The Tears of the Dead

[Jane]

(1997)

The Greyhound bus rolled to a dusty stop, a hot September sun beating down on the west Texas town of - Jane pressed her face against the grimy window, trying to read the sign. Somewhere between don't-give-a-fuck and who-cares, she decided. Good a time as any to get off and stretch her legs.

Gathering her backpack, the sixteen year old shoved her way up the aisle, stepping off the bus and blinking in the light. Passengers were milling about, and she walked into the truck stop to look for a pair of sunglasses. Her long mousy brown hair partially concealed her face as she slouched into the air conditioned building, wandering the shelves idly without touching anything.

Jane hugged her arm around her skinny body as she looked blindly at the spines of a display of outdated paperbacks. Despite the Indian summer heat she was wearing baggy black pants and a hoody, and she was starting to regret that decision. Turning her head to look around she found where the bathrooms were and made her way in that direction.

She splashed a bit of water on her face, a few long strands of hair clinging wetly as she stared at her reflection in the mirror. A fat woman from her bus was washing up in the sink next to her, but Jane studiously ignored her. How long had she been on that dammed bus?

Too long. Maybe not long enough. Jane closed her eyes, shuddering as air brakes squealed outside in the parking lot, transporting her momentarily back to her first car and a rainy night. Mouth open as she panted for breath, Jane realized that the bathroom had showers, and she hadn't had one in ages.

Digging in her pack she found a handful of quarters, and sequestered herself in a roomy stall, hanging her backpack on a hook out if the way of any potential spray. It only took a moment to strip off her lived in clothes and worn Doc Martens, and then she was huddled under the showerhead, the quarters fueling a stinging deluge of hot water.

She was still there when the Greyhound drove off, minus one passenger.

[Caiman]

Another bus rumbled its way into the desolate little town, kicking up a trail of brown dust that hung forever on the lifeless desert air. It was an old school bus, about two-thirds full size, covered in putrescent sea green paint that was peeling off the rusted fenders, and behind it jostled what looked for all the world like a circus trailer. Across its walls were several exotic landscapes crudely rendered in automotive paint - a misty jungle, an icy glacier, and a magma-filled cavern which might have been the artist's imitation of hell. But each wall also bore some variation of the legend: "Marvel at the genetic freaks of BARRANCA'S TRAVELING MUTANT PERFORMERS! Uncanny! Unreal! INHUMAN!"

Inside the bus's rattling cabin, the uncanny and inhuman lounged on the bolted-down second-hand furniture that replaced most of the original seats, more or less ignoring the passing desert landscape until they began to slow down in the vicinity of a scatter plot of building that could only generously be called a town. One man, a terrifying, feral brute with a wild mane of golden hair and a mouth full of sharpened fangs, looked up from his hand of beaten playing cards and out the greasy window at the passing ramshackle shops and houses and emitted a bubbling growl.

"You are fuggin' kiddin' me!" he roared, and he heaved up out of his seat and went jostling toward the front.

The hairless black man who had been sitting across from him - not merely brown-skinned, but obsidian black with an unctuous sheen - threw his cards down onto the table. "Shut up and play your hand, Wendigo!"

But Wendigo ignored him, steadying himself on the cracked and peeling seat covers as he prowled forward past two more members of the company - a lanky, gangrel man with slick amphibian skin and a pale woman with curling ram's horns sprouting from beneath her ebony hair. He didn't stop until he was directly behind the driver.

"Caiman!" Wendigo snarled. "What the hell is this?"

"It's our next stop," the driver replied, his voice a dry, rattling rasp.

"What, this one traffic stop shithole? There ain't enough money in this town to feed us, much less make a profit!"

"Got a friend here who does good advertising," Caiman replied. "Brings in customers from four counties. It'll be good enough."

"That's what you said about Laredo!"

"If you didn't make an ass of yourself in the tavern we wouldn't have been thrown out of Laredo. Sit your ass back down."

Wendigo flashed his fangs, then bit down on a guttural curse and stalked back to his seat. "Better at least be some soft piece of tail to squeeze in this dungheap," he growled.

Caiman said nothing more as he angled the bus toward the old, abandoned ranch with the field where local high school played its football games. It was flat and broad and relatively well-kept, and there were enough bleacher seats to hold the overflow of customers who couldn't get close enough to see into the ring from ground level.

Perfect spot for a freakshow.

[Jane]

Jane was lingering outside a diner as evening fell, scrubbed clean and wearing more weather appropriate clothing. Texas was hot and muggy, and currently full of delicious odors that were making her mouth water.

Unfortunately she only had two dollars to rub together, and the only thing on the menu she could buy was a Coke. She hadn't decided what to do next, except maybe look for a McDonalds or a Sonic or whatever they had that passed for fast food in this town, when she caught sight of a brightly colored flier on the gum stained concrete.

The girl bent down and picked it up, flexing it so she could read the faded xerox in the waning sunlight. There was some sort of carnival or something in town. BARRANCA'S TRAVELING MUTANT PERFORMERS, the paper read, proclaiming the mutants to be uncanny and all those other mutie buzz words.

Jane crumpled it up and tossed it away, her backpack heavy on her back with the sweatshirt stuffed into it, and stuck her hands in her pockets as she walked down the street away from the diner. Mutants. Horrible and awesome freaks of nature.

Just like her.

She barely realized she was doing it, but before long she had followed a growing throng of people to a ranch of some kind just outside town. She had to stop outside a large field where there were bleachers set up and people milling around inside. No money, no entrance. Jane hooked her fingers through the temporary chain link fence and tried to see what was going on inside.

[Caiman]

The ring had been an ingenious bit of engineering by Caiman's predecessor, the Barranca whose name still adorned the trailer. To haul out and assemble a platform each time they performed at a new venue would have been prohibitive, especially in those cases where their performances actually were prohibited by law. Instead, the trailer was the platform. The sides folded down level with the floor, and spare panels fit into the gaps to create a spacious octagon with expandable struts to stabilize the whole thing. Then the fence went up - eight-foot steel pylons at each corner of the octagon, joined together by chains to seal the fighters in. It was simple, elegant, and brutal.

The performers waited in the bus, which served as a sickeningly green room, wolfing down the last of their cheap, greasy dinners as Caiman strutted out into the octagon before the cautiously curious crowd. The bleachers were depressingly sparse, but there was a crush of guests crowding around the feet of the arena, close enough to see the glistening pattern of scales covering Caiman's craggy features.

