Street Freaks

by Terry Brooks

  Holly takes him right up to the opening and stops. A vidcom is set atop a metal stalk to one side of the concrete apron where drivers looking to shop must check in. Holly ignores it, her eyes on the building inside the fence.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” she says.

  “I don’t know. You can’t tell much from out here.”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t prejudge, should you?”

  He glances at the call box, but she says, “We don’t need to bother with that.”

  She puts her fingers to her lips and gives a shrill whistle. All work in the open bays stops, and an instant later the laser beams go off and the spikes retract into the ground.

  Ash stares at her. “They must know you pretty well here.”

  She grins. “They ought to. It’s where I live.”

  - 5 -

  Everything about this day has been beyond weird for Ash Collins—right from the moment he received his father’s vidview and started running. But going inside Street Freaks takes things to a whole new level.

  Holly Priest walks him into the first open bay, shouting out greetings and calling for everyone to come over and meet “the new fish.” That’s what she calls him—“the new fish.” He winces inwardly, wondering what that means, uncomfortable with the designation. He almost says something but decides to keep his mouth shut.

  He catches a glimpse of the machines being worked on in bays 2 and 5—both of them sleek and sculpted with lots of polished metal surfaces—before Holly’s summons is answered and his expectations get turned on their head.

  A boy balancing atop a catwalk that is fastened by heavy cables to pulleys and tracks attached to the ceiling of Bay 2 shouts down in response. “New fish, huh?” His blue eyes check Ash out before shifting away dismissively. “Throw him back.”

  “Be nice,” Holly says sternly.

  The boy gathers himself and vaults twenty feet onto the composite floor. He lands effortlessly, as if he does this sort of thing all the time. Even through his clothing it is apparent that he is ridged with muscle.

  He walks over and plants himself right in front of Ash, looking him up and down. “I don’t know. Kinda small, Holly.”

  “Hey, give him a chance. He’s got a good vibe.”

  The boy shrugs, looking doubtful. Then he offers his hand. “Tommy Jeffers.” Ash shakes reluctantly. Tommy laughs. “Hey, not so hard. You didn’t try that with Holly, did you?” He glances over at her, winks. A joke. Holly looks irritated. “Didn’t think so. What’s your name?”

  “Ash Collins.”

  “What’s your thing, Ash?” Tommy is white-blond and deeply tanned. He would have been the prototypical all-American boy a couple centuries earlier, but he looks curiously out of date in what is now a predominately multiracial culture. He gives Ash another quick up-and-down. “You don’t look particularly athletic. Must be an intelligence factor. How are you tweaked?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, T.J.,” Holly interrupts quickly. “He’s not looking for a home. He’s a civilian. Just a fish I offered to help out. He’s looking for his dad.”

  Tommy bounces on his toes. “You lost your dad? How’d that happen? Did you misplace him or something?”

  Ha-ha, Ash wants to say. “He sent me a vidview telling me to meet him here. I think he’s in trouble.”

  Tommy frowns. “What sort of trouble?”

  “Let it alone, T.J.” Holly takes Ash by the shoulders in a curiously protective gesture. “He’s a guest. He’ll tell us what’s wrong when he’s ready.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful,” T.J. protests. But he doesn’t sound it.

  “Well, stop it. You’ve said hello. Go back to work.”

  She pivots Ash away, and a dark-skinned girl with fine black hair and narrow features walks up. The girl is wearing a sheath ribbed with parallel lines of flexible tubing buried in the fabric, and because they are darker in color than the sheath, they look like stripes. At least that is the image that pops into Ash’s head. The tubes are connected to each other and to a pair of narrow cylinders strapped to her back.

  “Ash,” Holly says, “This is Jenny Cruz.”

  The girl nods wordlessly. Her gaze is steady and the expression on her oval face is serious and introspective. Ash sees that several of the tubes sprouting from the tanks are inserted into ports embedded in the back of her neck.

  “Nice to meet you,” Jenny Cruz says finally. “What brings you to Street Freaks?”

  “I just . . .”

