Dark Rivers of the Heart

ever seen it fall.
        Driving with one hand, Spencer stroked Rocky's head. The dog was too frightened to look up or to lean into the consoling hand.
        They went no more than fifty yards from the first arroyo when Spencer saw the earth moving ahead of them. It rolled sinuously as though swarms of giant serpents were traveling just below the surface of the desert. By the time he braked to a full stop, the headlights revealed a less fanciful but no less frightening explanation: The earth wasn't moving, but a swift muddy river was churnin from west to east along the gently sloping plain, blocking travel to the south.
        The depths of this new arroyo were mostly hidden. The racing water was already within a few inches of its banks.
        Such torrents couldn't have risen Just since the storm had swept across the plains minutes ago. The runoff was from the mountains, where rain had been falling for a while and where the stony, treeless slopes absorl)cd little of it. The desert seldom received downpours of that magnitude; but on rare occasions, with breathtaking suddenness, flash floods could inundate even portions of the elevated interstate highway or pour into low-lying areas of the now distant Las Vegas Strip and sweep cars out of casino parking lots.
        Spencer couldn't judge the depth of the water. It might have been two feet or twenty.
        Even if only two feet deep, the water was moving so fast, with such power, that he didn't dare attempt to ford it. The second wash was wider than the first, forty feet across. Before he'd traveled half that distance, the truck would be lifted and carried down river, rolling and bobbing, as if it were driftwood.
        He backed the Explorer away from the churning flow, turned, and retraced his route, arriving at the first arroyo, to the south, more quickly than he expected. In the brief time since he had crossed it, the silvery freshet had become a turbulent river that nearly filled the wash.
        Bracketed by impassable cataracts, Spencer was no longer able to parallel the distant north-south interstate.
        He considered parking right there, to wait for the storm to pass.
        When the rain ended, the arroyos would empty as swiftly as they had filled. But he sensed that the situation was more dangerous than it appeared.
        He opened the door, stepped into the downpour, and was soaked by the time he walked to the front of the Explorer. The pummeling rain hammered a chill deep into his flesh.
        The cold and the wet contributed to his misery less than did the incredible noise. The oppressive roar of the storm blocked all other sounds.
        The rattle of the rain against the desert, the swash and rumble of the river, and the booming thunder combined to make the vast Mojave as confining and claustrophobia-inducing as the interior of a stuntman's barrel on the brink of Niagara.
        He wanted a better view of the surging flux than he'd gotten from inside the truck, but a closer look alarmed him. Moment by moment, water lapped higher on the banks of the wash; soon it would flood across the plain. Sections of the soft arroyo walls collapsed, dissolved into the muddy currents, and were carried away. Even as the violent gush eroded a wider channel, it swelled tremendously in volume, simultaneously rising and growing broader. Spencer turned from the first arroyo and hurried toward the second, to the south of the truck.
        He reached that other impromptu river sooner than he expected. It was brimming and widening like the first channel. Fifty yards had separated the two arroyos when he'd first driven between them, but that gap had shrunk to thirty.
        Thirty yards was still a considerable distance. He found it difficult to believe that those two spates were powerful enough to eat through so much remaining land and ultimately converge.
        Then, immediately in front of his shoes, a crack opened in the ground.
        A long, jagged leer. The earth grinned, and a six-foot-wide slab of riverbank collapsed into the onrushing water.
        Spencer stumbled backward, out of immediate danger. The sodden land around him was turning mushy underfoot.
        The unthinkable suddenly seemed inevitable. Large portions of the desert were all shale and volcanic rock and quartzite, but he had the misfortune to be caught in a cloudburst while traveling over a fathomless sea of sand. Unless a hidden spine of rock was