Hell Holes: What Lurks Below

by Donald Firesmith

  Chapter 4

  Escape from Pump Station 2

  Another earthquake jarred us awake just after midnight. Bleary eyed from lack of sleep, I stared around the room as the bed Angie and I were sharing shook violently, banging over and over against the bunkroom’s wall.

  In spite of all the supernatural craziness of the last two days, the geologist in me couldn’t help but estimate the quake as a six on the MMI scale. Once again, I felt handicapped by my inability to log into the computers back at the university and see the seismic data. Given its source, I had no idea whether it was an aftershock or a totally new quake associated with the demon invasion. Although the shaking soon stopped, the distant rumbling continued.

  “Everybody, you’re going to want to see this,” Kowalski said, staring out the window.

  The six of us gathered around the bunkroom’s windows on the west side of the bunkhouse. It was a hellish scene. To our northwest, dozens of distant fires were sending plumes of black smoke billowing into the overcast sky. It was worse looking northward towards the coast where the majority of the initial holes had opened. Except for the green tundra instead of desert sands, it looked remarkably like the hundreds of burning oil wells set ablaze during Iraq’s withdrawal from its invasion of Kuwait. Repeatedly, we saw explosions sending balls of flames and smoke soaring hundreds of feet into the air.

  “Shit. Now what?” I asked, more to myself than to anyone in particular.

  “We leave,” O’Shannon said. “We grab our packs, fight our way over to the garage, and hope we find something we can drive. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck here until the army rescues us or we’re overrun.”

  We removed the barricade blocking the door, made our way downstairs, and wolfed down some granola bars we’d found in the pantry. Then, we all made one last final check of our backpacks and weapons, and we were ready. All of us, that is, except for our guardian sorceress; O’Shannon had pulled a shallow silver bowl some six inches across from her backpack, filled it with water, and was staring at it intensely while repeating the words “Ostende mihi futurum”. We gathered around her, impatiently wondering what she was doing. Looking through the water at the polished metal, all we saw was her reflection, inverted and made smaller by the bowl’s concave shape.

  “What’s that?” Kowalski asked, but O’Shannon just shook her head and continued chanting.

  I was about to turn away when the water in the bowl turned cloudy. Then, it cleared to reveal the image of a golden eagle flying high over the tundra. The image expanded until all we saw was the eagle’s eye. The image blurred, changing to show the North Slope as the bird saw it. Everywhere it looked, there were hell holes, their floors dotted with bluish flames. Flying lower, the eagle focused on one pit, which expanded until we could see hundreds of hellhounds racing up its steep sides, and they weren’t alone. Among them, half as tall but just as numerous, were little men, the brownish red color of dried blood, running alongside the hellhounds or riding them as though they were horses. As the image continued to enlarge, we could see they weren’t human. They looked like grotesquely disfigured chimps with stubby legs and monstrously long arms. Like the hellhounds, they had no skin, and we could see their muscles stretching and contracting as they ran. They wore black loincloths and were armed with swords or maces tipped with wickedly long spikes.

  “Imps,” O’Shannon hissed. “Why did they have to send so damned many imps?”

  “Are they worse than the hellhounds?” Bill asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” O’Shannon answered, her expression one of anger and disgust. “Imps are more intelligent and can plan and work together; hellhounds are as dumb as dirt. Although hellhounds can’t turn doorknobs, imps definitely can.”

  “Yes, that’s obviously bad,” Angie replied. “But the way you said imps made it sound like there’s more to it; it sounded personal.”

  “It is. A few years back when I was living in a dry cabin outside Anchorage, six of the little bastards ambushed me while I was fetching firewood.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kowalski interrupted. “I thought you said demons only came through one or two at a time. What were so many imps doing in Anchorage?”