He raised a microphone to his mouth, and his gravely voice momentarily overpowered the Marilyn Manson song screaming over the loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the bus:

"Ladies! Gentlemen! You are about to witness a clash of titans like nothing you have ever seen before! I bring before you an unnatural selection beyond Dawrin's wildest imaginations, of which I, grotesque though I may be, am the least bizarre. I give you the bestial. The Satanic. The terrifying. The alluring."

He reached out a scale-covered hand toward the rear exit of the bus, and Lilith emerged in a scandalous leotard that left very little to the imagination and very little of her ash-white skin unexposed. Already there were murmurs and shouts at her demonic elegance as she placed her hand in Caiman's and allowed him to parade her around the octagon, and here and there were whispers and scoffs of dissent - surely the horns couldn't be real. But as she waved and blew kisses to the crowd, there was a palpable shift in the atmosphere, an energy, an excitement, a hunger for something no one could really name.

Even on the still wind, Lilith's pheremones carried far. Caiman played the part of the stoic ringmaster, but inwardly he smiled. He already owned this crowd.

[Jane]

Jane could see a vendor selling hotdogs on the other side of the fence, and focused on him with an almost feral intensity. She walked around the fencing, and then found a break, where the chainlink was separated from a pole at the bottom and could be rolled back. She crouched down, shoved her pack through, then crawled after it, straightening and brushing off her pants.

Jane walked briskly along behind the bleachers, rounding the end and getting her first good look at the octagon that had been set up. A scaled mutant was addressing the crowd, a horned woman at his side. Somehow she forgot about her empty stomach, finding a seat on the uncomfortable metal bleachers and watching the show, transfixed.

[Caiman]

Against all the logic of the ringmaster profession, Caiman had not been exaggerating about his exhibition.

Each one shocked and enraptured the audience. There was Shiva, the tall, gaunt man with four spidery arms. He wore no shirt so everyone could see the rippling of extra pectoral and deltoid muscles under his taut, bronze skin as he juggled a quartet of swords, two of which he swallowed. Then came Newt, small, scuttling, with muddy green skin that glistened under the bright lights, and sticky hands and feet that were natural for climbing, and a flat, flexible tail from which he hung from the highest chain in the octagon fence.

The Tar Man was stranger than either of them. He was massive, with the physique of a bodybuilder, and his skin was black like pitch, but down his arms it shone and rippled as if he really were made of black tar, and then before everyone's eyes his hand flattened out, bubbled over, and expanded into a massive sledgehammer that hardened a moment before he struck it against the nearest steel pylon with a CLANG that made everyone flinch away, or worse, judging from the sudden stiff way one man went to excuse himself from the front row. With a shocking pearly white smile, the Tar Man shook his arm, and the hammer extended into a flexible whip, which he snapped at Newt's tail and made him jump, and then he snared Lilith with it around the waist and reeled her in from across the octagon for a kiss.

"My friends," Caiman rasped as the sounds of scandalized voyeurism began to die, "you have seen the strange and beguiling, but you have not yet seen the truly terrifying. You have not yet seen the blurring of the line dividing animal and man, the fusion of feral ferocity and cold, calculating intelligence. The Indians say that when a man in the wild eats the flesh of another man, he is cursed to wear the skin of an animal, and to crave human flesh the rest of his days. I give you that beast of legend now. I give you - the Wendigo!"

Wendigo prowled out from the tour bus, as tall as the Tar Man, but lithe and predatory, with thick, wild hair that resembled fur, with black, emotionless eyes and massive hands that ended in savagely hooked claws. He was clad in rough leathers and animal pelts, and he stalked the edges of the cage as if selecting his prey. Then he seized the chains of the octagon fence and roared, and the spectators in front of him nearly trampled one another in their retreat.

Caiman laughed into the microphone. "These performers, my good human beings, are not here merely so you can admire their good looks. You have seen my freaks of nature. Now you will see which of them is the strongest. Who would you like to put to the test?"

The crowd was uncertain at first, except for those few who had seen Barranca's Mutants before and knew what to expect - they began shouting the names of their favorites as the mutants goaded them on.

Lilith looked on, coiled in the Tar Man's embrace but still fueling the crowd with her gifts. And then she smelled something - the feedback of another mutation rippling back across her own, small and subtle, hiding somewhere out there under the garish floodlights. She pulled away from the black, viscous whip and stalked to the wall of the octagon, gripping the chain just below her chin and staring out into the darkness shrouding the back corner of the bleachers.

[Jane]

Jane had drawn her knees up against her chest, compacting her 5'8" frame into something much smaller as the freaks had paraded into the octagon. They were exotic and terrifying, equal parts intriguing and unsettling.

She couldn't look away as the four armed one and the Newt were paired off to fight, and then her eyes were drawn again to the pale woman with the curling horns. Her skin was almost white in the lights, her body lithe and womanly in a way Jane was sure hers would never be. Their eyes met, and Jane stared out from the darkness that covered her, unable to look away.

The woman, Lilith, suddenly moved, stalking across the octagon away from the edge, back to the arms of the ringmaster as the two mutants who were to fight got ready. Jane blinked, her eyes suddenly watering as though they'd been open too long. She couldn't have been looking at her... how could she have seen her in the dark?

Her stomach growled, but Jane just clutched her knees tighter to her body, trying to silence it.

[Caiman]

The display was savage and brutal, and before it was over, the audience was positively salivating. The fighters pulled some punches, and the more elaborate throws were thoroughly choreographed, but there were enough genuine body blows and chain-rattling collisions to justify the continued suspension of disbelief. The art, of course, was in the pacing. Under Caiman's expert showmanship, the tension and expectations increased with every knuckle-bleeding bout until Wendigo finally threw the Tar Man oozing to the mat and was crowned the champion of the night.

And then it was over. The spectators dispersed, not entirely certain of what they had seen, but almost universally they agreed it had been remarkable. Sensational, yes, carnal, certainly, but there were worse ways to spend an evening and a ten dollar cover charge. And word was the troop was performing again the following night, and that some guys were organizing a few wagers on the side. That was how it always went, Caiman knew. The first appearance in a town was to generate word-of-mouth. The second appearance was to reap the rewards before the word-of-mouth reached state authorities.

The fighters retreated to the bus to nurse their injuries - after that they would be free to enjoy whatever meager pleasures a town with two traffic lights had to offer. But Lilith had quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and a leather jacket and slipped away unseen, carefully managing the emotions of the people she passed so they didn't raise a fuss. The horned woman picked her way through the dispersing crowd toward the bleachers, where she saw rail-thin teenage girl trying to be inconspicuous in the shadows under the rusted metal scaffolding. The emotions rolling off of her were sharp and strident, even with all the background noise of the crowd behind her. Loss. Desperation. And a special sort of alienation that Lilith knew very personally.

