

Hell Holes 1 :

What Lurks Below

Donald Firesmith
Hell Holes 1: What Lurks Below

By Donald Firesmith

Copyright 2015-2020 by Donald G. Firesmith

Fifth Edition: May 2017

10 9 8 7 6

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters and events in this work are figments of the author's imagination.

1. Science Fiction 2. Paranormal 3. Fantasy 4. Apocalyptic

5. Action-Adventure

You may purchase autographed books by contacting the author via:

Magical Wand Press

20 Bradford Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15205

http://donaldfiresmith.com

This book is typeset in Times New Roman and Mortis.

Cover design and layout by Ellie Kay Bockert Augsburger of Creative Digital Studios

Editing by Heidi Brayer and Paul Smith of Wise Gray Owl

Interior design by Donald G. Firesmith
Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: An Unexpected Phone Call

Chapter 2: Into the Pit

Chapter 3: Hell Day

Chapter 4: Escape from Pump Station 2

Other Books by Donald Firesmith

The Team

The Demons

Acknowledgements

Dedication

The Siberian Holes

About the Author

Thank You

Praise for Hell Holes

"I couldn't put this book down! I started it just after breakfast and finished it around eleven that same night! I loved the way Mr. Firesmith combined science and a bit of paranormal to tell his story. James Rollins watch out!"

Lori Beasley Bradley, author of _The Legend of the Swamp Witch_ and _The Ruby Queen: Book 1 of The Soiled Dove Sagas_

"I really really loved it. It flowed so well, I was never bored. Overall a fast and exciting read that I would recommend to all fantasy and sci-fi readers."

Aoife Marie Sheridan, author of _The Eden Forest_ and _Hunters_

"Amazing story! I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I couldn't put it down."

Renee Scattergood, author of _Shadow Stalker_ , _The Dream Crypt_ , and _Demon Hunt_

"This book was a fantastic read. I like any story that I can envision being a movie or TV show. Aileen O'Shannon is an interesting character, who has a very intriguing past that I hope to learn more about in the next installment. I recommend this book to anyone."

Michelle E. Lowe, author of _Legacy_ , _Legacy: The Reunion_ , and _The Warning_

"What a great read!!!"

G. M. Sherwin, author of _Immortalis_ and _The Lazarus Gene_

"Your book is excellent. As for the ending,... it leaves the reader wanting/needing more. I'd absolutely love to read more..."

Patty Beaty, coauthor of _Sunshine in the South_

"I enjoyed my time in Firesmith's world. I did not want to leave. I really got a kick out of it, and would happily come back for more. Recommended."

MJ Kobernus, author of _The Guardian: Blood in the Sand_ and _The Guardian: Blood in the Snow_

"This book rocks."

Barton Paul Levenson, author of _The Celebate Succubus_ and _Dark Gods of Alter Telluria_

"A quick, enjoyable read. Full of action and fraught with danger"

Dave Robertson, author of _Strange Hunting_ , _Strange Hunting II_ , and _The Ultimate Guide to Zombies_

"The book is an easy and quick read and an action-filled one that you'll imagine as a TV series or a movie with no difficulty."

Olga Núñez Miret, author of _Escaping Psychiatry_

"That was amazing! I greatly enjoyed reading this book and cannot wait to find out what happens next."

Samantha C. Fischer, author of _Love and Self Discovery_
Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) Data

Name: Firesmith, Donald.

Title: Hell Holes: What Lurks Below / by Donald Firesmith.

Description: Fifth edition. | Pittsburgh : Magical Wand Press, 2020. | Series: Hell Holes, Volume 1.

Summary: An oil company sends team of scientists to investigate huge holes that mysteriously appear in the tundra of the Alaskan North Slope. | Audience: Adult. | Language: English

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-31043-121-0 (ebooks - Smashwords).

Subjects: BISAC: Fiction / Action & Adventure. | Fiction / Fantasy /Paranormal. | Fiction / Science Fiction / General. | LCSH: American–Fantasy–Fiction. | American–Paranormal–Fiction. | American–Science Fiction–Fiction. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Fantasy fiction. | Science fiction.

Classification: DDC 813.62 F57h 2016
Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: An Unexpected Phone Call

Chapter 2: Into the Pit

Chapter 3: Hell Day

Chapter 4: Escape from Pump Station 2

Other Books by Donald Firesmith

The Team

The Demons

Acknowledgements

Dedication

The Siberian Holes

About the Author

Thank You

Preface

Though the sun had finally dipped behind the rounded mountains of the Brooks Range, the temperature remained well above freezing, leaving the ground moist from the morning's rains. It was quiet except for the soft sound of the breeze blowing through the short shrubs and sedges that covered the tundra of the North Slope.

An arctic fox silently patrolled his territory. He sniffed the ground, following the scent of a female that had passed by earlier that evening. She had brushed against a bearberry bush, and he stopped to breathe in her enticing smell. She was in heat, and he hoped to father her second litter of the season.

Though the fox occasionally heard the distant rumble of big rigs driving north along the Dalton, carrying supplies to Deadhorse and the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay, he paid them no mind. The humans were several miles away, and unlike wolves and wolverines, they posed no threat.

The fox abruptly stopped, turning his head to the side in puzzlement. He heard a faint hum that seemed to come from the ground below him. It was a new sound, one that he had not heard before. It rapidly increased in volume until it became a piercing, high-pitched whine, far beyond the dull hearing of the humans in their trucks. In agony, the fox rolled on the ground, desperately pawing at his ears in a vain attempt to stop the pain. He yipped and whined, adding his voice to the faraway howling of wolves.

The sound suddenly stopped, replaced by a deep rumble as the ground beneath the fox began to shake. Slowly, foot by foot, a huge circle of tundra the size of a large pond began to push itself above the surrounding tundra. Carrying the fox upward, it rose until it reached the height of a caribou's antlers. Along its circular boundary, loose wet dirt and ragged patches of plants fell off, forming a ring-shaped pile that surrounded the rising ground.

With a sharp jerk, the massive cylindrical plug of earth underneath the fox stopped rising and began sliding downward. No longer incapacitated by pain, the terrified fox sped across the quivering ground, running for his life as the plug continued its unrelenting collapse. He ran toward the edge, arriving just as the ground beneath him slipped below the short ring of loose and muddy soil that marked its circumference. With a desperate leap, the fox jumped up, landing on the ring's slippery slope as the ground continued its collapse into the rapidly deepening crater. He slipped, sliding perilously backwards before desperately pawing his way back up and over the top. Once down on the solid ground surrounding the huge hole, he ran away as if he were chased by a pack of starving wolves.

The frightened fox was several hundred yards from the hole when the rumbling stopped. Still running for his life, he did not see the brilliant blue burst of light that shot skyward out of the huge crater. But he did see dozens of similar blue beams briefly light up the northern horizon. As suddenly as they appeared, the lights winked out. The fox did not stop until he had placed several miles between himself and the pit. Silence returned to the North Slope, while the scent of sulfur and decay filled the air above the newly formed hell holes.

Chapter 1

An Unexpected Phone Call

My name is Jack Oswald, and before the war, I was a geology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was the first week of August. The hot days of July were over, and chilly nights heralded the beginning of the brief Alaskan autumn. In three short weeks, nearly one thousand students would be swarming the campus, classes would begin, and summer would be officially over.

