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CreateSpace
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN-10: 0615877958
Pages: 466
Copyright: Oct, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780615877952
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
Do you believe in Angels?
Deep in the South African bush country, a wealthy British doctor and his family spent the greater portion of their professional lives in aid of others. However, goodness and sacrifice is not always rewarded in like kind.
One simple act of kindness pits Dr. Schumacher and his family against powerful enemies that even refuge across the globe cannot separate them from.
After losing his devoted wife and partner, now living in America, Kress is dealt another blow. A year later, on the verge of summer vacation, Chaste Ellen Schumacher, his young daughter, is abducted.
Days, weeks, months pass, with no ransom demands or contact. On the brink of insanity, he is offered one last hope.
This one hope however is beyond anything sane. Kress must battle a supernatural creature with the ability to help him find his daughter and the cost is beyond imagination.
Pitre will challenge everything he has ever believed.
Do you believe in Angels?
Deep in the South African bush country, a wealthy British doctor and his family spent the greater portion of their professional lives in aid of others. However, goodness and sacrifice is not always rewarded in like kind.
One simple act of kindness pits Dr. Schumacher and his family against powerful enemies that even refuge across the globe cannot separate them from.
After losing his devoted wife and partner, now living in America, Kress is dealt another blow. A year later, on the verge of summer vacation, Chaste Ellen Schumacher, his young daughter, is abducted.
Days, weeks, months pass, with no ransom demands or contact. On the brink of insanity, he is offered one last hope.
This one hope however is beyond anything sane. Kress must battle a supernatural creature with the ability to help him find his daughter and the cost is beyond imagination.
Pitre will challenge everything he has ever believed.
Excerpt
The remainder of our current assets were finally released by the South African government making our egress to the United States complete. As my small family stood together for the first time on American soil, I pondered the many connotations to the word Asylum.
My verbal English was tainted only by the lingering British accent of my childhood and where my sweet wife Elizabeth Ellen Schumacher and I had lived for the last eighteen years.
Funny how something that you never think of, the way you speak, can be the only indication that you’re not American born and raised. Strangely enough, our quaint dialect was our open door to several possibilities where we relocated in the United States.
Our pasty white skin, despite the lingering effects of the scorching South African sun, became our blatant malady while we lived among so much diversity of cultures in Zambia, South Africa. My wife and I were so desperate to make a difference in the lives of needy children that we volunteered to a twenty-year stint as a diplomatic token of good will.
We’d lived through the ending of the illicit regime of Apartheid, which had made our lives all the more at peril. Finally the world took note and new leaders emerged; along with them, hopes of sanity to a torn country.
As with all unwelcome change, bitter differences still existed where we lived. It came in the form of racial violence, not only against my family, but also between the competing populace.
Elizabeth and I were never accepted by some, despite the daily efforts of medical relief at our clinic. As a result, the ataxia between the leaders of the indigenous tribes and their so-called witchdoctors were the only constant; the one collective commonality among all the varied tribes.
The first few visitors to our medical clinic in the light of day were drastically overshadowed by the steady stream of knocks on our door during the cover of darkness. As our reputation in the region grew, so did our clientele. Soon it became expected to find a fever-burdened child cradled for miles in the arms of a desperate parent, brought at night for fear of repercussions from their leaders and peers.
Daily attempts at some medieval curse, mutilated animals, or feces on the doorsteps of the clinic we operated became our opposition’s calling card. Consequently, we were always coming down with some stomach ailment from having ingested a nasty root or native caustic flower clandestinely inserted into our food and medical shipments.
After eighteen years of sacrifice we finally gave up, tired of the violent opposition and continual political upheavals, but those events weren’t the reason we decided to leave.
Even stranger, as fate often is, after all the trials and bitter struggles were over and we were received into our new country, Elizabeth became ill and quickly passed away.
The American physician, a purported specialist, believed it was some rare malady, possibly contracted while living among the several different indigenous tribes, quite possibly some poison that they had never seen before.
