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"Your body is already spoken for," Price said.
"I've got some strong soap in my bag," she said. "Use it and I'll keep up my end."
"I thought humans made love face-to-face," Ahn-Kha said. Valentine wasn't sure he'd heard right until he looked at his friend. Even Price knew him well enough by now to know that one ear up, one ear out meant he was joking.
Catching up to the legworms wasn't as easy as having a clear trail made it sound. When moving without eating, a legworm goes at a pace faster than a horse's walk, similar to the Tennessee walking horse's famous six to twelve miles per hour run-walk. According to Price, they could pull up turf at a good three miles an hour, a typical walk for a human. A human on a sidewalk who isn't loaded down with pack and gun.
So they moved as fast as they could through the warm fall day, sweating and swearing at each new hill. Price and Valentine decided the course was arcing somewhat northerly, so they took a chance and tried to cut across the chord of the arc.
They never picked up the trail again. Other riders found them.
Bee pointed them out first. She dropped down on her haunches and let out a blue jay-like cry, pointing at a tree-topped hill. It took Valentine a moment to recognize what he saw. The legworm's pale yellow color was surprisingly effective camouflage in the shade of a stand of elms and oaks. Two figures sat astride it, probably human.
"Everyone wait here," Price said.
"Feels too much like a standoff," Valentine said. "Why not all go?"
"If you like, but as strangers we've got to approach unarmed." He unslung his Kalashnikov, held it up over his head, then placed it on the ground. He made a motion toward Bee and she sat next to his gun.
"Feel like showing off your famous charm school repertoire?" Valentine asked Duvalier. Behind them, Ahn-Kha kept a hand on Jimi the mule's halter.
"No. If there's a problem I like to disappear fast without anyone getting a good look at me."
"I shall stay back as well," Ahn-Kha said.
Valentine placed his U-gun on the grassy ground and set the pistol on top of it. He had to jog to catch up with Price.
"Let me do the talking, Val," Price warned as he lit his pipe. "They're tetchy around strangers."
"Any particular reason for it?"
Sweat ran lightly down the greasy dirt on his face. Price's filth was semi-waterproof, as impervious to rain as an oilskin. "Nobody likes them much. Most folks in the civilized world-beg your pardon, but that's how Tennesseans see it, stuck between corn-likker-swilling guerillas west and east-avoid them like they carry a bad fungus.
"Even the churchies keep clear, except a few unreformed Jesus-pushers."
"Why do the Kurians let them be?"
"They get loads over the mountains, one way or another. Between the New York corridor and Chattanooga precious little moves by train; the lines are always getting attacked by guerillas, and you have to pay through the nose per pound. A legworm can haul as much cargo as a railcar. They and their brothers in Virginia are the main east-west smuggling artery for the whole Midwest. Not that they don't do legitimate runs too."
They hopped across two old wormtrails, little more than hummocks of summer-dried weeds, and entered the woods. Evergreens staked out their claims among the tough oaks and smooth-skinned hackberrys.
The two men astride the sixty-foot segmented worm wore black leathers fitted with an assortment of barbs like oversized fishhooks. A third had dismounted and stood near the front of their beast, a burlap sack of potato peelings and pig corn thrown under its nose. All three men wore their hair long, tied down in back and then flared out like a foxtail. All were on the grubby side, but didn't make an art form out of it like their guide.
Valentine had never seen a live legworm at rest. Its "legs" were hundreds of tiny, paired, black clawlike legs, running down the bottom of its fleshy hide like a millipede's. Oversized versions of the claws, growing larger even as the front of the worm grew thinner, pulled up the corn and the earth beneath, stuffing it into a bilateral mouth. Scimitar-like tusks, facing each other like crab claws, stuck out the front
"That's close enough, stranger," said the second man.
"Friendly call, high rider," Price said. "I'm Hoffman Price, friend to the Bulletproof, Worm Wildcats, and the Uttercross."
"We're Bulletproof."
"I know," Price said. "That's why I listed you first."
"Story!" the second man said. "And if it ain't, you know we don't like bums-"
"I know him, Zak," the one with the corncobs said, dropping his sack. He had a little gray in his red-brown hair, and a little more flesh around his middle. "He's no bum. He came and got that Swenson newbie. Maybe four years back. That Colt the Dispatcher carries, he got it from him."
"You wanna vouch for him, Cookie?" the one who'd been called Zak said.