My wife and colleague, Dr. Angela Menendez, two of my grad students – Mark Starr and his wife Jill – and I were in a classroom in the Reichardt Building, a haphazard stack of gray monoliths that sat high on a hill above Fairbanks. The windows along the southern side of the second story classroom provided a breathtaking view of the heavily forested Chena River valley and the Alaska Range that stretched along the entire horizon.

That morning, we were helping Angie prepare to give a short talk at an upcoming TED Conference on the dangers posed by arctic methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. She was presenting a draft of her slides, while Mark, Jill, and I asked questions and made recommendations. While I was intimately familiar with her work, I never tired listening to her clearly and methodically make her arguments and present her evidence as she led her audience to the logical conclusion she herself had reached as a result of her research.

In addition to being a highly-respected teacher and oft-cited research scientist, Angie is a fierce environmentalist. Woe to any climate denier who called climate change a hoax when she was nearby. Why she had ever agreed to marry a petroleum geologist like me is one of life's little mysteries that I've learned not to question over our thirty years together. Whatever the reason, I will always be thankful for my little Latina chili pepper, the spice of my life who makes the best carne asada and cheese enchiladas in all of Alaska.

Two of my favorite grad students, Mark and Jill Starr, had married that June and were as inseparable as Siamese twins. Mark was working on his doctorate researching climate-related changes in Alaskan glaciers. Tall, athletic, and ruggedly handsome, he would not have looked 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 was turning out to be a fine glaciologist and geologist, a man who was as at home crossing a crevasse as he was working in our spectroscopy and advanced instrumentation labs.

Tall, slender, and two years younger than her husband, Jill was intrigued by all things permafrost, the subsurface layer of ground that has remained frozen since the last ice age. More specifically, she was fascinated by changes in the permafrost caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic due to climate change. After finishing her masters in geology, she was planning on following in Mark's footsteps and earning her doctorate. Smart, driven, and intensely curious about everything involving permafrost, she hadn't yet decided on the subject of her doctoral thesis. In June, she wanted to research the rapidly eroding coastline along the Arctic Ocean as the loss of sea ice enabled waves to form and wash away the newly thawed ground. A compassionate young woman, she had great sympathy for the inhabitants of native coastal villages being forced to move inland to avoid being swallowed by the sea. Last month, she wanted to study the loss of boreal forests as the ground beneath them thawed, forming swamps and toppling the trees like so many drunken roughnecks. This month, it was the formation of countless ponds as subsurface ice melted and the ground sunk. Next month, I fully expected her to change her mind yet again. Though technically one of my grad students, Jill's deep interest in global warming had caused her to take nearly as many courses from Angie as she did from me, and it was a toss-up as to which of us would end up being her thesis advisor.

Me? During the school year, I taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in geology and did research in petroleum geology. During the short Alaskan summer, I also did field work and often consulted with the oil companies up on the North Slope. Mostly, my research helped them access more offshore oil from fewer onshore wells, thereby lessening the incentives for drilling in the dangerous Arctic Ocean.

So on that fateful morning, Mark, Jill, and I were listening to Angie give her presentation on the danger posed by methane.

"Methane is the primary constituent of the natural gas we burn to cook our food and heat our homes," Angie said, as she displayed a slide showed the picture of the lit burner of a gas stove. "Colorless, odorless, and highly flammable, methane burns to form carbon dioxide and water vapor."

The slide changed to show a bar graph comparing methane and carbon dioxide. The bar labeled methane dwarfed the much smaller bar labeled CO2. "Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas that causes 86 times more warming than carbon dioxide. Although it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, methane is potentially far more dangerous if it's rapidly released."

Once more, the slide changed to display a graph of how the Earth's average temperature has changed over the course of the last hundred million years. A large red arrow pointed to a sharp bump midway along the graph. "We know that such a catastrophically rapid release is possible because it's happened before. Fifty-five million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, atmospheric methane skyrocketed, and the average global temperature jumped at least 7°F and possibly even as much as 15°F. The polar ice caps melted, sea levels rose hundreds of feet, and equatorial regions became uninhabitable deserts. The impact on the biosphere was horrendous as numerous species were driven into extinction." She paused to let the scale of the disaster sink in.

Angie clicked the remote and the next slide appeared. It showed a cross section of ground with bones, tree roots, and prehistoric stone tools buried amid huge lenses of ice. "Permafrost is far more than mere soil and rock that has been frozen since the last ice age. It also preserves a great deal of frozen plant matter. Over the millennia, windblown dust has buried grasses, shrubs, and trees as well as the frozen remains of animals ranging in size from mammoths to mice. Most people are surprised to learn that there is roughly twice as much carbon stored in arctic soil as there is in the atmosphere. As the arctic has warmed and the permafrost near the surface has melted, microbes have begun to digest this organic matter. Were all of the permafrost to melt, it could release roughly 1.5 _trillion_ metric tons of carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide."

A new slide appeared, displaying what looked like a white chunk of ice. "Another major potential source of methane is methane hydrate, which is nothing more than water ice with large amounts of methane trapped inside its crystalline structure. When the ice melts, the methane is released." The slide change to show the same chunk of methane hydrate, only this time it was on fire. It looked just like a burning chunk of frozen milk.

A new slide displayed a cross section of the earth's crust with white areas buried under both the land and the sea floor. "Great deposits of methane hydrate exist deep under the permafrost as well as in the frigid underwater sediments along the continental margins near the Earth's poles, where the low temperatures and high pressures keep the water frozen and the methane safely trapped. Now, global warming is raising both soil and ocean temperatures, threatening to melt the methane hydrate and release its trapped methane into the atmosphere."

"We in the scientific community are in overwhelming agreement about the grave danger posed by atmospheric methane. What we don't yet know is the tipping point, the point where the temperature of the arctic will produce a runaway positive feedback loop that causes a catastrophic release of methane."

The next slide showed several supercomputers and a screenshot of complex computer code. "Our climate models simply aren't yet able to give us a precise answer. Some models say we can let the Earth's temperature rise a further 7°F while others suggest a maximum rise of only 2°F, a threshold we are already rapidly approaching. The most frightening models are the ones that imply we're already past the point of no return and the tipping point will be reached in the next four to five years."

I tended to trust the more conservative climate models, but Angie was convinced that the pessimistic ones were more accurate. Truth be told, I feared she was right because every time we added missing feedback loops to our climate models, their predictions just got worse.

My phone rang, and Angie paused so that I could take the call. It was from Kevin Kowalski, an ExxonMobil manager for whom I'd occasionally worked as a consultant.

"Dr. Oswald," he said when I answered. "Thank God, I got you. We have a big problem, and I need you up here right away."

"What kind of a problem?" I asked, putting him on speakerphone so the others could hear. "Classes are about to start and I need to..."

"Forget the classes," Kowalski interrupted. "We have a disaster in the making up here. You know those huge holes that opened last year in northern Siberia?"

"Sure," I replied. "They're probably just big sinkholes caused by the melting of subsurface ice or the melting of very large pingos."

"Huh? What's a pingo?" Kowalski asked. To Kowalski, surface features were merely something that made life difficult when drilling wells and piping oil.

"Pingos," I replied, "are large conical hills of ice covered with a relatively thin layer of dirt. Anyway, what about the sinkholes? Are you telling me we've got one up on the North Slope?"

