"You can guess the rest," Killer Croc said.
He threw the last piece of bone into his mouth, worked it down, and dusted his hands against each other. "I woke up the next morning staying the same again. Dark green skin, scales fully regrown, tail back, claws and teeth exactly as they'd been. I went to the circus. Nobody could tell anything had happened the night before."
He walked a few more steps.
"So I let it go. Went back to the job."
The job was this: a specially constructed oversized tank, bolted to the performance stage, filled with water. Inside the tank, a very large crocodile. And Waylon.
The audience came to watch two monsters fight.
"Look at that! Alligator versus alligator!"
"That's terrifying—"
They cheered and pressed forward against the barriers, faces lit up by the water-reflections, most of them thrilled in the way people get thrilled by something they don't have to be part of. A few—a very few—looked worried. Nobody asked Waylon how he felt about it.
His only opponent, in all his time at the circus, had been the crocodile named Al. There wasn't another option. The only thing that could share a stage with a monster was another monster.
Ed ran the microphone from the side of the ring in a suit that probably cost more than Waylon's monthly take. He didn't watch the tank. He watched the audience's faces, and in his eyes the faces were just revenue streams—every open mouth and wide eye translated directly into ticket sales. Waylon had turned the circus profitable in a way it hadn't been before, and Ed's happiness and his greed had grown at exactly the same rate.
He also gave Waylon a name.
When Waylon climbed out of the tank holding his bitten arm—Al floating unconscious in the water behind him—Ed and a spotlight moved to his side simultaneously, and Ed raised Waylon's free hand.
"Tonight's winner—Killer Croc!"
The crowd erupted.
Waylon stood in the light. No one in the audience looked at his face. No one wondered what he thought about the name.
"That sounds painful," Jude said.
"It was," Killer Croc said.
Backstage. Waylon on a stool, a wrestler from the company wrapping his right hand. No fracture, but the skin and muscle were torn through, and it hurt in the specific way that things hurt when they've been worked on by something with serious jaw pressure.
Ed appeared.
"That alligator cost me five hundred dollars. Look what you did to it."
"S-sorry, Ed."
"Never mind. Here's your cut." Ed threw forty dollars onto the stool. Waylon stared at it. "A hundred dollars was the deal."
"The deal was a hundred. Now it's forty. Be grateful I'm giving you anything." Ed's expression was the expression of a man who had recently concluded he was the only intelligent person in the room. "What exactly are your other options, Waylon? What else does something like you do? You're Killer Croc. You want to open a dental practice in the suburbs?"
The other wrestler in the room found something to look at on the far wall and quietly left.
Ed wasn't done. He fanned a stack of hundreds in front of Waylon's face—not offering it, just displaying it, moving it back and forth slightly, the way you move something in front of an animal to see if it tracks.
"Here's how you make more. Next time in the tank, you let Al get a few good bites in. Arms, legs, stomach, doesn't matter. You heal overnight anyway—you've told me yourself. And the audience—" He smiled. "They want blood in the water. More blood, more tickets. Your cut goes from forty back to a hundred. Simple math."
Waylon didn't answer. He looked at Ed.
"That look." Ed slapped the bills against Waylon's face, not hard enough to be a real hit, hard enough to be something else. "Come on. Smile. Show those teeth. There's an old saying—don't bite the hand that feeds you."
Waylon had watched Ed work Al for weeks. Whip, then meat. Whip, then meat. After a few weeks, Al came when he was called and did what he was supposed to do.
He understood exactly what was happening.
He opened his mouth.
"After I bit his arm off, I ran," Killer Croc said, his voice still carrying the same flat distance. "GCPD put me on the wanted list. No place to stay above ground, so I went to the sewers. Tried living on rats for a while. Couldn't do it." A pause. "After that, you know the rest. Gangs. Robbery. Worse things. I even ran my own crew for a while. Turns out my body is much better suited to crime than to anything legal. I was more successful at it than I'd ever been at anything else."
He glanced at Jude.
"I was born like this. The scales, the claws, the teeth, the tail—that's what I am. My genes made that decision before I had any say. My only real mistake was wanting to be something else."
Jude was quiet for a moment.
"I don't think that was a mistake," he said.
Killer Croc looked at him.
"You can't be an ordinary person. That's just true. But you have human dignity. Human feelings. You think in human language, you read, you can write. You have a sense of what's fair and what isn't—I've been watching you for two weeks and I've seen it." Jude kept his voice matter-of-fact, not soft. "The way I see it, what makes someone human isn't their body. It's whether they do human things. There's an old man I like who put it this way: even without any mutation, some people manage to lose their humanity just fine."
He looked at the street ahead.
"Your birth wasn't your fault. Your crimes were. And crimes are something only a person can commit."
Killer Croc didn't answer.
He kept walking.