  “Not sure,” O’Shannon answered. “Probably hunting for me. It was unusual to see so many at once. I was so busy fighting the five in front of me that I didn’t notice the sixth one creeping up behind me. Luckily for me, he broke his silence before striking by cursing me for killing his companions; if he had remained quiet, he would definitely have killed me. I spun around to face him just as he swung his sword. I was fast, but he was faster. He managed to slash open the side of my thigh at the same time I bashed in his skull with a length of tree branch I was using as a club. That damned demon dwarf left me with a five-inch scar that reminds me to never ever let imps get behind me again.”

  “Look at that!” Kowalski exclaimed, drawing our eyes back to the metal bowl.

  In addition to the hellhounds and imps, the hole was now disgorging what I can only describe as enormous blood-colored bats, their bodies rivaling those of the hellhounds in size though their huge wings made them appear many times larger. Like the hellhounds, many carried imps as riders as they scattered in all directions. One, unencumbered by a rider and flying higher, headed for the eagle whose vision we were sharing. The eagle fled, twisting and turning to avoid its far larger pursuer. Less than a minute later, the scene in the bowl jerked sharply and disappeared. Once more, the bowl contained only water.

  “What in the hell was that?” Bill asked, giving voice to the question we all were thinking.

  “That was a gargoyle. Devils use them as spies, scouts, and as a way to rapidly move imps over short distances,” O’Shannon answered. “The nasty creatures like to drop down onto your back before you are even aware they are nearby.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “We prepare to fight hellhounds, imps, and gargoyles. The second phase of this war has begun. We need to get the hell off the North Slope and over the Brooks Range before the hell holes start vomiting even worse demons.” She picked up her little bowl, dumped out the water, and shoved it inside her backpack.

  A minute later, we were standing at the door to the passageway between the bunkhouse and office building.

  “Okay Dr. Oswald, you take the lead with me,” O’Shannon said, gesturing for me to join her at the door. “I want your shotgun in front with me. Dr. Menendez, you come next, followed by Mr. Kowalski. Bill can bring up the rear with his rifle. Remember, imps can open doors, so if anyone sees one opening, you damned better let the rest of us know. Once we’re outside, remember to look up for gargoyles.”

  As we lined up, O’Shannon looked at each of us in turn to ensure that we’d heard her and were ready to go. After taking a final look through the small window in the door, she opened it and we stepped into the short passageway.

  We stopped at the door to the office building, and O’Shannon looked in through the window. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean much. Ready? Let’s do this.” She opened the door, and we quietly entered.

  The garage, our immediate goal, was visible through the three windows to our right, and the doorway we planned to use stood just beyond them. But then, the silence was broken by the sounds of blades striking wood and a high-pitched argument spoken in a language of grunts, growls, squeals, and snorts. It was coming from behind us, from one of the private offices or the loading deck where I’d shot the hellhound.

  “What’s that?” Kowalski asked, speaking a little louder than he should have. Bill shushed him, and Kowalski briefly put his hand over his mouth before whispering the word “sorry”.

  O’Shannon turned to Kowalski and answered softly, her voice just loud enough for all of us to hear. “Imps arguing over how to keep the hellhounds from eating all of us and not leaving enough for them.” She pointed to the barricaded door to the loading dock, where the end of a sword poked through a small hole. “They’re using th
eir swords to cut their way in.”

  “How about we make sure they all go hungry?” Angie muttered softly from just behind me. “Let’s get the hell out of here before that hole gets any larger.”

  “Agreed,” O’Shannon said. “Follow me.”

  We passed the windows and gathered at the door leading outside and to the garage that hopefully held our transportation. O’Shannon reached out, but just before her fingers touched the doorknob, it began to turn, slowly and cautiously at first, then rapidly and loudly as an imp on the far side became angry and frustrated at finding the door locked. The turning stopped. A loud clang of metal on metal rang out, and the doorknob shook. The exasperated imp had stuck the doorknob with his sword.

