05-. Fear

In the tiny apartment, the silence was absolute. The workday was finally over.

At night they were free. There were no landlords or managers forcing their wills and actions, yet in those few hours of rest there was only tiredness and hunger to scourge their souls. Ronalda Manzano walked out of the one room into the small living room, stamping her feet and kicking everything that got in her way. Before she could soak the cloth in fresh water, the man of the house burst in anger.

"Damn it, woman, will you stop throwing things?" Agustin, her husband, shouted before getting up from the couch. "Mr. Tetherbee will charge us as brand new everything you break!"

Tired of intervening in the same fights every night, Roberto got up from the table, soaked the cloth himself and went into the only bedroom of the house, inside, his stepsister was burning with fever.

"That bastard's name is pronounced Tetherby" Ronalda, equally tired of the same fight, didn't move an inch from her place. Her husband, realizing that this time he couldn't intimidate her, made his way to the kitchen, but his wife blocked his way. "And don't you dare bring him into this discussion, the bastard already owes you three months' pay... you and your son are literally working for free on his land and..."

"And what?! Be thankful we have a job! A place to sleep when we're tired! Understand that we were very lucky to end up here!"

"Lucky? You really think we're lucky?" the meager fire in the fireplace grew to almost overflow the iron rims. "Look at the conditions in which we live now, before at least the hut in which we slept and the field in which we worked were ours, here we have done nothing but spend our savings. That alone should be enough to end this discussion!"

Augustin imagined that if the sun could speak, its words would sound exactly the same; a will impossible to bend, a will capable of intimidating and comforting at the same time.

"… All right, the mustard seed harvest is only a few days away," Agustín began. "as soon as I finish that last task I will talk to Mr. Tetherby about a raise and …"

Even without being the smartest man who ever lived, he knew his employer would never give him more pay, carefully closing his jaw against his upper lip, the man tasted his own blood, the fleeting dose of pain helped clear his mind, and allowed him to speak more calmly.

"At least let's wait until this last fortnight, let's hope this is the good one and we get paid this time. After that... well, the Guzmans will go out to town in the van to repair the tools and buy some things, we can ask them to give us a ride and then..."

"We don't have time left, Agustín," Ronalda pointed to the paired door of the only bedroom. "If we don't leave really soon, we'll die here!" Lifting one of her sleeves, she pointed to her skeletal arm. "The girl has not been able to work for almost two weeks, with less money, we have been left without food to feed her... on Saturday, Saturday I helped Alicia to bury her youngest daughter," Ronalda's parched lips, like her voice, trembled for a moment as the fire still burning in the tiny fireplace began to fade. "Her daughter was already five years old, but so thin she still looked like a babe in arms, our own daughter is already fourteen and she still hasn't had her first flow of blood, doesn't that worry you?" She looked away for a moment as she wiped away a tear, after exhaling a couple of times the fire grew again until it almost overflowed from the fireplace. "I do not want to and will not be the next mother to lose her baby to exhaustion."

"Then we'll leave tonight, let's start packing our things," trying not to make any more noise, the man took out the same cardboard box in which they had put their things the first time. "We will hope that no one notices our absence until the sun rises... then we will be far away, don't you think?"

"Do you want to walk away?" Leaning beside him and taking him by the hand, Ronalda directed his attention towards her. "Roberto is the strongest of the four, in his condition not even he could carry our things, let alone his sister. Tetherby's men will find us halfway and kill us right there in the middle of some field," with a light squeeze of her hand, Ronalda tried to transmit confidence to her husband. "I know you have your reasons for being suspicious of Mr. Batson... but he's leaving here soon too, his trailer is big enough to take us all and he's not going to stop until he gets out of state."

Billy Batson, the 'brave' journalist who selflessly sacrificed his own physical integrity to show the world the exploitation suffered by the immigrants who were part of the "bracero" program. Nobody couldn't expect Agustín to really believe the story that this burly man, who was almost eight inch taller than he was, would always help them selflessly… no, the old man was aware of the strange looks he was always giving his wife… but his family needed him, he had to be clear of mind and calm.

"¡Hey, dumbass!" from the small room peeked the shaven head of his first-born son. "Tell Mr. William if he kan jelp uz to..."

