CHAPTER13BOTS

CHAPTER 13

“Dada! Look what Audi ga’ me!”
The little girl ran with arms outstretched. She ran with a smile of complete confidence that the arms of the man would catch her if she were to fall. Bright, innocent joy lighting her face from within. The simple, basic, indestructible belief that love would be there always.
Barefoot, with golden, frizzy curls flying behind her, she wore a tiny, flowered sun-dress that fell to her chubby three year-old knees. The sunlight dappling her as she made her way through the tree lined path that led to a farmstead.
She looked so much like her mother he felt the breath catch in his throat. She had the same effect on him as her mother had. A kick to the gut, in awe that something so perfect and wondrous was apart of his life. That such a thing of beauty could love him unconditionally.
Audrey ambled along behind her. Giving the child time with her father and her newest, most precious possession. Laughing as thickly muscled arms picked up and twirled the little girl as if she were a top. Inducing a squeal of delight from the toddler that even had the usually solemn Riddick cracking a grin.
“What do you have there Goldilocks?” he asked as he held her to his chest.
“A pwitty fower’!
The chubby face with hazel eyes looked up at him with excitement and expectation. News of this magnitude deserved an equally exciting response. He dutifully ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ over the sadly wilted and twisted botanical victim. All the time wondering where the ability to make his daughter happy came from. ‘Cause it was damn sure no one in his childhood had ever ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ over anything of his.
He set the wiggley little girl down with instructions to go into the house and have Imam put it in water. Not that he seriously thought it would do the poor critter any good, but it would make Zarabeth happy.
And that was all that mattered to him anymore. Making the wondrous and beautiful creature that was his daughter safe and happy.
Something he hadn’t been able to do for her mother.
Four long years ago he’d awoken in the dirty supply closet alone and panicked.
Zar was gone.
Guilt and panic had immediately torn into him that he’d not heard her leave. Even the knowledge that she now had a fledglings helping of the same abilities as he possessed couldn’t quench the burn of self-blame in his gut.
He should’ve known she would try something like that with the frame of mind she’d been in! He’d slept before with one ear and eye open, pushing his body to rest only, never deeply sleep. Why hadn’t he done it then?!
He’d searched for her frantically around the perimeter of the supply closet. Unable to do as thorough a hunt as he wanted to do for fear of detection. Two hours later he reluctantly gave it up.
Sure that Zar had left to find a place to die by her own hand. Certain in his heart because his heart now beat alone. The other- worldly echo of her organs rhythm gone. Its absence filled by an aching knowledge that she’d been unable to cope with the Profearaben flowing through her veins like lava from a volcano. Refusing to trust him, or burden him for that matter. Refusing to believe that they would find a way to endure together.
He couldn’t really blame her. The woman who’d run away from him had just barely been the Zar he lived with and loved for the last few years. Really just a shadow of her former self. And the change would’ve just become worse as the vicious drug worked on her mind and body more and more. Her being an Orion Plague baby had allowed her to survive the injection, something most people did not. But that was as far as the immunity would’ve gone. She’d be just as susceptible to Profearaben’s corrupting influences as he’d been.
But that didn’t mean accepting her death had been any easier. In fact, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done is life. Every cell in his heart screamed at him to not give up. But his brain, (the part of him that long ago had learned to see what WAS...just fucking WAS!), screamed at him even louder to face the inevitable. To save the tube that held their child and get the hell off of Dee 7as Zar had begged him to do.
Calling on every scrap of emotional strength he possessed, he pushed the pain down deep into the small, cold box that was now his heart. Understanding that the only way he was getting off the asteroid was by numbing himself to the realization that he would never touch Zar again.
From the tidbits Bigsby had let drop, he knew the man hunting him was not the most mentally stable. A true sociopath if there ever was one. If only half of what the adjutant said was true, Bieti made Richard Riddick look like a school-yard bully in comparison. He knew the longer he left the tube in Bieti’s hands, the less chance he had of escaping with it surviving intact.
The frenzied, unorganized movements of the ASF showed that they were still clueless on how to find him. Most were as afraid of being the ones to find him as to not finding him at all. The bloody deaths of Bigsby and his lover making him, in their minds, a walking-talking monster of the most horrifying kind. The longer it took to find him, the more supernatural abilities he took on.
He took advantage of their lack of order to make his way to where he knew the stasis tube was kept. Part of him hoping to meet Bieti along the way. But realizing that it would probably come down to escape and safety for him and the tube or taking revenge.
He couldn’t even begin to think of a pay back painful enough for what Bieti had done to him. To Zar. It would’ve taken days, time he didn’t have, to formulate a retaliation as equally excruciating for the man that had taken away all that was precious to him.