  “So much for stealth,” O’Shannon whispered. “It looks like we are going to have to do this the hard way. Dr. Oswald, I am going to unlock the door and jerk it all the way open. You blast the imp and any other demons you see. I will cast killing curses at anything you miss. Then, we run down the stairs and over to the door in the garage across from us. I will unlock the door, we all rush in, and Mr. Kowalski will slam the door behind us and lock it. Dr. Oswald and I will take care of any demons inside while the rest of you find one or two vehicles and get them started. Then, we open the garage doors and drive over anything that gets in our way. We’ll turn right out of the garage and drive up the middle of the pump station to the North entrance. Once we are on the Dalton, we drive south as far and as fast as we can. Any questions?”

  Kowalski tentatively raised his hand. “What if some of us don’t make it across? What if the garage is empty? Or full of demons?”

  “We do what we must. We protect each other, fight, and improvise. If we have to, we prepare to fight our way to the other building with garage doors just north of us. We do anything and everything we can to ensure that as many of us as possible make it out of here alive. What we don’t do is stop; if we stop, we die.”

  “Oh,” Kowalski said, his face white with fear.

  “Okay,” O’Shannon said, pulling out her amulet and pointing it at the door. “We go on the count of three.”

  I raised my shotgun and aimed it at the door, this time holding it firmly against my shoulder.

  “One. Two. Three!” O’Shannon jerked open the door to reveal two very surprised imps.

  I fired the shotgun, blowing the head off one and badly mangling the other’s face and chest.

  O’Shannon, stepped forward, aimed her amulet down the stairs, and shouted, “Demorior demonia!” A hellhound and another two imps dropped and rolled down the stairs.

  Without waiting for their bodies to hit the ground, we ran down the stairs, jumping over the demons’ bodies or stepping on them, heedless of whether they were dead or merely stunned. A hellhound and its rider charged at us from the left as I raced across the fifty feet separating the office building from the garage. I fired twice more: once to drop a hellhound and its rider, another time to kill one of the imps running to cut us off. After casting in initial curse, O’Shannon ignored the demons, concentrating solely on making it to the door so that she could unlock it. I heard several shots from Angie’s handgun and Bill’s rifle mixed with hellhound howls, imp curses, and the screams of injured and dying demons. We reached the door, and I turned to see Angie and a pair of imps playing tug-of-war with Kowalski as the rope. Aiming around the screaming man, she shot one of the imps in the face while I blew a messy hole in the other’s torso. Several of the pellets peppered Kowalski’s hand; I’d apologize later if we managed to make it inside.

  Suddenly, a hellhound came running out from under the office building. It leaped on Kowalski, biting his left arm just below the elbow. It shook him back and forth as if the man weighed nothing. Kowalski’s forearm ripped off, the butcher knife still held tightly in his hand. As he screamed and fell, Kowalski swung his remaining arm and severed the hellhound’s throat with his meat cleaver. Angie knelt down, and grabbed Kowalski around the waist with his remaining arm held tightly over her shoulders. Then, she grunted, pulled him up to his feet and began dragging him towards the now open door.

  I stood just outside the garage, providing cover, while Bill swung his rifle swiftly from side to side dropping hellhounds and imps, who seemed satisfied to let the hellhounds lead the attack and take the brunt of our fire.

  “Damn it, Dr. Oswald, get in here!” I heard O’Shannon shout from inside the garage.

  That’s when I remembered that I was supposed to be inside, ensuring the building was demon free. I helped Angie pull Kowalski through the door and lay him on the floor. He was in bad shape with bright red arterial blood spurting out the end of his severed arm. His face was chalky white in the dim light, and he was barely conscious. I quickly pulled off my belt, wrapped it several times around his arm just above his elbow, and tightened it until the blood flow eased to a trickle.

  “You have to take over from here,” I told Angie. I stood up and started scanning the single room that ran the length and width of the building. I noticed a firetruck, a pickup, and an SUV parked behind three of the six garage doors. The back wall of the building was taken up by workbenches and a storage area partitioned off by chain link walls and doors. Once broken, a row of windows above the workbenches would provide access points easily big enough for imps to crawl through.