"He already knows, Dad, Ronalda asked me to tell him our plan since the morning, he's waiting for us behind the stables."

"Oh, I ce..." Augustín bit his lips again to stifle the "¡Putamadre mujer!" that threatened to escape from his throat. "Tehn take ur thingz with yo at once, kome on! We'll yust take kare of yor sister and get out of this fuking place."

Obediently, Roberto went out almost instantly through a window, and when he was on the other side, his father handed him the box with their clothes. With difficulty, the young man carried the package over his shoulders and walked away covered by the darkness of the night.

Minutes later, with Rosa already standing up and able to walk a few feets away, there was a knock at the door just before Ronalda could get out of the window. From the way they knocked on the wood, it could only be someone. Fearful, Agustin opened the door to find himself directly in front of Donald Tetherby's blue cotton and silk tuxedo and the almost worn out white suit of his main foreman.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen, I hear you're planning to leave us... even though you haven't even come close to fulfilling your contract of employment." Without asking permission, the foreman in the top hat and suit, both white, entered the small apartment, Tetherby continuing to speak impassively from the doorway. "Do you think these luxuries I gave you so freely are accessible, or cheap? Who else would give you a house all to yourselves and on credit...?! I'm sorry, but you can't leave until you pay everything you owe me."

-o-

George Roth, the red-skinned Indian, had managed to convince his wife not to disturb the worn-out girl until she woke up the next day, so the teenager would be more recovered from her heat stroke and perhaps even the shock of witnessing the fire in her home would have subsided, however, the carefree attitude displayed by the young Latina only indicated that the trauma, instead of receding as he had hoped, had increased during the night.

"I knew your face looked familiar, you're the famous 'Try-Gone' wrestler!" Happy and completely oblivious to everything that had happened to her the day before, Ronnie Anne lifted the old cloth mask over her head, "I can't believe I'm holding the mask of the "terrible conqueror"...!"

Worried, the old man had tried to distract his unusual guest while Angela, his young wife, prepared breakfast upstairs in the kitchen of the apartment. He never thought that someone so young would recognize the old posters and professional pictures he kept from his former glory days, after all it was little more than twelve years after those golden times.

"You watch BBB? You're the first woman I know around here that even knows that wrestling company existed, nobody around these parts cares about quality..." Stunned, George watched as Ronalda fell unconscious to the floor of the bookstore, not too surprised to see that behind the motionless body of the girl stood his wife, arms outstretched and in the pose to cast spells.

"I finally got this stupid beaner to shut the fuck up, quick, help me get her out of here, let's drop her off in the alley next door or something."

"Have you lost your mind?! What's wrong with you?!" All the calmness that George had tried to give the impression in Ronalda's presence disappeared in a second. "Angela, what did you do to the poor girl?"

"Before you keep yelling at me, I'm asking you to listen to me, okay?" Taking the slim Latina's body by the wrists, Angela started to drag Ronnie towards the back door, ready to keep her promise of leaving the poor girl lying on the street. "Yesterday, since I told you I felt something inside her I couldn't stay calm, so today in the middle of the night I started to investigate what was all that I saw in the subway, guess what I found?"

"No matter what you've discovered, nothing gives you the right to knock anyone out! Why would you want to leave a poor, abandoned girl alone in the cold street?" Grabbing the unconscious teenager's ankles, George dragged her back until he set her down beside the bookstore's dark brick fireplace. "Sometimes I can't even recognize you, you've become more and more withdrawn over the years, more silent and lonely than ever..."

"Can't you see, she's not a child, she's something much worse!" Angela stormed, her face twisted with bitterness.

"Then what she is? What makes you judge her so cruelly?"

The old man tried to confront his wife with a hug, but she pushed him away before he could touch her.

"She's a witch…! Or something like that. You see at last? She's a monster that must be destroyed!"

"So what? So are you! That should only awaken your empathy, or at least your pity, for the poor thing."

"You don't understand, if we keep her here people will start asking questions and they will go on and on until they discover that there's something strange around the girl, after they discover her power they will call someone who will offer them security and who will surely want to control her," Thick tears began to disfigure the delicately placed makeup of the black-haired woman, making the eye shadow begin to form raccoon eyes, "you already know what will come next, do you still remember? The chase, the terror and the madness of their 'training'."

