Forever Odd

switch activated service lamps in the storm drains, which would announce my presence sooner than necessary.
        I counted the steps, calculating eight inches for each riser. I descended over fifty feet, much deeper than I expected.
        At the bottom, a door. The half-inch-diameter latch bolt could be operated from either side.
        I thumbed off the flashlight.
        Although I expected the bolt to scrape, the hinges to creak, instead the door opened without protest. It was remarkably heavy but smooth in action.
        Blind and breathless, listening for a hostile presence, I heard nothing. When I had heard enough of it, I felt sufficiently safe to use the flashlight again.
        Beyond the threshold lay a corridor that led to my right: twelve feet long, five feet wide, a low ceiling. Following it, I discovered that it was an L, with an eight-foot short arm. Here stood another heavy door with a bolt action that worked from both sides.
        This arrangement of access to the storm drains was more elaborate than I had imagined-and seemed unnecessarily complicated.
        Again I doused the flashlight. Again the door eased open with not a sound.
        In the absolute darkness, I listened and heard a faint silken sinuous sound. My mind’s eye conjured an immense serpent slithering through the gloom.
        Then I recognized the whisper of easy-flowing water as it slid without turbulence along the smooth walls of the conduit.
        I switched on the flashlight, crossed the threshold. Immediately beyond lay a two-foot-wide concrete walkway, which seemed to lead to infinity both to my left and to my right.
        A foot and a half below the walkway, gray water, perhaps taking much of its color by reflection from the concrete walls of the drain, swept past not in a churning rush but in a stately flow. The beam of the flashlight stitched silver filigrees across the gently undulating surface.
        Based on the arc of the walls, I estimated that the water in the center of the channel measured, at its deepest, eighteen inches. Next to the walkway, it would plumb at less than a foot.
        The storm drain appeared to be approximately twelve feet in diameter, a massive artery in the body of the desert. It bored away toward some distant dark heart.
        I’d been concerned that switching on the service lamps in this maze would alert Simon that I was coming. But a flashlight would pinpoint me for anyone waiting in the darkness ahead.
        Taking the only logical alternative to feeling my way in the dark, I retreated through the stairwell door and found a pair of switches. The nearest one brightened the drain.
        Returning to the walkway, I saw that sandwiches of glass and wire protected lamps embedded in the ceiling of the tunnel at thirty-foot intervals. They did not shed the equivalent of daylight in this deep realm; repetitive bat-wings of shadow scalloped the walls, but visibility proved good enough.
        Although this was a storm drain, not a sewer, I had expected a foul smell if not a full stink. The cool air had a dank scent, but it wasn’t offensive, and had that almost appealing limy smell common to concrete places.
        Most of the year, these passages carried no water. They dried out and therefore did not support lingering molds of any kind.
        I considered the moving water for a moment. We’d not had rain in five days. This couldn’t be the last runoff from the heights in the eastern part of the county. The desert isn’t that slow to drain.
        The clouds crawling down the northeast sky when I’d left Terri’s place might have been the outrunners of a storming horde still hours distant.
        You might wonder why a desert county would need flood-control tunnels as elaborate as these. The answer has two parts, one involving climate and terrain, the other geopolitics.
        Although we have little rain in Maravilla County, when storms come, they are frequently fierce deluges. Large parts of the desert are less sand than shale, less shale than rock, with little soil or vegetation to absorb a downpour or to slow the runoff from higher elevations.
        Flash floods can turn low-lying desert areas into vast lakes. Without aggressive diversion of storm runoff, a significant portion of Pico Mundo would be at risk.
        We can go a year without a monster storm that makes us think nervously of Noah-and then have five the next