Black Frost Read online

  Black Frost

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Black Frost

  By

  John Conroe

  “Would you kill to save a life? Would you kill to prove you’re right?”

  Hurricane, 30 seconds to Mars

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 John Conroe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Books by John Conroe

  The Demon Accord Series:

  God Touched

  Demon Driven

  Brutal Asset

  Black Frost

  www.bearmountainblades.com

  Welcome to the home page for Bear Mountain blades. The blade business is shut down. Instead I’m using the site to get the truth out about the alleged chemical spill in Groton Falls, NY.

  Hopefully, this story will go viral. But I suggest you download this blog fast, as I don't know how long it will be before the government shuts it down.

  Just so you know…there was never any spill. Sure, the news had aerial photos of a tipped over tanker truck on the main street in Groton Falls. But it wasn’t carrying a restricted nerve agent, and the driver didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. He was transporting chlorine (none of which actually spilled) and he was stung to death. Then partially eaten.

  None of the deaths in town were caused by this fictitious, ‘highly experimental’ nerve agent.

  Pretty clever though….to leak a conspiracy story in order to cover up the real conspiracy story.

  No, the deaths were savage, violent attacks by outside forces.

  What actually happened is something the government scientists call inter-dimensional decay, but what I call a Rupture (as in ruptured membrane). Either way it’s pretty much the same thing – a break in whatever separates this world from its twin. See, all those bad science fiction movies about alternate realities and multiple dimensions have a grain of truth in them. Quantum physics is finding that we don’t know as much as we think we do. Here’s the deal – there are in fact other dimensions, at least one of which is very, very close to ours. So close that the solar system in that other place is pretty much a match for this one, although it has ten planets instead of nine. The third planet is almost identical to Earth, inhabited by similar lifeforms, and complete with a sentient species. It follows an orbit around its star that matches our orbit of the sun. Its dominant species have known and visited us for thousands of years. It turns out that the barrier that separates this universe from theirs thins naturally, from time to time. Aging stars give off the right kind of rays and particles, causing it to fail in places. The science types use words like string theory, neutrinos, intersection, and entangled quarks. I don’t really follow too much of that. But I know that this time it occurred at specific sites around the world, almost simultaneously. Places in Ireland, Germany, China, the Middle East, and Easter Island, among others. And if you Google those sites, you’ll find they all had an alleged problem of some type. Reactor leak, hazardous waste spill, outbreak of Ebola, whatever; you get the gist. Some calamity that allowed governments to shut down and cordon off the affected areas. There was no gas leak at Stonehenge, that’s a fact!

  I can even tell you what caused this inter-dimensional decay. You may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the largest particle collider in the world – largest machine ever built by man. A seventeen mile circular tunnel carved under the border between France and Switzerland. It was powered up in ’08 but was taken off line for repairs. It came back up in ’09 and has been running on and off ever since.

  Before it was turned on it made the headlines by way of dire predictions of the baby black holes and strange matter that it was bound to create. The doomsayers were silenced by its apparent success, but what they didn’t know, what no one knew, was that its effect took time. It slowly wore away the fabric of whatever cosmic firewall keeps old mother Earth separate from her dark twin. I can’t tell you how it did that, ‘cause I don’t understand it.

  But I also can't tell you how my cell phone works, it just does, so I won't dwell on the how, but instead I'll tell you about what came through, here, in Groton Falls. Because I know more about that than anyone, eggheads included. Who am I? My name is Ian Moore, and I was at ground zero for all of this. My house and knife shop is at the center of one of these sites – these weak points between worlds – so I got a front row seat to everything and now I know more than I should. More than I want. It sits in my brain like a pregnant spider, whose babies are swarming and squirming around in my gray matter. And now I’m gonna share it with you. I think of it as therapy. You can charge me for the sessions if you like, it won’t matter. I won’t be here when you read this. They want me back…on their side. And I’ll go, but not before I leave a little something behind.

  You see they've been here before, many times, and we've recorded it and kept track. No, I'm not talking about aliens, little green men (although some are green and short), UFO's and Area 51. Well, maybe I am, maybe that’s how we perceived them in this century. But no, the records I'm referring to are far older, mostly passed down by word of mouth, parent to child

  But the stories have lost important information. They've been twisted over time, made gentler, polished and turned into Disney movies.