The face of that chubby black woman appeared fleetingly in the old Indian's mind.

"'Angie can you move this?' and the answer they always want to hear is 'yes, yes I can' Do you know who's started to make their way around town? What was the name of that cult of yours...? "The blood people," I think.

"We have already faced the Church of Blood once and triumphed, maybe this time..."

"No. We escaped that time and we only managed it because you had great influence in their rituals and my abilities were largely unknown to them, now without your influence and without my surprise do you think we will have the same luck if we face them again? You will be sealed again and I will return to the post of ritual sacrifice..."

The old man was about to renege, when a new thought crossed his mind and filled his chest with worry.

"... wait, if the Church of Blood has returned to seek a magical avatar for their rites... that already puts us in trouble, think, if the new Brother Blood is as cunning as the old one then maybe he's looking for this girl at all times" a spark of glowing red flooded his pupils for a moment as he thought. "Then we must help her..."

Angela Roth raised an eyebrow, the classic "Are you serious?" gesture and one of the first he had to learn as soon as he started living with her.

"Think Angela! Don't do it for her, if they capture her, they'll torture her... they won't stop until they get what they want out of her, and I'm sure one of the many questions they'll ask her will be about who helped her and we both know that's not good for us. As soon as she wakes up we must leave… taking her with us."

-o-

"I swear it's not what you think." As fast as his poor physical condition would allow, Arturo dodged a new punch that was headed for his face. "I promise I came here to make things right."

"Then why did you say that!" Blinded by fury, Carlos threw another punch; missing the blow again, "What do you mean by 'I know who did it'!"

Impeded in his new escape attempt by an armchair and the narrowness of the hotel room, Arturo Santiago was cornered between a wall and his brother-in-law. Trying to protect himself as much as possible from the next blow, he simply covered his face with both arms and closed his eyes.

"¡Carlos, THAT'S ENOUGH!" Rosa Casagrande's loud scream rattled some windows and made the second son of the old couple stop trying to beaten up the other man. "He was the one who took you out of the cell you put yourself in in the first place, so you should at least have the decency to let him explain himself, your father doesn't want, and I'm sure your sister wouldn't want, to hear you shouting anymore. Now, you," she said pointing to the cornered doctor. "You are going to explain again everything you have told us."

"Of course, ma'am. What I told you yesterday, before you, Carlos, sent me to sleep in half the emergency room, was: 'I know why they did it'..."

Trying to make enough time to catch his breath, Arthur coughed a couple of times and adjusted his clothes.

"I know what those six men in black suits were doing in your building. Carlos, I'm sure you remember the organization that hires me..."

"The same one you abandoned my sister and your two children for?" Carlos cut him off, getting angry again a little at a time. "Are we talking about the same organization?"

"Yes... S.T.A.R. Labs are dedicated to many things, from building and maintaining hospitals and clinics in marginalized communities around the world, to... well, researching some mutations that might be beneficial to the world's society."

The Casagrande matriarch's eyes widened almost beyond her eyelids. Did he know about the family secret?

"Some years ago, when I was just an intern in a little hospital in Mexico, I was assigned the task of investigating an old rumor that existed among some indigenous communities in Sonora, according to what the people over there said, some women of a certain family were born with the ability to breathe and control fire." a nervous laugh came from the doctor's throat when he realized that now both, his ex-brother-in-law and his ex-mother-in-law seemed to want to kill him, "at first I didn't believe it was true at all, but I had to do what they asked me to do anyway, so I went to Sonora and did a blood test to all the women I met in the damned village... after months and months I didn't find anything out of the ordinary."

"And... and us... why should we care about that?" Unconsciously, both Rosa and her son Carlos had stepped in front of the door of the bedroom where Frida and Carlota rested. "What you are saying is bullshit, bullshit out of fairy tales for brats."

