Black Frost (10 page)

“Where did you move from?” I asked.
“Obviously some place warm and sunny,” I added, gesturing at her
tanned hand. “California, maybe?”

She laughed, sending a shiver through me.
“California’s certainly sunny enough,” she agreed. The plastic
blister pack of makeup she was holding suddenly slipped free from
her fingers and I reflexively caught it before it hit the
ground.

She took it back from my outstretched hand,
her eyes round with surprise. “Wow, you are fast! Great reflexes!”
she said admiringly.

“Dad trains MMA fighters!” Ashley
interjected. Eirwen looked surprised and a little confused at that
statement, not recognizing the term.

“She means mixed-martial arts, you know…like
cage fighters?” I explained. She still looked confused, slightly
shaking her head, but caught sight of my watch.

“Is that really the time?” she asked,
concerned. “ Oh, goodness, I really have to run. It was nice to
meet you Ashley, and very nice to meet you Ian,” she said, putting
the makeup back on the display and moving toward the door.

“It was nice to meet you too, Eirwen,” I
said, noticing that she looked as good going as she did coming.

It wasn’t till we were checking out about
five minutes later that I realized she had known my name without
either Ashley or I saying it. She also hadn’t ever said where she
was from. The checkout clerk was taking forever to install a new
roll of register tape, so I glanced around. Our register was
nearest the glass front doors and I watched cars roll by outside.
Suddenly a lithe figure in black tights crossed the street right in
my view. Needless to say Eirwen was more interesting to watch than
the cars so I saw her reach the far side just as three men moved
into sight and met her. Tall, lean and also blond, they could have
been brothers and as they crowded around her any momentary
fantasies I’d had evaporated. They all appeared her own age as they
listened to her talk, but when she pointed back at the drugstore
and they all followed her gaze, seeming to look right at me, a
chill chased down my spine.

Chapter 9

My mother answered the door when we arrived
at my parents’ house; carefully unlocking the twin deadbolts to let
us in. Max, my parents’ Doberman, greeted each of us with careful
dignity, which he promptly lost when he exchanged butt sniffs with
Charm. The two dogs led us further into my mother’s kitchen where
lunch was in its final stages of assembly, the odor of chocolate
chip cookies foretelling dessert. The fact that four places were
set at the kitchen table was not unusual as we often visited my
parents on Saturdays, but the certainty of it all told me that mom
had been tipped off.

“You texted Grandma?” I asked Ashley.

“Of course, Ian,” my mother answered for her.
“
Somebody
has to keep me informed!” she added with mock
outrage. Joan Moore’s hair was still blonde after more than six
decades, but I was pretty sure it owed that color more to chemicals
than nature.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Down in his lair,” she answered, handing a
bowl of grapes to Ashley who automatically started to help her
grandmother organize lunch.

I headed down the basement stairs, hearing my
mother ask Ash for updates on teen life.

The initial section of my parents basement is
finished into a theatre room, but if you travel through that, you
come to a regular-looking door set in the wall. Only when you open
it do you realize it’s steel and equipped with a Medeco deadbolt.
The door to my Father’s combination den and workshop was open and I
could see it was fully lit by the overhead fluorescents. Dad looked
up from his workbench when I came in, started to turn back to his
project but did a double take when he saw me close the door behind
me.

He raised both eyebrows and waited. “I’ve had
two
visits from the man in black,” I said as casually as I
could. His eyes widened and he put down the tube of epoxy he held
and straightened from the bench. He had been gluing the open ends
of hollowpoint cartridges that sat in a tray. They looked like
.45’s and there were at least three stacked trays behind the one he
was currently working on. Maybe two hundred cartridges
althogether.

Distracted from my story I bent over and
looked carefully. Each gaping hollowpoint cavity was filled with
iron filings and Dad had been epoxying the open ends. “Clever,” I
said. He was creating rounds that would spray iron particles
throughout the bodies of anything they hit. I nodded in
appreciation, but when I noticed the vein bulging on his forehead I
realized I had better get on with my story telling or he would kill
me himself.