She curled her arm around a slanted steel support and spoke in a rolling exotic tone that betrayed no secrets: "Did you enjoy the show?"

[Jane]

Jane started, her heart thumping loudly in her chest as the performer surprised her. "Uh, yeah. It was... great." She held onto the metal supports, half a hotdog in her other hand.

After a moment she dropped her gaze to the food, but didn't move. "I... I was going to pay for this." Her toe nudged her backpack, on the ground by her feet.

[Caiman]

Lilith laughed and tilted her head. The glow from the stadium lights played over the ridges in her curling horns.

"No, you weren't," she said, though she didn't seem to be terribly concerned about it. "Do I frighten you?"

[Jane]

"A little," Jane admitted, her mouth dry. "I was... I was gonna come by... after everyone left." Her eyes tracked beyond the impressive woman to where the last stragglers were being shown out of the fenced field.

"I thought... I mean..." Her body started trembling, hunger and exhaustion combining with stress to try to undo her completely. Jane hung her head, long hair concealing her face. "I'm a mutant too. I don't have anywhere to go and I thought maybe..."

Her voice trailed off, and she muttered, "It was stupid. Sorry."

[Caiman]

Lilith studied the girl. She sat at the center of a storm of emotions, most of them turning inward, retreating from the world so no one could see them and take advantage of them. But Lilith could see them, a beautiful swirling spectrum of fear and loneliness. Gently she pressed her own influence against the storm to soothe it, to put the girl at ease.

"It's not stupid at all," Lilith said. "Like seeks like. It's what brought us together, chere."

She waited until the girl lifted her eyes, trembling, and then she reached a pale hand toward her. "Come with me. You're hungry, yes? I'll get you something to eat."

[Jane]

She reached out her hand, as if to take Lilith's, but stopped before making contact, dropping her hand to her side. Jane bent over and scooped up her battered pack, the promise of food overwhelming her natural shyness as she slung it over her shoulder and followed the horned woman out from under the bleachers. "Thank you," she said, looking about her as they stepped out into the open.

The other woman smiled at her, leading her towards the bus, and Jane felt a knot of nervousness build in her stomach next to the gnawing hunger. She was going to meet the other mutants. She was simultaneously terrified and excited, the mix of emotions inside her combining to make her feel a little nauseated.

[Caiman]

Wendigo and Tar Man and Shiva had already cleared out, leaving Newt picking at his wounds and Caiman counting bills. Newt had his own first aid methods involving his own sticky saliva, which, he swore, had powerful medicinal properties. Not that anyone else had ever taken him up on his offer to try it. He was slapping viscous gobs of the stuff over a row of pock-marks left in his shoulder by Wendigo's claws when Lilith climbed up into the bus with a bewildered, willowy girl in tow.

The amphibious mutant popped his bulging eyes at the newcomer. "She's a little young for you, ain't she, Lily?" he drawled.

"Do you have somewhere better to be right now?" Lilith said icily.

Newt sniffed. "Huh, in this dust bowl? Not bloody likely."

Lilith folded her arms and gave him a slim smile. "I'm sure you'll find somewhere."

The green-skinned mutant looked mutely at her, then over at Caiman, who didn't bother looking back. "Fine. Okay, right. I can see where I rank in the general order of things." He threw his shirt over his shoulder, stuck his hands to the ceiling, and crawled over top of Lilith and Jane's heads. He dropped to the floor on the other side, pausing to give Jane a look of indifference. "Pleasure meetin' you, missy."

Caiman had still not looked up from his money-counting at the table. Lilith tugged on Jane's hunger and curiosity just enough to ensure she wouldn't bolt.

"Caiman," the horned woman said, "I've offered this girl a meal. She says she's a mutant."

The scale-skinned man looked up slowly, met Lilith's eyes, then glanced over at the withdrawn girl behind her. "She does. Well. Far be it from me to turn down a mutant in need."

He nodded toward the box at the end of the table. "There's still half a pizza in there. Got some drinks in the cooler over there. Help yourself."

[Jane]

Jane had watched Newt's exit with wide eyes, but the mention of pizza was enough to unglue her feet from the floor. She sat on a worn down couch, backpack on her lap, and lifted the lid of the pizza box to find half a pepperoni pie, just as promised. It was room temperature and she almost reverently lifted a slice, then started eating as fast as she dared.

"Thanks," she said around a mouthful, hand covering her mouth so as not to offend her hosts with an errant display of see-food. She swallowed hard, her too-big bite descending her throat slowly, and looked up to find Lilith extending a glass bottle of Coke toward her, its sides covered with condensation. Jane took it, popping the top with her bare hand, her adrenaline pumping enough that it took no effort and she didn't even notice the cut the metal cap gave her palm.

After a long swallow of soda, she liberated another slice of pizza from the box on the table, glancing sideways at the scaled mutant, Caiman. He was ignoring her, still counting money. Lilith was watching her, her expression unreadable, and Jane dropped her gaze, concentrating on filling her stomach.

It was bizarre, to be among these people, and be accepted. Not looked at as some bizarre accident of nature. If anything, the mutants around her were more freakish than she was.

She blinked, remembering her mother's horrified face the last time she'd gone home. Still covered... in dirt. When she'd found out what had happened to Hannah, and Lizzie. But nothing hurt more than that look her own mom had given her. No, nothing was more freakish than she was.

Jane blinked again, a few tears that had welled up in her eyes falling to the pizza in her hands.

[Caiman]

Lilith edged into the seat across from Jane and very gently rested her arm across the girl's narrow shoulders. She knew how emotions worked, and that a tender touch generally enflamed them rather than soothed them, even without the encouragement of her own empathic gifts.

"It's okay," she whispered, and while Jane's head was bowed, she aimed a quick glance at Caiman, who nodded, a lease of permission. Lilith ran her long fingers up through the girl's hair, an almost motherly gesture.

"We understand. We've been there. You're a long way from home, aren't you?"

[Jane]

Jane nodded mutely, half-eaten pizza forgotten in her hand. Lilith's touch brought forth a choking sob that she tried to contain, a surge of emotion that burned behind her eyes and formed a hard lump in her throat.