"Damned straight," Kowalski answered angrily. "In the last twenty-four hours, we've spotted over two dozen, and several have opened up near our oil wells. There's one close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline down near Pump Station 2, and I don't have to tell you the hell there'll be to pay if another one opens up under the pipeline. We're facing a financial and environmental disaster, and I need you up in Deadhorse ASAP. How soon can you put a team together? We need to know what's causing them and how likely it is that one will open under our facilities."

I looked questioningly at my wife and students. Angie nodded enthusiastically. Jill said, "Count me in," and Mark added "Me, too."

"Okay, you can have us for a week, two weeks tops, but then we have to be back here so we can finish preparing for classes."

"How soon can you be ready?" Kowalski asked, his tone making it clear he would have preferred to have us up there yesterday.

"We can pack our equipment and a few necessities and be ready to leave in four hours," I answered, looking over at Angie for agreement.

"That works for me too," she said. Mark and Jill briefly looked at each other and then nodded their approval.

I checked my watch. "The drive from the University to Deadhorse is just under 500 miles, and this time of year, it shouldn't take more than 14 hours or so. If we take turns driving and factor in a few short breaks, we could be up there in 20 hours."

Now some of you reading this account might think that 14 hours is one heck of a long time to drive 500 miles, but you don't know the Dalton "Highway." While some of it is paved, the rest is just a bumpy gravel road built to haul heavy oil equipment up to the North Slope. That's why locals simply call it the Haul Road. It also has many steep grades with no guardrails where it goes over the Brooks Range.

"Excellent. I knew I could count on you," Kowalski said. "But forget about driving. I had one of our aircraft take off 20 minutes ago to pick you up. You'll find it waiting for you in front of the western-most hangar on the south side of the Fairbanks Airport."

"You're pretty sure of yourself, sending a plane down without calling me first," I observed, not sure whether to be angry at his presumption that I would drop everything and come or impressed by his efficiency.

"Seemed like a safe bet. What geologist is going to pass up an opportunity to be the first to investigate these holes? I suspect it could have been finals week, and you still would have found some way to come."

"I assume you'll be supplying transportation, provisions, tents, and survival gear as well as someone to ensure the local wildlife keeps its distance." I said. "I don't want to wake up one morning with a hungry grizzly or polar bear in our tent."

"Don't worry. We'll take care of everything," Kowalski continued. "While you're getting ready down there, I'll fly over to Deadhorse and meet you there. My boss has made it crystal clear that this is my one and only priority until we know what we're up against. See you soon." Kowalski hung up, ending the call before I had a chance to say goodbye.

"Well, I guess we'd better go and get ready," I said, putting the phone back in my pocket.

"Hello," Angie said, addressing a strikingly beautiful young woman standing at the doorway. "Can we help you? You're early; the graduate residence, Harwood Hall, doesn't open for another couple of weeks."

In her early-twenties, she had long red hair that matched her dress, a scattering of freckles across her nose, and her emerald eyes were the greenest green I've ever seen. Definitely Irish, I thought to myself.

"Funny," she said with a smile. "It seems to me that my timing is just about perfect."

"Who are you?" I asked, somewhat thrown by her sudden appearance and unexpected remark.

"Aileen O'Shannon," she answered, walking up to me and reaching out to shake my hand. "I'm a photojournalist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner." She looked at the others in the room and asked, "And your colleagues are?"

As if her looking away had broken some spell, I realized that I was still holding her hand and quickly dropped it. "This is my wife, Dr. Angela Menendez, and these are two of my grad students, Mark and Jill Starr." I said, feeling a bit guilty without knowing why. "How can I help you?"

"I'm here to interview you about the holes that appeared up on the North Slope last night," she answered, once again training her green eyes on mine.

"I'm afraid you picked a rather poor time for an interview, Miss O'Shannon," I said, taking a step backwards when I realized how close she was to me. "As you may have overheard, we're leaving for the North Slope. Call my department secretary once school has started, and she'll schedule the interview. By then I should have something to tell you. So if you will excuse us, we have to be leaving now."

"Forget the interview, Dr. Oswald. That won't be necessary now that I am coming with you as your expedition's photographer."

"Now wait a minute, Miss O'Shannon," I said, irritated by her nerve presuming that I'd take a stranger with us up to the North Shore. "I already have my team, and we don't need a photographer."

"Oh, but of course you do, Dr. Oswald," she said with wry amusement. "Every expedition needs a professional photographer. Besides, my experience back during the summer of 2015 will prove useful. Have any of you been to the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia and actually seen the original holes there?" she asked, looking at each of us in turn. "I thought not," she continued when no one immediately answered. "Well, it just so happens that I have. You've probably seen some of my photographs of the holes in Discover Magazine and on the Internet."

Though she may have had a point, I didn't have time to deal with her. "I'll think about it," I said, trying to be as non-committal as I could. I looked at my wife and students. "Angie and Jill, why don't you two go and pack what we'll need while Mark and I crate up the equipment? We'll haul it out to the airport and meet you there."

"Sure thing, honey," Angie said sarcastically, giving me an exaggerated wink. "We women folk would just love to do our womanly chores while our big strong he men impress us with their manly muscles." Jill gave Mark a hug and the reporter a glance that clearly signaled "hands off – he's taken". Then they laughed as they walked arm-in-arm out the door.

Of course, Angie knew I was well aware that she was the athletic one. She may have put on a few pounds over the years, but we both knew she could easily bench press more than I could. And Jill was the outdoor type who wasn't afraid of getting her hands dirty doing fieldwork. I'd actually volunteered Mark and myself to pick up the geology equipment not because we were stronger than our wives but because I knew what I wanted to take and Mark knew how to pack it properly, having accompanied me on previous field trips. Mark was also the team's best engineer when it came to maintaining the equipment and would know the tools to bring in case anything failed in the field.

Out of habit, I stepped over to the chalkboard and erased the diagrams and notes from our discussion. When I turned back, Aileen O'Shannon was gone.

...

Alaska Map with Route to Hell Hole

We arrived outside the designated hangar on the private charter side of the airport within minutes of each other: Angie and Jill in our cars and Mark and I in a university van carrying the ground-penetrating radar, seismometers, portable drill for taking core samples, and the other gear we thought we might need. We pulled up to the open luggage compartment of the executive jet with the red, white, and blue ExxonMobil logo on its side. Mark and I loaded our luggage and equipment, while our wives boarded the plane.

Once everything was stowed, I followed Mark up the short stairs and into the lavish interior of the business jet. Unlike the cramped commuter planes I usually took when flying up to the oil fields, the Embraer Legacy 500 made first class seem like coach. Either the executive funding our study was desperate to get us up there, or this was the only aircraft the company had left to send. Either way, I was happy for the unexpected upgrade.

Unlike typical airliners, the jet's eight large leather seats were organized around four small tables, two on either side of the cabin. Each table separated two seats, one seat facing the back of the airplane and the other facing forward. Angie and Jill were seated in the first row of the plane leaving the second-row seats facing forwards for Mark and me. I'd just sat down opposite my wife when she pointed her finger over my shoulder.

"The photographer's back," Angie said with more than a hint of disapproval.

Following Mark had prevented me from noticing the unexpected extra person seated in the rear of the cabin. With the satisfied smile of a cat having feasted on canary, there sat Aileen O'Shannon. I wondered whether Angie and Jill had selected this particular seating arrangement so they could glare at the weirdly bewitching beauty in the back. Of course, it may have been to keep Mark and me from being tempted to look at her instead of paying proper attention to our wives.

