The Moment of the Storm

Chapter Fourteen

People are in the dark, they don't know what to do
I had a little lantern, oh but it got blown out too.
I'm reaching out my hand. I hope you are too.
I just want to be in the dark with you.

-Greg Brown, "In the Dark with You"

They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in the airport's long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the parking building was open to the sky.

Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions, folded the whole thing up, and dropped it into a garbage can. They had been waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested young man came out of an airport door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car, when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had before. It made him look older.

The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his jeans, extended one huge hand to Shadow. "I heard of the All-Father's death," he said. "They will pay, and they will pay dearly."

"Wednesday was your father?" asked Shadow.

"He was the All-Father," said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. "You tell them, tell them all, that when we are needed, my people will be there."

Czernobog picked at a flake of tobacco from between his teeth and spat it out onto the frozen slush. "And how many of you is that? Ten? Twenty?"

The barrel-chested man's beard bristled. "And aren't ten of us worth a hundred of them? Who would stand against even one of my folk, in a battle? But there are more of us than that, at the edge of the cities. There are a few in the mountains. Some in the Catskills, a few living in the carny towns in Florida. They keep their axes sharp. They will come if I call them."

"You do that, Elvis," said Mr. Nancy. Shadow thought he said Elvis, anyway. Nancy had exchanged the deputy's uniform for a thick brown cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. "You call them. It's what the old bastard would have wanted."

"They betrayed him. They killed him. I laughed at Wednesday, but I was wrong. None of us are safe any longer," said the man whose name sounded like Elvis. "But you can rely on us." He gently patted Shadow on the back and almost sent him sprawling. It was like being gently patted on the back by a wrecking ball.

Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he said, "You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which?"

The barrel-chested man pointed. "There she is," he said.

Czernobog snorted. "That?"

It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window.

"It's a fine vehicle. And it's the last thing that they'll be expecting you to be driving."

Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smoker's cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. "Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in."

The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. "So they take a look at you, they see you aren't hippies, they wave you goodbye. It's the perfect disguise. And it's all I could find at no notice."

Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. "Elvis, you came through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago."

"We'll leave it in Bloomington," said the bearded man. "The wolves will take care of it. Don't give it another thought." He turned back to Shadow. "Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy." He squeezed Shadow's hand with his own catcher's-mitt fist. It hurt. "You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith."

The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.

"Who was that?" asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears.

"Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. He's the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk."

"But he's not a dwarf," pointed out Shadow. "He's what, five-eight? Five-nine?"

"Which makes him a giant among dwarfs," said Czernobog from behind him. "Tallest dwarf in America."

"What was that about the vigil?" asked Shadow.

The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced at Mr. Nancy, who was staring out of the window.

"Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him."

Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. "You will not have to do it," he said.

"Do what?"

"The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind."

***

Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain it-perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future.

He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back.

Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus's path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence posts.

Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. "I dreamed a strange dream," he said. "I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away." He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the cigarette between his lips and lit it.

Shadow wound down his window.

"Aren't you worried about lung cancer?" he said.

"I am cancer," said Czernobog. "I do not frighten myself."

Nancy spoke. "Folk like us don't get cancer. We don't get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson's disease or syphilis. We're kind of hard to kill."

"They killed Wednesday," said Shadow.

He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to jangle.

They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said "Yes." Then she looked back at the room, said, "Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now," and walked over to Mr. Nancy.

"It's for you," she said.

"Okay," said Mr. Nancy. "Now, ma'am, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt." He walked over to the pay phone. "This is he."

"And what makes you think I'm dumb enough to trust you?" he said.

"I can find it," he said. "I know where it is."

"Yes," he said. "Of course we want it. You know we want it. And I know you want to get rid of it. So don't give me any shit."

He hung up the telephone, came back to the table.

"Who was it?" asked Shadow.

"Didn't say."

"What did they want?"

"They were offerin' us a truce, while they hand over the body."

"They lie," said Czernobog. "They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do," he added, with gloomy pride.

"It's on neutral territory," said Nancy. "Truly neutral."

Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. "I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days."

Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. "Mm-mm. These are fine fries," he said.

"We can't trust those people," said Shadow.

