Rest in Peace Read online

  “Yes. I do.”

  Hannah gave Mark a panicked look. She didn’t know what to say next.

  And since she was infinitely smarter than her husband he didn’t either.

  “Mom, it’s gonna be my tenth birthday. That’s a big one in a kid’s life. It’s supposed to be something special. I don’t want you to make me a sweater. Or whatever you’re planning to make that’s easy to want to make but not quite so easy when you actually do it.

  “I don’t want a sweater, or mittens, or any of that kind of stuff.

  “And let’s face it, Mom. You really suck when it comes to crafts. If you made me a sweater it would have six buttons and seven buttonholes.”

  Hannah caught Mark’s eye again and both breathed a sigh of relief.

  Mark asked his son, “So what would you really like for your tenth birthday?”

  “I want my first gun. I want to start packing.”

  -3-

  Ninety three miles away from the mine, in the tiny town of Eden, Lenny Geibel pulled his regular shift at the former Eden Federal Prison.

  There wasn’t much to it, really. Sentry duty didn’t require a lot of brains or talent.

  Just a willingness to tromp back and forth in front of the high walls, watching for signs an intruder might be trying to break in.

  It was what, in his Army days, he used to call “grunt work.”

  Lenny Geibel was a good man. He was one of those men who went mostly unnoticed, but who was always around.

  He wasn’t flashy or particularly good looking. He was a fairly smart man, but he didn’t go out of his way to show anyone his capabilities.

  He was quite capable of doing many things, but he did them quietly and without fanfare.

  He wasn’t, as many other men were, one who craved limelight, or attention, or praise.

  One of Lenny’s biggest attributes was his loyalty. He was the best of friends to almost everyone he knew, because he was dependable. When something needed to be done, Lenny was there to do it. When someone needed a friend, they could count on Lenny to help see them through.

  When something was broken, Lenny was there to fix it.

  That was Lenny. If one were to sum up Lenny’s very existence given just a handful of words they likely would have said, “Lenny is always around when I need him.”

  Marty Haskins and Lenny Geibel were best friends for more than thirty years. They’d started out as partners in Marty’s fledgling independent trucking company.

  Marty grew tired of living in the tiny town of Chickasaw, Oklahoma and decided he wanted to be an over-the-road trucker. He went to driver’s school to obtain his commercial driver’s license.

  His best friend Lenny, who’d graduated from high school two years before and was wandering through life with no real goal in mind, went along too.

  Marty talked his mom and dad out of the college money they’d been setting aside for him for years.

  “I’m not a college kind of guy,” he told them. “I want to be a businessman. I want to make my own way. I want to work for myself, because then I’ll have the best boss in the world.

  “I want to succeed or fail on my own merits and talents.”

  He took the money and used it as a down payment on a two-year-old Kenworth.

  As an independent trucker he had to log four hundred miles a day, five days a week, just to make his truck and insurance payments and have enough money to live on.

  With a partner at his side he could log twice as many miles and make enough money to put aside for later.

  And Lenny was game.

  Lenny considered Marty more than a friend.

  To Lenny, Marty was a big brother and someone he could easily look up to.

  For Marty was everything Lenny wasn’t. He was tall and handsome; Lenny was squat and average.

  Marty exuded self-confidence. Women flocked to him.

  And sometimes those women had friends they set up with Lenny.

  Marty was a go-getter; Lenny was a follower.

  And while Lenny certainly had the tools to make it on his own, he was just as content in following Marty through life.

  They made a good team.

  They augmented one another.

  They succeeded together.

  They were the two musketeers.

  Three years before Saris 7 delivered her anger on planet earth, Lenny developed deep-vein thrombosis in his left leg.

  “You need to find a new line of work,” his doctor told him. “Sitting in the cab of a truck for fourteen hours a day will kill you.

  “You need to find a job that will get you off your butt and on your feet.”

  For the first time since high school Marty and Lenny parted ways.

  But not totally.

  Lenny loved the trucking business, and could never leave it completely.

  He took a job as the yard man at the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop, on Interstate 10 just outside of Kerrville, Texas.

  As yard man, he was responsible for telling truckers where to park their rigs for a night of rest.

  He showed them where to drop their loads if they were passing their trailers onto relay drivers, and provided security for said loads until the relay drivers arrived to pick them up.

  Finally, he was a jack-of-all-trades and a better than average mechanic, helping drivers fix whatever issues they had with their rigs and getting them back on their way.

  Marty, still an independent trucker, landed contracts for two “milk runs”: regularly scheduled pickups and deliveries for two different companies.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he hauled a trailer of cargo for one of the big transfer companies from San Antonio to Dallas.

  Each time he arrived in Dallas he dropped his trailer and drove eight miles to Texas Pride Freighters, where he picked up a different trailer bound for San Antonio.