Annoyed by her presumption, I got up and marched straight to the rear of the plane. "I'm sorry, Ms. O'Sullivan, but..."

"Miss O'Shannon," she corrected in a hurt tone exaggerated by a pout. "It's Aileen O'Shannon, as in the song, Oh Shenandoah." She paused and sighed. "Most men do not forget my name." She looked at me with a twinkle in her emerald eyes and smiled. "Either I must be slipping, or you, Dr. Oswald, are not like most men." She glanced down at my reasonably fit, if nonetheless middle-aged, body. "I do like challenges, Dr. Oswald. I wonder. Are you a challenge?"

I admit I must have stood there for a second with my mouth open. Was she actually flirting with me? Like all professors, I've had the occasional female student – some quite pretty – who'd try flirting with me in the vain hope of raising a test score or grade. Somehow, this was different. I felt strange in a way I still find hard to explain. Suddenly, I forgot why I had wanted to talk to her. I forgot the airplane and the mysterious holes. My mind went blank. Without willing them, my eyes gazed down past her perfect nose and lips to where the top two buttons of her shirt lay unbuttoned. Slowly, as if my body had a mind of its own, I leaned forward, overwhelmed by an intense desire to see more.

But then, between the perfect swells of her breasts, I caught sight of a necklace that had lain hidden beneath her shirt. A large red crystalline stone set in a circle of gold hung from a simple golden chain. Looking closer, I could see that it was shot through with minute golden lines.

At first, I thought it might be a form of rutilated quartz, but the longer I looked it, the more I realized that couldn't be right. No quartz had the beautiful deep red color of a flawless ruby, and no ruby was rutilated with tiny needles of titanium oxide.

Though it made no sense, I had the strangest feeling that the stone was faintly luminescent, that it would be glowing brightly if only my eyes were not limited to visible light. It was unlike any stone I had ever seen, and that is what finally snapped me out of my trance. Suddenly, I remembered my beautiful wife and the reason she'd sent me to the back of the plane. I felt my ears burning with embarrassment. I was confused, shocked the young woman's inexplicable effect on me. What the hell had come over me? I took a deep breath and started over again. "Miss O'Shannon, I'm sorry, but I never said you could come along on this trip."

"You are?" she asked coyly. "Oh, my. You never said I could not come." She gave me a stunning smile that I'm sure usually got her everything she'd ever asked for. "I naturally took your silence to signify agreement, so I packed my bag and camera, and here I am. Lucky for you that I did; you wouldn't want to get up there only to realize you needed someone to make a visual record of your discoveries. Besides, I know some of the discoveries the Russians made that they didn't publish."

The co-pilot walked up behind me. "Excuse me, Dr. Oswald. Can you please take your seat now? We're on a very tight schedule, and Mr. Kowalski wants you in Deadhorse as soon as possible."

I looked up front and saw that the cabin door was already closed, and the seat belt signs were on. Before I could answer, the plane began taxiing away from the hangar. Realizing that it was too late to rid ourselves of the reporter, I turned around and walked back to my seat facing Angie.

"I see we still have Miss O'Shannon with us," Angie said with a hint of irritation. "I thought you'd decided we didn't need her."

"I did," I answered as the plane accelerated down the runway. "But the cabin door was already closed, and we were already moving."

"Jack, you're the leader of this study, and this plane wouldn't even be here if it weren't for you. The pilot would have turned around if you'd asked him to."

"You're right," I admitted sheepishly, silently cursing my habit of not questioning authority figures, at least not unless it involved science.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

Suddenly and for no apparent reason, my annoyance with O'Shannon disappeared, and I felt an overpowering desire to keep her with us, with me. I twisted around and looked back at her. She was staring back at me with a knowing smile. God, she looked so mesmerizingly beautiful as her fingers provocatively played with the top button of her shirt. Of course, she should come...

"Jack... Jack!"

I jerked back around, my heart pounding as I felt my face warming. I was blushing from embarrassment and guilt. I was also confused, unsure of what had just happened.

"Jack, I was talking to you, and you just ignored me! What's gotten into you?"

"Uh... Nothing," I lied. _What had gotten into me?_ "I'd ditch her in Deadhorse, but I think she'd just find a way to follow us. And as much as I hate to admit it, I'm beginning to think it's best if she comes along. We're going to be very busy the next couple of weeks, and I'd just as soon not be bothered by having to stop and take pictures of what we find. Who knows? Maybe she does know something interesting that the Russians didn't publish."

"Assuming of course that she's actually been to Siberia and isn't just lying through her teeth to get a free ride up there, not to mention access to the holes and our research," Angie replied. "But I'll put up with her as long as she doesn't get in the way and you keep your eyes on your work."

"Angie, are you jealous?" I asked, surprised at her uncharacteristic reaction.

"Of course not!" she replied. "It's just that there's something strange about her I can't put my finger on. I get the impression that she's hiding something. Besides, she seems like the kind of woman who enjoys wrapping men around her little finger and doesn't care whether they're married or not. You know I totally trust you, but that doesn't mean I want to watch her try to work her magic on you, and I'm sure Jill feels the same about Mark."

Thankfully, Jill interrupted us by reaching over and handing me a large envelope. "The pilot asked me to give you this."

I opened the envelope and pulled out a letter from Kowalski with the job description, a standard consulting contract, a dozen pictures of the holes, a map with their positions labeled on it, initial reports from company geologists, and a thumb drive that I assumed had electronic copies of what he'd provided in the envelope. I spread the pictures out on the table between us so that Angie and I could look at them.

"Look at the size of this hole," she said, pointing to an eight-by-ten photograph that had obviously been taken from the air. "I didn't realize how big it was until I noticed a pair of musk ox standing next to it. It has to be a couple hundred feet across and nearly as deep."

Alternating layers of soil and lenses of ice were plainly visible where sunlight illuminated the top fourth of the hole. The very bottom looked like it might have been covered by water, but it was too dark to tell for sure.

"Where'd all of the earth go?" I asked, completely stumped by the enormous size and strange shape of the crater. Essentially circular with smooth vertical sides, it looked like a giant had taken a huge cookie cutter and dug out a titanic-sized drum of dirt. Also bizarre was the fact that only a tiny amount of loose soil ringed the perimeter of the pit. Whatever it was, it certainly didn't look like a normal sinkhole or the remains of a melted pingo. In fact, I had no idea what I was looking at.

After passing the photos over to Mark and Jill, Angie and I looked at the map. I counted 26 holes running from the National Petroleum Reserve to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and from the Brooks Range to the coast. Most were close to the coastline. Sixteen were in areas with active oil wells, and one hole – a little farther south than the others – was within a few miles of the Trans-Alaska pipeline.

By the time we were done with the photographs and map and had skimmed the preliminary reports from the company geologists, we were just leaving the Brooks Range and beginning our descent into Deadhorse.

The pilot came on the intercom and informed us that we would be flying over two of the holes during the last 10 minutes of our flight. Each time we approached a hole, the pilot put the plane in a sharp bank and flew completely around it in a relatively tight circle. Even though that gave us an excellent view from all sides, the relatively featureless tundra made it impossible to estimate the holes' sizes and the low angle of the sun cast dark shadows that hid their bottoms from view.