"Listen, I'm older than you and I'm smarter than you and I'm better lookin' than you," said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. "I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you'll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale..."

"And your point here is...?"

Nancy's brown eyes gazed into Shadow's. "And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it."

Czernobog said, "There is no such neutral place."

"There's one," said Mr. Nancy. "It's the center."

***

Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic at best. With living things-people, for example, or continents-the problem becomes one of intangibles: What is the center of a man? What is the center of a dream? And in the case of the continental United States, should one count Alaska when one attempts to find the center? Or Hawaii?

As the Twentieth Century began, they made a huge model of the USA, the lower forty-eight states, out of cardboard, and to find the center they balanced it on a pin, until they found the single place it balanced.

As near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, Kansas, on Johnny Grib's hog farm. By the 1930s the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn't want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the hogs, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to go in the park, and a brass plaque on the monument. They blacktopped the road from the town, and, certain of the influx of tourists waiting to arrive, they even built a motel by the monument. Then they waited.

The tourists did not come. Nobody came.

It's a sad little park, now, with a mobile chapel in it that wouldn't fit a small funeral party, and a motel whose windows look like dead eyes.

"Which is why," concluded Mr. Nancy, as they drove into Humansville, Missouri (pop. 1084), "the exact center of America is a tiny run-down park, an empty church, a pile of stones, and a derelict motel."

"Hog farm," said Czernobog. "You just said that the real center of America was a hog farm."

"This isn't about what is," said Mr. Nancy. "It's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things."

"My kind of people?" asked Shadow. "Or your kind of people?"

Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have been a chuckle, might have been a snort.

Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of the bus. He had only slept a little. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The back of his neck prickled, he felt sick and, several times, in waves, he felt scared.

Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket. Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the parking lot, smoking his cigarette.

There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking the breakfast cereal shelves.

"Hey," said Mr. Nancy.

"Hey," said the young man. "It's true, isn't it? They killed him?"

"Yes," said Mr. Nancy. "They killed him."

The young man banged several boxes of Cap'n Crunch down on the shelf. "They think they can crush us like cockroaches," he said. He had a tarnished silver bracelet circling his wrist. "We don't crush that easy, do we?"

"No," said Mr. Nancy. "We don't."

"I'll be there, sir," said the young man, his pale blue eyes blazing.

"I know you will, Gwydion," said Mr. Nancy.

Mr. Nancy bought several large bottles of RC Cola, a six-pack of toilet paper, a pack of evil-looking black cigarillos, a bunch of bananas, and a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. "He's a good boy. Came over in the seventh century. Welsh."

The bus meandered first to the west and then to the north. Spring faded back into the dead end of winter. Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts. Shadow had become adept at hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio and dance music, and Czernobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations. For himself, Shadow liked oldies.

Toward the end of the afternoon they stopped, at Czernobog's request, on the outskirts of Cherryvale, Kansas (pop. 2,464). Czernobog led them to a meadow outside the town. There were still traces of snow in the shadows of the trees, and the grass was the color of dirt.

"Wait here," said Czernobog.

He walked, alone, to the center of the meadow. He stood there, in the winds of the end of February, for some time. At first he hung his head, then he began gesticulating.

"He looks like he's talking to someone," said Shadow.

"Ghosts," said Mr. Nancy. "They worshiped him here, over a hundred years ago. They made blood sacrifice to him, libations spilled with the hammer. After a time, the townsfolk figured out why so many of the strangers who passed through the town didn't ever come back. This was where they hid some of the bodies."

Czernobog came back from the middle of the field. His mustache seemed darker now, and there were streaks of black in his gray hair. He smiled, showing his iron tooth. "I feel good, now. Ahh. Some things linger, and blood lingers longest."

They walked back across the meadow to where they had parked the VW bus. Czernobog lit a cigarette, but did not cough. "They did it with the hammer," he said. "Votan, he would talk of the gallows and the spear, but for me, it is one thing..." He reached out a nicotine-colored finger and tapped it, hard, in the center of Shadow's forehead.

"Please don't do that," said Shadow, politely.

"Please don't do that," mimicked Czernobog. "One day I will take my hammer and do much worse than that to you, my friend, remember?"

