Disclaimer : I don't own any of the characters from Pitch Black, although if I had my way I would.

Note : Watched the movie the other day, got bored and decided to do my take on what happens afterwards. I wasn't that fond of Chronicles or some of the other Jack/Riddick fics that I found out there. Not that some of them weren't good, hell, some of them were really good, but I wanted to do my own take, so, yeah. Here it is.

Valley of Death

Prologue : Of Hell and War

Seven fucking years and they're still fighting over this worthless ball of dust. That's what the planet is now, nothing but dust and ashes, remnants of cities that used to stand there glittering on the horizon like so many jewels. I remember first setting foot there, just before the war began, escaping the ship I'd stowed away in on New Mecca with such ease that I was quite sure no one would ever figure out where I had gone. The sun had been setting and the sky was the color of an amber rose and then, not a month after looking up at that sky and feeling the hope that my fucked up life would from that day forward change, did the first guns fire and the first bombs drop.

They weren't nukes, no, humanity had learned from the disaster that was Earth that nukes weren't the answer to all of life's little problems. However, blowing things up was still a military fashion trend. It seemed like every gun toting convoy had one of the new pulse bombs or handful of plasma grenades ready to throw at the enemy or any mob of civilians that got in the way. Life is a picnic when your running away from nationalistic psychos whose greatest goals in life is to die killing someone because some asshole in the government can't get over his ego enough to say 'Hey, why don't we stop dropping bombs and start seeing what the people want for a change'.

They are all such fucking morons. It pisses me off that they never once thought what would happen to the rest of us when they started fighting. It pisses me off even more when I hear somebody talk about how proud they are that a relative of theirs is off fighting for whatever faction they favor. Sometimes I just want to shout in their faces the gritty truth, that the war is just another display of how little the Company gives a shit about the people whose lives it controls.

I despise those bombs and the people who carry them around like some kind of sick badge. Hell, I avoid people altogether, because things are a lot different among the people of Kartos now a days. While the factions fight their selfish war the civilians fight their own just trying to get through the day without getting killed. It's chaos, panic, and disorder, all rolled up into a neat little word called 'anarchy' and, surprisingly, I don't mind it at all.

My turf has been staked out for three years now; all the local thugs know it and avoided my mansion like it's bearing some kind of deadly disease. I am, of course, that disease, for I proved my mettle long ago when the war had just started and the gangs had first formed. The leader of one had gotten an eye for me, had come right into my old hiding place at a warehouse where the downtown area used to be, and tried to have his way.

I still remembered his face, scarred from some brawl and his hands rough against my skin as he shoved me around, looking like he was getting some kind of high off of hitting me. I can recall every bruise and every cut that he gave me that night. I can count every scar. I can still hear his shout when I slammed the crowbar against shins so hard that the bone nearly shattered. His plea still rings in my mind every time I remember taking that same crowbar to his skull. I can still smell the blood staining my hands. That bastard didn't know who he was messing with when he messed with me.

The mansion wasn't mine originally, hell, I don't know who the fuck it belonged to originally, it was so looted by the time I got there, the front doors were even missing. The yard was knee deep in scraggly weeds and there were burnt patches on the ground and the outside walls from when the troops passed through in their arguments. I've watched from the upstairs window as they shot at each other in the streets, their blood pouring down into the sewers like rain water. I found out quickly that watching people die from that vantage point is a good way to stop caring when it's your hands actually doing the work. I stay upstairs most of the time now, only venturing out to find food or to replenish my lamp bulbs, because, even now I still dislike the darkness. I'm nineteen almost twenty and I'm still afraid of the fucking dark.

There's one thing I'm grateful for and that's the non-electric water system built into the mansion. There's no hot water, but there's plenty of plain water so I can use it to barter with if I needed anything extra, like cigarettes or the occasional and hard to come by beer. I'm not even old enough to drink legally yet but who fucking cares now? Nobody cares about anything any more, except maybe staying alive.

No one bothers me here; I'm completely alone in my castle, watching the war go by. Alone in a little town I've had renamed 'Hell', just as a reminder.