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 thought ahead 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 his blood poured from a small wound in his chest and a gaping wound in his back, 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.
But when he died, he died all alone.
Final Dawn Book 13:
REST IN PEACE
will be available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, Hastings Books, and more than two dozen on line book stores in March, 2018.
If you enjoyed
WHERE COULD HE BE?
you might also enjoy
ALONE Book 1:
Facing Armageddon
Dave and Sarah Anna Speer had been preparing for Armageddon for years. They thought they’d covered all the bases and had planned for everything.
It never occurred to them that the single thing they had no control over was the timing.
Sarah was on an airplane with her young daughters when solar storms bombarded the earth with electromagnetic pulses. Everything powered by electricity or batteries was instantly shorted out and would never work again.
Dave was suddenly alone.
He was also unsure whether his family was dead or alive. He assumed that the airplane stopped working and plunged from the sky. But it was scheduled to land in Kansas City at almost the exact time everything stopped working.
Had they landed in time? Was it possible they survived?
This is the story of a man facing Armageddon alone. It chronicles the things he does to survive in a newly vicious world.
It also includes Dave’s desperate and poignant diary entries to his wife. Just in case she did survive, and somehow makes it back to him to find he didn’t make it himself.
From the author of best sellers “Final Dawn” and “Countdown to Armageddon” comes a new tale of one man’s journey through hell… alone.
Chapter 1:
Dave couldn’t get the tune out of his head. He’d heard it all morning long, off and on, playing quietly in the back of his skull. And it was driving him crazy.
Oh, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was a happy little ditty. At least it sounded that way. It sounded more like sunshine and smiles rather than rainclouds and foreboding.
Finally, he’d had enough.
“Okay, let’s play a game,” he announced while looking in the rearview mirror at Lindsey and Beth.
“I’ll hum you a tune, and the first one to guess the tune gets a candy bar when we get to the airport.”
Sarah looked at him from the passenger seat. With that look.
“Excuse me, mister? You’re going to get the girls all hyped up on sugar just before I take them on a four hour plane ride?”
“Not both of them, honey. Just the one who guesses the name of the song.”
“Uh… no. If that song is still bugging you, just hum it. If any one of us guesses it, you can buy each of us a cinnabon.”
The girls laughed. Beth gave Lindsey a high five. Lindsey said, “All right! Go, Mom!”
Dave coughed. At first he had no words.
Then he found some, and stated the obvious.
“Why is it okay to get all three of you hyped up on sugar but not okay to do it to just one of you?”
“Because you know I have a thing for cinnabons. And I’m the mom. So that makes me the boss.”
Lindsey broke out in uncontrollable laughter from the back seat, and Beth said, “Ooooohhh, Dad, you just got owned.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean, those things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“Oh, we know, don’t we girls?”
Two heads nodded up and down behind her.
“But, Dave, they are soooo worth the price. And I’ll give you a bite. And think how sweet I’ll taste when you kiss me goodbye.”
Little Beth made a gagging sound.
“Besides, if you want us to help you with that song, you have to pay the piper. It’s only fair. And if you don’t, it’ll continue to drive you crazy for days. Maybe even the whole week we’re gone. And we’d feel so bad for you if that happened.”
“Yeah, you’re just oozing with sympathy for my plight.”
Sarah smiled and blew him a kiss. She was even more gorgeous now than the day they’d met thirteen years before. It suddenly dawned on him that he was an incredibly lucky man, to have such a beautiful wife and family. And that the price of three cinnabons wasn’t that great, in the grand scheme of things.
In other words, he played right into Sarah’s hands. She knew he would, as soon as she let the kiss fly.
“Okay, here goes.”
Dave started humming the tune that had played in his mind a thousand times since the previous evening.
It took the three of them no more than ten notes. They’d have been Name That Tune champions in another era.
All three of them blurted out, almost simultaneously, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
Then Dave felt incredibly stupid.
“Of course. How could I have not known that? The old Mr. Rogers theme song. Sheesh! Now I really feel dumb.”
Sarah said, “Did you know that Fred Rogers was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and wore his red sweater to hide all of his tattoos?”
Dave scoffed.
“Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet. Why?”
“That story’s been going around for years. It was debunked a long time ago. Mr. Rogers was a fine man, but he was never a Green Beret.”
“Oh, yeah? Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet.”
It was too much for Lin
dsey.
“Gee whiz, would you two stop believing what you read on the internet? Nearly all of it is garbage.”
She turned to her little sister.
“Do we have to teach these old people everything?”
Beth said nothing but nodded her head decisively. She was in firm agreement.
Dave was a man of his word, and after the family checked in at the ticket kiosk and Sarah and the girls got their boarding passes, they made a beeline to Cinnabon.
“Daddy, are you going to walk us to the gate?”
“No, honey, I can’t go through security without a boarding pass, so I’ll walk you as far as I can and then you can give me a great big hug and a kiss.”
“I wish you could come with us.”
“I know, sugar. I wish I could too. But with two of the guys being sick at work, they just can’t let me take vacation right now. Uncle Tommy will understand, and we can go fishing another time. And you’ll be so busy helping Aunt Karen get everything ready for the wedding, you won’t even have time to miss me.”
“Bet I will!”
Sarah looked at him longingly. They were going to be apart for their twelfth anniversary. It would be the first one they’d missed.
It was as if he could read her mind.
“We’ll do something special when you get back, I promise. We’ll get a sitter and go spend the weekend at the lake. Just the two of us.”
“I’d like that.”
He walked the three special ladies in his life to the TSA checkpoint and got his hugs and kisses.
He held Sarah close and told her he loved her.
Little Beth rolled her eyes and said, “No mush, you two.”
Dave paid her no mind. He looked Sarah in the eyes and said, “It’ll seem like forever before I see you again.”
Neither of them had a clue how true those words would be.
ALONE, Book 1:
Facing Armageddon
is available now on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, selected Hastings book stores, and at other fine booksellers.
Final Dawn: Book 12: Where Could He Be? Page 19