  The rifle fire ceased as Bill backed in through the open door and slammed it shut behind him. A long thin red forearm was stuck between the door and door jam, and its owner howled in agony as Bill put his shoulder against the door and pushed with all his might. The arm broke with a loud snap as the door closed. Held by a slender strip of mangled muscle, the end of the imp’s arm twitched, then hung limply, dripping black blood on the garage’s concrete floor. The imp screamed as he yanked backward, attempting to free itself. The crushed strip of flesh parted, and the severed arm fell and landed on the floor, lying in a small spreading puddle of blackish blood.

  Bill had no sooner locked the door than it shuddered with a loud crash that reverberated through the largely empty building. The handle rattled as the imps tried to get inside. They howled and shouted curses of rage as they realized their prey were temporarily out of reach.

  Bill’s shirt and pants were ripped, and he was bleeding from several scratches and a long gash down his left forearm. While reloading his rifle, Bill looked down at Angie. She’d ripped off a sleeve of her shirt and held the blood-soaked wad of cloth against the stub of Kowalski’s severed arm.

  “Everyone get in and quick,” O’Shannon called through the open window of a Jeep Grand Cherokee near the north end of the building.

  “Kowalski’s been injured,” Angie yelled back. “A hellhound bit him and ripped off part of his arm.”

  “Leave him,” O’Shannon shouted. “If he is not dead yet, he soon will be. Hellhound venom is inevitably fatal unless the one bitten immediately receives the antidote, which I do not have. Even if I had all the ingredients, which I do not, it would take far too long to brew.”

  We all looked down at Kowalski, who wasn’t breathing and stared up at us with unseeing eyes. I reached down and gently pulled up my wife. The sound of shattering glass at the back of the building made our decision for us. Imps shouted curses as they poured through the broken windows, heedless of the razor-sharp shards of broken glass lining the window frames. I opened the SUV’s back door on the passenger side and shoved Angie inside. I turned to open the garage door, but Bill had beaten me to it.

  “Get in,” he ordered. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  I ran around to the driver’s door, yanked it open, and threw myself in. As I passed my shotgun over to O’Shannon, it dawned on me that she was sitting in the front passenger seat when she should have been sitting where I was with the car already started. “Why aren’t you driving?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t drive and cast spells at the same time,” she explained, turning around and handing my shotgun back to Angie. Her tone was that of an exasperated parent explaining the
obvious to a particularly slow and annoying child.

  I slammed my car door shut and had just realized I didn’t have the keys when O’Shannon pointed her amulet at the front of the car and shouted “Vigilaveris!” The engine started. Bill yanked up on the garage door handle with his left hand and used the rifle in his right to fire at the imps racing across the garage. He made it into the seat behind me, and the imps were upon us, their swords and maces striking the car doors.

  I floored it. With tires squealing on the concrete floor of the garage, the car sped outside. We heard several satisfying crunches as we bounced over hellhounds and imps, sending others flying like pins from a bowling ball. I turned right and raced a hundred yards north between buildings, the purpose of which I hadn’t a clue. Just before the end of the pump station, I yanked the wheel to the left and sped towards the exit, sending dust and gravel flying in our wake.

  A horizontal bar stretched across the driveway, blocking our path to the highway. I skidded to a stop, missing it by inches.

  Bill put down his rifle and grabbed his handgun from Angie. “I’ll get it,” he said, jumping out of the car before anyone had a chance to offer joining him to stand guard. He had to shoot the padlock three times before it opened. He raised the bar. Turning back, he looked up, shock and fear emblazoned upon his face. Less than a heartbeat later, a gargoyle the size of a lion dropped from the sky. It plowed into Bill, knocking him onto his back, and sat heavily on his body. The demon dug the long talons of its front feet into Bill’s chest as the former ranger stiff-armed the demon’s neck with one hand and brought the handgun up with the other. He fired twice in quick succession. The gargoyle screamed in pain and anger as the bullets broke its left wing and burrowed into its side. Still very much alive, the demon strove to sink its jaws into Bill’s neck. I thought he might manage to shoot it again, but two more gargoyles landed on either side.

