The Tears of the Dead

[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.