I filled him in on Greer’s two visits, the
politics of his world as I understood them, and the feeding
incident with the pucks.

“Sooo, that’s about all I know, although
remind me when I leave that I have to stop by the meat market on
the way home. They should have some of those beef bones they keep
for dogs that I can use,” I finished.

He had listened to the whole thing in silence
and now sat twiddling with his mustache, trying to deal with the
load of incredible information I had dumped in his lap, staring at
the concrete block wall behind the workbench. While he thought it
through I looked around his man cave for anything new. As always it
was neatly organized, everything in its place. A twenty-gun
fireproof safe squatted in the corner of the room, taking pride of
place. Two stuffed chairs and a loveseat were arrayed in the
opposite corner around a forty-two inch flatscreen. That was
football central. The other two corners of the room were filled
with the opposite ends of the workbench that ran the full length of
the wall. This bench was solely dedicated to gun related work, as
the garage held his wood working tools. A big Dillon reloading
machine took up space on half of the bench, bracketed by a Lee
single stage reloader and a big vibrating brass case cleaner. That
side was the reloading center, the other half of the bench set up
for gun smithing and cleaning. The only thing new that I could see
was a heavy duty steel cabinet with a push button electronic lock
on the door. It was obviously a gun cabinet but that seemed rather
redundant with the fire safe.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the
cabinet. Dad looked up and grunted. “Ready rig, I’ll show you
later. Combination is the last two numbers of your birth year and
Ashley’s…in that order.”

I studied him from the corner of my eye while
pretending to still look at the metal cabinet. He was off…way off
his normal pattern. His eyes were looking everywhere but at me and
he was fiddling with his mustache in a nervous way. This was not my
father. Then it hit me…he couldn’t wrap himself around this
situation. It was too weird, too science fiction-come-to-life.

I had never seen this before, my father, the
federal agent, unable to cope with a situation. This was the man
who had been in running gunfights with hardened drug lords, the man
who had single handedly stopped a convenience store robbery with a
can of beans and a display rack of potato chips.

“Ah Dad? Do you believe me?” I asked, first
checking his faith in me. He looked up and nodded, but the fear in
his eyes threw me. “It’s the whole elf, goblin and fairy part,
isn’t it?”

His lack of answer was answer enough. I had
another flash of empathy. I had felt much the same way when the
pickup truck with the arrow headed plow blade had slid through a
stop sign and crushed my wife to death right next to me. Waking up
from the walking nightmare that followed had taken weeks. Trying to
figure out what to do and being at a loss for answers. Dad and mom
had helped me through that by breaking it down into small pieces,
small decisions.

“Dad, stop thinking about this as elves and
think about it as illegal aliens from rival gangs or intelligence
agents from China and Russia. They think Ashley has the plans to a
secret new weapon and will stop at nothing to get it. No one will
believe us if we try to warn people. So it’s up to us, although we
have a double agent on our side and have turned one of their
biological weapons against them,” I said, trying to use terms he
was comfortable with.

“Now I plan to stay at home with Ashley for
tonight. The house is sealed in steel mesh, the pucks are there and
Greer will be back in six hours or so. I also think the Summer
elves, er agents are already in town, poking around. But I need
more plans and I need your help securing Grandpa’s house,” I said,
meeting his now firm gaze. “I’m thinking booby traps or
something.”

His expression had changed during my little
speech and I could almost tell you the moment when his brain
reengaged the problem and started to plan.

“Booby traps? Actually, I’ve already got some
ideas on that, Ian,’ he said, moving toward the workbench. He
picked up a seven inch section of two-by-four that had things
attached to it.

“Here, see I screwed one of these new mouse
traps to the two-by-four, drilled a one inch hole through the wood
and fitted this little section of steel pipe in it. Then I fastened
a little strip of steel to the jaws of the trap and put a nail out
on the end of the metal. You just slide a twelve gauge shell into
the pipe and its primer is all lined up with the nail. Set the trap
by pushing down on this lever and when this string gets yanked the
shell goes off.”