"Yes," said Shadow. "But if you tap my head again, I'll break your hand."

Czernobog snorted. Then he said, "They should be grateful, the people here. There was such power raised. Even thirty years after they forced my people into hiding, this land, this very land, gave us the greatest movie star of all time. She was the greatest there ever was."

"Judy Garland?" asked Shadow.

Czernobog shook his head curtly.

"He's talking about Louise Brooks," said Mr. Nancy.

Shadow decided not to ask who Louise Brooks was. Instead he said, "So, look, when Wednesday went to talk to them, he did it under a truce."

"Yes."

"And now we're going to get Wednesday's body from them, as a truce."

"Yes."

"And we know that they want me dead or out of the way."

"They want all of us dead," said Nancy.

"So what I don't get is, why do we think they'll play fair this time, when they didn't for Wednesday?"

"That," said Czernobog, "is why we are meeting at the center. Is..." He frowned. "What is the word for it? The opposite of sacred?"

"Profane," said Shadow, without thinking.

"No," said Czernobog. "I mean, when a place is less sacred than any other place. Of negative sacredness. Places where they can build no temples. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods only walk if they are forced to."

"I don't know," said Shadow. "I don't think there is a word for it."

"All of America has it, a little," said Czernobog. "That is why we are not welcome here. But the center," said Czernobog. "The center is worst. Is like a minefield. We all tread too carefully there to dare break the truce."

They had reached the bus. Czernobog patted Shadow's upper arm. "You don't worry," he said, with gloomy reassurance. "Nobody else is going to kill you. Nobody but me."

***

Shadow found the center of America at evening that same day, before it was fully dark. It was on a slight hill to the northwest of Lebanon. He drove around the little hillside park, past the tiny mobile chapel and the stone monument, and when Shadow saw the one-story 1950s motel at the edge of the park his heart sank. There was a black Humvee parked in front of it-it looked like a jeep reflected in a fun-house mirror, as squat and pointless and ugly as an armored car. There were no lights on inside the building.

They parked beside the motel, and as they did so, a man in a chauffeur's uniform and cap walked out of the motel and was illuminated by the headlights of the bus. He touched his cap to them, politely, got into the Humvee, and drove off.

"Big car, tiny dick," said Mr. Nancy.

"Do you think they'll even have beds here?" asked Shadow. "It's been days since I slept in a bed. This place looks like it's just waiting to be demolished."

"It's owned by hunters from Texas," said Mr. Nancy. "Come up here once a year. Damned if I know what they're huntin'. It stops the place being condemned and destroyed."

They climbed out of the bus. Waiting for them in front of the motel was a woman Shadow did not recognize. She was perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed. She reminded him of every newscaster he'd ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn't really resemble a living room.

"Lovely to see you," she said. "Now, you must be Czernobog. I've heard a lot about you. And you're Anansi, always up to mischief, eh? You jolly old man. And you, you must be Shadow. You've certainly led us a merry chase, haven't you?" A hand took his, pressed it firmly, looked him straight in the eye. "I'm Media. Good to meet you. I hope we can get this evening's business done as pleasantly as possible."

The main doors opened. "Somehow, Toto," said the fat kid Shadow had last seen sitting in a limo, "I don't believe we're in Kansas anymore."

"We're in Kansas," said Mr. Nancy. "I think we must have drove through most of it today. Damn but this country is flat."

"This place has no lights, no power, and no hot water," said the fat kid. "And, no offense, you people really need the hot water. You just smell like you've been in that bus for a week."

"I don't think there's any need to go there," said the woman, smoothly. "We're all friends here. Come on in. We'll show you to your rooms. We took the first four rooms. Your late friend is in the fifth. All the ones beyond room five are empty-you can take your pick. I'm afraid it's not the Four Seasons, but then, what is?"

She opened the door to the motel lobby for them. It smelled of mildew, of damp and dust and decay.

There was a man sitting in the lobby, in the near darkness. "You people hungry?" he asked.

"I can always eat," said Mr. Nancy.

"Driver's gone out for a sack of hamburgers," said the man. "He'll be back soon." He looked up. It was too dark to see faces, but he said, "Big guy. You're Shadow, huh? The asshole who killed Woody and Stone?"

"No," said Shadow. "That was someone else. And I know who you are." He did. He had been inside the man's head. "You're Town. Have you slept with Wood's widow yet?"

Mr. Town fell off his chair. In a movie, it would have been funny; in real life it was simply clumsy. He stood up quickly, came toward Shadow. Shadow looked down at him and said, "Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish."

Mr. Nancy rested his hand on Shadow's upper arm. "Truce, remember?" he said. "We're at the center."

Mr. Town turned away, leaned over to the counter, and picked up three keys. "You're down at the end of the hall," he said. "Here."

He handed the keys to Mr. Nancy and walked away, into the shadows of the corridor. They heard a motel room door open, and they heard it slam.

Mr. Nancy passed a key to Shadow, another to Czernobog. "Is there a flashlight on the bus?" asked Shadow.

"No," said Mr. Nancy. "But it's just dark. You mustn't be afraid of the dark."

"I'm not," said Shadow. "I'm afraid of the people in the dark."

"Dark is good," said Czernobog. He seemed to have no difficulty seeing where he was going, leading them down the darkened corridor, putting the keys into the locks without fumbling. "I will be in room ten," he told them. And then he said, "Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?"

"Different woman," said Mr. Nancy. "Same deal."

Mr. Nancy was in room 8, and Shadow opposite the two of them, in room 9. The room smelled damp, and dusty, and deserted. There was a bed frame in there, with a mattress on it, but no sheets. A little light entered the room from the gloaming outside the window. Shadow sat down on the mattress, pulled off his shoes, and stretched out at full length. He had driven too much in the last few days.

Perhaps he slept.

***

He was walking.

A cold wind tugged at his clothes. The tiny snowflakes were little more than a crystalline dust that gusted and flurried in the wind.

There were trees, bare of leaves in the winter. There were high hills on each side of him. It was late on a winter's afternoon: the sky and the snow had attained the same deep shade of purple. Somewhere ahead of him-in this light, distances were impossible to judge-the flames of a bonfire flickered, yellow and orange.

A gray wolf padded through the snow before him.

Shadow stopped. The wolf stopped also, and turned, and waited. One of its eyes glinted yellowish-green. Shadow shrugged and walked toward the flames and the wolf ambled ahead of him.

The bonfire burned in the middle of a grove of trees. There must have been a hundred trees, planted in the rows. There were shapes hanging from the trees. At the end of the rows was a building that looked a little like an overturned boat. It was carved of wood, and it crawled with wooden creatures and wooden faces-dragons, gryphons, trolls, and boars-all of them dancing in the flickering light of the fire.

The bonfire was so high that Shadow could barely approach it. The wolf padded around the crackling fire.

In place of the wolf a man came out on the other side of the fire. He was leaning on a tall stick.

"You are in Uppsala, in Sweden," said the man, in a familiar, gravelly voice. "About a thousand years ago."

"Wednesday?" said Shadow.

The man continued to talk, as if Shadow were not there. "First every year, then, later, when the rot set in, and they became lax, every nine years, they would sacrifice here. A sacrifice of nines. Each day, for nine days, they would hang nine animals from trees in the grove. One of those animals was always a man."

He strode away from the firelight, toward the trees, and Shadow followed him. As he approached the trees the shapes that hung from them resolved: legs and eyes and tongues and heads. Shadow shook his head: there was something about seeing a bull hanging by its neck from a tree that was darkly sad, and at the same time surreal enough almost to be funny. Shadow passed a hanging stag, a wolfhound, a brown bear, and a chestnut horse with a white mane, little bigger than a pony. The dog was still alive: every few seconds it would kick spasmodically, and it was making a strained whimpering noise as it dangled from the rope.

The man he was following took his long stick, which Shadow realized now, as it moved, was actually a spear, and he slashed at the dog's stomach with it, in one knifelike cut downward. Steaming entrails tumbled onto the snow. "I dedicate this death to Odin," said the man, formally.

"It is only a gesture," he said, turning back to Shadow. "But gestures mean everything. The death of one dog symbolizes the death of all dogs. Nine men they gave to me, but they stood for all the men, all the blood, all the power. It just wasn't enough. One day, the blood stopped flowing. Belief without blood only takes us so far. The blood must flow."

"I saw you die," said Shadow.

"In the god business," said the figure-and now Shadow was certain it was Wednesday, nobody else had that rasp, that deep cynical joy in words, "it's not the death that matters. It's the opportunity for resurrection. And when the blood flows..." He gestured at the animals, at the people, hanging from the trees.

Shadow could not decide whether the dead humans they walked past were more or less horrifying than the animals: at least the humans had known the fate they were going to. There was a deep, boozy smell about the men that suggested that they had been allowed to anesthetize themselves on their way to the gallows, while the animals would simply have been lynched, hauled up alive and terrified. The faces of the men looked so young: none of them was older than twenty.

"Who am I?" asked Shadow.

"You?" said the man. "You were an opportunity. You were part of a grand tradition. Although both of us are committed enough to the affair to die for it. Eh?"

"Who are you?" asked Shadow.

"The hardest part is simply surviving," said the man. The bonfire-and Shadow realized with a strange horror that it truly was a bone-fire: rib cages and fire-eyed skulls stared and stuck and jutted from the flames, sputtering trace-element colors into the night, greens and yellows and blues-was flaring and crackling and burning hotly. "Three days of the tree, three days in the underworld, three days to find my way back."

The flames sputtered and flamed too brightly for Shadow to look at directly. He looked down into the darkness beneath the trees.

A knock on the door-and now there was moonlight coming in the window. Shadow sat up with a start. "Dinner's served," said Media's voice.

Shadow put his shoes back on, walked over to the door, went out into the corridor. Someone had found some candles, and a dim yellow light illuminated the reception hall. The driver of the Humvee came in holding a cardboard tray and a paper sack. He wore a long black coat and a peaked chauffeur's cap.

"Sorry about the delay," he said, hoarsely. "I got everybody the same: a couple of burgers, large fries, large Coke, and apple pie. I'll eat mine out in the car." He put the food down, then walked back outside. The smell of fast food filled the lobby. Shadow took the paper bag and passed out the food, the napkins, the packets of ketchup.

They ate in silence while the candles flickered and the burning wax hissed.

Shadow noticed that Town was glaring at him. He turned his chair a little, so his back was to the wall. Media ate her burger with a napkin poised by her lips to remove crumbs.

"Oh. Great. These burgers are nearly cold," said the fat kid. He was still wearing his shades, which Shadow thought pointless and foolish, given the darkness of the room.

"Sorry about that," said Town. "The nearest McDonald's is in Nebraska."

They finished their lukewarm hamburgers and cold fries. The fat kid bit into his single-person apple pie, and the filling spurted down his chin. Unexpectedly, the filling was still hot. "Ow," he said. He wiped at it with his hand, licking his fingers to get them clean. "That stuff burns!" he said. "Those pies are a class-action suit waiting to fucking happen."

Shadow wanted to hit the kid. He'd wanted to hit him since the kid had his goons hurt him in the limo, after Laura's funeral. He pushed the thought away. "Can't we just take Wednesday's body and get out of here?" he asked.

"Midnight," said Mr. Nancy and the fat kid, at the same time.

"These things must be done by the rules," said Czernobog.

"Yeah," said Shadow. "But nobody tells me what they are. You keep talking about the goddamn rules, I don't even-know what game you people are playing."

"It's like breaking the street date," said Media, brightly. "You know. When things are allowed to be on sale."

Town said, "I think the whole thing's a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybody's happy." He slurped his Coke. "Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. We're all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are."

"Hey," said the fat kid to Shadow. "Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him?"

"I told him," said Shadow. "And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that today's future is tomorrow's yesterday." Wednesday had never said any such thing. Still, these people seemed to like clichés. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle flames back at him, like eyes.

The fat kid said, "This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you're already back in the stone age." He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table, and walked away down the corridor.

Shadow reached over and placed the fat kid's garbage back into the paper sack. "I'm going to see the center of America," he announced. He got up and wa............