Forever Odd by Dean Koontz

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 gods 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 entity 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
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.

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