It was deadly simple. He had used those new
type plastic mouse traps, the kind that are much easier to set than
the old wooden ones. He showed me how he would set one up by using
a drill to screw it solidly into position, the tube of the pipe
aimed at a doorway or some other narrow space.

Pausing, my father looked over at me.
“Chinese and Russian agents?” he questioned, eyes glinting in the
overhead light.

“Listen, don’t let the sci-fi part throw you.
A lot of science fiction ends up coming true and in this case us
human types built the Large Hadron Collider, which started all
this,” I said.

“That big accelerator thingy in
Switzerland?”

“Yeah, it wore away whatever separates our
worlds naturally. So now we have illegal
aliens
within our
borders, intent on child kidnapping. They have advanced biological
weapons and can hide among the local population. And they’ve done
this all before when the stars were right or the astrological
alignments were in order or something,” I said.

His mouth had thinned to a flat line of anger
at the words ‘child kidnapping’ and he gave a sharp nod of
agreement.

“In fact, I find it hard to believe that some
obscure government agency doesn’t already have some knowledge of
them, like the guys at Area 51 or something,” I wondered.

His head snapped up. “I’ll check into it,” he
said, his tone determined.

There probably wasn’t any such group, but it
would give my dad something to do. He had contacts in almost every
part of the federal law enforcement establishment. I doubted it
would help our situation or stop the storm I could just about feel
approaching Groton Falls, but what the hell, it was better than
seeing my father not knowing what to do.

He showed me how to put the shotgun shell
traps together and we made four more, placing them into a cardboard
box.

“Here, take these as well,” Dad said, handing
me an electronics box.

“Cameras?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a two camera security system I
picked up at Walmart. Each camera on a remote control and
wirelessly connected to the monitor. It was on sale and I thought
I’d try it out. Put one camera under the eaves of the shop so it
looks at the whole outside of the house and one on the ceiling of
the porch. Should give you pretty good coverage and the cameras
have infrared ability.”

The setup seemed pretty simple to use. The
cameras either plugged into a socket or ran on batteries. I could
think of two easy places to plug them in. The base monitor also had
dual power sources so you could move it room to room.

“Now what did you do to your ammo?” he asked,
his mind fully engaged in the problem at hand.

I pulled up my sweat shirt and grabbed the
spare magazine of ammo I carry in front. It slipped out of its
kydex carrier and I showed him the round of .40 S&W that was
visible at the top.

“You sectioned rod?” he asked. At my nod, he
went on. “How did you hold it in?”

“It’s actually a pretty tight fit, but
there’s a drop of super glue in there to make sure.”

“Hmm, it’ll be a deep penetrating mother
won’t it?” he mused.

“Yeah, those goblins were pretty densely
built. But your filing design will spread the iron quicker. I’m not
sure which is more effective,” I said.

“Generally, I prefer penetration over
expansion, but we’ll just have to see, won’t we? What did you do
for the cowboy assault weapon?”

Dad nicknamed my deer rifle when I first got
it. I only ever hunted deer on Grandpa’s land, which is thickly
wooded with no real open shots beyond a hundred yards. So when I
bought my first rifle it was a Winchester Trapper .44 magnum. With
a sixteen inch barrel it’s a short, light handy little gun, perfect
for our land. Dad had laughed at it at first, but after seeing me
shoot ten fast shots of heavy .44 rounds he had gotten a thoughtful
look on his face. The short barrel is still longer than a
revolver’s so the bullet picks up speed, bringing up the kinetic
energy of the round. At anything under 125 to 150 yards it’s
deadly. My father had promptly borrowed it and when I got it back
it had custom peep sights, a smoothed and tuned action and a
buttstock ammo carrier that held ten more rounds. It also had a
mount for a flashlight for investigating bumps in the night.

“Same thing, but bigger diameter rod,” I
answered.