The Strangers of Kindness (6 page)

It was a challenge question, between the two males. “Darn it, why do guys always have to have a pecking order?” Jennifer groused.

Theo’s answer deflated the challenge. “She bought me at the sidewalk sale.” He let it hang in the air over the table.

Surgeon nodded. “That’s probably where I’ll end up. They’ll catch us eventually. How’d they get you?”

“They got both of us,” Jennifer said, and she told him her situation, and Theo’s. “So this is our last little party,” she finished. “I have to find someone to buy him who’ll treat him decent or he’ll have to go to prison. By January first I’ll be married to Glen.” She shuddered. “Or maybe I’ll check into one of their convents.”

“You don’t want to do that,” Surgeon said. “Believe me.”

“What do you know about them?”

“If they’re anything like the orphanages, forget it. I’ve been there. So has Curt.”

“How’d you kids get together?”

“I was living in Dodge Park down by the river. I’d check out the railroad yards every few days, sometimes there’s food or clothes the railroad guys throw out. I found Curt one night, in the woods between the tracks and the river. He broke his leg jumping off a train. He’d been in an orphanage in Utah. I guess he’d been a little troublemaker and they were shipping him to the Appalachians to work in a mine. He decided to change the plan. I took him back to my hide-out and set his leg. That was, oh, two years ago.

“Winnie’s from Des Moines. She was roaming around trying to stay alive in Hummel Park when we met her. She’d never been caught. Her stepfather . . . wouldn’t leave her alone . . . you know? And when she told her mom, her mom had her decreed an incorrigible and they were coming to get her so she took off. Hitched a ride with a trucker—just like her stepfather, she said, but at least this time she got something out of it. A ride to Omaha. So she’s been with us a year or so.

“Joseph just showed up one night. I’ve never heard him speak. He was just all of a sudden standing there at our hide-out, and who could turn him away? I called him Joseph, I had to call him something, and he accepts it, so . . . I don’t know anything about him except that it’s pretty obvious that somebody’s hurt him bad.

“Sissy. She came along last spring. Her folks must have been passing through Omaha, who knows which direction? We were downtown scrounging in the middle of the night, and there she was, standing on a street corner, all alone. Crying for her momma, scared, hungry. They just dumped her. Nice, huh?

“We’re all just garbage to them, you know? Nobody gives a damn about us but us. I gotta keep us together, and free, as long as I can. It’s no fun but at least . . .” He trailed off.

“What about you, Surgeon?” Theo asked softly. “How’d you get here?”

Surgeon chewed his lip. “My mom and dad died in a car wreck. I was ten. I’m thirteen now, tall for my age, huh? They took me to an orphanage in Chicago, one whose ‘patrons’ were a bunch of doctors in the medical center. They only took smart kids. I was real smart in science. Other kids were out kicking a football around, I was in my room cutting up road-killed squirrels, frogs, anything I could find. I was lucky. They used the other kids for psych experiments. They ran all these aptitude tests on me and found out I was maybe college level in biology, then they had me watch some surgeries, then gave me lab rats to do operations on.”

His face went sad. “They had this new technology they wanted to try out on someone. Lucky me, I was It.” He put his gloved hands on the table. With a funny tilt to his head, as though he was diffidently preparing to show them his favorite model airplane, he pulled one glove off.

Jennifer gasped and involuntarily shoved her chair back. Theo set his jaw and leaned forward, peering at Surgeon’s hand.

The last joints of his fingers, under the nails, were abnormally large, each spread out and thickened to the shape of a stack of four nickels. At each tip there was a dimple, half an inch long, looking like a lipless mouth. He hyper-extended his fingers and the mouths’ edges retracted, opening to reveal little black recesses, each studded with several brass pins.

Theo met his eyes. “Looks like you’re wired for cable,” he said. Surgeon nodded. He dug into the bottom of one of the knapsacks. He brought out a flat box in a velvet bag, stainless steel, four by eight inches by one inch deep, perforated along the sides. He snapped it open.

