Black Frost

by John Conroe

  “Grandpa?” she asked, snuffing back her tears.

  “Who else do you know that can reach any department in Homeland security from his cell?” I said.

  “Dad is going to quietly see if there is any department that might possibly handle strange things like this.”

  “Like Fringe?” she asked.

  “Well, this is certainly wacky even by that’s show’s standard. In the meantime, you and I are going to lie low and keep a watch on things, till Greer gets back.”

  “But wait…if they only take kids with Talents or ESP or whatever, they’ll ignore me right? So we got nothing to worry about right?” she asked, suddenly hopeful.

  I didn’t answer right away which was the wrong way to answer.

  “Dad? I don’t have any psychic powers or anything so they should leave me alone?”

  “Honey, Greer says that you do have some ability of some sort, something that just hasn’t manifested yet,” I answered, being truthful and hating myself for it. I could hear Sarah’s voice from deep inside my brain, yelling, “Are you fucking stupid! Why would you tell her all that!”

  She surprised me then, my daughter did, by sitting up straight and wiping away her tears. “Well, he’s obviously wrong then, because I failed the online psychic test that Lindsey and I took. The only person’s mind I can ever read is Lindsey’s and that’s just because I know her so well!” she said with conviction.

  “You may be right, but until then we have to be very careful and watchful,” I said.

  “Like you had to be growing up with grandma and grandpa?”

  “Yes, very much like that,” I agreed.

  We continued on in silence till we pulled into the driveway. The farmhouse and barn looked quiet in the early afternoon sun. Ashley helped me unload the stuff from my father as well as the packages from the farmers market and CVS. Charm basically got under foot and barked excitedly at the meat she could smell in the packages dad had given me.

  Unlocking and disarming the house alarm reassured me that it was all clear, backed up by Charm’s quick inspection with her nose and ears. After putting the food away, I grabbed the box of boobytraps, cameras and frozen meat, then called Ashley to me.

  “Come on, I want to show you something,” I told her.

  We marched out to the barn where I put most of the meat into the chest freezer. Then I opened the last three and put them on the floor in the middle of the room. Corralling Ashley and Charm over to the doorway, I took a firm grip on Charm’s collar then whistled my five note call.

  “Hey that’s the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” Ashley said. What can I say, we watch a lot of sci-fi in our house. For a moment nothing happened, then a familiar dark blur sped into the room and alighted on the side of the door frame, sharp talons gripping the barn wood with ease.

  “Ohh!” was Ashley’s response, her eyes as wide as I’ve ever seen them.

  “Ashley, meet Pancho,” I said. Pancho’s eyes were as big as Ashley’s as the two looked each other over. Charm growled at the little flyer, surging against the choke collar, yanking my arm hard.

  I admonished the powerful little dog, but she ignored me, until Ashley turned, tapped one finger against the dog’s nose and said “No!” Charm settled back with a whine, giving her master a reproachful look.

  The puck watched the byplay among us and then made an impassioned little speech in his twittering voice, ending it with a strange bow.

  “Pancho, here’s some more food for your hungry mouths as promised,” I said, pointing at the meat.

  He looked where I pointed, finally noticing the food, then made his silent screech, which had the effect of making Charm whine and growl at the same time.

  Seconds later, dark blurs filled the open air and Ashley ducked behind my back reflexively. This time the pucks alighted around the barn instead of immediately attacking the food. The frenetic action slowed to just the rustle and whir of several pairs of wings and the clan looked from their leader to me with gleaming eyes. Ashley leaned back around me and gasped at the furry little people arrayed around our barn. The pucks all locked their gazes onto her and went motionless, big eyes widening even further.

  “Ash, these are pucks,” I said, immediately realizing how obvious that already was. Such was my daughter’s shock that I didn’t even get a “no duh!” look from her. The puck family suddenly unfroze, all at the same time, rustling excitedly and starting to come closer, which made me push Ashley behind me by reflex. The little leader, Pancho, noted my actions and twittered loudly, the effect of which was an immediate cessation of forward motion by his troops. I nodded my thanks to him, my protective reflexes not yet ready to let them all over her. I pointed to the meat, but he just looked from me to Ashley, who was once more peeking around my side.

