Submerged

by Alton Gansky

  Submerged

  Alton Gansky

  Copyright 2012

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords License Statement

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN: 9781301534517

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations in books and critical reviews.

  Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission." (www.Lockman.org)

  First edition, trade paper, Promise Press Fiction, an imprint of Barbour Publishing Inc. 2005

  Cover provided by Promise Press

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alton Gansky is the author of 4o books, novels and nonfiction. He is a former firefighter, architectural project manager, and Christian minister. He resides in Central California. www.altongansky.com

  Prologue

  It was a small boat and an old one. Matthew “Bear” Barrett sat on the middle seat, his six-foot-four frame, 270-pound bulk pressing the hull of the rowboat deep into the cool, blue-green water. It creaked when he shifted his weight, as if the little vessel had grown weary of supporting the big man on its wood back. But it continued to hold him, just as it had for the last twenty years. Bear had every confidence that it would once again return him to the shore as it always had and as it had for his father who built it. His father was dead and long gone now, yet his memory hovered around Bear in the house he called home. A hundred mementos were there, with stories at the ready anytime Bear found himself longing for the man who had brought him up in a stern but loving fashion.

  It had been Bear’s father who had taught him to fish for bass and trout at the lakes and man-made reservoirs around Nevada and California. Honest to a fault, Bear was now involved in a bit of criminal activity. This, too, he had learned from his carpenter father. Bear had adopted his father’s sense of justice, and it was unjust for the “gov’ment” to snatch from the hands of its citizens what was rightfully theirs. Fishing was a right protected by the Constitution. Bear had once tried to convince his father that the Constitution nowhere mentioned fishing. The logic was faulty as far as his father was concerned.

  “You expect me to believe that Jefferson didn’t dip a line and pull in his share o’ bluegill? Ol’ Georgie Washington wouldn’t have been much of a president if he didn’t bring home a mess o’ catfish from time to time.” Bear’s father had never lost his Arkansas way of talking or thinking.

  An uneducated man, he drew his degrees from the school of life; from sweating in the Las Vegas sun, building one casino after another; driving one more of the million sixteen-penny nails of his life; erecting one more wall, laying one more header. Like Bear, his father’s shoulders had been wide, his back strong, and his heart good. But such qualities were useless in the face of skin cancer left undiagnosed for too long.

  Bear shook his head and drove from his mind the last painful days of his father’s life. Death had quieted his father’s agony but had done nothing for Bear. He lived with the memory of it every day.

  Unlike his father, Bear didn’t swing a hammer or wield a saw. Instead, he sold houses to the hundreds of people who moved to the Las Vegas area, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. It struck Bear as odd that people would choose the desolate terrain of the Mojave Desert to be home. He was ready to move any place that had more green on the ground and more cool in the air. But he was stuck in the desert with a wife who refused to move from her roots. So he lived in a two-thousand-square-foot house in Henderson, Nevada, with a wife who loved him and two teenage children who tolerated him.

  All of Las Vegas and Henderson were well over three hundred miles south. Tonopah, the town where he would sleep tonight before returning home, was miles to the west. The roar of an F/A-2 Raptor sounded overhead, a reminder that Nellis Air Force Base was not far south of the lake in which Bear and his boat sat. Hearing and seeing jets was nothing new. He had been sneaking up to this lake for as long as he could remember. Nellis had over three million square miles of airspace they called their own. Seeing jets was just part of the entertainment.

  Working his reel, Bear pulled his lure into the boat for what must have been the one hundredth time. No fish trailed from its treble hook. Bear didn’t much care. A day skunked while fishing was better than any day selling real estate to demanding young couples who wanted champagne on a beer budget.

  He raised the tip of his rod, took aim at a promising patch of reeds, and let the lure fly. It plopped softly in the water. Bear began the ritual reeling, hoping to tempt some widemouth bass out of its hiding place. He laughed to himself. He was floating in the deep water and casting to the shallow. His father had always laughed at men who stood on shore and cast deep while men in a boat sat over the deep and cast back to shore. Now Bear was doing the same. Perhaps he would change tactics soon, leaving the bass alone and turning his sights on trout. He had Velveeta cheese to tempt the little buggers.

  A soft string of popping caught his attention. The noise was familiar, yet impossible to place. He reeled the lure in and once again sent it flying. A second after it dropped in the water, Bear heard another plop. Then another.

  He stopped reeling. It sounded close.

  Plop, plop.

  With a practiced eye he scanned the surface of the water. The rising sun bejeweled the surface, forcing Bear to squint. Were the fish feeding off the surface? That wasn’t unusual, but it was an odd time of day for it.

  Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.

  “What the . . .” It was close all right. Bear looked over the edge of the rowboat and gazed at the bubbles that were surrounding its hull. At first it was just a few bubbles, but they were large, some the size of a grapefruit. No lake creature made bubbles that large. One bubble followed another, and soon they broke the surface in a frothy mass.

