards away, watching him with her head tilted to one side, an inquisitive expression on her face and the feeling that she had always been there. She was dressed in clean white, a loose wrap of soft cloth that seemed to simply float around her, as if made of somehow spun fog. There was a faint hint of a smile, but it was tinged with a deep, resounding, heartbreaking sadness. There was a touch of sorrow around the large, slightly slanted eyes, in the arc of the strong brows. Green eyes met mirrored silver.
She had a Shine.
She was an inmate.
She held a hand towards him as he reached for his gun, palm up, her face set in the same melancholy, almost apologetic expression.
The air around her shivered, quivered, like the heat off a desert sand. Somehow, she seemed to change. For a moment, she was no longer the soft looking girl in the flowy cloth but the same girl in bloodstained prison rags, a blade dripping ichor in her slender hand, a spray of blood lining the pale mournful face and more drying in her dark hair. She bore the scent of death around her like a perfume, the visceral tang of fresh blood, and the odor of fresh death.
All around her, the walls were stained, smeared, painted a deep, dripping primal crimson, splashed and streaked with sprays and graceful arcs of the thick color. The doors were open, and pooling blood inched from some, half visible bodies fell through others, the blood reflecting their wide, horrified, fear filled, fogging eyes.
And behind her a vision of hellish terror.
A huge man, broad in shoulder and built like a raging bull. Hard forearms were gloved with the slime of viscera and other gobbets of dripping gore. In one hand was the limp, nearly decapitated cadaver of a guard, arterial blood still flowing. In the other was a curved, wide blade. His shirt was the deep near-black hue of fresh blood, and it was hard to tell exactly where the wetly sanguinous cloth ended and the crimson soaked skin began.
The face was set in a stony glare, proud and dangerous. Blood was spattered over the chiseled features, as if the hell-spawned being had been carefully striped with it in primitive, terrifying marks of an otherworldly warrior.
He too had the deep, cold, emotionless silvered eyes, but there was a different quality to his. Those deep eyes showed nothing, no expression, no reflections. They were simply there, darkly gleaming in the shadowed facets of his cruelly ecstatic face.
He simply didn't look human.
He was too cold, too obviously freed by the sprays of crimson that accompanied his every move, too viciously, mordaciously, venomously joyous. He seemed to delight in the feeling of the hot life pouring over him, but he dropped the still-dripping corpse and began to stride forward, only pausing in his approach long enough for a deep kiss of the thin, pale, ghostly woman, and to murmur something to her, his hand leaving a smear of brutish scarlet on the pale cheek.
And then the vision was simply gone.
The hall was empty, dully gleaming metal, sterile as always. Quiet filled his senses, calm air gently moving from the vents caressed his skin. He could smell his own sharpened sweat under the heavy scent of the oils in his hair. He blinked. His pounding heart thundered in his ears.
But there was no trace of the vision; no scent of copper and gore, no sign of the blood dripping over the walls, none of the silent choking of the dying breaths of mangled once-human meat on the floor. Thundering, booming footsteps of the fiend had vanished. The doors were closed, pristine, without even light leaking from beneath them.
And the girl was gone. Faded, vanished, or whatever hallucinations did, just like the rest of it.
His hand lowered from where it rested on the gauge, going back to his side. He shook his head. That was the problems with these shifts. The mind played tricks, twisted around the fears of the men who worked them, especially shifts like this where there wasn't anyone to talk to.
But damn if he didn't need that cigarette.
And then he felt the soft, teasing, tearing kiss of metal sliding into his flesh.
There was the heat of fiery breath against his cheek.
His blink brought the world into a cruel focus of ruby and silver.
Beside him, an arm around his shoulders to still him and pull him deeper onto the blade that snarled into yielding flesh, was the devilish creature. He opened his mouth to cry out, but no sound came.
The man-shaped demon nearly smiled.
And then the girl appeared again, striding slowly, silently up to him. The long, cool fingers slipped into his pocket, then raised the smoke to the paling lips, flicking the lighter to life for him.
A voice rumbled, thundered, shuddered through the muscles holding him on the icy blade.
"You're a damn sentimentalist, Spook."