He had no idea how he was going to get into Bieti’s office. Certain the passage way and entrance would be closely guarded. But in a way, the general himself gave him an ‘in’.
He and Zar hadn’t been the only ones the ASF had been brutalizing on Dee 7. A heavy round of interrogations and ‘justified’ detentions had been inflicted on the residents of the asteroid. The reason given was to apprehend the wife-killer Rick Miller, but in reality the ASF tended to do that kind of shit just to keep the populations under their control in a constant state of unease.
Most inhabitants caved. Did what the brutal organization demanded and prayed that they’d leave. But Dee 7 was made up of men and women previously abused by the Alliance Security Forces. Ex-cons and escapees, those caught and those who’d slipped the net by the skin of their teeth, the mining asteroid was their last chance at a somewhat normal life.
Once here they tried, like he and Zar had, to live their lives. But it was always with a desperate habit of looking over their shoulder for a mercenary or agent. It made them mean whenever a sense of uncertainty or upheaval entered those lives.
And the ASF did nothing else if it didn’t dump a shit load of uncertainty and upheaval on a place. Add his own little guerilla war on the soldiers in the mines, (he managed not to kill any of the miners, but the ASF hadn’t been so discriminating in who they’d blasted) and you had a riot waiting to happen.
When a miner’s child had been killed in an ASF round-up, all Hell had broken loose on Dee 7. The mines shut down, looters ran rampant and Molotov cocktails flew in every direction.
Chaos reigned.
And Richard B. Riddick knew how to use chaos to his advantage. It was as comfortable to him as a shiv in the hand.
So access to Bieti’s office was ridiculously easy. No one stood guard and the door stood half-way open as light smoke poured through. Lights strobed and klaxons blared. Once inside fire retardant coated his skin as he walked cautiously through the room that held a desk and some utilitarian furniture.
The adjoining rooms door was completely open also. It’s contents, like the room he was in, were obviously ransacked. Going through he was greeted by a sight that made him both rejoice and grit his teeth in anger.
Alphonse Bieti lay dead against the furthest wall. A miner’s pick-ax imbedded in the middle of his forehead. A look of surprise etched into his blood covered face.
Riddick knelt down next the man who tried to destroy him. Feeling the rage gradually slide into disappointment as he studied his face. He had so wanted to hurt this man in a very bad way. Put him through the same pain and anguish and hopelessness that he’d put Zar through.
But, as one of the his many foster mothers had told him, them’s was the breaks.
The grief tried to claw its way out of his throat and he had to bow his head to get control. It was then he saw it. The tube, the object that held his and Zar’s child, was clutched in a literal death grip by Bieti’s right hand.
And it was intact.
He tried to tear it from the dead man’s fingers, but he had too strong a grip on it. That was easily solved by a scalpel laying on the floor. Two minutes later the corpse was missing five fingers from the first knuckle up and the stasis tube was safely tucked into his shirt. Its coolness a comfort against his skin.
He’d left the room without a backward glance.
With the breakdown of even basic safety protocols, it was absurdly easy to walk to the port section of the asteroid and steal a ship. His luck held when, after escaping and putting a good deal of distance between himself and Dee 7, he checked the cargo and discovered that he’d hit the jackpot.
The ship, “Marie’s Ruin”, held a smugglers dream of contraband liquor, clothing, drugs and other assorted goodies. He was going to be a very rich man once he was able to sell everything.
Five years ago this would’ve been his dream come true. Now, it just gave him a mild feeling of satisfaction. Material possessions meant little to him without Zar to share them with.
The long days alone in the ship gave him time to think about what he was going to do with his life know. There was no where he really wanted to go, nothing he really wanted to do. Bieti hadn’t wanted to take the chance on another agency getting their hands on him, so as far as the rest of the galaxy knew, with the exception of Audrey and Imam, Richard Riddick was still dead.
So he drifted for a few months. Docked at some out of the way space port whenever he had an opportunity to sell the cargo. Played a few game of cards, drank a little, even had mindless sex occasionally with a clean prostitute.
Each time his body had demanded the release. But, it return for the release, he got paid back with a sick feeling in his stomach. A reaction he knew was psychosomatic. His brain, and dick, might know that Zar was dead, but his soul still felt he was cheating on her. He knew she wouldn’t have begrudged him. But it still felt too much like Miriam Gonzalez all over again.
It was while playing one the poker games with other nefarious characters that he won the farmstead he now lived on. When the guy had turned over the deed to him, he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with the property. Sell it probably.
Too bad he didn’t know how to farm.
That’s where Imam had come into the picture. He...