  “Go, God damn it,” he cried. “Drive!” One of the gargoyles bit into his abdomen, ripping him open from groin to sternum. Then the other bit into his neck, abruptly ending his tortured scream.

  I was furious at the flying fiends. Wanting nothing more than to blow them all back to hell, I was about to demand that Angie give me my shotgun when she screamed. Yet another gargoyle had landed right outside her door. It looked hungrily at her and smiled, revealing a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth the length and diameter of my little fingers. It raised a massive paw up to her window. Its sharp talons left long scratches in the glass as it lowered it paw towards the door handle. I’d left the doors unlocked so Bill could get back in after opening the gate!

  “Lock the door!” I yelled, as I searched for the unfamiliar car’s door lock button.

  With a loud crash, the SUV’s roof buckled downward to where it nearly touched the top of my head. Then with the sound of ripping metal, four black claws, razor sharp and the size of my thumbs, punched through. I looked to my right and saw the curved claws pulling backwards as the metal began to tear. A fifth gargoyle had landed on the roof!

  O’Shannon yelled, “Go!”

  I stomped on the gas pedal, and the car sent twin rooster tails of gravel flying behind us. We skidded sideways as the SUV fishtailed from the driveway onto the Dalton Highway heading south. The gargoyle on the roof screamed with rage and frustration as it fell off the roof. Its scream cut off abruptly as it hit the hard pavement and rolled to a stop, its ripped and broken wings wrapped tightly around its hideous body.

  “Can you see any more of those damned hell bats?” I demanded as I accelerated the SUV to 70. Although it took all of my concentration to keep the car from plunging off the road’s slender shoulders onto the tundra, I couldn’t help repeatedly glancing up at the leaden sky. A southwest wind had blown the smoke away and with it the stench of sulfur. The air beneath the clouds was clear, providing excellent visibility for spotting any formations of flying gargoyles.

  I was still doing twenty over the Dalton’s 50 mph speed limit when the pavement abruptly gave way to gravel some ten miles down the road.

  “Christ!” Angie cursed as I applied the brakes as hard as I dared. “Jack, slow down! It won’t do us any good to outrun the demons if you end up killing us by running off the road and crashing.”

  “Okay, okay,” I replied as we roughly bounced over potholes and rows of washboard ruts. The violent vibrations snapped my teeth together and threatened to shake out my fillings. “How fast can gargoyles fly?” I asked as we slowed to just a little above the speed limit. I was worried that the slower speed made us vulnerable to attack from the air.

  “I’m not sure,” O’Shannon replied. She glanced over at the speedometer. “We may be okay. I suppose it depends on how serious they are at catching up with us.”

  “Watch out,” Angie warned, pointing past my shoulder and out the windshield.

  There was a car on its side next to the road. I slowed to a crawl as we drove by, but the blood smears down the roof ending in bits of bone and gore on the ground made it clear that there were no survivors.

  “There’s another one,” Angie said before we were even a mile past the first wreck. This time, it was a big rig that had run off the road. Its driver’s door had been ripped off and more blood was all that was left of its occupant.

  Over the next few miles, we passed several more wrecks and abandoned vehicles. It was so depressing that after a while, we drove past as fast as I dared, our eyes anywhere but on the bloody carnage.

  As we continued farther south, I began to spend more and more time looking at the sky and across the endless expanse of tundra. Where in hell were the demons? Had we really made it far enough south to be ahead of their army of hellhounds, imps, and gargoyles?

  “Look out!” Angie shouted, yanking my attention back to the road. She was pointing out the front windshield.

  It’s hard to estimate distances on the flat featureless tundra, and a distant smudge on the horizon had somehow transformed into two wrecked cars blocking the entire road only a hundred yards in front of us. “Damn it,” I cursed as I stomped on the brakes, bracing for a crash. At the last second, I yanked the steering wheel to the right. The SUV left the road and bounced across the tundra for another fifty feet before stopping.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked, my head hurting like hell from banging repeatedly against the car’s dented-in roof.

