Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [162]
And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.
The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.
But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.
A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.
The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”
Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.
The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.
Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.
The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars” — the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face — “are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”
The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick, exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands, why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer’s nose. He looked at the leader again, saw him rubbing at the fading marks.
“Sorry,” said the painter.
“It’s okay,” said the Crow. “It’s the fate of the noble savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers.”
Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, “You guys must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me.”
The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. “That could be. We need to go.”
It developed that the leader’s name was Japheth Sapp. At least that’s what the other Crow Brothers called out to him from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high above.
Soma descended into a reverie space, singsonging subvocally and super-vocally (and being hushed down by Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some sort of will-sapping effect. He didn’t feel like he could open his head and call for help; he didn’t even want to. But “I will take care of you,” Athena was always promising. He held onto that and believed that he wasn’t panicking because of the Crows’ drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the police soon. “I will take care of you.” After all, wasn’t that one of the Governor’s slogans,