He didn’t speak much while he trained them the next day. Did not compliment or criticize, swear or fawn over the boys who did better. He just trained them. And trained with them, as well. A vicious, sweltering game of Follow the Leader beneath the rising sun. He ran them, sprints first and then endless circles around the camp, made them do pushups until their arms were boneless and they gasped and sweated on their stomachs in the dust. He got them all on their backs just by getting on his own, and they did hundreds upon hundreds of situps, crunches, then twisting, opposite elbow to opposite knee, until their obliques were on fire. Then up on their feet, running headlong into the wind a mile or so, and back.
Then sleep. Water and sleep, until night fell.
Riddick woke to the beautiful blanket of soothing blackness over his face and opened his eyes. He took the goggles off, massaging his head where the elastic had pinched his skin since daybreak, and scanned his surroundings. The shifty ash of the burnt cornfield was all a vast silver being twitching along the horizon, and all the men were still asleep. He could smell Cabos but not see her, could smell the exhaustion on her. Even his body was stiff. If the newbies slept too long, they wouldn’t be able to move when they woke. He stretched his giant arms up over his head, hocked and spat, and found Cabos, pressing the sole of his boot down on her hip and shaking her lightly. She blinked and looked up at him.
“Help me wake them up,” he whispered. She stood slowly, and he regarded her with something just short of disinterest as she pulled her long hair back and braided it with deft fingers. She dusted herself off, then went about shaking the men.
“Come on, boys, up. Come on.” Riddick kicked and shoved them all awake, stopped by Connelly and Wade and shook them. They blinked drowsily up at him.
“Still dark,” Connelly grumbled, and Riddick ignored his complaint. What was that? The breeze was shifting, and there was something…Cool, salty, strong. Then it hit him in a steady gust mixed with ash and dirt. Blood. Fresh. Lots.
“Stay here,” he growled at Cabos, and she looked at him strangely, but nodded. Riddick took the bone shiv from his belt and jogged alone away from the pathetic party. Cabos watched him until he was swallowed by the inky blackness, and went to look in on Ignacio.
Riddick knew who it was long before he got there. Ignacio had managed to drag himself almost half a mile before blowing off the back of his head with a silenced pistol. He lay there in a pool of his own blood, staring sightlessly intot he clear, starry sky, his cold, white fingers still wrapped around his gun.
“Jesus,” Riddick said. He squatted and took off his shirt, tying it around the man’s head. Ignacio was not a big guy. Riddick outweighed him by somewhere around sixty pounds, and lifting him was no difficulty. He didn’t smell yet, but would soon, int hat heat. Riddick could hear Cabos calling for her brother as he neared the camp.
“Quiet,” he gruffed, and she turned. Her shoulders dropped as if someone had let the air out of her.
“Oh, no. No, no, no. Nacho, godammit.” Riddick lay him on the ground at her feet and Wade handed him a canteen. He rinsed Ignacio’s blood off his hands and chest and tried to remain detached as he watched Cabos drop to her knees next to her brother and touch him almost squeamishly with the fingertips of one hand. She ran her fingers through her hair and stared down at him, and her attempt at stoicism under such a heinous amount of pain touched Riddick somehow, reached in through his armor and twisted at him.
“Come on,” he said, hauling her to her feet by her upper arms with a gentle sort of insistence. “I’ll help you bury him.”
The task at hand kept her hysteria at bay as they dug with shivs in the soft ash and dirt alongside the road, a long, arduous task. The moon was full, the stars were bright, and the darkness was comforting without being oppressive as they laid Ignacio in the grave and covered his body with earth. Cabos stood and stared at the mound as if she didn’t believe what she’d jus seen and done. Riddick hesitated a moment, then reached over and took her hand, squeezing gently. She looked up at him, shocked at the tender gesture, and for the first time, read sincerity there, actual compassion void of cynicism and sarcasm.