  It took a moment for Bear to realize that something else was different about these bubbles. The froth they formed on the surface was brown, not white. Then he noticed the smell. The air began to reek of spoiled oranges. He pulled back, trying to gain a little distance between the foul air and his nose.

  He grimaced, then sneezed. It was time to move and time to do it fast. Bear began to reel as fast as his big hands would allow. The air might stink to high heaven, but the lure on the end of his line had been his father’s favorite. He wasn’t going to risk losing it on the bottom of Lake Lloyd.

  The lure rose from the depths and hit the surface, skipping along the water as Bear reeled for all he was worth. His eyes began to sting, and unbidden tears flowed. The lining of his nostrils seemed ready to combust, and his lungs were beginning to ache.

  The instant the lure touched the rod’s tip, Bear set the gear down on the bottom of the boat, letting it rest against the craft’s front seat. He reached for the oars.

  The bubbling was increasing, and spurts of foul water were becoming an airborne mist. Brown lake water was dropping inside the boat in tiny splatters. Bear had no idea what was going on, but he didn’t intend to stay around to figure it out.

  He dipped the oars in the water and pulled. He repeated the action several times before he realized something else was wrong. He had used these oars on this boat more times than he could count, and they didn’t feel right. They weren’t sitting in the water
the way they always did. His weight pushed the boat lower than most people found comfortable, but he had become accustomed to it. Now, however, the boat was riding deeper than he had ever seen and much more than when he had rowed out on the lake two hours earlier.

  Again he dug the oars into water that boiled like a witch’s brew in an iron cauldron. They slipped through the surface as if it weren’t there, as if Bear were rowing in the air. He peered over the edge and saw that the brown froth was now a mottled mix of brown and black.

  The smell was putrid. Bear gagged and fought down the rising gorge in his belly. A dead rainbow trout rose to the surface, its eyes curtained in cataract white. Another fish followed, this time a large catfish. He looked to the other side, and more fish percolated to the top. A couple twitched in death throes.

  This time Bear rowed with an urgency fired by fear. His first desire was to move from the rancid air. Now he knew something was very, very wrong. What killed the fish might just kill him. He had no desire to spend his last moments alive floating in a private lake where his body might never be found.

  He pulled hard. The boat moved a foot but no more. He pulled the rough handles of the oars again and again but made little headway. The sight over the stern of the boat sent ice water coursing through his veins. What had begun as a few bubbles, then a stream, had extended out from his location in a wide disk of putrid, boiling, churning froth.

  Bear had never been a spiritual man and couldn’t recall ever having prayed. Until now. He yanked at the oars in a panic, replacing the rhythmic stroking he’d learned as a boy with terror-filled jerks. He coughed and tasted copper. His mouth was bleeding. Something trickled from his nose, but he was too busy rowing to wipe it away. He knew what it was. He’d had enough bloody noses in his youth to be certain.

  Stroke. Pull. Yank.

  He looked to the side and saw his worst fear—the water was just an inch below the gunwales. To dip the distal end of the oar in the water, Bear had to level them until they were almost horizontal. He was sinking. His heart was pounding without regularity. It skipped. It paused. It fluttered. The exertion demanded more air, but every breath made Bear more sick and weak.

  He was sinking. The cascade of bubbles eroded the surface tension and water density. A boat could float in water but not on something as thin as soapsuds.

  Bear pulled at the oars as the first trickle of water crawled over the edge of the boat and poured into its bottom, settling at his tennis-shoe-clad feet.

  Reason floated away from Bear’s mind like the bubbles floated to the surface. He pulled on the oars a few more times but knew he was making no progress. When the water that was invading the boat grew from trickle to cascade, carrying several dead fish with it, Bear did a desperate thing. He jumped into the water and tried to swim through the stew.

  The water that could not hold his boat could not hold him. Dead fish might cling to such a nebulous surface; a man of Bear’s bulk stood no chance. He flailed at the water, grasping for a shore that was still a hundred yards away—a shore that might as well have been a hundred miles distant.

  He slipped beneath the surface but kicked his way back up for another breath. Something was wrong with his eyes; the shore he had seen clearly seconds before now seemed draped in milky white. He thought of the first dead fish with its white eyes.

  Against his will, contrary to his desperate fear, water entered his nose and poured into his mouth. He retched and doubled over.

  A roar filled his ears, and he squinted through hazy eyes to see another fighter jet shoot overhead. He waved at it. He reached for it. He knew that the pilot was too high and moving too fast to see him.

  Matthew “Bear” Barrett slipped beneath the surface of the private lake he had loved.

  Chapter1

  “They don’t have a power tool for this?”

  Perry Sachs looked at his friend Jack Dyson and laughed. “Is that your solution to everything—power tools?”

  “Since you put it that way—yes.” Jack hunched over a wide board and pushed a flat piece of metal along its surface. For a man as tall and as broad as Jack, bending over for extended of periods could be painful. He pushed the scraper forward again, and the burr on the edge of the rectangular piece of metal peeled up shreds of wood and glue.

