some kind of straps. He was in a car, sitting on leather upholstery. For a moment he wondered if there was something wrong with his depth perception and then he understood that, no, the other seat really was that far away.
There were people sitting beside him, but he could not turn to look at them.
The fat young man at the other end of the stretch limo took a can of Diet Coke from the cocktail bar and popped it open. He wore a long black coat, made of some silky material, and he appeared barely out of his teens: a spattering of acne glistened on one cheek. He smiled when he saw that Shadow was awake.
“Hello, Shadow,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. Can you drop me off at the Motel America, up by the interstate?”
“Hit him,” said the young man to the person on Shadow’s left. A punch was delivered to Shadow’s solar plexus, knocking the breath from him, doubling him over. He straightened up, slowly.
“I said don’t fuck with me. That was fucking with me. Keep your answers short and to the point or I’ll fucking kill you. Or maybe I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll have the children break every bone in your fucking body. There are two hundred and six of them. So don’t fuck with me.”
“Got it,” said Shadow.
The ceiling lights in the limo changed color from violet to blue then to green and to yellow.
“You’re working for Wednesday,” said the young man.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“What the fuck is he after? I mean, what’s he doing here? He must have a plan. What’s the game plan?”
“I started working for Mr. Wednesday this morning,” said Shadow. “I’m an errand boy. Maybe a driver, if he ever lets me drive. We’ve barely exchanged a dozen words.”
“You’re saying you don’t know?”
“I’m saying I don’t know.”
The boy stared at him. He swigged some Coke from the can, belched, stared some more. “Would you tell me if you did know?”
“Probably not,” admitted Shadow. “As you say, I’m working for Mr. Wednesday.”
The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. “Smoke?”
Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, but decided against it. “No thank you,” he said.
The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, the odor that filled the limo was not tobacco. It was not pot either, decided Shadow. It smelled a little like burning electrical parts.
The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public.
“If you’ve lied to me,” said the boy, as if from a long way away, “I’ll fucking kill you. You know that.”
“So you said.”
The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. The lights inside the limo transmuted from orange, to red, and back to purple. “You say you’re staying at the Motel America?” He tapped on the driver’s window, behind him. The glass window lowered. “Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest.”
The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.
The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy’s eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.
“You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he’s history. He’s forgotten. He’s old. And he better accept it. Tell him that we are the future and we don’t give a fuck about him or anyone like him. His time is over. Yes? You fucking tell him that, man. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Shadow. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.
“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
“Got it,” said Shadow. “You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way.”