  One of the perks of the job was he got to have breakfast with Lenny every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and a late dinner with him every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

  On Sunday nights they typically double-dated with their girlfriends.

  They were, as the old saying goes, “thick as thieves.”

  -4-

  In the chaotic days leading up to Saris 7, over-the-road truckers were abandoning their loads by the thousands and bobtailing it home to be with their families.

  The twenty acre yard at the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop filled up fast with abandoned trailers no one would ever be coming back for.

  And as the yard man, Lenny had a reason to talk to each of the truckers as they departed.

  He had a pretty good idea what was inside each locked and sealed trailer, and kept copious notes.

  Together, he and Marty concocted a plan to ride out the freeze.

  Their plan required quite a bit of real estate. So they made a deal with a farmer who owed a large piece of land adjacent to the truck stop.

  In exchange for setting up their camp in his hay field, they’d bring him a trailer full of food bound for a supermarket chain. And park it right outside his back door.

  They took thirty trailers and configured them into more or less a donut shape. They’d live inside the donut’s “hole” and each of the trailers’ doors would open up into the hole so they had a constant source of food and supplies.

  They used a hundred sheets of plywood from an abandoned flatbed to cover the spaces beneath the trailers and between them to make their camp free from bitter drafts.

  Huge tarps covered the top of the donut hole.

  Three rigs: two Peterbilts and Marty’s Kenworth, were parked in the hole, their smokestacks protruding through portals cut in the tarps.

  The sleeper cabs provided living quarters and sleep space for the group. On the coldest of days they provided a warm refuge where they could hang out, talk and watch movies or play cards.

  Most of their time, though, was spent in the common area or in a trailer they emptied out and turned into a fifty-three foot long lounge.
/>   They insulated their lounge with mattresses on both sides, floor and ceiling, and heated it with an industrial heater which blew hot air into the space and made it quite comfortable despite a door that was left partially open for ventilation.

  For fuel they parked three tankers of diesel just outside the camp and tapped into them one at a time with a quarter-inch thermal hose. It provided just enough fuel to cover all their needs.

  There were five of them when the ordeal started.

  There were Marty and Lenny, their good friends Joe and Tina Koslowski, a husband and wife driving team, and a man named Scott Burley.

  Burley was one of those people who was barely tolerated. A good worker and average guy, but a man who tended to fray the nerves of the others.

  He was the first casualty among them.

  Five years into the freeze Burley started sneaking out of camp.

  No one knew where he went until the farmer on whose land they squatted came to call with his teenaged daughter in tow.

  “That’s him. That’s the man who raped me.”

  Finding Burley was ridiculously easy. The footprints he left in the snow led right back to the camp.

  On behalf of the others, Marty apologized to the farmer and the girl for bringing Scott Burley into their midst.

  Then he shot Burley in the head.

  “Some things cannot be tolerated,” he stated without remorse. “Raping a young girl is at the top of that list.”

  It was Lenny who helped Marty drag Burley’s body away from the camp, where it would thaw out and then rot once the freeze was over.

  He didn’t deserve a proper burial.

  His last miserable act would be to provide a tasty meal for hungry buzzards.

  Eventually the thaw came and the group went their separate ways.

  Marty and Lenny remained partners, though, and took on the responsibility of running the truck stop in a new world trying desperately to regain some semblance of order.

  They got to know Mark and Hannah and their bunch in their compound a few miles away near Junction.

  And they got involved in a major skirmish in the tiny town of Eden, halfway between the truck stop and San Angelo.

  They’d learned that Eden’s prison had been emptied of the worst of society’s bottom-feeders just before the freeze came. By a soft-hearted warden who couldn’t stand the thought of keeping the men locked in their cells to freeze to death.

  Many of the men scattered into the wind.

  But many others, led by a brutal man named Castillo, stayed in Eden and ran roughshod over the town.

  They raped the town’s women and girls. Used the boys for slave labor.

  And shot any men who protested.

  Marty led a posse of volunteers into Eden and cleaned it of the evil men.

  In the process, two things happened.

  He met Glenna, who attacked and killed Castillo in a well-justified act of vengeance.

  And he was hailed as a hero by the townspeople of Eden, and subsequently offered the position of police chief.

  Marty and Glenna fell in love.

  He accepted the job.

  And all was right with the world.

  Until, that is, Hannah came to call with her news a second meteorite might be headed their way.

  -5-

  Marty was the one who headed up the project to turn Eden Prison into Eden South, a shelter large enough for all the town’s eighty-one residents.

  When the cold returned Marty joined Glenna and her three children and took refuge in the shelter.

  Lenny, having fallen in love with a woman from Eden named Rebecca, followed suit.

  And he and Marty remained the best of friends, the closest of allies, still thick as thieves.

  Lenny didn’t like pulling guard duty outside the shelter’s gates.

  To be fair, no one else did either.

  But Richard Sears, the head of security, deemed it appropriate and essential.