Still, even with the woman's arm around her, Jane sat stiffly upright, her downcast face a mask of misery. "They don't want me anymore," she managed, another tear escaping down her cheek. "They buried me -!" Jane sucked in a ragged breath, knuckling her eyes with a fist.

[Caiman]

Lilith rubbed her hand up and down Jane's back. The shirt was so thin it might have been a molted skin, and she could feel the bumps of the girl's spine and ribcage under her taut flesh. But even now the girl was resisting the show of compassion - trembling, but like a tree standing in floodwaters. Lilith caught a meaningful look from Caiman, and she carefully withdrew her arm.

Caiman set the bills down on the table and scribbled some figures into a little dogeared notepad. "What's your name?" he rumbled.

[Jane]

She was breathing slowly through parted lips, and lifted her eyes to the scaled man's, holding his gaze for a moment before looking down again. "Jane," she answered uncertainly, "Jane Meyer."

She scrubbed at her face, her emotions just barely under control, and still bubbling under the surface.

[Caiman]

"Jane Meyer," Caiman repeated. "It's a good name. An ordinary name."

His flat, yellowish eyes slid over the girl from top to bottom. "What are you looking for?"

[Jane]

What was she looking for? She'd started off running blindly away from her home, just to get away from the stares and the terrible knowledge of what she'd done. Away from that look in her mom's eyes that never really went away.

All the time she'd spent on the Greyhound had been just to keep in motion, to keep putting distance behind her as she wandered. It wasn't until he asked her that Jane realized that she'd been searching for something the whole time.

"I ..." She took a deep breath and squared her thin shoulders, lifting her chin and meeting his reptillian gaze. "I want to fit in somewhere. To belong."

[Caiman]

"And you think you can find that in a group of fellow mutants," Caiman replied.

He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a pack of black clove cigarettes. A few deft motions had one out and lit and pinched between his teeth, littering the air with the sickly pungent smell.

"Why would you want to belong here?" he asked. "You look normal. People will treat you as normal. There's no such thing as normal here."

[Jane]

Jane was shaking her head stiffly even as he was talking. No, not normal. Not her.

"I'm a freak," she said, one hand clenching until she realized she was still holding half a slice of pizza. She awkwardly put it down on top of the pizza box, and clutched her backpack in her lap. "I died in a car accident. My- my family buried me. Funeral home... everything."

Jane ran her tongue over her teeth, almost tasting the embalming fluid again. "I woke up in my coffin, like four days after the accident." She sniffed hard, adding, "They told me I was so ...mangled that my dad could barely identify me at the m-morgue."

[Caiman]

Caiman's attention on Jane intensified. It was easy to miss unless you knew him well. He had a very practiced air of reptilian indifference. But Lilith noticed, and she chewed lightly on her lower lip.

"You're a healer," Caiman surmised. "That's a handy one."

[Jane]

She shrugged, slowly. "I guess so." Jane took the soda off the table and took a sip before holding it on top of her backpack between her hands.

"My... parents... took me to the hospital. After I came back. They said I had a mutation." Jane rolled her eyes a bit. Duh. But she recognized the need to impress Caiman with her ability, and now that she was talking about it seemed easier to keep talking. She was calming down and feeling more comfortable, Lilith a warm presence behind her though the horned woman was no longer touching her.

"They ran tests, all that stuff. And said if I get injured enough I go into this hibernation state where I look like I'm dead." Jane bit her lip a little. "Fooled the paramedics and everyone else after... the accident. Ah, and then my body heals itself, yeah."

She sipped her Coke again, adding, "And my fight or flight instinct," Jane tried to remember the words the doctors had used, "When it kicks in I kinda go numb. Like, not totally, but stuff doesn't hurt me. And I get stronger. Like when I got myself out of the coffin."

Jane shrank back down into the sofa a little, her hair hiding her face from him as she looked down at her backpack. "I guess that's it though."

[Caiman]

"Hm. Fascinating," Caiman said, as if it was anything but, and he puffed a cloud of brownish smoke out of his mouth. "Well, kid, from where I sit, you seem very lucky. Most people don't get a second go of it. But quite frankly, I don't know what you're asking for."

He squinted over Jane's shoulder. "Lilith's soft heart aside, this isn't a charity. I'm going to guess you didn't pay for the privilege of seeing my gang in action, but you know what we are, and you know what we do. So I'm asking you: what do you want from me?"

[Jane]

She seemed to wilt with each of his words, like a turtle drawing up in it's shell. "I just want a chance." Jane raised a hand, tucking her hair behind her ear, exposing her face to Caiman as she stared at the side of the bus opposite her.

"I'll do anything you want - I work hard, and I'm a fast learner." Her eyes tracked sideways to meet his, holding his flat yellow gaze as boldly as she could. "I just can't stay here."

[Caiman]

Caiman took another contemplative drag of his cigarette, staring Jane down with hooded eyes. He felt Lilith's gaze on him as well, heavy with a strange sense of imploring. He was accustomed enough to her influence by now that it didn't sway his emotions, but all the same, he was never quite sure what she was really feeling. Maybe she thought she was being kind, maybe not. Caiman knew what the kind answer would be, but he was not a kind man.

"We're performing here tomorrow," he said, "and then we're traveling to Rico. If you still want to stay with us then, we'll find something for you to do. Ah!"

He held up a finger to forestall any response from the girl. "This isn't a family. It isn't a club. It's a business. If you're no good to me, I'll leave you off at our next stop. Understand?"

"Of course she does," Lilith cut in quickly, and she wrapped an arm warmly around Jane's narrow shoulders. "I'll look after her, Caiman. Better me than any of the men."

Caiman's eyes flicked over to Lilith, and he gave a terse nod, though he wasn't entirely certain that was true.

[Jane]

The sun was hot and burned Jane's pale skin as she stood in the field in baggy cargo pants and a tank top, her backpack leaned against the back wheel of the bus but still within reach. Lilith had let her spend the night on the second bed in her motel room, and Jane had fallen asleep to the woman's soft words from across the room.

It was drawing near noon, the blazing Texas sun high overhead, and Lilith had gone to talk to Caiman, or something, and Jane was alone outside, her arms wrapped around her body as the other mutants began to trickle into the field from wherever they had spent the night. The one called Newt was first, staring at her with his bulging eyes, but saying nothing as he slipped into the bus. The four armed one, Shiva, ignored her completely, and Jane turned about in a slow circle, wondering what she should do.

She heard someone talking, and took a few steps toward the sound, looking around the end of the bus and catching sight of Caiman talking to the big, wild haired mutant Wendigo by the fence. He turned his head and looked toward her while they were speaking, and she felt like she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't. Jane backed up again, and leaned her back against the bus, trying to stay in the tiny amount of shade it offered.

