Showers in Season by Beverly LaHaye Page B

that this was another mother who would know the pain.
    “The child she went looking for?” Harry asked Jim.
    Jim shook his head. “She hasn’t found him, either. Harry, he was probably buried before she went looking for him. That volcano is nothing but sand. When it rains like this…”
    “Well…should we go there and try to dig them out? See if there’s some way they lived?”
    “There’s no possible way,” he said. “Besides, there’ll be more mud slides as the hurricane gets closer. Even after it’s gone. We can’t go near it.”
    The woman cried and groaned in agony, stomping her foot and pulling at her mud-caked hair.
    Dear God, how do I comfort her? Sylvia prayed. It was too much. She couldn’t do it.
    She took the woman to a cot and sat down with her. She and Harry prayed over her while she wept and moaned. When they had finished, Harry gave her a sedative, and eventually, the woman lost her fight and lay back on the cot, still weeping softly. Sylvia didn’t leave her until she was asleep.
    She got up, feeling shell-shocked, and not even noticing the mud covering her own clothes, looked for someone else who needed her help. She could hear the wind tearing at the walls of this weak structure, pulling off pieces of the roof. Something crashed on the side of the building, and she met Harry’s concerned eyes across the room. It was a tree, she thought, or a piece of someone’s house. She wondered how long these walls would remain standing. What would they do if their own roof flew off?
    She looked helplessly around her. Families were huddled side by side and on top of each other in the smelly gym. Children cried at the sounds around them. Some of the men stood at the doors, watching through the windows that hadn’t shattered yet. Mothers tried to keep the children occupied and distracted. Spanish was spoken all around her, but even without understanding their words, she knew how to attend to their needs.
    But this was only the beginning. After the hurricane, diseases would be rampant because of the corpses of animals lying around. Those who didn’t have their property ravaged by flood may well be those who lost everything to the mud slides. Tornadoes would take what floods and mud slides didn’t. It was as if God’s wrath was beating down on this country…but if so, it was beating down on others, as well. There had been too many hurricanes in too many places this year. Three had already threatened the East Coast of the States. One had ravaged the Florida coast.
    She couldn’t believe that, just yesterday, she had felt sorry for herself because she lacked purpose.
    She wished she could call the neighbors on Cedar Circle and tell them to pray without stopping. She wished she could talk to her children, Sarah and Jeff. If she could just hear those voices, maybe she could forget the anguished cries of that mother who’d lost everyone she loved in one moment. But there wasn’t time to make calls, even if the phone lines worked. There was too much to do.
    She prayed she would have the energy to do it.

C HAPTER Sixteen
    Brenda read the clipped e-mail Sylvia had sent during the night, and tears came to her eyes at what her friend was experiencing. She went to the television and turned on the Weather Channel to see if the hurricane showed any sign of leaving Nicaragua. But it seemed parked there, intent on ravaging the small country that wasn’t equipped to endure it.
    “Lord, please keep her safe,” she whispered under her breath. “Protect her so she can help those people.”
    The door of her little computer room opened, and David stepped inside. He was a large, ruddy, red-haired man who seemed to have aged years in the last few months. “Are you finished with the computer?” he asked.
    “Yeah.” She sighed. “I was just checking my mail from Sylvia.”
    “Everything all right?”
    She shook her head. “The hurricane sounds bad.” She got up and offered David the computer chair.
    “How’s