  “I’m fine, but you scared the hell out of me,” my wife said angrily. “You need to keep your mind on your damned driving and let us worry about the demons.”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, trying to ignore the pain spreading down my neck and wondering whether I’d given myself a concussion. “I guess I forgot just how fast we were going.” Hoping to steer the conversation away from my driving, I looked over my shoulder at O’Shannon and asked, “How ‘bout you?”

  “Okay, I think,” she answered. “A little shaken, but fine.”

  Suddenly, an unexpected knocking on my window startled me. I looked out to see a man in his mid-forties. His shirt ripped and splattered with blood, he was cradling his right arm with his left.

  “Please,” he begged. “You got to help me! We have to get out of here before…” He paused and looked up, searching the sky. “…before any more of them damned things show up.”

  “Get in,” I said, nodding my head at the back door and the empty seat behind me.

  He wasted no time. “Thanks, mister. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along. Those things will rip you apart if they get their claws in you.”

  “What happened?” I asked, pointing at the wreckage blocking the road. “Anyone else survive?”

  “Nope, they’re all dead.” He answered. “The other car was trying to pass me when one of them creatures landed on my hood. Scared the hell out of me. I swerved and hit the other car. The next thing I know, we’ve crashed and are rolling sideways down the road. The only good news is I managed to roll my car over that tiger/bat thing. I crushed the sucker good.”

  I put
the car in drive and slowly drove off the soft tundra, climbing up the steep shoulder and back onto the raised bed of the Dalton. “We’re heading south for Fairbanks,” I said as I floored the gas pedal. “You’re welcome to ride with us. The way I look at it, there’s safety in numbers, and we need to work together if we’re going to make it out of this alive.”

  The speedometer was just passing 50 when I detected the faint stench of sulfur coming from the seat behind me…

  The End

  Other Books by Donald Firesmith

  Fiction

  Hell Holes 2: Demons on the Dalton

  Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore

  Nonfiction

  Common Testing Pitfalls and Ways to Prevent and Mitigate Them

  The Method Framework for Engineering System Architectures

  The OPEN Process Framework

  The OPEN Modeling Language (OML) Reference Manual

  Documenting a Complete Java Application using OPEN

  Dictionary of Object Technology

  Object Oriented Analysis and Logical Design

  THe Team

  Dr. Jack Oswald is a petroleum geologist who teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). During the short Alaskan summer, he conducts field research and consults for the oil companies, one of which has hired him to lead an expedition to the North Slope to study huge holes that have mysteriously opened up near the Arctic Sea. Dr. Oswald bears witness to Armageddon in Hell Holes 1, What Lurks Below, the first book in the Hell Holes series

  Dr. Angela Menendez is a noted climatologist who teaches at the UAF. Her research concentrates on the climatological impact of methane produced by melting permafrost and marine deposits of methane hydrate. In addition to being a highly-respected teacher and oft-cited research scientist, Angie is a fierce environmentalist. Dr. Oswald’s wife, she bears witness to Armageddon in Hell Holes: Demons on the Dalton, the second book in the Hell Holes series.

  Mark Starr is a UAF geology graduate student working on his doctorate by studying climate-related changes in Alaskan glaciers. He helps Dr. Oswald, his doctoral advisor, perform research and maintains the team’s equipment. Tall, athletic, and ruggedly handsome, he would not look out of place on a movie set with his tousled brown hair and beard trimmed so short it always looked like he’d only started growing it the week before. Instead, he is turning out to be a fine glaciologist and geologist, a man who was as at home crossing a crevasse as he was working in the laboratory.

  Jill Starr is also one of Dr. Oswald’s geology graduate students working on her master’s degree. Mark Starr’s wife, Jill often joins Mark and Dr. Oswald during summer fieldwork. Tall, slender, and two years younger than her husband, Jill is intrigued by all things permafrost, the subsurface layer of ground that has remained frozen since the last ice age. More specifically, she is fascinated by changes in the permafrost caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic due to climate change.