  “We don’t have cameras on the outside to tell us whether anyone is out there casing the place,” he constantly reminded his security staff.

  “I wish we’d had more time and installed cameras out there. But we didn’t and it’s too late now.

  “And since we don’t have cameras, we have to have a presence out there. To turn people away. To walk the perimeter to see if we can spot any suspicious footprints in the snow.

  “To make sure no one’s bringing ladders and trying to scale our walls.

  “Look, I know it’s cold out there. But you guys are tough. You can handle being out there for two hours at a time.”

  And to his credit, Richard wasn’t just a blustery boss who barked orders for others to follow.

  He pulled his share of shifts in the cold as well.

  Lenny checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to go before he could return to the front gate of the shelter and hand off the duty to whoever was sent to relieve him.

  It had been an uneventful shift thus far.

  Nothing to see. Just a blast of wintry wind stinging his cheeks and making his ears numb.

  He couldn’t wait for his last twenty minutes to pass.

  He never heard the shot, never felt any pain.

  To quote a much-overused term, he never knew what hit him.

  His heart, and it really was a kind heart, exploded instantly and he crumpled to the icy ground.

  As blood poured from a small wound in his back and a gaping wound in his chest, it turned the snow beneath him into a crimson slush. Its warmth melted the snow on contact, but not for long. By the time they’d find his body half an hour later the melted red snow would be frozen again.

  Lenny’s eyes were wide open, yet he’d never see again.

  He was a good man by all accounts. A faithful friend, a great ally.

  The first one to be called when help was needed.

  But there was no one here and now to help him in return.

  Lenny Geibel spent most of his life struggling to be included, struggling to be wanted and struggling to be like his best friend Marty. He was a popular guy, and a guy with lots of friends.

  But when he died, he died all alone.

  -6-

  Richard Sears consulted with Frank Woodard several months before to write security procedures for the old prison.

  Frank was a former United States Marine NCO and a police detective with many years’ experience.

  He oozed security. He ate the stuff up. It was the stuff he dreamed of late at night.

  Although the two were separated by ninety three miles, they spent a lot of time on the radio back then, Frank giving Richard pointers and ideas and Richard jotting them all down.

  Marty went to the mine and saw Frank on a regular basis.

  Every time Richard had a draft copy of a security procedure he’d pass it to Marty, who’d deliver it to Frank on his next run toward Junction.

  Frank typically made short work of them, writing notes and recommended changes in the margins before Marty returned them to Eden.

  Now things were much different. Now Frank was missing, and no one knew whether he was alive or dead.

  But his fingerprints were left behind in the written procedures Richard used to run his security operation.

  They were thorough and well thought out.

  But they didn’t provide for every possible scenario.

  The written procedure for the sentry outside the walls called for him to work a two-hour shift whenever inclement weather or low visibility made it impossible to see the entire perimeter from the watchtowers.

  During his shift the outside sentry was to ensure he took a fresh radio battery before he left the gatehouse so he was in constant radio contact with the control center.

  He was to call in immediately any time he saw something out of the ordinary, and that was to include any living, breathing person.

  Even if such a person didn’t appear to be a threat.

  He was also to ensure he had a working watch, and was to ch
eck it frequently. He was to report back at the gatehouse promptly at the end of his two hour shift, and was to time his rounds accordingly.

  The gatehouse was warm and comfortable.

  Outside it was miserable. Frigid cold with a biting wind.

  The sentries were never late getting back to the gatehouse.

  They were frequently early, and once the world went dark and the procedures were implemented it became a problem.

  A sentry who returned five minutes early demanded to be let in to warm up.

  His replacement, conversely, refused to go outside until it was his time to go.

  The five minutes that no sentry was out walking the fence line soon turned to six minutes, then to eight, then to ten.

  That was when Richard Sears put a stop to it.

  “You men might think a few minutes doesn’t matter.

  “But all it takes is for someone to be watching to know that every other hour you guys are bunched up here at the gatehouse instead of making your rounds. And those ten minutes are more than enough time for bad guys to cut through the wire and to make their way into the prison.”

  Now you’d think that grown men would understand Richard’s logic and stop with the foolishness.

  And they did, for about two days.

  Then they went back to their old ways.

  Richard put a stop to it once and for all by telling the man in charge of the gate house, “From now on if a man comes back early refuse to let him in until ten minutes past his shift. Maybe that’ll get his attention. Let the replacement out the door at shift change, but make the slacker pay for his laziness with an extra ten minutes in the cold.”

  The slackers stopped slacking and all seemed right with the world.

  But although they stopped coming five minutes early to end their shift, no one was ever late coming back.

  Especially Lenny.

  Lenny was a good man. A trusted friend and a great ally by anybody’s definition.

  But he was famous far and wide for hating the cold.

  Oh, he pulled his share of the sentry detail.

  He knew it was an essential part of keeping everybody safe.