The evil continent’s tentacles wouldn’t let her go even after we were separated from its soil.
My Elizabeth was an exceptionally skilled surgeon and physician; the best I’d ever known. I considered it an honor to work alongside her with my common pediatric skills. While I was always immersed in treating a wide foray of parasitic infestations, or childhood diseases; Elizabeth was tirelessly mending broken bones, gunshot wounds, or vicious cuts and contusions from the blade of homemade weaponries. Angolan rebels regularly frequented our facility, sparing us for our services rendered.
She was always relieved to be away from the violent aspect of her profession, such as when assisting the birth of a child. The bright innocent eyes of a new generation gave us hope.
God I miss her.
I think…, I know, that it was my efforts at helping our daughter Chaste understand the loss of her mother that helped me maintain my own sanity.
Chaste has become my one reason to go on.
Elizabeth and I never intended to start a family while we worked through our twenty-year commitment at this primitive location. Please understand, our commitment wasn’t some legal contract. No one was forcing us to stay, we were mostly self-funded; it was our own mutual dedication to what we felt was a worthy cause. The only assistance we received was from the European Medical Association in the form of medical supplies and the gift of diplomatic status for our medical practice.
When was it?
I believe it was…, well Chaste Ellen Schumacher was born on December first, eight years ago, …do the math.
The first threat to her life was when Elizabeth and I went straight to the American Consulate in Johannesburg and applied for citizenship in the United States. It seemed that one of the feather-headed aborigines decided our presence was responsible for some intertribal confusion and we were bound to repay for our meddling.
After personally saving the life of a young tribesman named Owasu Satiiri intended for assassination; a young fellow with dangerous ties challenging a local tribal leadership, then all eyes focused on our little girl.
Our unintended enemy demanded recompense in the respect that Chaste Ellen would become his personal cochon de lait.
The evident barbarism in third-world areas of the globe still repulses me.
Putting our lives at risk on a daily basis was our decision, but our innocent child, the baby girl that I helped birth with my own two hands certainly did not.
Chaste did not ask for the peril, and well…, I don’t feel the need to explain further. If you are a parent, or for that matter a rational human being, you understand our reasoning.
After Elizabeth’s passing and as soon as the last of our South African resources reached our bank in Phoenix Arizona, Chaste and I began looking for a place to put down permanent roots.
We found just such a place between Scottsdale and Fountain Hills; a radically modern designed home with various angles, lots of glass and plenty of scenery. It was far from being some ostentatious show of wealth, but considerably more than the tiny habitation we’d just left; certainly more than the two of us needed. Our real-estate agent said it was a wise investment considering it cost less than half its market value; something about a buyers market.
It seemed a nice quiet community with its own small park and a decent nature trail just a few hundred yards away. We were also a short drive away from the Tonto National Forest. Both of our outdoor attractions were without the dangers of hungry predatory animals at every turn. It was much needed bliss.
Chaste loved the fact that she could ride the bus to school into Scottsdale without fear.
Fear of what you might ask?
Of being mobbed, blown up, shot, poisoned, rotten food hurled at her and constant vile name-calling, not to mention the final threat of some sort of ritualistic human sacrifice.
When you’re a child, especially puttering through the formative years, how could you possibly comprehend the reasons? At forty-four years of age, I don’t understand them.
But that’s quite enough about the past.
The peace of living in a protected society was so much a relief that we didn’t know where to begin…, now only the two of us. I knew that she needed a mother’s nurture, but I confess I had denied myself the idea of finding a mate. I’ve tried to put it off on Chaste, devoting my time helping her cope with the empty space left by her mother’s passing, but I just wasn’t and I guess I’m still not ready.
The first school year passed quickly. Chaste seemed to be enjoying life, coping well, enough so that we had discontinued the counseling sessions. At least her nightmares had ceased.
We both still had those moments…, you know the ones, the ones with memories attached, but they were getting farther apart.
It was the last week of fourth grade, right before the summer break that our lives changed yet again.
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