Forever Odd

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 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 associates.
        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.

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    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 passage. 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 passageway 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 passageway, 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 massiveness, 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