  Kevin Kowalski is a mid-level manager for ExxonMobil, who hires Dr. Oswald to put together a team to study the mysterious holes and thereby determine the degree to which the mysterious holes threaten oil company operations in Alaska’s North Slope.

  Bill Henderson is a wildlife biologist, who works part time for ExxonMobil, typically as a consultant developing environmental impact statements. Kowalski hires Henderson, an avid hunter and outdoorsman, to protect the team from dangerous wild animals such as polar bears, grizzlies, and wolves.

  Aileen O’Shannon is a photojournalist with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, who finagles her way into the research expedition as the team’s photographer. Born in Ireland during the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, Curatrix Maxima O’Shannon is actually a ranking member of the military arm of the Tutores Contra Infernum, the ancient secret order of sorcerers and sorceresses dedicated to the use of magic to defend humanity from demons. She bears witness to Armageddon in Hell Holes: To Hell and Back, the third book in the Hell Holes series.

  The Demons

  Coming from another world that we have historically called Hell, demons are vile and vicious creatures that are intent on conquering our planet and enslaving humanity. Hideous and terrifying, they are carnivores with large sharp teeth that will attack, kill, and eat people, animals, and occasionally even other demons. They are hairless with moist transparent skin that exposes their underlying muscles, cartilage, and bones as well as the dark purple veins and arteries that carry blood the color and consistency of crude oil. Having almost no body fat, demons are always hungry and must eat regularly or risk starving. Their large yellow eyes have horizontal goat-like pupils, and their retinas are reflective, making them appear to glow like crimson coals in the dark. Their breath and blood have the unmistakable stench of sulfur.

  Demons are also supernatural creatures of dark magic. They are impervious to fire and possess the ability to heal most injuries in at most a minute or two. These regenerative powers make demons very difficult to kill. The most effective ways of destroying them are gunshot to the head, decapitation, and extensive injuries that overwhelm their regenerative powers.

  Low Demons

  Low demons are the beasts of Hell and roughly have the intelligence of a dog. They can be controlled by high demons such as devils.

  Hellhounds look somewhat like exceedingly well-muscled, naked wolves. They are gigantic, with alpha males weighing some 250 pounds. Standing on all four legs, their shoulders reach up to a person’s chest, enabling them to look people in the eye. They are venomous with long fangs that reach down past their jaws of their massive heads. The long razer-sharp claws on their massive paws are retractable like those of a cat.

  Gargoyles look like a nightmarish cross between a black panther and an enormous bat. They have long fangs and talon-like claws on their front and back paws. With leathery wings that are twice as long as a man is tall, they can fly and even carry an imp rider for short distances. When not flying, gargoyles may appear clumsy due to their large wing span. They prefer to attack from the air.

  High Demons

  High Demons are the humanoid rulers of Hell, malicious and devious. They have four fingers on each hand and cloven hooves.

  Devils are the roughly the same size as people. The apex predator of Hell, devils are the most dangerous of all demons. They have multiple rows of sharp shark-like teeth, and their hands have retractable claws. They are highly intelligent and cunning. Devils can be hard to identify because they have the magical ability to glamour people so that they appear to be human.