Looking at aerial photographs was one thing; actually seeing the holes with our own eyes was something altogether different. It seemed that the more I learned about the holes, the less I understood them. We were not going to discover their cause from the air.

We touched down on the Deadhorse airport's single runway and taxied over to the private hangars used by the different oil companies. Our plane rolled to a stop next to two Range Rovers and a Ford Raptor pickup truck towing a small trailer for our equipment.

Kowalski was waiting next to the vehicles. Short, with thinning brown hair, and the belly of a man who spent his time behind a desk instead of in the field, Kowalski was in his early sixties. In the past, he had always been immaculately dressed in an expensive three-piece suit and tie. Thus, I was only slightly surprised to see that he wasn't properly dressed for fieldwork. Instead, he was wearing business casual: black dress shoes, pressed khakis, and a button-down shirt under his jacket.

On the other hand, I was very surprised to see that Kowalski was smoking a cigarette. He'd had a scare a couple of years previously when doctors found a spot on his chest x-ray. Though the biopsy revealed that the mass was benign, he'd vowed to quit, and he'd been quite proud of himself the previous summer when he told me he hadn't had a smoke in six months.

A much taller man exited one of the Rovers as we stepped off the plane. In contrast, the stranger was perfectly dressed for the wilderness from his weather-beaten hat down to his well-worn boots. He stood six-two and had the rugged build of a former oil roughneck. Younger than Kowalski, he was in his late forties or early fifties and sported a short black beard and mustache.

"Welcome to Deadhorse, Dr. Oswald," Kowalski said as we approached. "This is William Henderson, one of our wildlife biologists. He'll be watching our backs and protecting us from any polar bears, wolves, or other animals that might interfere with your research."

"Dr. Henderson," I said, shaking his hand. His grip was firm but not excessive like those of some oilmen I've met; he had the handshake of a man comfortable in his strength with nothing to prove by squeezing harder than necessary.

"Call me Bill," he replied. "Just a masters, I'm afraid. Could never quite justify the time and expense of going for my doctorate. Besides, I'd rather spend my time outdoors than indoors studying or teaching classes."

"This is my wife, Dr. Angela Menendez," I said, motioning to Angie. "She's our climatologist and will be helping us determine whether the exceptional warming we've been having up here the last couple of years has caused the holes. This is Mark and Jill Starr, two of my grad students. They'll be helping us take measurements and take care of the equipment we brought."

Having given my full attention during our flight to the information Kowalski had provided, I'd managed to forget our fifth wheel who'd sat quietly in the back of the plane during our flight from Fairbanks.

"Hello Mr. Kowalski," she said, stepping forward and extending her hand when she realized I wasn't going to introduce her. "I'm Aileen O'Shannon. I'm here to photograph the holes and make a visual record of our findings while we're in the field." She shook Kowalski's hand, holding it a few seconds longer than necessary and smiled. "I hope you will find some time to tell me all about the important work you do up here."

I'm sure that Kowalski was beginning to blush when O'Shannon turned to our field biologist. "And it is a pleasure to meet you too, Bill," she purred, placing her left hand on top of his right as they shook hands. "I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we all feel safer knowing you are watching our backs."

"Miss, the pleasure is definitely all mine," Bill replied, his expression making it clear that he would be more than happy to watch any part of her.

Angie leaned over. "Care to guess whose back he'll spend the most time watching?" she asked, whispering into my ear.

"Nope," I whispered. "And the way she just hooked and reeled in Kowalski and Bill pretty much settles the matter of her status. We're just going to have to get used to having her with us for the duration."

"Maybe so, but that doesn't mean I have to like it." Angie replied. "Just look at her. Who the hell prepares for a week in the field by having herself made up to look like a model on a fashion magazine photo shoot. No, her story's nothing but a load of bullshit! Her spending time in northern Siberia is about as likely as me being wined and dined by the Koch Brothers."

I glanced over to where Kowalski and Bill were vying for O'Shannon's attention. I hadn't noticed, but now that Angie pointed it out, I realized that our reporter did look more like a supermodel than someone ready to spend a week living out of a tent on the North Slope of Alaska.

Kowalski interrupted my train of thought by saying, "I'm sure we're all anxious to get started. Let's load up, shall we?" I was annoyed to see him casually flick the rest of his cigarette onto the tarmac, where it gave off a thin stream of smoke. It always bugged me how smokers seem to think it's okay to use the world as their ashtray. I nearly said something, but then thought better of it. It doesn't pay to publicly point out the failings of the person providing your paycheck. I waited until Kowalski wasn't looking and then walked over, picked up the now dead butt, and tossed it in a nearby garbage can.

Mark and I transferred our equipment from the plane to the trailer that held the tents and other supplies ExxonMobil had provided, while Angie, Jill, and O'Shannon loaded our luggage and backpacks into the back of the Range Rovers.

"It's almost two," Kowalski noted as he glanced down at his watch. "Did you all have time to grab lunch before you left? Maybe we should have a late lunch here in Deadhorse. That way, you can get right to work once we arrive on site."

"Mark and I grabbed snacks from the vending machine in the geology building," I answered. I looked over at Angie and Jill.

"I had an apple and a yogurt," Angie replied.

"I had some crackers and cheese, but it wasn't much. I wouldn't mind eating again," Jill added.

"Between packing, talking my boss into letting me come, and tying up a few loose ends, I am afraid I completely overlooked lunch." O'Shannon said.

"Okay," Kowalski said. "We'll stop at the Prudhoe Hotel for a quick lunch on our way out of town."

We left the tiny airport, and five minutes later, we pulled into the hotel's parking lot. Once in the restaurant, Angie and Jill steered Mark and me to one table while Bill and Kowalski happily sat with O'Shannon at another. As we were finishing our meals, my wife noticed the reporter get up and put on her coat.

"I wonder where she's going," Angie said as the photojournalist walked past our table on her way to the door.

A few minutes later, we let Kowalski pay the bill and headed outside. O'Shannon was standing by our vehicles, talking on the phone.

" _Debeo abire nunc. Et veniunt. Et loquar ad te postea. Vale_ ," she said, quickly ending the call and putting her phone back into her purse.

"Italian?" Angie asked. "Our photographer is full of surprises."

"Latin," O'Shannon corrected, having overheard my wife's comment. "One of my younger brothers recently moved to Rome to complete his training. He says practicing with me is helping him master the language."

"Oh, your brother's studying for the priesthood." Kowalski inferred. "That's wonderful. My uncle was a priest at Saint Raphael in Fairbanks before he retired. Perhaps you knew him."

"No, I am afraid not," O'Shannon answered. "I have not attended mass since I was a child. Fortunately for my brother, however, I have never forgotten the Latin I learned in school."

I wondered how her younger brother ended up a priest given her family had apparently left the Church when she was so young. I sensed there was an interesting story there. However, she turned, climbed into the Raptor, and shut the door, putting an end to the conversation.

Five minutes later, we were caravanning south down the Dalton Highway. We were heading towards a large hole that had appeared uncomfortably close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which carried North Slope crude to the Valdez Marine Terminal where it was loaded onto giant tankers for transport around the world. I led the way with Angie and Kowalski in the first Rover. Mark and Jill followed in the second Rover, and our biologist and reporter brought up the rear in the Raptor.

