Rescued by Love

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Southeastern Colorado

Late afternoon

May, 2008

Daniel Boudreaux cast an anxious look at the lowering sky. Out here on the prairie, shelter was not always easy to find. Still, from the sky’s appearance, he’d need some soon. Not that he hadn’t gotten soaked before or ridden in the rain, but the look of the clouds spelled trouble. They appeared bumpy, bubbled, or cobbled on the underside, dark and sullen. A distant grumble of thunder reached his ears as a gusty wind kicked up, buffeting him with dust and bits of vegetation.

He accelerated, forcing maximum speed out of the old Indian. The vintage motorcycle had been in the Boudreaux clan a long time. Family legend said his grandfather Hebert had come home from a stint in the marines in World War II and bought the machine, far from new even then. He’d spent the better part of a year wandering around the country with it to get back on an even keel after the trauma of war. Then Pop had come home from Vietnam, dug the old bike out of the barn, tuned it up, and taken off. He’d been gone longer, almost three years. Now it was Dan’s turn.

He’d joined the National Guard to help pay for the specialized education he wanted and wound up going to Iraq. Why he had survived almost unscathed when a roadside bomb took out a half-dozen buddies in his platoon, he didn’t know. He’d been just far enough back the blast threw him to the ground, barely clear. Still, feeling bits of his friend’s shattered bodies falling on and around him was a horror he would never forget. So far he had not nearly outrun it, although he’d been on the road almost six months.

Today he was somewhere in the vast, nearly empty area including the Oklahoma panhandle, north Texas, and southeastern Colorado. High plains country. Exactly where in the vast region, he couldn’t be sure. As often as possible, he kept off the freeways, taking winding country roads and old, cracked, two-lane blacktops tending to corner abruptly around farms and meander over the rolling terrain. The solitude was a welcome relief from too many people crowded into tents and barracks, while the challenge of driving strange, unpredictable roads kept him from dwelling too much on the haunting past.

Just as the first cold raindrops splattered on the visor of his helmet, he saw an old barn, not too far off the road. A rusty, narrow cattle guard in the roadside fence marked the trace of a lane leading to the barn. He turned down the lane, found one door of the barn hanging open, and rode right inside. As a shelter, it wasn’t much, although he thought it would be better than being out in the full force of what sounded like the start of a nasty storm.

The pitch of the wind changed, becoming higher, shriller, rising to an almost continuous ululating scream. The force caused the rickety building to wobble, wood creaking as beams and rafters shifted, rubbing against each other. He dismounted and put down the kickstand on the bike. He’d just started to cross to where an empty five-gallon plastic bucket lay against the wall, thinking to use it for a seat, when something made him look up.

As he watched, too shocked to move, half the roof peeled away overhead, like the lid coming off a can. He found himself staring up into a swirling maelstrom of purple-black cloud with a gigantic finger coming down toward him like the hand of an avenging god.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The nearest wall of the barn shuddered and then started to lean inward. He made a frantic dive toward the bike and fetched up against it, his face to the dusty floor. The taste of dust and long-dry manure was about the last thing he knew.

Jesus and Mary, I’m going to die with a mouthful of old cow s**t…

* * * *

Garrett kept his attention welded to the TV screen as the latest disaster began to emerge in the news. A series of unusual weather patterns had spawned a swarm of tornadoes along the western edge of the plains. The phenomenon was wreaking havoc. One little community in the Oklahoma panhandle had been all but obliterated as the twisters’ paths of destruction wandered the rim of the prairie, just beyond the influence of the Rockies.

He rested a hand on Mandy’s head where she lay in her usual spot, right beside his easy chair. “Wake up, old girl. I think there’ll be work for us in this mess. What do you say we get loaded up and head across to the prairie side? We might as well put all our training to work.”

An hour later, they were heading out of Durango, in the well-outfitted truck Garrett had acquired and stocked once he and Mandy had completed their intensive initial training. This would be the first big disaster they’d taken part in. So far although Mandy had found two lost children and the body of a missing coed from the local college, the only disaster work she’d done had been practice exercises.

From the looks of the wide areas of devastation, there would be enough work for as many search and rescue teams as could be brought in. Garrett knew at least two other teams from his southwestern corner of the state would be headed east too. The state SAR organization would have a command post set up by the time they arrived in the devastated region the next morning.

Mandy clearly knew something out of the ordinary was happening. Instead of curling up in the back seat of the king cab truck to sleep, she stayed in the passenger seat, watching the dark highway slide by as Garrett drove through the night. When she finally lay down, he could tell she wasn’t sleeping soundly, just napping a bit.

“You need to get your rest, girl. We’re going to be working hard tomorrow and likely for several days afterwards.”

She made a little sound, kind of between a whimper and a faint growl—one of her efforts to talk back to him. Maybe she didn’t understand everything he said, but it was easy to believe she did.