[Wendigo]

Wendigo regarded Jane with a curling sneer that didn't look any better for his fangs. After one more muttered question to Caiman, he stalked over toward the girl. With every step he seemed to grow larger and she seemed to shrink, until he towered over her, pinning her to the side of the van by the sheer weight of his presence.

"Jane, is it?" he said, his voice a feral snarl. "Jane! There's a name to strike fear into your heart! So what is it you do, Jane? Are you a fighter? Or are you earning your keep some other way?"

He trailed one of his long fingers along the girl's jawline, extending a fearsome claw to tug at the skin of her neck.

Caiman stood by, watching to see how Jane would handle herself around the troop's designated bully.

[Jane]

Jane lifted her chin, afraid to breathe as he ran his finger along her jawline, claw lightly scratching her skin. He was huge, nearly a foot taller than her, and intimidating, trailing his claw down along her jugular toward her collarbone.

She slapped his hand away before it could go any lower than the edge of her v-neck, one fear greater than another and jerking her into motion before she could think about it. Jane's mouth went dry, and she said, "I'm not earning my keep that way."

[Wendigo]

"So you're saying you don't have a good singing voice?" Wendigo said. And then he laughed hoarsely and thumped the side of the bus hard next to Jane's head.

"I hear you can heal from any injury. Is that true?"

[Jane]

She flinched away from his fist, closing her eyes a moment and taking a breath before answering his question. "As far as I know, its true."

Her hair hung in her face, and she squared her shoulders and stood up straighter, tucking the long strands behind her ears and meeting Wendigo's eyes for the first time.

[Wendigo]

The monstrous mutant grinned down at the girl, baring a mouth full of predatory fangs, and extended one huge paw as if to shake. "I'm willing to find out if you are."

Jane made no move to take his hand. She stared at it warily, then lifted her eyes to meet his again. Wendigo laughed just as unpleasantly as the first time, and he set his hand on top of her head and savaged her hair, leaving it in an untidy explosion with half of it over her face. Then he turned away to board the bus.

[Caiman]

Caiman shuffled forward to meet Jane with a face as expressionless as ever. "You still coming?" he asked. "It might be informative to see the show from the inside."

[Jane]

She nodded, swallowing hard, bending slightly to retrieve her backpack from the ground and then following the scaled mutant into the bus. What had she gotten herself into? But she didn't know any other mutants, had never met one before yesterday.

If she had a place anywhere, it had to be here. Or somewhere like here, with the other freaks. So she'd stick it out, make it work if she could. The last one on the bus, she found everyone's eyes on her except for Caiman who was settling in the seat at the table he'd been at the night before. Jane tried not to look like a scared little kid, and walked over to where Lilith was sitting, taking a seat next to her.

[Caiman]

Lilith gave her a soft smile and reached over to rub Jane's hand - a quaint little gesture that was hard to classify. No one else seemed to notice.

Even though the day's show was in the afternoon instead of the evening, the turnout was bigger, a testament to Caiman's talent for generating word of mouth. The football field and bleachers were jammed with more people than the town could reasonably support alone. And Caiman, with Lilith's empathic assistance, charmed them, thrilled them, teased and beguiled them, like an artist paints his canvas, like a lover romances a woman, like a spider who whispers to her prey as she drains their bodies dry.

Shiva staggered back into the bus after a vicious scrap with the Tar Man and dipped into the ice box to grab a cold pack for one his left arms. He grimaced and collapsed onto a seat bench across from Newt.

"Somebody had some frustrations to work out," Shiva muttered in a New Jersey accent that belied his New Dehli trappings. "Think it's because he couldn't find a girl last night and Wendigo had two."

"Heh, I struck out too, but you don't see me complainin'," Newt replied, and he swigged from a carton of orange juice. "Lilith found somebody... but what else is new, eh?"

Shiva glanced over at Jane and then spoke in a voice that couldn't have been as quiet as he meant it to be. "Yeah, what's her story, anyway? Didn't think we were running a nursery."

"Hell if I know, mate," Newt replied. "You don't think she's... well, a replacement?"

"Replacement?" Shiva said. "What, for Tank?" The four-armed mutant glanced at Jane again and then crossed himself. "God help her if she is."

[Jane]

Jane was fascinated by the inner workings of the show, watching the performers and beginning to see how things went together. Once Shiva and Newt started talking, however, she began to feel uncomfortable again. She looked toward the back of the bus, to where Lilith was standing in the ring with Caiman.

Jane brushed her hair out of her eyes, and made eye contact with Shiva. "Who is Tank?"

[Caiman]

The two mutants looked at each other as if they were negotiating over who had to tell her something unpleasant. Finally, Newt's bulging eyes edged toward Jane. "Big guy with armor plates on his back and arms," he said. "Tough as a brick wall, 'e was. And about that smart, too. He'd always go in the round robin with me an' Shiva, clean up the both of us, then lose to either Wendigo or Tar Man just to show how nasty they were."

Newt flicked his eyes toward Shiva, who scratched the back of his neck and reluctantly picked up the story. "Tank walked in on... well, he walked in on Wendigo and Lilith. Took exception to the way he was treating her. There was a fight."

Newt laughed nervously. "There's always a fight, in't there? But this was different. This was pride on the line. And Tank, he made a big mistake. He won."

"Tank put him in a choke hold," Shiva continued, using two of his arms to demonstrate. "Armor plates pressing in on his throat. And he made Wendigo apologize to Lilith."

There was a crash from the ring and a roar from the crowd - Wendigo had just slammed the Tar Man to the floor, setting the chains swaying. Black tar spurted into the air as the feral mutant pummeled his opponent.

"Wendigo, he's a right bastard, but a patient one," Newt said. "It was three weeks he waited til he got his chance. The rest of us knew something was brewing, but Tank, he'd forgot about it. The two of them were in the cage, and Wendigo was supposed to finish him with a throw against the chains. But he changed it. Gave him a vicious driver down into the floor, straight on his neck. Stone dead. Bastard used the weight of Tank's own armor to kill him."

[Jane]

Jane looked at both of the mutants - the other mutants - and felt like they must have been pulling her leg. The expressions on their faces, however, and her own recent encounter with Wendigo, assured her they were telling the truth.

"Well... I don't know how to fight," she said. "And I don't think I'm about to start making Wendigo angry."

"Don't take much," Newt said, almost under his breath.

