Nature wiped it off the map, too.
In addition to more wreckage strewn over the streets, I found four fresh bodies in the time it took me to reach the trashed neighborhood skirting Inner Tulsa, where debris often rained down but tornadoes rarely ventured.
Chunks of wood littered the streets along with hail, so thick it resembled snow.
For a rare change, no one had been lobbed into Inner Tulsa as a gruesome reminder Mother Nature didn’t give a shit about humanity. The lack of curious spectators eyeballing the passing storm worried me—and warned me the storm was likely revving up for another show.
Someone needed to set Mother Nature straight and tell her to give the Alley a break already.
Deep in the heart of Inner Tulsa, a tornado siren wailed, and I halted long enough to listen while regarding the dark sky warily. I supposed the swarm had moved north to visit another neighborhood—one closer to the city’s heart, which people still cared about.
While the clouds remained an ominous green and the wind howled, I couldn’t spot a single funnel reaching for the ground.
Shaking my head, I went in search of one of the elusive sewer covers that hid something other than the city’s sanitation system: an illegal entrance into Asylum, one of the few safe places left in the Alley.
Two
Some said a city was defined by its sewers.
Friday, May 1, 2043.
Asylum, Oklahoma.
The Alley.
* * *
Some said a city was defined by its sewers, and I was one of them.
In New York, function beat form, although the ancient sewers there were in dire need of repair and upgrade. Above its streets, New York sought to rule the world, but if the city and its people didn’t figure out how to curb the decay eating away at it from beneath, the ground the city stood upon would likely tire of its shit and dump it into the sea.
But much like its decaying sewers, New York endured.
If I had a choice in the matter, I’d never go anywhere near New York or its sewers again.
In London, a place I only dreamed of going, the sewers melded form and function, transforming a base necessity into works of art. The city itself drew people from around the world to marvel at its wonders, and it carried itself with pride, even below its historic streets.
Rome’s aqueducts ranked among legend and myth, something I would need to see to truly believe in.
In Tulsa, the sewers were a matter of life and death.
When the storms raged overhead, the wise could shelter within them, an unpleasant enough experience I’d endured a few times in a pinch. After a particularly lethal blow, when there was nowhere else to put the bodies, the sewers served as temporary tombs. For the truly cunning, who knew how the sewers connected to Asylum, they became a road.
During Asylum’s construction, Tulsa’s sewers had undergone renovations to account for the underground city’s special needs. The tunnels meant for Asylum cut across the city, served only those living within the sanctuary, and did more than remove waste.
Some of the pipes pumped fresh air into the city below. Others carried water. A few bore the electric cables needed to give Asylum’s residents electricity. All of them needed to be maintained.
I used those precious maintenance pathways to infiltrate the city below. To access them, I headed for the edge of Inner Tulsa to the nearest entrance, an hour hike at a brisk walk, and triple checked the quiet street before focusing on my work. I wrestled aside the manhole cover, which had a tiny A etched into the design differentiating it from the thousands of other covers in the city, and eased into the shaft. A crowbar chained to the wall gave me the leverage required to restore the plate to its original position.
The crowbar and its chain made me laugh. Did someone expect the bar to be stolen? Why chain it? Unauthorized people poking around the sewers, like me, weren’t about to steal some damned crowbar. We had more important things to do—or steal. I could see securing the crowbar to make certain it wouldn’t drop on someone below, but the chain was welded to the crowbar, and a padlock kept the chain securely attached to the wall.
When vagrants like me ventured into Tulsa’s underbelly, we needed a lot more than a shaped piece of metal. If we needed metal, we salvaged some. The outskirts had plenty of debris to spare.
Shaking my head over the idiocy of locking the crowbar