  “Ah, Ash, I think he’s waiting for you to give the okay,” I suggested. She looked at me uncertainly, then moved farther out from behind me and closer to the meat.

  “Not too close, their feeding time gets pretty violent!” I warned.

  She froze her motion, then waved her hand to include all the pucks and pointed at the meat.

  “Go ahead, ah, dig in!” she said, uncertainly.

  Pancho gave her a tiny little bow, which the rest of the clan immediately attempted to copy with varying degrees of success. Then they hit the meat like a furry cyclone.

  An astonishingly short period of time later it was over. I wiped a tiny speck of spattered meat from Ashley’s shocked, pale white cheek. “See what I mean?”

  One of the littlest fliers whirred over, hummingbird fast and hovered in front of Ashley. My daughter looked at the little puck in wonder, then instinctively held out her right hand, palm up. The tiny puck, a girl I think, landed softly on her hand and the two looked at each other in silence. Suddenly, the rest of the clan darted forward and before we could fully react we were both covered in furry bodies that plucked at our hair, touched our skin and even rubbed a shivering Charm.

  Ashley giggled, while my reaction was to release my hand from my Sig and try to will my stomach to unclench as well. The pucks were just curious, although the thought of their flashing razor teeth never left my mind as they checked us out. Ashley was more comfortable than I and was literally swarmed with small furry bodies. Then two of the young ones started to fight over the right to sit on her shoulder, teeth were bared and the whole situation headed for hell. But it never got that far. Ashley stiffened, Charm growled and I started to speak, but it was Pancho who intervened with a sharp yip. The two youngsters immediately broke off fighting and were both displaced by the little leader who claimed the coveted shoulder spot for himself. Then he launched into a high pitched tirade, lecturing the clan for almost a full minute. When he finished, the adults all took to the air, the males heading out to where ever they all lived in the barn, the females and older children wrangling the youngest. Pancho was the last to leave, standing gravely at a kind of military attention till the others were gone, then giving bows to Ash and I, in that order. Then he too was gone.

  We both stood still for a few moments, than I moved forward to pick up the paper and bone scraps. I looked back at my daughter, her face bemused. “Wow!” she finally said.

  “Yeah, I hear ya,” I said, dumping the refuse into a garbage can. “Ash, you realize you can’t talk about this with anyone but me or grandpa and grandma, right? Not even Lindsey, right?”

  She nodded at the first part, but looked up ready to protest at the mention of her buddy. Whatever she was going to say died on her lips. “Nobody would believe me would they?”

  “Not likely, or worse, someone might!” I said.

  She looked at me confused. “Ash, these aren’t Disney characters, these are killers! The pucks are razor toothed predators who have killed most of the small animals around this farm. The goblins are something from a horror film, basically engineered killers. And the elves, both Summer and Winter kinds, are hell bent on kidnapping any suitable child they can find,�
�� I explained, holding up one fragment of deer rib from the morning’s frenzy. The bone was riddled with teeth marks.

  Her face went a little white and she nodded, then dropped down and hugged her dog.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said, pointing toward the house.

  Chapter 11

  Charm and Ashley went back into the house while I worked on setting up the two cameras that dad had given me. I mounted one under the eave of the barn roof, leaning out the hayloft door to screw it into the old wood. An extension cord run up from below gave it steady power, although it had a battery compartment for back up. From that angle I could remotely turn the camera to look over most of the house’s back and side. The other camera went under the porch roof, with a power cord from the exterior outlet my father had wired up fifteen years ago when electric bug zappers had been all the rage. Thinking of the bug zapper caused me to go looking for it, finding the insect encrusted light stored in the garden shed. I brought it back into the house to ponder how it might help against the poisonous Tinkerbell looking fliers, finally plugging it into the same outlet as the camera and hanging it in front of the kitchen exhaust fan. It covered the opening, hopefully frying any curious Tinks.