“God,” she said, pulling her hand away swiping angrily at her eyes with the back of it. “We could have carried him. There are plenty of people. He wouldn’t have…” She trailed off, and the silence was deafening. The boys were sitting quietly, watching the scene groggily with eyes lit orange by the fire.
“You had a better chance of survival if he was dead,” Riddick said softly. “ He knew that, and he chose your life over his own.” He marveled at the weight of that fact even as he spoke it.
“Bastard,” she said. “Ignacio, you bastard.” She turned her back on Riddick and, with one brief gesture, had all the boys on their feet.
There wasn’t enough ammunition to really train them to shoot. None of them had been through any military training program, formal or otherwise, with the exception of Wade, who’d attended a military secondary school, some sort of Junior ROTC program, and Riddick liked that he was humble even in the face of his obvious superiority over the other recruits. They weren’t in a pissing contest anymore. The lewd jokes, the ballbreaking and spitting and locker-room talk had ceased and they were all afraid. Scared shitless. And rightfully so. Their unfaltering confidence in the psycho-killer leading the pack unnerved, rather than galvanized, Riddick…
He had killed more like forty men, not sixty, he judged by the number of clips he had left in his pack, and even though forty or sixty or anywhere in between was an awesome feat, he knew he probably could not do it again if he tried. He guessed the militiamen he’d annihilated must have been recruits as green as his own, or close, and the way they’d spread out looking for him, in a circle, had been undeniably in his favor. There had been no men behind him, flanking him, and there hadn’t been the distraction of any of his own men. Not to mention it had been dark. The killing conditions had been impeccable, and not likely to repeat themselves.
Yet now he had this reputation. And this responsibility. It was a bitch to lead and a bitch to be led, but when given a choice between the two, he supposed leading would always be the favorable alternative in his mind. So he had to train thirty-three momma’s boys to be ruthless, silent, calculating and inventive killers, despite a shortage of nearly every vital commodity…men, food, supplies, ammunition, transportation. They needed to be physical perfection, able to walk or run for days and then fight, deadly and accurate and not fatigued. And he would set about making shivs for all of them. The bullets, he knew, sooner or later, would run out.
He didn’t necessarily want them to be afraid of him, but they were, and it was not without its perks. They were quiet. They were obedient. No one challenged his authority, except occasionally for Cabos, whom, he grudgingly admitted, knew more about firearms than he did. Blades had always been his weapon of choice, and all of them seemed to know it. Everyone was perfectly at ease when he had a loaded gun in his hand, aimed at a target a few feet from the group, yet he could draw his shiv to slice a piece of rope and they all took two or three large, measured steps back away from him, and it usually made him smile.
There was plenty of material to craft shivs from. The three shivs he had on him were sharp and sturdy enough to cut scrap metal from the bomb-gutted cars they happened upon, sharpen bovine bone to hair-splitting perfection, even chip at stone, and each night when he camped them, he made a shiv or two. It only took him about three hours to perfect one, after some ten years of experience, and he armed his most useful recruits first, working his way down to the men he planned to use as bait or for pertinent suicide missions.
For fifteen days, they saw no one. Only corpses and ashes and timber that had long since stopped smoldering. They marched on and he watched as his men became confident and proficient in their weaponry and hand-to-hand skills. By the light of the fire, and sometimes before they built one, they would draw a ring in the dirt, and Riddick would pair them against one another, armed to the teeth, with orders not to maim or kill one another, and they would fight. For hours, they would fight. He alternated camping them during the day and in the dark, alternated the terrain he camped them on, and the weather he camped them in. He accustomed them to sleep under any conditions, taking it when and where they could get it.
Their luck with finding water was decent. They came upon several relatively large towns that had been burnt to the ground, found compasses and socks and a new (albeit far too small) shirt for Riddick in a backwoods convenience store, picked through what people had dropped in the street for things that may not have burned.