  “He’s looking for his dad,” Holly repeats. “I found him on the streets.”

  “Who’s your dad?” Jenny asks.

  “Brantlin Collins. Do you know him?”

  She hesitates. “The biogenetics engineer? That Brantlin Collins?”

  He nods. At least she didn’t call him “the Sparx guy.” Even if she doesn’t know his father personally, she’s heard of him. “Do you have any idea why my dad would tell me to come here? Does he have something to do with Street Freaks?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you think we would know anything about him?” T.J. is back. “You sure he told you to come here?”

  The question distracts Ash from asking Jenny Cruz anything more. It’s only been a few minutes since they met, but he is already growing irritated with T.J.

  “Ignore him,” Holly says, giving T.J. a strong push.

  But Tommy Jeffers holds his ground. “You don’t run things around here,” he tells her.

  “For which you should be eternally grateful.” Holly glances past him dismissively. “Hey, Woodrow! Come here! Don’t be shy. This fish doesn’t bite.”

  Ash turns and has to work very hard to keep from gaping in astonishment. A five-foot-tall bot approaches. It lacks legs and its cylindrical upper torso is fastened atop a rectangular metal container that houses whatever computers and power sources enable it to function. The container, in turn, is attached to a complex platform of treads that allow it to move easily over any surface. A smoked-glass panel set into its chest reveals switches and digital readouts. Colored lights blink from behind the panel. Hinged at the wrists, elbows, and shoulders, its flexible arms can move in any direction and are comprised entirely of interlocking metal parts—fingers, hands, forearms, upper arms, and shoulders.

  Everything says it is a bot except for its head.

  Which is the head of a mixed-race, dark-skinned boy, one younger than Ash but unmistakably human—kinky hair cut short, round face flushed, and wearing an expression of mixed uncertainty and discomfort.

  “Hey,” he mutters, rolling up.

  He has a boy’s voice, a real boy’s voice, a human voice, not a mechanical one.

  “Hey,” Ash replies. Woodrow does not offer to shake, so he doesn’t either. “I’m Ash.”

  Woodrow can’t seem to meet his eyes. He keeps his own downcast, almost as if he is afraid of what looking up might cost him. Ash finds himself studying the way the boy’s neck disappears down inside a metal collar where it is somehow attached to his robot body. He has never seen anything like it; he didn’t know a bot like Woodrow could even exist.

  “I was an experiment,” Woodrow says suddenly, eyes lifting all at once to meet Ash’s.

  Jenny Cruz makes a dismissive gesture. “He doesn’t need to know that,” she says quickly. “Do you, Ash?”

  Ash shakes his head in agreement, although he really does want to know. Instead, he asks, “Why is Holly calling me a ‘fish’? What does that mean?”

  “Oh, it’s just an expression.” Holly gives him a broad grin. “It means you’re a newbie, a first-time visitor to the Zone.”

  “An outsider,” T.J. adds pointedly. “Not one of us.”

  “You’ve been thrown into the pond with the rest of us, so now you need to learn how to swim,” Holly continues.

  “So, Ash.” Jenny takes hold of his arm and turns him away from the others. He can hear the soft humming of pumps in the cylinders she wears
. “You’re looking for your dad? Why is that?”

  “Yeah, he was coming here to find him when—” Holly starts to say.

  “Don’t interrupt, Holly.” Jenny cuts her short. “Let Ash speak for himself.”

  Holly Priest flushes, but in spite of her dominating physical presence, she backs off with a shrug. It’s apparent that Jenny Cruz is in charge—at least in this situation.

  Ash hesitates. How much should he tell these four? All of them are waiting. He can feel their inquisitive eyes watching him. This is some sort of test. They want to know the specifics of what brought him here, and he senses that hedging or lying would be a mistake. Jenny Cruz, at least, is making up her mind about whether or not to trust him. At the moment, she is undecided.