  The reality is far different. You’ll need to know more. You’ll need the information that I will leave on these pages. Consider it a survival manual, a primer for our new reality. ‘Cause they’ll be back and I wouldn’t rely too heavily on old Uncle Sam to contain them. You’ll need to prepare. Kipling had the right of it:

  “Gold for the mistress, silver for the maid, copper for the craftsman, cunning in his trade. Good! said the Baron, sitting in his hall. But Iron, Cold Iron is master of them all!”

  Ah, that Rudy, he was really clued in.

  I don't have much time, so I need to get down to it. You'll have to be patient and let me tell the story my own way. And you have a bit of time to read this, because of me. Actually, because of my daughter, but that’s all part of the story, isn’t it? How much time, I can’t tell you. They will be back. Some, the lesser ones, are still here. I'll tell you this…none of the old stories come close, not even the Brothers Grimm.

  So grab a seat and buckle up. I’m gonna tell it like it happened to me, fast and bumpy. You can even call �
�shotgun’ if you like (although you’ll probably want to own a shotgun when I’m done).

  Oh, and I can tell you the name of earth’s dark twin…..Fairie.

  But before I start this story I need you to ask yourself one question: would you kill to save a loved one? Or maybe it should be will you kill to save a life? Make up your mind…fast.

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time...sorry, just kidding. I couldn’t resist. As I think back, I can remember the first day I started to feel something was wrong. Standing that morning in my usual spot, I looked down at my GrandFather’s house below me and thought about death. A natural enough thought, given the time of year. Halloween was just past and the last of the autumn leaves were barely hanging on, waiting for a stiff breeze or a cold November rain to rip them off their trees.

  Nature was killing off green things in preparation for the long, cold upstate New York winter. Frost glittered on almost every surface that I could see, the sun not yet high enough to melt it back.

  A half mile in front of me I could see my daughter Ashley’s school bus turning down Brown Road, following the route that would end at her middle school.

  Looking at the skeletal branches, mostly bare, and the distant fields full of stubby shorn brown corn stalks, death was an obvious thought. The two year anniversary of my wife’s passing would be here in January, less than two months time. To be honest with you, I would have thought of death even had it been July and the corn fields were knee high with green. I pretty much think of death every day.

  But I’m losing focus, already drifting from the important stuff.

  Let me just say that death had played a big role in bringing me to that position, high on the hill we call Bear Mountain that November morning. Death and the recession. To make short out of long, it happened like this. I lost my wife to a sliding snowplow on an icy road. I lost my job as a mortgage originator to the economic collapse, and I lost my grandfather to a stroke.

  My unemployment meant that I had to sell our four-bedroom colonial at a fire sale price. I was lucky to get it sold at all. Without a job and with the family home gone, it looked like Ashley and I would have to move in with my parents. But then my grandfather, Robert Moore, Sr, died rather suddenly of pneumonia. Or so we thought.

  My father, Robert Moore, Jr., disclaimed the house, barn and forty acres of land, allowing it to pass to me, giving us a home that was familiar and still in Ashley’s school district.

  All of which left me here, standing on the top of Bear Mountain looking at my GrandFather’s – now my – home. It’s not really a mountain, just a large hill, a small up-thrust of granite, very common in the foothills of the Adirondacks. My grandmother had christened it Bear Mountain not long after marrying my grandfather.

  Grandpa had come running in, excited by finding a black bear track on the hillside, the muddy pugmark of an early spring bear passing through on its way to its summer range. The name had stuck and also became the name of Grandpa’s knife smithing shop.

  My reverie on death was interrupted by the lively bark of my companion. Looking at the hill top behind me, I spotted the brindled bundle of energy, quivering and barking at an untidy lump of gray on the ground. Charm was sixty pounds of pitbull mix and my constant shadow during school hours. When Ashley was home, Charm left me like she owed me money. As far as she was concerned, the sun rose and set on Ashley Ting Moore.

  But just now, she was making hell’s own racket, an unusual behavior in the once abused dog. I approached her and whatever she had found, the indistinct gray lump resolving into wispy fur and a long ratlike tail. The ‘possum was most thoroughly dead, a condition that would normally delight Charm, who loved to roll in stinky things.

  The animal looked deflated, really just scraps of fur, flesh and bone. But the blood on the ground was fresh as was the bits of flesh on the skin, although the body looked like it had been picked over for weeks, not hours. There were no tracks in the bloody mud around it.

  Puzzled, I poked it with my utility knife, a four-inch blade of my own design. The cause of death was obvious based on the inch-wide crescent bite marks that had literally hollowed out the carcass.