Jane shrugged, "Maybe, but... I mean, if I learned how..." Her voice trailed off, aware of the impression her thin body and unattractive features made. Jane clenched her fists in her lap. "I can't die," she ended, lamely.

No matter how much I want to.

[Caiman]

Newt goggled at her. "Oh. Well. That's lucky for you, innit?"

Shiva stared at the girl, looking as though he were growing more uncomfortable by the moment. "You're really planning on coming with us, aren't you?"

"Well!" Newt rolled his shoulders, and each one gave a distinctly wet popping noise. "Only fair then to give her the insider's scoop. We're the ones you want to talk to, Jane. The only sane ones here. Now, you prob'ly already know all you need to about Wendigo. Hair-temper. Vicious and vindictive. Takes personal delight in making everyone's lives a living hell."

"Tar Man," Shiva said. "A real loner. Next to Wendigo, he seems low-key. But don't ask about his past, or he gets ugly in a hurry."

"Now, Lilith..." Newt looked off into the middle distance and filmed over. "Ahh, Lilith. Lovely lady, but defin'ly not right in the 'ead. She don't just read emotions. She feeds off 'em." The amphibious mutant snapped out his tongue as if in illustration. "She likes her feelings raw. Just watch yourself around her. She never does anything without gettin' her own back."

Shiva nodded. "And Caiman..."

The two looked at each other. "Caiman's tough to figure out," Newt said. "Never can tell what's going on behind that reptilian gaze. But he's smarter than he looks. And he's harsh, but fair."

"He keeps the customers comin'," Shiva said. "You do what he says, he'll take care of you. You're stupid enough to cross him, you deserve what you get. Even Wendigo won't challenge him. Still. Not the best conversationalist."

"Not like us," Newt nodded sagely. "All right, so: Jane. Anything we oughta know about you?"

[Jane]

She swallowed hard, her hair falling in her eyes. "I don't think so. I'm pretty easy going, I guess."

Jane took a deep breath, eyes flicking to the back of the bus where Wendigo was roaring at the crowd. "I'm just a nobody." She felt a spike of despair as Newt and Shiva nodded, awkwardly turning back to a private, and quieter, conversation.

She looked out again, and found Lilith staring at her from the ring.

[Caiman]

The Traveling Mutant Players bundled on down Texas Route 118 with an extra passenger, whom they mostly ignored as the evening wore on and turned into the desert night. Some time after dark, the bus and trailer left the highway and jostled down a dusty, rocky road that had no name. Caiman had switched off the headlights, which he apparently didn't need to see in the dark.

Jane had just resigned herself to the fact that she was never going to get any sleep between the bouncing of the wheels and the knocking of the seats and the yammering that went on almost constantly between Wendigo and the Tar Man, but the next thing she knew she was being shaken awake in one of the back seats. Caiman stood over her, as implacable as a dinosaur, and he handed her a foil-wrapped breakfast bar. Except for him and Jane, the bus was deserted.

"Time to get up," he rumbled. "When you're finished, come find me in the garage."

He left her to his breakfast and trundled back up the aisle and out the front door into the blistering morning heat, which hit his metabolism like a pot of black coffee. The bus and trailer sat on a cracked pad of tarmac amid a dozen rusted and mangled hulks of old cars within a chain link fence, across from which sat a village of shacks that paled even before the Texas hamlet they had left behind the previous evening.

Caiman crossed the peeling pavement into the cool dark of a large garage with a sloping roof of corrugated metal. Inside there was an assortment of machinery, weights, and exercise dummies, but the space was dominated by an aging wooden platform covered in stretched and splitting canvas. Caiman stood in its center to wait for his newest pupil.

[Jane]

Jane ate the breakfast bar quickly, snagging a bottle of water out of the mini fridge in the bus before following Caiman outside. The sun was already baking the junk yard, or wherever it was they'd parked. She looked around surreptitiously as she crossed the broken asphalt, her cargo pants hanging off her hips and her tank top beginning to cling to her stomach in the heat.

She pulled her long hair out of her face, trying to untangle it with her fingers before she reached the garage, but then gave up and tied it back in as neat a ponytail as she could manage. Jane walked in through the open roll up door, stopping a moment to let her eyes adjust from the glare of the sun.

Caiman was waiting on a rickety looking boxing ring, but she assumed it was tougher than it looked. She looked around as she approached him, but it seemed that they were alone. Pulling herself up onto the platform, she navigated the ropes and gave him a half smile. "Okay. Here I am." Her smile was offset by a bleakness in her eyes that the curve of her lips couldn't touch.

[Caiman]

"So you are," Caiman replied. He stood like a granite carving, absolutely motionless. Nobody stood that still - everyone swayed a little, shifted their balance, breathed. But only his eyes moved, a milimeter at a time. He didn't even blink.

"There are no illusions here," he said. "We make a living kicking the shit out of each other. If what you told me is true, then getting the shit kicked out of you is what you do best. But that's not good enough. You need to last long enough to give us a show."

He raised one scaley hand and prodded Jane's chin. "I need to know you can take a hit without sitting on the floor and crying. Can you?"

[Jane]

Jane lifted her chin a bit when he touched it, but she nodded. "I... I think so." She felt her heart rate spike a bit, but that was a good thing. Settling back a bit on her heels, Jane rocked back to the balls of her feet and tried to think about steeling herself for a punch.

To be perfectly honest, she was terrified. What if it didn't work? She did her best to look calm, but there was a bit of a frightened rabbit in the way her eyes flicked back and forth from Caiman's unblinking eyes to his fists. She'd always been a tomboy but this was a bit extreme.

Taking a deep breath she ground her teeth together and clenched her hands into fists at her sides. "Try it then," she gritted out, a bit of fire replacing the fear.

[Caiman]

Caiman nodded. She was keeping her eyes open, which was a good sign. He let his hand fall back to his side and, in a motion like a springing bear trap, snapped his other arm out and buried the iron-hard heel of his hand in Jane's solar plexus.

[Jane]

She hadn't locked her knees, so she avoided falling straight to the mat like a board, but instead she crumpled backwards like a puppet with cut strings. Jane's mouth gaped like a fish out of water, all the air snapped out of her lungs, but there was no pain, only discomfort.

She drew in a ragged breath and pushed herself to her feet, turning to face Caiman again. Ready, again.

[Caiman]

There was no reaction on Caiman's face - not a glint of approval or an ounce of disdain - just cold, reptilian intelligence.