The fifty-six-mile drive was uneventful except for the large trucks that occasionally barreled past us going in the opposite direction on the narrow two-lane highway. Dotted with ponds and small lakes, the tundra was a beautiful green in late summer. We occasionally saw isolated musk ox or a lone caribou in the distance or crossing the road. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline paralleled the highway some distance away on our left. Typically raised eight feet above the ground on its vertical supports to prevent it from melting the permafrost, the pipeline was high enough for the caribou to cross under. Just past the pipeline, the Sagavanirktok River, or the Sag as everyone called it, ran north to the Arctic Ocean.

Fifty miles south of Deadhorse, we passed Pump Station 2, an unmanned complex of ten buildings, a huge satellite disk, and a large oil storage tank. One of 11 such stations along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, it had once helped pump oil south to Valdez. No longer needed, it was mothballed and placed on standby status in case it might someday be needed again. Kowalski remarked that it had the last indoor toilet along the highway this side of the Brooks Range. Just past the pump station, the road bent to the southwest, away from the pipeline and the river.

Four miles further down the road, we came to the spot where the Dalton Highway came closest to the hole that was our first destination.

"You can pull off here," Kowalski said, looking at his GPS receiver. "The hole is about one and three-quarters miles northwest of us."

"Where?" I asked, slowing down to look for an access road to take us to our destination.

"Right here."

I put on my turn signal to warn the others, slowed, and pulled off the side of the elevated road. I inched forward onto the marshy tundra as far as I dared to avoid rocks thrown up by the big rigs that would be barreling past while we were gone. "How far did you say it was to the hole? Some of our equipment is kind of heavy; I wasn't planning on having to lug it cross country."

"Sorry," Kowalski apologized. "I was originally hoping to get one of our helicopters, but they're all being used looking for more holes and checking the pipelines for damages. That's why I chose this one; it's the closest hole to a road. And don't worry about the regulations against driving across the tundra before it's frozen. The company will pay any fines. Just drive nice and slow, and stick to the highest ground you can so we don't get stuck. Otherwise, we really will end up having to carry your equipment. Either that, or do without."

I put our SUV into four-wheel and carefully drove out onto the tundra. Our off-road vehicles had no trouble driving over the gently rolling ground, though it was touch and go crossing two tiny streams that flowed north to the Arctic Ocean. Sinking several inches into the soft, wet soil of the streambeds, the cars left muddy ruts that marked our passage towards the giant pit.

Ten minutes later, we came over the top of a gentle rise and saw it, a huge hole that seemed totally alien and out of place in the featureless tundra. After driving around the hole, I found a slightly-elevated dry spot and parked our car next to where we would make camp. The hole was seventy yards away to the northwest: close enough to walk to with our equipment but far enough to avoid the risk of the weight of the cars causing the side of the hole to collapse.

Once we'd stepped outside our vehicles, Bill handed out the compulsory cans of insect repellent. "Better put this on," he said. "Although it's mid-August, and the mosquitoes don't swarm much after the end of July, there are still more than a few of the little vampires that would happily suck us dry, not to mention all the black flies that love taking little nips out of any exposed skin."

"Bill, would you be a dear and please spray me where I can't reach," O'Shannon asked. She turned her back to him and used both hands to lift her long, fiery curls from her neck.

"It would be my pleasure," he replied. Given the time he allocated to the task, it seemed clear he believed the mosquitoes and flies would be particularly attracted to her.

Scowling at O'Shannon's obvious manipulation of Bill, Jill handed Mark her can of repellant. "Spray my back," she ordered and turned around. Taking the hint, I quickly offered to spray Angie and then made a point of not looking at O'Shannon while my wife returned the favor.

Once protected from attack by Alaska's famed flying bloodsuckers, we walked over to the hole to get a better look. It was much bigger than I'd expected, roughly 100 yards in diameter and over 200 feet deep. That made it roughly the same diameter as the largest of the Siberian holes, but at least two to three times deeper. The exact measurements would have to wait until we unpacked our surveying equipment.

An uneven ring of loose dirt, as high as my waist and twice as wide, surrounded the pit. Just inside this circular mound of muddy earth, the top few feet of ground had thawed, loosened, and slid into the hole, producing an incline of 45 degrees before angling straight down to the bottom

The thawed layer above the permafrost was primarily silt saturated with the water from the frequent summer rains. Seepage had washed tiny gullies into the soft dirt, forming thin streams that ran down the walls. Farther down, the smooth sides of the pit remained frozen, kept that way by the dense cold air trapped in the hole.

"Damn," Mark said, inching his way closer to the ring of dirt for a better look. "That is one big hole." He was just about to step onto the encircling ring of loose dirt when Jill yelled, "Stop! Mark Starr, don't you dare get any closer until you're in a climbing harness that's properly roped to the winch."

"Okay, Jill," he answered sheepishly. "But Baby, you've got to come up here and see this." He waved her forward, and she slowly advanced until she stood next to him. Mark put an arm protectively around her waist.

The rest of us carefully crept closer until we stood in a row parallel to the edge.

"Doc, have you ever seen anything like this?" Jill asked with a nervous tremor in her voice. "The photographs of the Siberian holes don't do it justice."

Our reporter-turned-photographer grimaced at the unintended slight of her work as she raised her camera and began taking pictures.

"I don't see how global warming could have caused this," Jill continued, pointing to the side of the hole where tiny crystals of ice sparkled in the slanting rays of the setting sun. "Even though the top couple of yards have thawed, and that's about four times deeper than it should be this far north, the rest of the hole is clearly frozen all the way down to the bottom."

"Is the permafrost layer usually this deep?" Bill asked. "I thought it would only be frozen 50 feet down or so."

"It varies depending on how far north you are," Jill replied, naturally taking on her role as teaching assistant. "Down in Fairbanks, the ground's actually frozen down to about 150 feet. It's about a fourth of a mile deep where we're standing, and up at Prudhoe Bay it reaches down some 2,000 feet below the surface."

"That's got to be what's keeping the nearly vertical sides of the hole from collapsing," Mark said, clearly impressed by the strange cylindrical shape of the hole.

"Still in spite of the record temperatures the last couple of summers," Jill continued, "it's surprising to find the ground has thawed even six feet down, when it shouldn't be more than a foot and a half. That's got to have an impact on methane production. We're going to have to re-measure the depth of thawing and factor that into our climate models."

"You're right, Jill," I replied. "I'll help you put together a grant proposal once we're back down in Fairbanks."

"Just remember that I'm not paying you to study climate change," Kowalski interjected. "You're here to determine the risk posed by these holes to our wells and pipelines, not to work on your climate models. Every minute spent on something else is a minute we don't have to waste."

Kowalski finished his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the soggy ground. I silently vowed to come back later and pick it up.

"But the increasing temperatures may be part of what's causing the holes," Mark said, coming to his wife's defense.

"I fail to see how a little extra melting at the surface could be causing such deep holes or explain where all the ground's gone, for that matter," Kowalski said, his increasing irritation clear in his voice.

"You're right, of course," I told Kowalski before Jill or Mark could say anything more that might upset the man signing the check. We needed every dollar we could earn during the summer vacation to pay for new equipment and fund our research during the rest of the year. "We're here to study the holes and find out what's causing them."