On the fifteenth day since the attack in the woods, they came to a town which had been completely abandoned and had not been touched by a lick of flame. There were tank tracks through the park at the center of the town, though, and some of the homes were bowled over, half of a house missing. Some were shot to shit with machinegun fire. There were a few corpses around, but it was obvious that the people here had not been massacred. Scared out, it seemed. Riddick guessed an unlucky few had been made examples of to cause the rest of the people to flee, and that a couple thousand militiamen had camped there. Perhaps while awaiting orders. Perhaps while evolving a plan. But it seemed they had just…moved on, taking what they could carry.
What they could carry had not been everything. There was a large grocery store chock full of food. Everything fresh or frozen had been eaten, but even canned vegetables were filet mignon compared to the shit they’d been living off of. And there were bottles and bottles and bottles of water, soda, juice. Riddick stared at the jubilant men as they ran through the aisles, eating until they vomited and then going back for more. He had an uneasy feeling, like they might have been baited and would be ambushed at any time, but they weren’t. Morale skyrocketed at the unexpected smile from God. Even Cabos tore open a package of cookies, sitting next to Riddick, and he smiled at her. She returned the smile slowly, and he realized she hadn’t genuinely smiled since Ignacio’s death. Neither of them had. And they hadn’t had sex since that rough tumble in the woods the day they’d found all the boys. There’d been neither energy nor opportunity, and now there was both.
He motioned for her to follow him and she stood up and did so, nonchalant so no one would look twice. Wade and Connelly had not opened their mouths about him throwing her over his shoulder and hauling her off to bang her in the bush, and none of the others had been given reason to suspect. They headed back, back away from everyone, toward where the ice cream had been. There was nothing rotten in any of the fridges or freezers, and Riddick guessed the Engine men had gone for the cold stuff first. Riddick’s mouth watered as he thought about ice cream…It had been fifteen years…But then Cabos hooked a forefinger in his belt loop and pulled hard, into the ladies room, and he forgot there ever was such a thing as food…
She took his face in her hands and kissed him, kissed his mouth softly, and his cheeks and his nose and his eyelids, his throat and his jawline and his ears, and he stood, arms hanging at his sides, dumbfounded. What was this? What was this tugging he felt in his chest, this weakness in his knees as she touched him, this absence of volatile lust and this presence of…of what? What was this?
To be perfectly honest with you I wouldn’t know how. His own words echoed in his mind as something like a nervous panic crept up on him. I don’t know how to be this way. I don’t know how.
But she did. And she was willing to wait while he learned. He slid his hands up underneath her black shirt, pushing the hem up along the flat, chiseled plane of her stomach, up over her breasts. The red satin lingerie of that first insane night was gone, probably forever, and in its place was a sweat-stained gray sports bra, but she smelled wonderful, and he buried his face between her breasts, his hands splayed across her shoulder blades, pushing her to him, as he struggled to quell the storm the scent of her had conjured in him. He succeeded, pulling back and looking at her, his hands trembling on her skin, and she smiled, that large, pillowy top lip begging him to taste it, and he took it in his mouth and sucked it while he worked her breasts free of the awful gray thing, his breath rushing hot through his nose into her lashes, and then his face was gone from her and he was pulling her shirt up, and the bra up, and he looked down at her body, a darker and more delicious caramel even than his own, at the nipples hard from his teasing, the two perfect feminine swells rising and falling as she breathed, and he worked his fingers into the tight braid of her hair and tore it free, watching the black torrent rush down over her shoulders and arms. He took her waist in his hands and bowed forward, touching one nipple with his tongue, delighting in the catch of Cabos’s breath as he did so, and moved to the other, nipping it lightly, and she pulled back at first, then thrust the assaulted breast forth again for more. He was gentler, but not by much, and when he pulled back and sighed shakily, she laughed, low and throaty from deep within her, and he fell to his knees before her, his boneless legs no longer able to support his weight.