  Then I spent a half-hour lining up Dad’s shotshell traps and mounting them with a couple of wood screws each. I used all five inside the house, covering the stairway, doorway from the foyer, the kitchen and the dining room. I put a steel-shot 12 gauge shell in each, set up hooks for the fishline I measured out, but left the traps unarmed. My thought was to protect the center of the house and the doorway to the basement which would be our retreat of last resort.

  I powered up the little handheld monitor for the cameras and spent some time toggling between cameras and using the remote control to swivel each one through its complete range of motion.

  Next I got my deer rifle from its locked case in my bedroom closet and loaded the magazine with nine steel modified rounds. The gun case also held the high powered gun light that dad had given me for it. The little unit had both a high lumen light and a red laser to help target attackers. It snapped onto the mount attached to magazine tube under the barrel. Ashley came along while I was finishing with the rifle and immediately picked it up from the table I had it lying on.

  “Chamber is empty, hammer down, nine in the tube, ten more on the stock,” I said, watching her handle the little gun. Growing up with Bob Moore, Jr. as a grandfather guaranteed that she already knew a lot about handling guns. But she had shot my little rifle quite a bit. I could handload light powered loads pretty cheaply and the two of us had spent many an afternoon shooting old milk jugs and cans.

  Ashley levered the action open to check for herself, a habit that both dad and I had trained into her. The chamber was empty, but the magazine had fed a round to the loading ramp, ready to slide into the chamber when she closed the action. I watched as she tilted the gun sideways till the open breech pointed at the ground, her free hand cupped underneath to catch the loose round when it rolled out and dropped for the ground, all while keeping the muzzle pointed up and away. She closed the lever, lowered the hammer and fed the loose round back into the magazine, then looked up at me in challenge. “Perfect,” I pronounced, smiling as her face lit up in triumph.

  ***

  I headed out to the forge with another project in mind and had only been at it for a few minutes when Ash and Charm appeared in the doorway. I wasn’t overly surprised.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

  “I’m making caltrops from sheet steel,” I answered, without looking up from the forms I was cutting out with power shears.

  “Cal what?”

  “Caltrops. Japanese weapon, actually Ninja I think. They look sorta like the old kids’ jacks that grandma and grandpa used to play with. You throw them on the ground and they always have at least one point up. Drives right into your enemies feet. I’ll harden these in the tempering oven…who knows they might help,” I said.

  “Dad, how do you know about all this stuff?”

  “Well pumpkin, I was raised by your grandfather for one thing. And my grandfather always encouraged me to make new weapons and blades, so I did a lot of research in school. Most of my Social Studies papers were on ancient weapons of one form or another.”

  “You’d get expelled for writing about weapons now!” she said, the look on her face telling me she was imagining it.

  “Yeah, no doubt, which is really stupid. But anyway, the police use modern versions of these to blow car tires,”

  “Oh,” she said, distracted. “Dad?”

  I looked up at the uncertain note in her voice.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked, the fear coming through.

  I didn’t have a good answer. But not answering wasn’t an option. “I’m not sure kiddo, but whatever happens we’re going to stay together, got it?” I assured her.

  “Charm too?” she asked, hugging her dog.

  “Of course!” I answered. “Now help me carry these over to the vice so I can bend the points up, jack like.”

  “Dad? Do you know what I think?” she asked suddenly. I shook my head.

  “I think they’re really, really stupid!”

  “Who honey?”

  “The elves! They’re stupid to think I have some power or something, and they’re really dumb to come after the daughter of a knife and weapon maker who was trained by grandpa, especially when they’re allergic to steel! Dumber than Mack Enders and he’s on his second try at eighth grade!”

  “Well I don’t think I would say they’re stupid, but I’ll tell you what….they’ve got their work cut out for them,” I answered.

  She helped me shape and harden a couple dozen caltrops, each made from two inch square patterns of heavy gauge sheet steel. I wasn’t sure how useful they would be, but when I stepped on one it held my full weight and even bit into the bottom of my hiking boot. Only the steel shank in the sole kept the point from punching through my foot.