  I’d grown up running these woods in the summers, hunting the hills with my father and grandfather, during deer, partridge and turkey seasons. I knew every track, every predator that roamed this land, and nothing made wounds like the ones I was seeing. Not finding any other clues, I snapped a couple of pictures with the camera in my cell phone, then strolled around the top of the hill to see what I could find. At the very top of Bear Mountain is a granite outcropping that was rounded and smoothed in the last Ice Age. Some force of nature, be it seismic or ice, had cracked the big chunk of rock from the top down. The resulting crevice is four feet wide at the top and about a foot at the bottom, making a natural little chasm on our hill. As a kid I had played cave explorer in that dark rocky nook, able to crawl much farther back than my current size would allow. There was some disturbance in the sandy soil at the bottom of the crack, but nothing as clear as a track. I took one last look around, shivered in the chilly air and continued my morning stroll, brindled dog in tow.

  Getting back to the household, I stopped in the kitchen long enough to get a fresh cup of coffee from the breakfast pot, then headed to the barn to check the forge.

  School days follow a pattern, as they do in most households. I get up first, dress for the day, then wake Ashley – a job that combines the skills and danger of snake handling with zombie reanimation.

  I honestly don’t recall being that hard to roust from bed, but maybe my Father’s drill sergeant approach was just more effective than my own more gentle method.

  Once she’s up and showering, I head down, turn on the coffee, feed the dog and start breakfast while watching the morning news. When sleeping beauty finally makes it downstairs, we eat, chat about the day and then make Ashley’s lunch. It’s a team effort, her on sandwich duty while I gather drink pouch, chips and dessert. I’ve offered many times to let her buy lunch, but she always refuses. My guess is that the long wait in the lunch line cuts into chat time with her buddies.

  When her lunch is put together, we both head outside; her to wait for the bus, and I, in theory, to light the forge. While I do actually light the fire, I spend more time watching her from the grimy, carbon streaked window to make sure she gets on the bus okay. I’m not allowed to wait with her, as that would leave her so embarrassed that we would have to move to the west coast to make a clean start. Instead I entrust her to Charm’s careful guard while I lurk in the gloom of the workshop, unable to concentrate on anything but her safety. Once she’s on the bus, Charm meets me half-way down the driveway and we begin our morning tour of the property, a ritual that happens rain, snow or shine.

  That morning I found the coal burning red, the three-inch billets of stainless steel I had left nestled in the firebox just reaching a dull cherry hue. I turned on the blower, quickly bringing the metal to an almost white-orange, the color of critical, the temperature where the steel becomes nonmagnetic. Then I pulled a chunk of steel from the fire and began the rhythmic work of hammer and anvil that would shape the metal for its future life – in this case as cooking knives for a chef in New York City.

  My GrandFather’s forge had been a godsend in many ways. First, when I became unemployed after losing my wife, my grandpa had asked me to help him with the forge. At the time I had been shocked he would do so, as despite his eighty-nine years of age, he was still spry and capable. But looking back it was obviously his way to help me, one proud man discreetly providing financial and mental help to another proud man.

  I say mental help, because forging steel into useful blades is a very Zen-like business. You need to picture the metal in three dimensions, then form an image of what you want it to look like. From there it’s a gradual coaxing process, convincing the steel to move where you want it to. The steady work of hands and mind is much different from the stress of originating mortgages; working paper, pho
ne and numbers to get approved loans. The work in the smithy was as therapeutic as it was helpful financially. The old skills I had learned as a boy, hanging with and helping my grandpa came back quickly, tempered and smoothed by age and life experience.

  When he died, I took over completely, using the income to supplement the social security death benefits that Sarah had left behind. I had a third source of income that took up time in the afternoons and some evenings, but it was more irregular.

  None of this seems important to you, not, but trust me, this back story is important if you’re going to understand what has happened.

  About two hours into the morning work, Charm lifted her head from her paws and looked at the door of the smithy, silently announcing a visitor. By habit and lifelong training I put the current piece back in the forge and picked up the fighting ax that was one of the first things I ever made. I moved closer to the door, strategically positioned for when it eventually opened and I got a look at the white-haired head framed in the opening.

  “Hi Dad,” I said, noting his slightly widened eyes.

  He wasn’t really shocked to find me within his danger space, a modern tomahawk in my hand. He was, instead, pleased, although the only sign of it was a slight quirk at the corners of his mouth, just under the white mustache that lived on his upper lip.

  “Hey Ian, how’s it comin’?” he asked.

  “Good, I’ve got some roughing out to do on one more blade, then I can come in for a coffee break and help you,” I said. My father had come over to go through some more of Grandpa’s papers.