Black Frost (12 page)

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.

Fighting is an athletic skill, and like any
other athlete, a good fighter develops instincts and ingrained
muscle memory. It’s like a zone, where part of your mind takes over
the action, making choices and plans at mental speeds far greater
than the everyday level of thinking most of us use. My fight brain
took over, slowing my perceptions and moving me backwards and down.
I dropped to one knee, placed both palms on the edge of the hatch
and kicked my feet out and down. Hanging for a split second from my
hands, I let go, falling the last six feet of the twelve foot drop
to land awkwardly in front of the barn. Immediately three figures
flipped out of the door above me, landing lightly on their feet
twenty paces from the barn before spinning toward me, blades in
hand. My gun was a little more than a yard in front of me, closer
to me than the elf I had punched. His two pals had landed closer to
the house, their amused faces watching the fun.