We set up our seven tents: one for Angie and me, one for Jill and Mark, one each for Kowalski, Bill, and O'Shannon, one for our equipment, and another as our supply tent. Then we unpacked our equipment and set off to measure the hole. I set up the tripod and mounted a theodolite for accurately measuring angles and the laser range finder for measuring distances. Jill and Mark then took turns holding the prism poles and measuring the distances between our instruments and the edge of the hole, while Angie entered the data into her laptop. Meanwhile, our photojournalist snapped pictures of our camp, the pit, and us while we worked.

An hour later, we had our initial measurements and headed back to camp, where Mark and Jill helped Bill rustle up a quick dinner of hamburgers, hot dogs, baked beans, and coffee. With no wood to set up an actual campfire, we gathered our chairs around the camp stove and began to eat.

Kowalski broke the silence by asking, "So Professor, now that you've seen one of the holes up close, what can you tell me about what's causing them?"

"That _is_ the $64,000 question," I replied, shaking my head in frustration. "I don't know. Hopefully, I'll be able to tell you tomorrow once I've had a chance to rappel down inside for a closer look."

"Well, surely you can tell me something based on all those measurements you made."

"Angie, why don't you give us a summary of our measurements?"

Putting her plate down on the ground next to her chair, she picked up her laptop and turned it back on. Once she had logged in, she brought up our survey application. "As you can see, the hole is nearly circular. It varies from 79 to 84 meters across."

"Feet, please, for us non-scientists," Kowalski asked.

"That would be 260 and 276 feet across," Angie continued without missing a beat. "The bottom is flat and averages 190 feet deep with the slight differences in depth being due to variations in ground level. The walls of the hole slope an average of 3 degrees inwards from vertical, making the bottom roughly 240 feet across and the walls of the hole – for all practical purposes – straight up and down. That results in a volume of just under 10 million cubic feet."

"That's over 2,000 railway tank cars," I told Kowalski, translating the volume into terms that the oil company manager would appreciate.

"That is an awful lot of dirt to go missing," O'Shannon observed, opening up a notebook so she could take notes. "I understand you are reluctant to speculate on the hole's origin, Dr. Oswald, but surely you must have a theory."

"The problem is that I have three theories, none of which fit all of the facts. The most obvious one is that we're dealing with a sinkhole, caused by an underground stream that has washed away the dirt leaving an empty hole behind." I paused, silently contemplating the problems of that theory.

"That makes sense; I saw a big sinkhole down in Florida once," Kowalski said. "Granted, it wasn't as big as this one, but it was still pretty big. So why don't you think it's a sinkhole?"

"The biggest problem is the location. Florida is largely made of limestone covered by sands and silts deposited by ancient beaches. Slightly acidic water percolating through cracks dissolves the limestone, forming extensive caves and underground streams. When the caves get big enough, they collapse causing sinkholes, and the underground streams wash away the loose soil. The North Slope isn't anything like Florida."

I raised my fingers to count off the problems with the sinkhole theory. "First of all, there is very little shallow limestone up here north of the Brooks Range. Without limestone, you don't get limestone caves. Secondly, there's the permafrost that Jill mentioned. While we're standing on hundreds of feet of relatively loose river deposits and windblown silt that could be washed away, the ground here is frozen solid to a depth of at least 1,500 feet and has been that way at least since the last Ice Age. Without an underground stream of liquid water, there's nothing to wash away the missing contents of the hole. Third, the walls of sinkholes are never vertical. They're typically larger around just below ground level than they are at the surface, and their bottoms are nearly always very uneven. Finally, I can't think of a single known phenomenon that could simultaneously create dozens of sinkholes scattered over an area as large as the North Slope."

"So if it is not a sinkhole, then what is it?" O'Shannon asked.

"The second possibility is that it's the hole left behind when a pingo melted."

"I remember you mentioned that word when talking to Mr. Kowalski on the phone," O'Shannon said "but I am afraid I have forgotten what you said a pingo is."

"Jill, why don't you explain pingos to Miss O'Shannon?" I asked, happy to let my student do the talking to our strangely distracting member of the team.

"Okay, Dr. Oswald." Jill paused for a second, undoubtedly trying to remember my lecture on periglacial landforms. "Pingo is an Eskimo word meaning small hill. A pingo is a mound of earth-covered ice that forms in arctic regions over the course of thousands of years. Each winter additional ground water freezes to an existing lens of buried ice. The resulting giant ice lens slowly glows, lifting the overlying soil until it forms a hill. The largest pingos are over 200 feet tall and 2,000 feet in diameter."

"Nice summary, Jill. Mark, why don't you continue by explaining why these holes can't simply be the remains of pingos that have melted?"

"Okay. There are several reasons. As Jill said, a pingo is a hill covering a slowly growing, convex lens of ice. The lens gives the pingo its characteristic round shape. The ice lens is also quite shallow because it grows when ground water above the permafrost layer freezes onto the ice lens. While this could explain the hole's circular shape, it is totally inconsistent with the cylindrical hole's great depth and vertical walls. Secondly, even with global warming, it would take years, if not decades, to melt all of the ice in a pingo this big, especially when you consider that the soil on top of the ice acts as an insulating layer, slowing the ice's melting. Finally, there's no way that a set of widely distributed, different sized pingos are all going to simultaneously melt over the course of a single night."

"Correct, Mark. So we can cross out the simple melting of pingos. How about you, Angie? Given our discussion on methane this morning, what's our third theory?"

"Well, maybe the holes started out as pingos. If a pingo's ice lens happened to block methane rising to the surface from oil reserves through fractures left by earthquakes, the cold and the pressure from the weight of the pingo could have turned the methane gas into a layer of frozen methane hydrate. Then as the pingo melts, the pressure is relieved, releasing the methane like the fizz from a giant bottle of champagne. The resulting explosion blows out the pingo's ground cover and remaining ice, leaving behind the hole. The small chunks of water ice scattered around the hole quickly melt. As I see it, the main advantage of this theory over melting pingos is that it explains how the holes could suddenly appear, and the record temperatures this summer could partially explain why the holes formed at the same time."

"So that's the answer," Kowalski said. "Since cracks in the rock would only very rarely rise up directly beneath a pingo, then these holes will also have to be extremely rare. With luck, all of the pingos that are going to explode have already exploded, and the danger is over."

"Not so fast, Kowalski. Honey, now explain why the pingo and methane explosion theory also can't be right."

"Well, we still have the problems of the cylindrical shape of the hole and the fact that such different-sized pingos are not going to simultaneously explode during the same summer, let alone the same night. And look at the ring of lose dirt surrounding the hole. It's much too neat to have been caused by an explosion. And where is the rest of the dirt that covered the pingo? There should be lots of large clumps of it all over the place. Do you see any? Because I sure don't. No, as much as I'd like my work on methane to be part of the answer, I just don't see it."

"So, if sinkholes, pingos, and methane explosions aren't the answer, what is?" Bill asked. "How about meteors? A single swarm of meteors would explain how they all formed at the same time."

"Meteorites," I corrected, unable to help myself.

"What?"

"Meteorites, not meteors. They're only meteors when they're streaking through the atmosphere. They become meteorites once they hit the ground."

"Okay, meteorites," our field biologist conceded. He sounded slightly irritated, possibly because I corrected him in front of O'Shannon. "Couldn't they have been made by meteorites?"

"No," I replied. "Meteorite craters have a totally different shape. Besides, meteors big enough to do this would have caused massive explosions. The resulting shock waves would have broken every window in every town and village north of the Brooks Range. And space radar would have picked up any house-sized space rocks as they entered the atmosphere. A series of huge meteor strikes would have been all over the news this morning, and Mr. Kowalski wouldn't have had to hire us to come investigate."