He was face to face with the apex of her thighs now, and only camo and cotton stood between him and the thing he wanted more than anything in the world. His fingers shook violently as he fought to keep them from tearing the pants from her and thrusting his mouth up to bite the black heat there. Again, he succeeded. He could do this. He could be a considerate lover. He could.
He untied the laces of her standard issue boots and she lifted the foot a few inches off the ground so he could pull the boot off of her, and he repeated the performance on the other one, then reached for the fly of her pants. The button was a giant obstacle with shaking hands, and she laughed again, that low rumble that melted his insides, and pushed his hands gently away. She undid the button, unzipped, and he slid the pants down over her hips, her thighs, her knees, till they pooled around her ankles, and she stepped out of them, kicked them aside, and sat completely naked on the cold linoleum tiling of the floor before him. He grasped her mouth in his again, easing her back down onto the floor, until the heat of her skin was cooled and only the fire between her legs remained.
His weight on her was beautiful, but she resented the shirt between his skin and hers, and yanked it up over his head in one deft tug. She pulled the goggles off as well, knowing the early evening light from the only window was enough to make his eyes glimmer but not enough to hurt them. Perfect. His lids were heavy and he seemed unsure of himself, as though he’d lost his footing and was falling fast. All she could see on either side were his arms, great bulging walls, and she could feel the soft hair on his belly as he pressed his body against hers, kissing her throat. He was only kissing, not licking or biting, nothing animalistic or rough, as he made his way down. Kisses. Soft, innocent kisses that burned her skin like fire, and he could smell the core of her, that warm, salty-sweet haven he could lose himself in…
He was so hard it was almost painful and she hadn’t lain a finger on him.
He took her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and closed his eyes as he reached his destination. He drew a deep breath. He’d never done this before, was unsure of how to go about it but absolutely certain that he wanted to try. Her legs went around his arms, her feet on his shoulders for leverage, as the delicious roughness of his tongue hit the absolute root of her and pressed hard upward, jarring her with a searing shard of ecstasy that tore up from between her legs, through her belly and her chest and caught in her throat with a sharp gasp. He wasn’t sure what he’d just done, but it had either been very right or very wrong, and from the way she was undulating against his lips, he guessed it had been right. He waited a moment before he found a rhythm, his mouth and his hands falling into it together, pinching the hard, dark nipples and pressing the sweet little berry of a nub with his tongue in unison, all the while inhaling deep breaths of what had to be the most intoxicating scent known to mankind.
He brought her as close to the edge as he could and stopped, the hot, trembling body beneath him too much to resist any longer. He rested his chin on her belly and she propped herself up on her elbows, staring into his face as he smiled his irrepressible lust up at her sheepishly.
“Come on up,” she said, laughing breathily, and he did, with one eager lunge, the canvas camo pants rough between her legs where such a softness had just been, but not unpleasantly so. She was ready for a bit of roughness now. She pushed the pants down off of him and seized him in her hand, bringing the end of him to the beginning of her, and the gentility with which he entered her took her aback. He was kissing her throat and rolling slowly with his hips, the beast gone from him completely, and he found her hands with his own, lacing his fingers in hers as he…made love to her? Jesus Christ, is that what this was? He was next to positive that he didn’t love her, but this was not fucking, and more than sex…
She could not close her eyes, would not, stared at him in bemusement. This was a killer? This man? She did not believe it. Maybe this body had killed, but this man had not. He murmured something against her throat, and just the tickle of his breath as it traveled across her skin, as well as the soft push between her legs, brought a long, strong, but beautiful orgasm crashing over her in waves.
He held her hands in his own as her body surrendered, and he came harder than he ever had in his life, his eyes closed, face buried in the soft cloud of black hair, sheathed completely, his heart throbbing against his ribs.
Exhausted as he’d never been before, he fell asleep sprawled across her with his head on her shoulder, naked and vulnerable as the day he was born.