"Fair is fair," he rumbled. "I took a shot at you. You take a shot at me. And don't hold anything back."

[Jane]

She looked at him a little incredulously, but slowly brought her fists up by her chin and settled back into what she imagined was a fighting stance. Jane hesitated, feeling foolish, but punched Caiman in the chest, pushing with her feet and trying to put as much power behind it as she could.

He didn't even move when she connected with his solid body, and she stumbled a bit. Catching herself, Jane straightened up, slowly shaking her hand a little and flexing it. Not painful... uncomfortable. Her heart rate was slowing a little as she felt more comfortable in the situation.

[Caiman]

Caiman lifted his chin almost imperceptibly as he studied her reaction. "Interesting."

Before Jane could ask what was so interesting about it, he'd stepped toward her, taken her by the shoulders, and thrown her hard to the floor with a force that set the ring rattling. Once again Caiman allowed her to retaliate, though she might as well have been striking an oak tree.

It wasn't a fight - it was a one-sided parody, and yet Caiman never offered any ridicule. He began to give her advice, showing her how to roll with the body blows to minimize their impact, how to fold up just so when she hit the floor to save her head and joints, how to step through her punches to maximize her strength and accuracy. Not once did she complain while the bruises piled up and puckered all over her slender body, as her knuckles cracked and scraped and bled all over Caiman's shirt.

Until Jane finally mustered all the strength she had and plunged her fist into the spot where his kidneys should have been. "Stop," Caiman ordered, and he snapped out his hand to grab her by the arm.

He examined her hand, still balled up into a tight fist and bent at an awkward angle from her forearm. "Do you realize you've just broken your wrist?" he asked.

[Jane]

Jane stared at her hand, at the awkward angle of her wrist and the growing bruise. She was breathing heavily and she slowly wiggled her fingers. "I can't feel it. I mean, I can... but... it doesn't hurt."

She looked up at him, a smile slowly crawling across her face. "That's good, right?"

[Caiman]

'"When someone can't feel pain, they call him a leper," Caiman said. "They'll step on broken glass, handle hot iron... walk on as their flesh disintegrates around them. The living dead."

The scaled mutant released Jane's arm. Already her wrist was beginning to swell, her skin so red it nearly glowed.

"Hit me again," he ordered. "I haven't felt a thing yet."

[Jane]

She stared at her hand, and then forced it into a fist. Thinking better of it, Jane threw a left, and then kicked Caiman in the knee. He didn't budge, then he hit her in the jaw, spinning her around and to the mat. She lay ther a minute, gasping, the roar of blood in her ears...

...and the roar of the crowd in her head, swearing in Spanish, and she pushed up to her feet, ducking one of Shiva's four arms and rushing in under his grasp, slamming into him and shoving him back against the chains.

[Caiman]

The lanky mutant gave a hiss of pain and tried to twist away from the little hellion, but he was already off-balance, and she had leverage on him. Shiva wrapped her up in a four-armed bear hug and scrabbled for a foothold against the dusty canvas floor.

"Damn it, girl, will you go down already?" he complained. "You're makin' me look bad!"

[Jane]

Jane grunted through gritted teeth, kneeing his inner thigh as a parting gesture, and then letting him throw her away from him. She didn't feel like she needed to stop, but she could only see out of one eye because of blood from a cut in her scalp. Gathering herself, Jane feinted, then Shiva punched her in the temple, blood spraying from her head wound.

She obligingly crumpled to the mat, the crowd noise swelled around her, and then Newt was helping her back into the bus. Jane grinned as soon as the back door closed, flopping into a vinyl seat. Newt pressed a beer into her hand, and she drank it greedily, her knuckles burst open and bleeding, hand bruising and ribs creaking where a few had been broken.

[Caiman]

Lilith uncurled herself from the seat behind Jane. She leaned over the ragged, peeling seat back and reached to card her fingers through the girl's lank, sweat-matted hair.

"Hey, girl," she said softly. "You lookin' good out there. Lookin' like you had to hold back."

The horned mutant flashed a pearly-white smile. It faltered a little at the sight of Jane's battered face.

"How are you feeling?"

[Jane]

"Good," smiled Jane, her lip split and adding to the blood dripping from her face. Lilith took a dark colored towel and pressed it to the girl's head, applying pressure to the most obvious injury.

Jane leaned gratefully against the touch, closing her eyes for a moment. She was starting to feel tired, and Lilith's presence was always slightly hypnotic. "I'll be fine after I sleep, you know that." She stifled a yawn and sat up straighter, pulling away from the other woman.

The crowd outside was getting louder, cheering on the next bout. "I could have taken him. I feel unstoppable when I'm fighting."

[Caiman]

Lilith rocked back in her seat, kneeling, with her hands propped on the seat back in front of her, like a girl sharing secrets with a friend on a ride home from school.

"Other fighters feel that way," she said. "But for you, it might actually be true. Give it time. Another night or two, and Caiman will turn you loose. You'll beat Newt and Shiva, and you'll move on to face Tar Man, maybe even Wendigo."

She kneaded the seat cover with her long fingernails, a mark of worry, or longing - it was impossible to say.

"Does that frighten you? Or excite you?"

[Jane]

Jane shivered a bit, her breath shallow because of her broken ribs even though they didn't exactly hurt. "Tar Man would be exciting. Wendigo..."

She shook her head. "He scares me." Then she grinned and added, "Of course, I'd still kick his ass," because Lilith liked it when she talked tough.

Newt snorted, and Jane inexplicably blushed, having forgotten he was sitting in the bus with them. She turned to look at him, but he was watching the bout through the back of the bus and draining his beer.

[Caiman]

Lilith tilted her head and matched Jane's smile. "Wendigo is a brute on a leash," she said. "He can be controlled. You don' need to fear him."

"That's a matter of opinion," Newt said from his perch at the back of the bus.

Lilith spun toward him and speared him with an icy glare. "I don't recall askin' your opinion."

Newt stirred his beer bottle in a circle, watching the yellow dregs slosh about. "Then let's examine the facts, shall we? Wendigo, seven feet tall of muscle, claws, and personality disorders. Jane, teenage girl, ninety pounds if she's soaking wet, whose only experience is losin' fights on purpose. Bein' afraid doesn't sound like such a bad idea."

"Jus' because you're a coward doesn't mean she has to be, too," Lilith spat.

"Bein' a coward's kept me alive," Newt replied. "I thought that might interest you. But, hey, if you think you can heal up from anything he throws at you, more power to you. We aren't all so lucky."