"I thought so too, ma'am... or at least until the locals told me a thing or two," Arturo began to crack his neck bones, a little tic that gave away when he was tense. "Some of the locals told me that two girls, sisters in fact, had been expelled from the community shortly after the revolution for burning down a whole family's house, to prove it they showed me the place and when I ran tests on the burnt land… well, the evidence I had been looking for began to appear."

The color in the faces of the three adults disappeared.

"Soil tests revealed that the site burned on one occasion and years ago at nearly 5,500 Kelvin..."

"And what with that?" said Rosa. Because of the speed with which her heart was beating, the old woman started to fear she was going to have a heart attack.

"That's almost the temperature of the sun's surface," Carlos, feeling defeated, dropped onto the couch with force. "That's the temperature... of the sun..."

"Exactly, for the time and place it was impossible to reach that temperature by conventional methods, so that gave me all the motivation and funds I needed to complete my mission." After talking so much about what he knew was a delicate subject, Arturo began to feel, he too, very tired. "I spent the next six years tracking that family. First I got to..."

"A small town in Tabasco?" Rosa said, sitting up in the same couch as her son. "My mother had me after she married a widower in a town in Tabasco."

"Yes, and so I tracked down a family I had never seen before. It was the late eighties when I finally caught up with them here in Michigan... after all those years searching I had gained enough experience and had fulfilled all the requirements to get a staff job in any hospital and I still didn't know what those women looked like," he also sat on the couch, next to his brother-in-law, "I must tell you that after so much chasing I expected to catch some kind of monster or deformed or something like that... but when I saw her..."

Feeling tired and embarrassed, Arthur rested his head in both hands. Leaning so low made it difficult for his two listeners to hear him clearly, and also for the pair of women spying on them behind the door of the other bedroom.

"I met a magical, beautiful... unique woman," a huge sigh that seemed to have been held back for a lifetime came from his throat. "A woman I adored from the moment I saw her, she didn't care that I was a little older and responded to my love."

Feeling uncomfortable, Carlos got up from the sofa and with slow steps approached the only window in the room.

"But I couldn't leave my life's work unfinished, I just couldn't... or the same people who entrusted me with the research would send someone else to do the job," Arturo swallowed and shifted the weight of his body on the couch. "I did some test with Maria's blood... with her mother's, with her grandmother's. Hell, I was so desperate that I even tested Frida! and…"

"And you betrayed her, didn't you?" Without turning to look at the man he'd considered his best friend for years, Carlos' voice sounded empty and cold. "Everything we gave you meant nothing in the end."

"In fact... I didn't find anything strange in anyone but the grandmother; Ronalda Manzano was the one I was looking for and when I found her she was already so old, so tired... that I didn't tell anyone. She couldn't hurt anyone anymore and I didn't want to hurt someone who had been through so much..." Rosa also got up and approached her son and put a hand on his shoulder. "So I stayed happily with the love of my life in a small house in Royal Woods for years. A year before the arrival of the new millennium Bobby came into our lives, in 2004 the branch of S.T.A.R.S Labs that had hired me in Mexico finally closed down, I thought I wasn't obligated to anything anymore... just a year later the problems began."

Once again overcome with rage, Carlos approached Arturo and grabbed him by the collar of his sweater and pulled him up. How dare this fucker to call his only daughter a problem? Surprisingly for the university teacher, it seemed from the doctor's hurt look that nothing could hurt him more.

"My baby girl was born... and they forced me to test her, they made me bleed my baby girl... I did the all the test I needed only once..." Tears came to his eyelids, but they never fell. "The anomaly wasn't present... and when they realized that this was a fruitless clue for their purposes, they transferred me. If I resigned, there would no longer be anyone to cover up my little trap in the blood test of Grandma Ronalda, and then they would exhume her remains and do countless experiments on all of you..."

"So, if your people already knew that Ronnie was an unfinished track, why were they still looking for her?"

"They didn't just assign the case to me, I was the one who got the furthest, yes... but there were others, some of them were fired before they could finish their own searches, others were simply terminated when it was discovered that they had sold information to other agencies. My point is that there are people who know that powerful beings existed in this family, but they don't know that Ronnie is not one of those beings. That's why they're chasing my baby down."

Breaking down, Arturo wept bitterly, clutching his ex-brother-in-law's sweater.