  “I got a vidview from my father this morning. He told me to leave and come into the Red Zone. To come here, specifically. Then Hazmats came through the door, just blew it down, and started shooting the bots. I climbed out a window, took a jumper to another building, and got down to street level. I thought about taking a transmat, but I wasn’t sure how it worked. So I took a robo-taxi to a substem, thinking I could catch a train into the Zone. The next thing I know, I see my face on the reader board with a warning to report me to the L.A. Preventatives if I’m seen. Then Achilles Pod shows up, and I start running. I go down into the tunnels and out to the departure platforms. But someone in the crowd recognizes me and calls it in, and Achilles Pod comes after me. I know I can’t take the train because they’ll be waiting for me down the line. So I run back up to the street and hop another robo-taxi. But they can’t go into the Red Zone, so I get dropped on the perimeter and have to walk in. I tried to find Street Freaks, but Holly found me first, and here I am.”

  He runs out of breath and story at about the same time. His listeners just stare at him.

  “You see!” Holly exclaims. “Not your average fish. I found him on the strip about to be eaten for lunch by Ponce and his crew. You think maybe his dad’s a customer?”

  “Achilles Pod is after you?” T.J. interrupts. He purses his lips. “Really? What’s so important about you?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Holly snaps, glaring at him.

  “Maybe it is, now that you’ve brought him here,” T.J. replies.

  “Where do you live, Ash?” Jenny Cruz asks. “Somewhere in the Metro, right? Did you say you took a jumper to get away from the Hazmats?”

  I nod. “I live in a sky tower.”

  “But he says he’s not usually allowed to go anywhere alone,” Holly interjects. “Isn’t that right, Ash?”

  “My father travels a lot. So I’m homeschooled and I don’t go to regular . . .” He trails off. He is talking too much. “Like I said, this is the first time I’ve been out alone for a while. So far, it’s not much fun.”

  “Kind of exciting, though, huh?” T.J. declares with a grin. “Damn! Achilles Pod!” He looks out the open bay door. “Maybe we shouldn’t be standing around like this where anyone looking in can see us.”

  “So your dad didn’t tell you why you were supposed to come here?” Jenny presses, ignoring T.J. “You never heard him say anything about Street Freaks before?”

  Ash shakes his head. “Not a word. I didn’t even know what Street Freaks was before today.”

  “You still don’t,” T.J. adds.

  “Shut up, T.J.,” Jenny says quietly. She keeps her eyes fixed on Ash. “We have to be careful about who we let in here. The Shoe doesn’t like strangers. And this is his shop, not ours. We just work for him. Our customers insist on a high degree of privacy. They depend on us to keep everything we do for them a secret. The Shoe gives them that guarantee. Letting strangers into the shop doesn’t help with that.”

  Ash gets what she’s saying, but it makes him angry. “The only reason I came to Street Freaks was because that was what I was told to do. I just want to find my dad. I don’t want to know any secrets. I don’t care what goes on here.”

  “Hey, calm down.” Holly makes a soothing gesture. She puts a hand on his shoulder, and it feels oddly reassuring. “I brought you here to help you because you asked me to. Remember? The point is, you don’t know why your dad sent you here, but he must have had a reason for doing so. He didn’t just pull our name out of a hat. We need to find out what the connection is. But you have to help us.”

  “Because your dad’s not here,” Jenny Cruz finishes. “There’s no one here but us.”

  “So maybe this is turning into a search and rescue,” Holly adds. “Maybe finding your dad is going to require more from you than just standing around waiting for him to show up.”

  “Now might be a good time to ask him how he’s tweaked,” T.J. says. He flashes his disarming beach-boy grin at Holly. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. If he’s tweaked, it might explain why Street Freaks was chosen as a meeting place.”

  “Do you know what T.J. means?” Jenny asks him. “About being tweaked? Have you heard the word?”

  “He’s heard the other ‘T’ word,” Holly grumbles. “The bad one. He didn’t know what it meant.”

  “I don’t know what ‘tweaked’ means either,” Ash answers.

  “If he was tweaked, he would know it,” Woodrow says. He’s been mostly quiet all this time. The buttons on his metal chest are flashing.