[Jane]

"Whatever," Jane mumbled, pushing up to her feet and wiping blood off her face with the towel. "I'm not a coward, but I'm not stupid either. Just stop telling me what I should think!"

The last statement came out louder than she'd intended, and it wasn't clear if she was talking to Newt, Lilith, or both of them. Jane threw the blood soaked towel to the floor of the bus in frustration and stomped down the length of it, shoving the doors open and stepping out into the warm Mexican evening.

[Caiman]

It was louder outside the bus than inside - a couple hundred paying customers were pressed up around the octagon hooting and bellowing as the Tar Man threw Shiva against the chains. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to the scrawny teenage girl stealing away from the front of the bus outside the brilliance of the tripod floodlights.

Caiman had landed his troupe of mutants in the parking lot of an enormous shipping center - acres of concrete and asphalt spread in every direction, crisscrossed by chain link fences, cavernous warehouses, and sunken loading docks. Jane wandered under the sodium-yellow glare of the towering streetlights until the roar of the crowd faded to something tolerable, and that was when she heard Caiman's voice.

The reptilian mutant fidgeted with his clove cigarette as he spoke in rapid Spanish with a diminutive gray-haired man in a gleaming white suit in front of an enormous Lincoln Town Car. Two other men stood flanking the well-dressed stranger, each one a mountain of muscle with shoulders hunched and heads dipped low like hungry pack animals.

[Jane]

Jane hesitated, and then walked slowly onward, parallel to where Caiman was talking to the Mexicans. A semi-truck trailer was sitting abandoned in the lot, and she sidled up to it until it concealed her from whatever the lizard skinned mutant was doing.

She leaned against the trailer, bone weary from her fight, and listened in. Not that she knew much Spanish, but she knew dinero, and that was being said a lot.

"Me debes dinero y voy a cobrar si no me pagas," said the older gentleman. Jane knelt down by the rear wheels and peeked out from under the trailer.

[Caiman]

Caiman's voice was a low rasp, but the tension in it was unmistakable. "No puedo pagar ahora. Usted lo sabe. Dos semanas más en Rico y voy a tenerlo todo."

When the white-suited gentleman replied, his voice was measured and calm, as if he were entertaining a friend at the hacienda over a bottle of wine. "Usted está viviendo en tiempo prestado, así como el dinero prestado. He sido paciente contigo y con tus abominaciones, pero mi paciencia se ha ido casi."

Caiman's hands curled and uncurled at his sides. "Ya he explicado--"

"¡Ay!" One of the bodyguards squinted at the shadows under the trailer. Caiman wheeled around, and Jane could see his eyes reflecting the streetlamps back at her, pale green, like a crocodile's.

"Jane!" he snarled. "Get back on the bus!"

"This girl is one of yours?" the white-suited man asked in English.

Caiman hesitated. "Yes."

"I would like to see her."

The reptilian mutant took a long, deep breath, and then called out, "Jane. Come over here."

[Jane]

She had ducked back out of sight a few moments too late, her eyes squeezed shut and adrenaline spiking a little. The thump of her heart caused the dull ache in her tired body to slip away and she didn't feel like sleeping much anymore, either.

As Caiman called to her, she took a deep breath and then rolled to her feet, walking around the end of the trailer. The distance between her hiding spot and the town car seemed even further than before as she walked, her heart still beating double time as her apprehension grew. "Lo siento," she mumbled as she reached Caiman's side, her eyes downcast.

[Caiman]

The white-suited man frowned as Jane stepped coltishly into the light. He approached her, eye-to-eye, and reached up to turn her chin this way and that as if he were inspecting an animal on the market.

"What does she do?" he asked.

"That would be telling," Caiman replied.

"She doesn't look like much."

The gray-scaled mutant snorted. "You should know by now, Señor Martillo, that looks aren't everything."

The white suited man stepped back, no longer interested. "Mi dinero. Una semano." He turned and climbed into the Town Car, and his bodyguards followed. The behemoth growled away over the concrete.

Caiman laid a massive hand on Jane's bony shoulder, heavy and controlling. "Let's go."

[Jane]

She licked her dry lips, and nodded meekly, letting him direct where they were walking without protest. She hadn't liked the way the man in the white suit had been looking at her, and his touch had made her skin crawl. Like she wasn't a person to him.

"I'm really sorry," Jane said finally, if only to break the moody silence that was suffocating her.

[Caiman]

"You apologize too much."

The concrete crunched underfoot as they passed into sight of the floodlights. The crowd had reached a fever pitch - there in the octagon, the Tar Man and Wendigo were locked in savage combat, shaking the whole structure on its moorings. Wendigo bore the Tar Man hard against the chains and closed his jaws on his opponent's oily black neck like a wild animal. The Tar Man morphed his hands into a garrotte which closed around Wendigo's throat, and they staggered across the stage together like some kind of macabre waltz.

Caiman halted there, his hand unyielding on Jane's shoulder. "Do you know who those men were?" he asked her.

[Jane]

Sorry, she thought, but she didn't say it. "No," Jane said simply, watching the fight with interest as Tar Man seemed to gain the upper hand against Wendigo.

She looked sideways at Caiman, unsure if she was supposed to guess, or not. Not, she assumed.

[Caiman]

Caiman took a deep drag on his clove cigarette and hissed out a stream of rotten-smelling smoke. "They're Tres Onces," he said. "The Three Elevens, a Mexican street gang. Their business is drugs, weapons, money laundering, even a little human trafficking."

His flat, yellow eyes shifted to meet Jane's. "Horacio Barranca, he's the man whose name is on the side of the trailer. He was one of them. Compared to the rest of them, he was friendly to our kind. That should put things into perspective."

Caiman looked back to the octagon, where Tar Man stood victorious with his bare, gelatinous foot planted firmly on Wendigo's chest while the feral man snarled savagely in defeat.

"How would you like to take a bigger role in our operations?" Caiman asked.

[Jane]

"A bigger role..?"

Jane realized she was just dumbly repeating the question, and tore her eyes away from the cheering and jeering crowd to look at Caiman again. "Uh, yes, I'd like it. I'm happy to help out with whatever." She wiped her hand across her forehead to keep the trickle of blood dripping from her scalp from running into her eyes.

"What exactly... what do you have in mind?" She had her doubts about how she could be of more assistance to Caiman and his traveling band of cage fighters, or maybe this had something to do with the Mexican gang but then that made even less sense. Still, a bigger role was a bigger role and maybe he meant bumping her up to a bigger fight in the ring. Now that would be exciting.