They didn’t understand at first what was inside. Ten jointed columns covered in clear plastic, packed with copper wires.

“Oh God,” Jennifer breathed, “They’re fingers!”

Surgeon had removed his other glove. Now he calmly and seriously plugged the extensions into his fingertip jacks. When he was done he held up his hands and rippled his fingers like a pianist. The extensions flexed and extended as nimbly as a Horowitz arpeggio. The tips were tiny, bullet-shaped, and covered with spongy pads.

“So what good are those things?”

“Micro-surgery.” Surgeon pulled the sponge pads off the tips and told Jennifer, “Lean over here, shake your hair down.”
 

She leaned over and Surgeon combed his “fingers” through her straight honey-colored hair. He locked eyes with Theo, and without looking he manipulated a strand of her hair for a minute.
 

He withdrew one hand with the tips of the artificial thumb and forefinger pinched together.

“Ouch!” Jennifer said, then stared at his hand. He was holding a single hair. “Good Lord! How’d you do that?”

“By feel. They’ve got pressure sensors in the ends and feedback loops.”

“They must be worth millions!”

“Probably.”

“Why’d you run away? You could be making a fortune in medicine!”

He smiled a grim smile. “Not me. I was just their guinea pig. They wouldn’t do this to anybody who already had his surgery training unless they knew it would work. Stupid me, I thought like you did, I’d be a doctor. But I’m just a kid, I’m still growing. I should have thought of that. It’d be too costly to keep re-fitting, and then I’d be competing with them. No, once I succeeded in an actual surgery—a spinal tumor—I was dead meat. The next day I was informed I’d be going to Georgia to dig peanuts the rest of my life.

“So, I broke into the lab and stole these, and I took off. Stupid them, they were used to dealing with the drugged-out electrode-heads they did their psych experiments on. Security was laughable. I imagine they’re still looking for me. If they don’t intend to kill me, they’ll probably call these units my ‘debt’ and put one of those things in my neck, like yours, and sell me off.”

He looked at Theo’s neck curiously. “I bet I could get that out of there.”

“Then what?”

“What? You could go underground.”

“Like you? I suppose I could but they’d just catch me again. There’s nowhere to go. Besides—” he glanced at Jennifer. “You’re forgetting my owner. If she didn’t want it out, we’d have to separate her from the control unit somehow and keep her from interfering, and from calling the cops as soon as I took off. Do you have a taste for that? I don’t.

“If she was willing to let you do it, then she’s left holding the bag. They’ll be checking up on us and when they found me gone she’d go to prison as an accessory. That’d be nice, too, wouldn’t it?”

Jennifer finally stuck an oar in. “Would you like me to leave the room while you two discuss it? Christ, everybody’s busy deciding my future, even my, my chattel—” she flung this at Theo, who winced. Then she felt bad. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s just the truth.”

“Just don’t anybody be deciding what I think and do, okay? You forgot one option, though. If Surgeon could get that thing out we could ditch it and the control and I could go with you—or away, anyway.” She suddenly ripped the thing off her wrist and threw it on the table. “There sure isn’t any future for me here.”

“None out there, either,” Theo said. “There’s still the problem: Where the hell would we go, singly or together?”

“Nevada.” The new voice startled them. It was Curt, sitting in his p.j. bottoms on the last stair step. He grinned at them slyly.

 
“Sneaky little dickens,” Surgeon said with affection. “Nevada, huh?”

 
“Sure. They’d let you in. It’s free there, freer than here anyway.”

 
“That’s just rumors. Since they seceded in the ‘04 election nobody ever runs any news out of Nevada any more. It might be a radioactive hell, for all we know.”

 
“I think we’d have heard about that,” Theo laughed. “But there’s no way in there, is there?”

 
“Airplane. California lets planes go back and forth across the border—”

 
“—for a small fee,” Surgeon injected, his grin a death’s-head leer.