  Imps are roughly two and a half feet high, with grotesquely small skulls and flat faces and unnaturally long arms. They are roughly as intelligent as a six-year-old child, if that child were a hyperactive, self-centered psychopath who would rather torture and eat small puppies than pet them. Armed with simple swords and spiked maces, they move in large, disorganized troops.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska Fairbanks for generously sharing his expertise regarding North Slope permafrost and geology with me. Google maps, both satellite and street views, were highly useful in locating the hell hole and getting an outside view of Pump Station 2. I would like to thank my two editors, Heidi Brayer and Paul Smith, who greatly improved the quality of the book. I would also like to thank those who read early drafts of the manuscript including James Edmondson, Caitlin Leigh Halvorson, Terry Ireland, Suzanne Miller, Adam Spieth, Rebekah Stephenson, Dr. Joyce Tokar, Terry Tyler, and A. J. Watson, as well as my wife Becky, and my son Dane. A special thank you goes to my readers who have taken the time to leave reviews, especially Gordon A. Long and Terry Tyler who provide constructive criticism that caused me to make changes. Finally, I would like to thank movie producer Michael Chamoy, not only for acquiring the shopping rights to my Hell Holes trilogy with the goal of turning it into a major science fiction feature film, but also for suggesting two significant improvements for the script that I also incorporated into new editions of
the books.

  Dedication

  For my wife, Becky, who has suffered as a book widow through the many hours I spent writing and rewriting this book.

  The Siberian Holes

  The idea for this book series came to me when I first heard of the discovery in mid-July of 2014 of several large mysterious holes in the permafrost of the Yamal Peninsula in Northern Siberia. By the summer of 2015, scientists and local residents had identified some 20 to 30 such holes. The holes are mysterious because of their large size (50-100 feet in diameter and up to 230 feet deep), their cylindrical shapes with nearly vertical walls, their existence in frozen ground (permafrost), and the fact that the contents of the holes is nowhere to be found. As in the books, scientists have measured high levels of methane gas in the holes.

  As of the summer of 2015, there was no scientific consensus as to their cause. Scientific explanations have ranged from the explosive release of methane from buried methane hydrate ice to the melting of pingos (i.e., large dirt-covered lens of ice) due to rising temperatures from global climate change. Other less-believable proposed explanations have included meteor strikes and alien excavations. The currently best, if still unsatisfying, scientific explanation appears to be that as warming temperatures melt the ice in pingos, the pressure on the underlying methane hydrate ice decreases, causing methane explosions that blow out the soil that once topped the pingos. The holes are essentially the voids left behind once the pingo’s ice has melted.

  I began to wonder. What would happen if thousands of these holes simultaneously appeared around the entire Arctic instead of just in Siberia? What would happen if these holes were even larger than the initial ones in Siberia? What if there really was an “alien” connection with the holes? My son Isaac was attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the time, so it was natural to pick Alaska as the location for the book and his university as its starting point.

  Every summer, more holes are discovered, and I sometimes wonder if something other than methane will someday emerge from them.

  About The Author

  A geek by day, Donald Firesmith works as a system and software engineer helping the US Government acquire large, complex software-intensive systems. Named as a distinguished engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery, he has authored seven technical books, written numerous software- and system-related articles and papers, and spoken at more conferences than he can possibly remember.

  By night and on weekends, his alter ego writes modern paranormal fantasy, apocalyptic science fiction, action and adventure novels and relaxes by handcrafting magic wands from various magical woods and mystical gemstones. His first published foray into fiction is the book Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore written under the pen name Wolfrick Ignatius Feuerschmied. He lives in Crafton, Pennsylvania with his wife Becky, and his son Dane.

  You can learn more about the author by visiting his author website https://donaldfiresmith.com.

  His magical wands and autographed copies of his wand lore book are available from the Firesmith’s Wand Shoppe, which is on the Internet at: https://magicalwandshoppe.com.

  Thank You

  Thank you for purchasing and reading Hell Holes: What Lurks Below, the first book in my Hell Hole series. I hope you enjoyed it and are looking forward to reading book 2, Hell Holes: Demons on the Dalton.

  The success of all books, but especially books by new indie authors, greatly depends on their readers. Potential new readers are unlikely to become aware of, let alone purchase, books without book reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. If you liked this book, then please help others enjoy it too by recommending it to your friends, both directly and via social media, and by taking a few minutes to post an review on your favorite e-bookstore.

  If you post a review of the book, please email me at donfiresmith@gmail.com with a link to your review, and to show my appreciation I’ll send you a coupon for a free ebook copy of the second book in the series.