The Strangers of Kindness by Terry Hickman Read Free Book Online Page A

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