“She needs new clothes. We should go into town. There are other supplies to get anyhow. Two birds with one stone, I figure.” Audrey’s hopeful voice severed his reverie. He couldn’t blame her. The quiet of the farm brought him a degree of peace, but he could see how a twenty-year-old woman would need a change of scenery occasionally.
It had been a good two months since they had ventured into town. Whitson’s Crossing, on the planet of New Concord, wasn’t exactly a merc hotspot, but Richard avoided large gatherings if at all possible just to play it safe.
Turning towards the shed that housed their land transpo, he sighed just a little as he answered her. “Yeah, I know. You’re right. Go get everyone and we’ll head in.”
Audrey punched him lightly in the arm as she teased him, “ C’mon Riddick, it won’t be that bad!”
His only answer was a grumpy twist of the lips as he pulled his ever present goggles from his pockets and put them on in preparation for the short trip into town.
The journey didn’t take long once Audrey had gathered Zarabeth, Hill and Imam. But Zarabeth and four-and-a-half-year-old Hill’s irrepressible excitement at going into town, along with Audrey’s constant pleas that they settle down, had made him edgy.
The idiot screaming and slapping around his woman did little to alleviate his condition.
The couple had just come out of the general store as the family had arrived. He was a scraggly looking specimen. Skinny with patchy, greasy hair, he was laying into the woman with a venom that sounded as if it been habitual. The woman looked even worse. He could only see her from the back, but she wore khaki colored, dingy pants and pull-over top. Her feet were bare. Her close cropped hair, spiky with dirt, lay above a filthy neck. She let the man, who had what had to be a very painful grip on her arm, push and pull her around like a rag doll.
Guys like that always made Riddick nervous and wary. They had a tendency to attract the wrong kind of attention. Part of him wanted to bitch smack the man senseless. But the part of him that had made a survival an art form cautioned him that his and his family’s life weren’t worth the woman’s. Besides, he knew any interference from him would just make it worse on the woman later.
“Stupid cunt! What did I tell you about touching stuff?!” His words were accompanied by a shove in her chest that sent her tripping backwards. She instinctively wobbled her body to keep from falling and Riddick wondered why she hadn’t used her arms to help keep her balance. Then he realized her hands were probably constrained.
Whiplash rage tightened his muscles. Unconsciously he readied himself to give the sleaze bag the ass whopping of his life.
Riddick felt an arm go around his knees and looked down into Zarabeth’s frightened face. The others stood as if frozen. Looks of mingled disgust, anger and fear showing on their faces. They didn’t need to see this. Especially Zarabeth and Hill.
“You and Hill go with Audrey and Imam. Go ahead, go into the store!” Gently he disengaged the little girls death grip, hauled her up and gave her to Imam. He wanted to kill the man just for the trembling he felt in his daughters body.
“Take them in. I’ll be there in a minute.” Even with his goggles on, Imam could tell Riddick was not happy with the situation. But the changes Zar and her love had made in him left him little alternative but to act.
Waiting until the four of them were safely within the stores confines, he turned back to the couple. The woman hung her head and seemed to be breathing heavily. Why the hell didn’t she fight back?! But he figured he knew why. Some people mind-fucked the survival instinct right out of themselves.
Hauling his arm back the man delivered a brutal back hand to the woman’s face. “Why the fuck don’t you ever learn?!” The blow sent her sprawling backwards, landing her face down on the ground at Riddick’s feet.
The man moved in to deliver another blow, but he finally noticed the boots at which the stupid bitch had fallen. His eyes traveled up the long, muscular legs and torso, finally rising to the lightly bearded face. It was covering a caramel skinned, uncompromising visage. The top style buzz cut faded down to almost bare sides. Dressed in a dark gray vest over a red cotton top with matching dark gray pants, the giants arms were crossed over his large chest. Goggles hid his eyes, but the aura of danger let him know that this was not someone he wanted to fuck with.
He stopped with an primitive sense of survival, waiting to see what the muscle man would do. Sweat began to break out under his arms even though it was a cool day in Whitson’s Crossing.
Riddick slowly reached down to gently pick up the woman. He wanted her out of the way before he beat the everlasting fuck out her boyfriend. He’d risk the attention of the authorities to teach the prick some lessons.
The woman had remained face down in the dirt. Not unconscious, but not coherent either evidently. He brought her to her knees then stopped. She seemed to cower like an oft beaten dog. Learning to deal with the abuse by presenting the smallest target possible. She hadn’t made so much as a sound through the whole beating.
Something was wrong. No...that wasn’t quite right. Something was...back. The echo that had been missing from his heart for four long, painful, hopeless years...started again. Thumping rhythmically, almost painfully, its beat of two souls irrevocably connected through love.
With shaking hands her reached for her chin. And lifted to his eyes a face that had filled his mind during the day and haunted his dreams at night.
“Zar?!”