 
“Of course.”

 
“But they don’t have them orphanages there, or work camps—”
 

Curt looked at Theo—“or slaves, neither. It’s almost like it used to be, the way they say it used to be, everywhere. I was trying to get there but they caught me.”

“How could you get on a plane?”

“I couldn’t. There’s one other way. Trains. Trains run in and out all the time, coal going in, sulfur coming out.”

“Sulfur?”
 

“Big export after the secession.”

Surgeon smiled at them. “See? There you go. Get rid of the tether, hop a train, everything’s rosy. Aren’tcha glad you found me?”

“Thanks for the thought, Surge, but the damn thing’s right on my jugular. You shake a little, I bleed to death.”

Surgeon looked offended. “I don’t shake.”

“Maybe not, but I’m not ready to take that chance.”

“Okay. It’s your neck.”

* * *

Theo woke before everybody else in the morning and started the coffee, then went outside to persuade eggs out from under the hens. The screen door’s screech woke Surgeon. He yawned, scratched, and stretched on his sofa bed and finally got up to put on his pants. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement in the kitchen.

“Morning, Sissy. Sleep good?”

Theo came back in with eggs pouched in his T-shirt.

“Hi Surge,” Sissy said, “What’s this?”

Surge turned just in time to see Theo flying across the kitchen table reaching for her, and in eerie slow motion her little pink index finger poking straight down onto the yellow button on Jennifer’s control unit.

“No!” he screamed, but it was too late.

 
Like a giant unseen fist had thrown him, Theo bounced off the table, doubled up in mid-air, and fell to the floor. Eggs shattered and splattered around him. A thin wheeze came from between his gritted teeth.

 
“Oh, no!” Surgeon yelled, “Jennifer! Come now!”

 
But there was nothing anyone could do. The pain-dose had dissolved when it entered Theo’s jugular vein and it could only run its course.

 
The kitchen was a chaos of Theo’s agonized screams and Sissy’s hysterical crying, Jennifer and Surgeon dithering helplessly, slipping in the broken eggs. Joseph, Curt and Winnie sat on the stairs, frightened, hugging each other.

 
“Oh, God,” Jennifer cried, “The damn things last an hour or more. Oh Theo, what can I do?”

 
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” Sissy wailed, and Winnie hurried to pick her up.

 
“Get her out of here,” Surgeon hissed. “Calm her down, don’t let her see.”

 
Theo’s body contorted in waves and his legs kicked and cramped. His arms contracted, pulling his hands into claws. Only the whites of his eyeballs showed. Inhuman grunts, and bubbling saliva leaked from his lips.

“Curt, come here, help us get him into the john,” Surgeon said. “It’s gonna be messy.” He looked at Jennifer. “Get his feet, will you? Careful, he’ll kick the shit out of you. I’ve seen this before. In a few minutes he’ll lose everything, both ends. Hurry!”

When they’d laid him on the tile floor Jennifer brought Surgeon armloads of towels, then he closed the bathroom door in her face. She sagged against the door and wept, listening in horror to Theo’s animal screams. She pounded the door in impotent rage.

“Get away, Jenny,” Surge called, “Go help Winnie with Sissy.

* * *

When it was over they put him in his bed and he slept for an hour. Jennifer peeked in and saw his eyes were open. The purple gouges under the lower lids were back.

“Hi, bud,” she said softly and knelt by the bed. “How you doin’?”

“Oh, I’ll make it. Some fun, huh?”

“No.”

“I’m sore. And hollow. Clean inside and out—who cleaned me up, you?”

“No. Surge wouldn’t let me. Seemed to think it’d bother you.” Her grin was weak.

 
“Smart kid.”

 
“Good kid.”

 
“They all are.”

 
“Theo, I had no idea how bad it would be. I never thought I could use it, except right at first when I didn’t know if you’d get violent, or, or—”

 
“Whatever.”