-o-

"That's right Kenny Everett, everything seems to indicate that the rumors about the 'strange' savior of the victims of yesterday's fire were true," Sameer walked with his headphones on at full volume. If someone had asked him on a normal day, 'Hey Samy, what do you think of the radio?' the boy would surely have answered impolitely, after all, no one could discover his secret taste. "Besides, videos have just started to circulate on the net of people claiming to have seen him this morning thwarting a robbery at a Royal Woods coffee shop, could this be one of the so-called metahumans...?"

A swipe caught him by surprise and snatched the device from his ears, snapping him out of his reverie and back into the cold of the streets that his thin sweater couldn't keep out.

"Casey, give it back!" The jab with which he tried to retrieve the cell phone missed the back of the African-American boy's head, who sped away on his bike. "I was listening to that!"

"I'm sorry fatty, but it's my turn to use the cell," his friend scoffed as he quickly passed him. "Besides, all you do is plug in your headphones and listen to the dumb radio, who does that?"

"It's not fair, we had agreed on half an hour each, I had barely been there for fifteen minutes! Nikki, tell him it's not fair!"

Indifferent to the chaos around her, the blonde took a last puff on her cigarette and kept walking. It always made her nervous to go near that stupid bookstore, what if the one who was greeting her was the racist punk? Was it worth the insults in exchange for extra money? The two morons following her constantly reminded her that yes, it was.

"Hey you two! Could you be quiet for just... fifteen minutes, for God's sake! You're still behaving like fucking babies" despite having called them so rudely, there was a small smile on the three friends' faces, they always got along and would stay fair, no matter what. "Do you know we're heading to that witch's place? I need you to behave as if you were rational and decent people... at least for once in your miserable lives."

"Why do we keep harping on these guys when there's a whole town out there looking for someone to do some work?" Casey rode his old bike and circled around the blonde and Sameer.

"Is it because they're the only ones who would give some money to a trio of bums without demanding really nasty or dangerous things in return?" With a wave of her hand, Nikki asked the biker to stop. "Or have you already forgotten what that old lady made us do? I still haven't heard from that Casagrande prick."

"Well... at least I hope it's not that crazy lady who greet us this time," Sameer swiped the cell phone from Casey's hand and turned the radio back on, "I think she hates us more with every visit."

The trio kept moving at a brisk pace, one close to the other, almost shoulder to shoulder so as not to lose warmth, and after a few insufferably cold blocks they finally arrived. A discreet sign in muted colors greeted them: "Bookstore and Tarot, Azarath.

Before Nikki could turn the knob, the door to the bookstore swung open, slamming into Sameer and Casey's faces. The young adult couldn't laugh at her friends' misfortune because as soon as the door opened, Ronnie Anne shot out from inside, crashing into Nikki and knocking them both to the snow-covered sidewalk.

-o-

"Hi, Lori," The joy with which her brother greeted her hurt the blonde, "how's everything in the big city?"

Lincoln was always such a considerate and caring person to everyone, someone like him didn't deserve more bad things to happen to the people he loved and cared for. Unbidden, tears overcame the firstborn Loud after a few seconds.

"Lori? What's wrong?"

The new tone of voice, somewhere between worried and nervous, more appropriate to the situation, helped Lori quickly subdue the tears.

Feeling a new wave of tears come, the firstborn allowed herself a small pause to sort out in her mind the words she would say to the albino «Quick Lori, the breathing exercises Yeah, girl, just like that!» slowly and thanks to her controlled breathing, Lori began to calm herself down, her little brother didn't need to know all the nasty details.

After a few seconds, when she was finally ready to speak again, a white-haired woman sat down next to her on the same park bench, largely invading her personal space. As if she had known her all her life, the woman smiled at Lori just inches from her face.

"Hi Lori, I need you to ask for someone on my behalf, okay?" The young college girl couldn't complain or say anything, because as soon as she started to gasp for air to complain about the invasion of her personal space, she saw something that ended all her free will.

All she could see and all she could think of from one moment to the next was a pair of glowing red eyes.

"Lincy... something happened," Lori began to say "Ronnie Anne did something terrible…"

I was forgetting to post this shit

Sorry

:p