Submerged

Submerged

Alton Gansky

Copyright 2012

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords License
Statement

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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

I
t 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.