fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe it’ll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die.”
Shadow thought. “Hey, Jacquel?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe in the soul?” It wasn’t quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say.
“Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You line up when you die, and you answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.”
“He must have eaten a lot of people.”
“Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”
The streets were quiet, in the way that streets only are when the first snow falls. “It’s going to be a white Christmas,” said Shadow as he pumped the gas.
“Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin.”
“Jesus?”
“Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, it’s not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well…I’ve never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he’s back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he’s probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don’t even remember your birthday.”
Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice.
A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped.
The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic.
“That’s good,” said Jacquel. “So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”
“I think a real storm’s coming,” said Shadow. He was talking about the weather.
Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasn’t talking about the weather at all. “You look at me and Ibis,” he said. “We’ll be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? You’ve seen Bast. And we’re in better shape than most of them. At least we’ve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. It’s like the funeral business—the big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, because they’re bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fighting’s not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn’t care that we’d arrived. So we get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. You’re right. The storm’s coming.”
Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. “Take the back alley,” said Jacquel.
He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared