Forever Odd Part 11

Tributary tunnels fed the one in which I walked. Some were dry, but others added to the flow. Many were about two feet in diameter, although several loomed as large as this pa.s.sage by which I had entered.

At each intersection, the walkway ended but resumed on the farther side. At the first ford, I considered taking off my shoes and rolling up my jeans. Barefoot, I might step on something sharp in the water-a concern that kept me shod.

My new white sneakers were at once a mess. Terrible Chester might as well have peed on them.

Mile by mile, as I moved eastward, barely aware of the gradual incline, I found the subterranean structure increasingly impressive. The pleasurable curiosity that arises from exploration gradually matured into admiration for the architects, engineers, and skilled tradesmen who had conceived and executed this project.

Admiration began to ripen into something almost like wonder.

The complex of tunnels proved to be immense. Of those large enough to provide human pa.s.sage, some were lighted, but others were dark. Those that were illuminated either dwindled away as if to infinity or curved gracefully out of sight.

I saw no terminations, only the openings to new branches.

A fantastic perception arose that I had ventured into a construction that stood between worlds, or linked them, as if uncountable nautilus sh.e.l.ls intersected in myriad dimensions, the fluid geometries of their spiral pa.s.sages offering pathways to new realities.

Beneath the city of New York supposedly lie seven levels of infrastructure. Some are cramped and tortuous to service, others grand in scale.

But this was Pico Mundo, home of the Gila Monsters. Our biggest cultural event is the annual cactus festival.

At key stress points, arches and b.u.t.tresses lent reinforcement, and in some places the curved walls were ribbed. These elements had been executed with rounded edges that didn't detract from the organic quality of the whole.

The immense volume of these tunnels seemed excessive for their reputed purpose. I found it difficult to believe that, with so many routes to follow, the runoff from even a hundred-year storm would rise as far as the midpoint of one of the larger arteries.

I had no difficulty, however, believing that these tunnels were only secondarily drains and were primarily one-lane highways. Trucks could travel through them, even eighteen-wheelers, and transfer from one pa.s.sage to another with a two-maneuver turn.

Ordinary trucks or mobile missile launchers.

I suspected that this labyrinth lay under not only Fort Kraken and Pico Mundo. It also extended miles north and south through the Maravilla Valley.

If you needed to move around hot-target nuclear a.s.sets during the first hours of the Last War, to get them out of the devastation of the initial strike zone to points from which they could be taken to the surface and launched, these subterranean highways might meet your requirements. They had been constructed at sufficient depth to allow considerable hardening against blast penetration.

Indeed, having acc.u.mulated this far below the surface, storm runoff eventually must be dumped not into a reservoir but into an underground lake or other geological formation that supported the area water table.

How peculiar to think of myself, in the days before my loss, at the griddle of the Pico Mundo Grille, frying cheeseburgers, wrecking eggs, turning bacon, dreaming of marriage, unaware that far beneath me, the highways of Armageddon lay in silent antic.i.p.ation of sudden convoys of death.

Although I see the dead, whom others cannot see, the world wears many veils and is layered with secrets that cannot be perceived with merely a sixth sense.

Mile after mile, I progressed less quickly than I would have preferred. My psychic magnetism served me less well than usual, often leaving me standing in uncertainty when I arrived at the option of another conduit.

Doggedly nonetheless, I proceeded eastward, or suspected that I did. Holding fast to an accurate sense of direction underground is not easy.

For the first time, I encountered a depth-marker post-white with black numbers at one-foot intervals-situated in the center of the watercourse. This six-inch-square fixture rose eleven and a half feet, nearly to the apex of the curved ceiling.

The gray water reached three or four inches shy of the two-foot line, close to the estimation that I'd made earlier, but of greater interest was the corpse. It had snared on the post.

The cadaver bobbed facedown in the flow. The murky water, the billowing pants and shirt, prevented me from determining even the s.e.x of the deceased from where I stood on the elevated walkway.

My heart knocked, knocked, and the sound of it echoed through me as though I were an empty house.

If this was Danny, I was done. Done not just with the search for him, but finished.

Two feet of fast-moving water could in an instant sweep a grown man off balance. This conduit had only a minimal slope, however, and the unchanging depth of the flow, plus the lazy look of it, suggested that the velocity was-and would continue to be for a while-less than overwhelming.

After dropping my backpack on the walkway, I stepped down into the channel and waded toward the marker post. As lazy as the water appeared to be, it still had power.

Rather than dawdle in midstream and tempt the G.o.ds of the drain, I didn't at once try to roll the body over and look at its face, but grabbed a fistful of its clothing and towed it to the walkway.

Although I am comfortable with the spirits of the dead, cadavers spook me. They seem like empty vessels in which a new and malevolent ent.i.ty might take up residence.

I've never actually known this to happen, though there's a clerk at the Pico Mundo 7-Eleven that I wonder about.

On the walkway, I flopped the body on its back and recognized the snaky man who had Tasered me.

Not Danny. A thin whimper of relief escaped me.

At the same time my nerves coiled tight and I shuddered. The dead man's face was unlike the faces of other corpses that I had seen.

His eyes had rolled so far back in his head that I could not see the thinnest crescent of green. Although he could have been dead, at most, only a couple hours, his eyes also seemed to swell forward as though pressure within the skull might force them from their sockets.

Had his face been a bloodless white, I wouldn't have been surprised. Had the skin already turned a pale green, as it always will within a day of death, I would have wondered what had hastened the process of decomposition, but I would not have been startled.

The skin was neither bloodless nor pale green, nor even livid, but several shades of gray, mottled from ash-pale to charcoal. He looked drawn, too, as if life were a juice that had been sucked out of him.

His mouth hung open. His tongue was gone. I didn't think anyone had cut it out. He appeared to have swallowed it. Aggressively.

His head bore no obvious injuries. Although I was curious about the cause of death, I had no intention of undressing him in a search for wounds.

I did did roll him over, facedown, to check for a wallet. He wasn't carrying one. roll him over, facedown, to check for a wallet. He wasn't carrying one.

If this man had not died accidentally, if he had been murdered, surely Danny Jessup had not killed him. Which seemed to leave only the possibility that he had been offed by one of his a.s.sociates.

After retrieving my backpack and shrugging my arms through the straps, I continued in the direction that I had been headed. Several times, I glanced back, half expecting to discover that he had risen, but he never did.

SEVENTEEN.

EVENTUALLY I TURNED EAST-SOUTHEAST INTO ANOTHER tunnel. This one was dark.

Sufficient light intruded past the intersection to reveal the GFI switch on the wall of the new pa.s.sage. The stainless-steel plate was set at six feet, suggesting the designers of the flood-control system had not expected water ever to rise within a foot of that mark, confirming that the volume of the drains was far greater than a worst-case storm required.

I flicked the switch. The tunnel ahead brightened, as perhaps did other branches related to it.

Because I now proceeded east-southeast and because the storm was evidently coming in from the north, this new pa.s.sageway brought no water toward me.

The concrete had nearly dried from its most recent soaking. The floor featured a skin of pale sediment littered with small items that had fallen out of the last spate of runoff from a previous storm.

I looked for footprints in the silt, but saw none. If Danny and his captors had come this way, they had stayed on the elevated walkway that I used.

My sixth sense compelled me forward. As I walked somewhat faster than before, I wondered In the streets of Pico Mundo are manhole covers. Those heavy cast-iron discs must be disengaged from integrating latch slots and lifted with a special tool.

Logic argued that the conduits belonging to the department of power and water and those under the authority of the sewer department must be systems separate from-and much more humble than-the flood-control tunnels. Otherwise, I would by now have encountered numerous maintenance shafts with stairs or ladders.

Although I had walked miles in the first tunnel, I had not seen a single service entrance after the one through which I had arrived. Less than two hundred yards into the new pa.s.sageway, I came to an unmarked steel door in the wall.

The psychic magnetism that drew me toward Danny Jessup did not pull me toward this exit. Simple curiosity motivated me.

Beyond the door-heavy to the point of ma.s.siveness, as had been the two through which I had entered-I located a light switch and a T-shaped corridor. Other doors stood at the ends of the short arms of the T.

One of these revealed a vestibule where an open spiral of metal stairs led up to what was clearly another slump-stone shed like the one into which I had broken, property of the Maravilla County Flood-Control Project.

At the other end of the T, a door opened into a high-ceilinged transition s.p.a.ce that housed a steep flight of conventional stairs. They rose twenty feet to a door marked PMDPW.

I interpreted this to mean Pico Mundo Department of Power and Water Pico Mundo Department of Power and Water. Also stenciled on the steel was 16S-SW-V2453, which meant nothing to me.

I explored no farther. I had discovered that the subterranean systems of the department of power and water interfaced with the flood-control-project tunnels at least at a few points.

Why this might eventually be useful information, I didn't know, but I felt that it would.

After returning to the drain and discovering that the white-eyed snaky man was not waiting for me, I proceeded east-southeast.

When another tunnel met this one, the elevated walkway ended. In the powdery sediment below were footprints crossing the intersection to the place where the walkway resumed.

I dropped two feet to the drain floor and studied the prints in the silt.

Danny's tracks were different from the others. His numerous fractures over the years-and the unfortunate distortions in the bones that often accompanied healing in a victim of osteogenesis imperfecta-had left his right leg an inch shorter than his left, and twisted. He hobbled with a roll of the hips and tended to drag his right foot.

If I was also hunchbacked, he had once said, I'd have a lifelong job in the bell tower at Notre Dame, with good fringe benefits, but as usual, Mother Nature hasn't played fair with me.

In keeping with his diminutive stature, his feet were no bigger than those of a ten- or twelve-year-old. In addition, his right was a size larger than his left.

No one else could have made these tracks.

When I considered how far they had brought him on foot, I felt sick, angry, and afraid for him.

He could take short walks-a few blocks, a tour of the mall- without pain, sometimes even without discomfort. But a trek as long as this would be agony for him.

I had thought Danny had been taken by two men-his biological father, Simon Makepeace, and the nameless snaky man, now deceased. In the powdery silt, however, were three three additional sets of footprints. additional sets of footprints.

Two were the prints of grown men, one with larger feet than the other. The third appeared to have been made by a boy or a woman.

I tracked them across the confluence of tunnels to the next section of walkway. Thereafter, I again had nothing to follow except my uniquely intense intuition.

This dry section of the labyrinth lacked even the silken whisper of shallow water flowing unimpeded. This was deeper than a silence; this was a hush hush.

I have a light tread; and having proceeded at a measured pace, I was not breathing hard. Even as I walked, I could listen to the tunnel without masking any noises my quarry might make. But no telltale footfalls or voices came to me.

A couple of times, I halted, closed my eyes to concentrate on listening. I heard only a deep hollow potential potential for sound, and not a throb or gurgle that wasn't internal to me. for sound, and not a throb or gurgle that wasn't internal to me.

The evidence of such profound silence suggested that somewhere ahead, the four had departed the flood tunnels.

Why would Simon have kidnapped a son he didn't want and whom he refused to believe he had fathered?

Answer: If he thought that Danny was the offspring of the man with whom Carol had cuckolded him, Simon might take satisfaction in killing him. He was a sociopath. Neither logic nor ordinary emotions served as a foundation for his actions. Power-and the pleasure he got from exercising it-and survival were his only motivations.

That answer had satisfied me thus far-but no longer.

Simon could have murdered Danny in his bedroom. Or if my arrival at the Jessup house had interrupted him, he could have done the job in the van, while the snaky guy drove, and would have had time for torture if that was what he wanted.

Bringing Danny into this maze and hiking him through miles of tunnels qualified as a form of torture, but it was neither dramatic enough nor physically invasive enough to thrill a homicidal sociopath who liked wet work.

Simon-and his remaining two companions-had some use for poor Danny that eluded me.

Neither had they come this way to circ.u.mvent the roadblocks, nor the sheriffs-department aerial patrols. They could have found better places in which to lie low until the blockades were removed.

With grim expectations, I walked faster now, not because psychic magnetism pulled me more effectively, which it did not, but because at each intersection, I had the confirmation of their footprints in the silt.

The endless gray walls, the monotony of the patterns of shadow and light thrown by the overhead lamps, the silence: This might have served as h.e.l.l for any hopeless sinner whose two greatest fears were solitude and boredom.

Following the discovery of the first footprints, I hurried along for more than another thirty minutes, not running but walking briskly-and came to the place at which they had exited the maze.

EIGHTEEN.

WHEN I TOUCHED THE STAINLESS-STEEL SERVICE DOOR in the wall of the tunnel, a psychic hook bit deep, and I felt myself being reeled forward, as if my quarry were the fishermen and I the fish.

Beyond the door, an L-shaped hallway. At the end of the L, a door. Pushing through the door, I found a vestibule, spiral stairs, and at the top another slump-stone shed with tool rack.

Although the February day was pleasantly warm, not blistering, the air in here was stuffy. The smell of dry rot settled from the rafters under the sun-baked metal roof.

Apparently Simon had picked the lock as he had done at the first shed off the alleyway near the Blue Moon Cafe. Leaving, they had closed the door, and it had latched securely behind them.

With my laminated driver's license, I could spring a simple latch, but although cheap and flimsy, this model would be impervious to a plastic loid. I retrieved the pair of locking tongs from my backpack.

I was not concerned about the noise alerting Simon and his crew. They would have pa.s.sed this way hours ago; and I had every reason to believe that they had kept moving.

As I was about to apply the tongs to the lock cylinder, Terri's satellite phone rang, startling me.