Black Frost

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.

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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.