The Tears of the Dead

[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.