  “It means you have special abilities as a result of the way you are put together.” Jenny considers her choice of words. “It means you can do things other people can’t because of the way you are enhanced or reengineered.”

  “Not because of how you are born or because of the genes you inherited,” Woodrow adds, sounding put out. “You can do things because your physical makeup has been significantly altered through science.”

  Tubes feeding into your body, strength that would crush a regular human, an athleticism that lets you drop twenty feet from a ceiling, and a boy’s head improbably mounted on a robot’s body. Ash nods. “Like all of you?”

  Jenny nods back. “Like all of us. We’re tweaked, each of us in a different way. The Shoe found us and brought us together to help him work the shop. He doesn’t judge us like some people do. He accepts us for who we are.”

  “Remember when I told you what Street Freaks meant?” Holly jumps back into the conversation. “How I told you it referred to the street machines we build for our special customers? Well, it means something else too. It’s street slang for people like us—me and Jenny and T.J. and Woodrow. It’s what we’re called. Street Freaks. It’s not meant in a nice way, but we’ve turned it back on those people who use it by adopting it as our own.”

  “It’s what we call ourselves,” T.J. adds. “Openly, not in secret. Street Freaks. That’s our identity. It’s who we are and what we build. We construct the machines, and we own the name.”

  “Like a club,” Ash says. “Like Ponce and his friends are called Razor Boys.”

  “Not exactly.” T.J. looks irritated. “We’re not a club and we’re not dumbass thugs looking for trouble. We’re a family.”

  “Bet you’ve never met anyone like us before, have you?” Holly cocks her head at him. “Being homeschooled, never going into places like the Red Zone, pretty much keeping to yourself? Or am I wrong? Maybe you know more than you’re saying.”

  “How about it, Ash?” Jenny gives him a questioning look. “You think you might be like us? Are you tweaked in any way? Your dad is a biogenetics engineer.”

  Ash shakes his head. “Yeah, he’s a biogenetics engineer, but I don’t think he’s ever done anything to me. I can’t do anything special. I’m just average.” He pauses, considering. “Except that I’m good at remembering stuff. I can see something once and remember it for weeks afterward. Sometimes for months.”

  “Like you see people you don’t know, and you can remember their faces?” T.J. asks.

  “Well, yeah. That too. But mostly I’m good at remembering things that are written down.” Ash looks around, suddenly eager to feel like a part of the group, to belong in some way
. “You show me the specs on a machine, I can draw out copies that look just like the originals. Well, you know. Not stylistically, maybe. But the details would be accurate. I keep it all in my memory, and I can bring it out or recognize it again without hardly thinking about it.”

  The other kids exchange glances. “That sounds like a pretty useful skill,” T.J. observes. Ash can practically see the wheels turning. “Does it mess with your head to be able to remember so much?”

  Ash grins in spite of myself. “I can see how you might think it would. But it doesn’t. It’s there if I need it or if something triggers my memory of it. It isn’t like my brain’s about to explode because there’s too much stuff crammed inside.”

  T.J. laughs. “Well, there’s some good news! Now we don’t have to worry about asking you to step outside if you feel a major thought coming on.”

  “Which is why we feel so safe about you, T.J.,” Holly says.

  Even Jenny Cruz smiles.

  Ash begins to feel comfortable with these kids, to get beyond his first impressions, to see past their strangeness to what makes them seem as ordinary as he is. In spite of the unexpectedness of the situation and the unusual circumstances that brought them together, he finds himself liking them.

  “You think I might be tweaked like you are?” he asks, genuinely curious.

  “Maybe.” Jenny preempts the others. “Tweaked, that is. But not like us. Look, you can wait here for your dad, if you want. Maybe he’ll show up later. Meanwhile, I’ll check our business records and see if there’s any mention of him. Maybe he’s been here and hasn’t told you about it. I’ll have a look.”

  She turns away. “The rest of you better get back to work on Starfire. The Shoe wants her ready for pickup tomorrow morning first thing. Ash, you can watch if you promise to stay out of the way.”