  “Woodworking is about more than power tools,” Perry said. “It’s about crafting something that will live long after you’re gone; it’s about pouring yourself into the work, feeling the wood beneath your fingers, smelling the unique aroma of the wood as you sand and scrape. Woodworking is about inserting yourself into the object you make.”

  “Yeah, very poetic. You got anything nice to say about my aching back?”

  Perry drew a dusty arm across his forehead, pushing back black hair that had just begun sporting some gray, diverting sweat from his blue eyes. It was a warm August day in Seattle, warmer than most residents cared for. He finished seating a long plank of wood in the lathe. He would have to put the turning off just a little longer.

  “Let me show you.” Perry walked to the wide assembly table, where Jack was struggling with his task. “Since we milled the wood ourselves, we’re left with machine marks. Add to that the glue that squeezed out when we built up the tabletop. All of that has to be removed before we can get down to the serious task of sanding.”

  Jack relinquished the scraper, his black face a mask of innocence. “Teach me, oh wise one.”

  Perry always felt tiny next to his friend who was large enough to make linebackers look at him twice. Perry was trim and six-foot-two, not small by any means, but size was relative. Jack cast a wide shadow. He was also one of the brightest men Perry had ever met. He was not a dumb jock. In fact, he wasn’t a jock at all. Despite his size, he had only a passing interest in sports and preferred the Discovery Channel to a football game.

  “Watch and learn. Put just a slight bend in the scraper, then push it along the grain. Don’t dig the edges into the wood’s surface. Quality hardwood is expensive.” With practiced hands, Perry pushed the scraper over the rough surface, and the Honduras rosewood yielded to him. He repeated the action, loving every minute of it.

  Perry was in one of his favorite places. When not working in some far-off corner of the world for his father’s firm, Sachs Engineering, he spent as much time as possible in his wood shop. This shop was new. Six months ago, he had bought a home with a great view of Lake Washington, but the view was secondary. The previous owner had added a shop to the side of the house to work on his car collection. The shop was large enough to accommodate the man’s vintage cars. Perry had no interest in classic automobiles, but he did need a large place for his hobby of furniture making.

  Jack had helped him fix up the house and move in. As a reward, Perry promised to make Jack’s mother a new dining room table. Jack volunteered to help. So began the lessons.

  Perry stroked the wood in smooth, rhythmic motions, and his mind began to wander. The woodshop was where his best ideas germinated.

  He stopped and looked at Jack. “This is a trick, isn’t it?”

  “Trick? Me, trick you?” Jack struggled to fend off an insistent smile. “Why, you’re far too clever to fall for a trick from a simpleminded man like me.”

  “MIT doesn’t give civil engineering degrees to simpleminded men.”

  Perry and Jack had attended MIT together. Perry earned a degree in architecture. It was his love for structure that made him excel at his work and also gave him a love for smaller structures like dining room tables.

  The phone began to ring. Jack jumped a foot. “Whoa! Is that thing always that loud?”

  “It’s hard to hear a phone when a table saw is running. Here, get back to work, or I’ll tell your mother that you held up the delivery of her table. And remember, you asked to help.” Perry handed the scraper back to Jack and moved to a phone mounted on the wall near one of the workbenches. “Hello.” He could hear Jack mumbling and the soft scratching of metal against wood.

  “Perry,
it’s Mom.”

  “Hi, Mom. You should be here. I got Jack to do some meaningful work.”

  “Perry . . .”

  “Do you and Dad want to do dinner tonight? My treat. We could go for steaks or fish if you like.”

  “Perry, it’s your father.”

  Perry’s heart stumbled to a stop, and his stomach pulled into a knot.

  “They’ve taken him to the hospital in an ambulance.”

  Perry could hear tears in her voice. “When? Where are you? What happened?”

  The scraping stopped, and Perry turned to Jack. The big man had picked up the urgency in Perry’s voice.

  “They wouldn’t let me ride in the ambulance. They took him to Seattle Medical Arts Hospital. He just collapsed. I was cleaning up after lunch and . . . oh, Perry, his eyes—his eyes.”

  “I’m coming for you, Mom. You stay right there.” Perry looked at Jack. “They’re taking my father to the hospital.”

  Jack approached, shaking his head. “You go to the hospital. I’ll get your mom.”

  Jack tried to take the phone from Perry. He was reluctant to release it, as if holding on to the receiver was the same as holding his mother.

  “Go, pal,” Jack urged. “I’ll lock up and get your mother. Go. Get out of here. And don’t drive stupid. One Sachs man in the hospital is enough.”

  Perry Sachs, forty-year-old architect and engineer, fought back tears as he ran for his car.

  The irony wasn’t wasted on Perry as he pulled his black BMW 760Li sedan into the parking structure of Seattle Medical Arts Hospital—Sachs Engineering had provided structural consultations on the hospital and parking structure. Now the man responsible for the work was somewhere inside the walls he helped design.