  After cleaning up our mess, I packed the caltrops into a cardboard box and we headed inside to make dinner and hunker down for the night. Ashley volunteered to make a pizza, using a package of frozen dough from the local pizza shop.

  I checked the house over, positioning some of my handmade weapons around the house. The old storage room in the back of the kitchen had a door out that we almost never used. I noticed it as I checked on Ashley in the kitchen and realized I had forgotten about it as a weak point. After thinking it through, I took down one of the shotgun shell traps from another part of the house and positioned it to aim at the door. Then I rigged it to trip from both a line to the door handle and a tripwire ten inches off the floor. Lastly I put eight or nine of the caltrops on the floor in front of that door, then closed the inner door warning Ashley that the trap was armed. I had shown her how to disarm them quickly if needed, each trap having a flat piece of broken yardstick to shield the shotshell primer from the nail.

  The afternoon was rapidly fading into dusk as I completed my rounds. The Winchester rifle was propped up at the archway between the kitchen and the family room. Grandpa’s shotgun was out of its hiding place and propped near the entry to the front door foyer. Various bowies, axes and a machete that resembled a short sword were stashed all about the house.

  Ashley was humming a pop song to herself as she worked on the pizza fixings. I turned on the camera monitor and clicked on camera one, panning it in its position under the porch roof to scan the barn and yard. All clear. I clicked over to number two, panning it first right to look over the house, then left. The picture jerked and shuddered when I panned left but was smooth on the right side. Trying the left again I got the same result, a rabid jilting of the picture, like the camera was hung up on some old nail or something.

  “I gotta go unstick the barn camera,” I said to Ashley, who glanced outside then nodded. It was still light out, but the shadows had grown deeper and more abundant.

  Checking to make sure my Sig was secure in its holster, I
grabbed my beat up Carhart work coat and headed out the door. Wane sunlight washed the porch of the house, the sun hanging low over the barn roof. Standing under camera two, I couldn’t penetrate the little pocket of shadows it was in, but something seemed to be near the lens. Entering the barn, I clicked on the lights then climbed the steep ladder to the hayloft, which did not have electric lights.

  Enough daylight entered the open hayloft door to see well enough and I felt comfortable crossing the wooden planks and leaning out the loft hatch to peer at the camera. A black rod was stuck in the wood to the left of the camera, effectively shortening its turn radius. Grabbing the slick metal rod I yanked it back and forth till it popped free them pulled myself back into the hayloft to examine it. About six inches of round, lightweight rod, sharpened at both ends to wicked needle points. Made from some metal I couldn’t identify. About then the hackles went up on my neck as I realized someone had stood underneath and thrown it sixteen or so feet straight up to block the camera. It didn’t interfere enough to render the camera useless so the only reason to do was to lure….

  A heavy weight hit my back hard enough to almost pitch me out the open loft hatch. My hands automatically dropped the spike and grabbed the doorframe, then I spun back to face behind me. Three men stood arrayed before me, wearing green clothes and nasty grins. They were blond, lean, all six feet tall or better and tan. Their clothes were a leather-looking material similar to Greer’s, but forest green, rather than black. Each elf had a harness strapped across their chests with more of the spikes and sword hilts poked over their shoulders, along with something that looked like a quiver filled with very small arrows and a wooden something attached alongside.

  I slammed my hand under the coat, grabbing for my gun. The pistol was just clearing the holster when one of the elves flicked his hand and a sharp pain lanced through my right hand. The Sig clattered to the wooden floor and then fell out the hatchway, clunking to the ground below. The closest elf darted my way, but ran into my open left palm against his sternum. His chest was hard, like it was made from plywood. He grunted as my palm-heel strike stopped his forward momentum, then grunted again when my right fist crossed his chin. Lightning bolts shot through my wounded forearm, telling me that arm wasn’t going to be much further use. The other two were amused at their companion’s pain, but the gleam in their eyes was cold as each reached up for the hilts over their shoulders.