We spent a few hours struggling to come up with better explanations, but each suggestion was shot down almost as soon as it was made. The suggestions became wilder, eventually to the point of silliness.

"Well, Dr. Oswald, where does that leave us?" O'Shannon asked. "Surely, you do not think that little green men came down and stole the dirt to fuel their spacecraft."

I almost started to laugh at her tabloid suggestion, when I saw from Kowalski's expression that he was seriously considering it.

"I don't know what the explanation is," I answered, "and it's clear we aren't going to come up with it sitting around making silly suggestions. What we need is evidence. We need to rappel down into the hole and take samples from the hole's walls and bottom."

The temperature was dropping rapidly as the sun dipped below the northern horizon. I yawned, Angie followed suit, and the yawns traveled around our team like a human wave at a football stadium. "Okay, I'm calling it a night. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, and we're all going to need a good night's sleep."

Mark and Jill shared that smile newlyweds give each other, stood, and walked hand-in-hand to their tent, where their sleeping bags no doubt lay zipped together. I couldn't help but smile myself at the bittersweet memory of how Angie and I used to do the same thing before eventually trading that level of constant intimacy for separate sleeping bags and considerably more uninterrupted sleep. Oh, to be so young and full of passion again. Kowalski, Bill, and O'Shannon went to their separate tents. I put my arm around Angie as we walked the short distance to the comfortable old tent we've shared for so many years of vacations and summer field studies.
Chapter 2

Into the Pit

The next morning, I woke up at six. I had far too much on my mind to go back to sleep and crawled out of my sleeping bag twenty minutes later. After fixing coffee, I took a quick stroll around the hole. It was calling me; I couldn't wait to climb down inside it. I headed back to camp and woke the others.

We wolfed down the briefest of breakfasts before heading over to the crater. Kowalski helped Bill unload the portable winch and electric generator from the trailer. They set it up 15 feet back from the edge of the pit. Angie carefully connected one end of a quarter-inch synthetic rope to the winch, and Mark threw the rest over the edge.

"I selected a 250-foot rope," Angie said. "That way, we'll have about 40 extra feet once you reach bottom. Taking stretching into account, we probably could have gotten by with a 200-footer, but better to have the extra length and not need it than need it and not have it."

I'd decided to take Mark down with me. We'd rappel down, one at a time. Once we were done, Angie would use the winch to raise us, saving us the long climb back up. Meanwhile, Jill stood on the far side of the hole with binoculars and her own walkie-talkie. From there, she could keep an eye on Mark and me and give instructions to my wife in case of an emergency.

Mark and I strapped on our climbing harnesses, put on our backpacks, and donned hard hats. After attaching geology hammers and walkie-talkies to our belts, we pulled on our climbing gloves. I clipped a carabiner onto my climbing harness, locked it shut, and threaded the rope through my figure eight descender. Mark checked my setup and gave me thumbs up. Then, I grabbed the attached end of the rope with my left hand, took the free end in my break hand, and held it behind my back.

Angie walked up to me. "Jack, I want you to be extremely careful down there." She glanced nervously at the hole. "The ground at the top has thawed much farther down than usual, and there's no telling how stable the crater wall is. Try not to dislodge anything on the way down, and stay away from the side while Mark's coming down."

"Yes, dear. Don't worry. This isn't the first hole I've rappelled into."

"Not like this, you haven't. This isn't like repelling into a Yucatan cenote. I know you're excited about getting down there and discovering how the hole formed, but please be careful. I don't know what it is, but the hole gives me the creeps. It shouldn't be there, but it is."

"I will," I promised.

Angie leaned in, took my head in her hands, and gave me a long heartfelt kiss. "I love you, Jack Oswald."

"I love you too." I smiled to think that after all our years together, she could still make me feel like the lucky young college kid who'd somehow won the heart of the most beautiful girl in school.

"Okay then. Let's do this." She stepped back away from the edge, and I was ready to go.

I backed up to the pit, climbed over the low mound of loose dirt that ringed the hole, and slowly lowered myself down the short slope of thawed ground. I had to be very careful because water draining into the crater from the summer's light rains had carved deep ruts into the soft water-saturated silt. I sank nearly to the top of my boots in the mud and was glad to reach the top of the permafrost, although my muddy boots made the footing treacherous.

I rappelled down the side of the hole, stopping every so often to take a closer look at the frozen surface of the wall. Clearly visible layers of unconsolidated marine, river, wind-borne, and glacial deposits interlaced with ice and decaying plant matter. For the first fifty feet, muddy groundwater trickled down the sides of the pit, painting vertical stripes of brown ice across these horizontal layers. It made the walls look like a giant chessboard. After that, the rest of the way down was merely more of the same. I stopped a couple of times to chip out samples and place them in collection bags, more from habit than anything else. Truthfully, I didn't see anything unusual in the frozen deposits surrounding the pit. The only remarkable things about the hole's sides were that they were smooth and nearly vertical. Ordinarily, I would have expected to see buried tree roots and animal bones occasionally sticking out of the frozen soil. Instead, they were broken or sheared off, their ends blackened as though burned.

About three-fourths of the way down, I started to smell the foul stench of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide was in the air, and that was surprising. North Slope oil contains traces of the gas, and you can sometimes see surface oil seeps farther north, but I didn't see any on the floor of the pit and the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field was much deeper at nearly 9,000 feet.

Regardless of how it got there, hydrogen sulfide is dense enough to collect and slowly build up in low places, especially somewhere like the bottom of the hole where the wind couldn't blow it away. It's also toxic and can make you sick in concentrations as low as 100 parts per million. The smell became quite strong as I stepped down onto the pit's floor. The gas was going to be a problem if we needed to stay for longer than a few minutes.

I remembered the disposable acid gas respirators sitting uselessly back in my lab and wanted to kick myself for not remembering to bring them. Though they wouldn't do anything to protect our eyes, they would have kept the hydrogen sulfide out of our noses and lungs. When Mark and I returned to the surface, I was going to ask Kowalski to have some full-face respirators sent down from Deadhorse.

I unhooked myself from the rope and waved up to Jill, who was standing on the far rim of the pit. "I'm down," I said into my walkie-talkie. "You can send Mark down."

There was no sign of frozen ground or even loose soil on the floor of the hole. Instead, I was standing on a flat sheet of ice some six inches thick except for where hundreds of short mounds of dirt stuck up through its surface. I couldn't explain this obvious evidence of recently liquid water that had refrozen to make the layer of ice on which I was standing; the ground should have stayed frozen at least another fifteen hundred feet down. I looked around for a source of the hydrogen sulfide, but didn't see anything.

A few minutes later, Mark reached the bottom, unhooked himself, and walked over to where I was standing. "Shit, Professor," he exclaimed, a look of disgust on his face. "It stinks like year-old eggs down here. Where's the hydrogen sulfide coming from?"

"It's got to be from the natural gas associated with an oil deposit," I answered, my voice beginning to sound a bit like I was catching a head cold. Something in the hole was making my allergies act up, making my nose start to run and my eyes water. "Alaskan oil typically contains trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Since it's corrosive, the oil companies sweeten the crude by removing it before they pump the oil into the pipeline."

"Professor, take a look at this," Mark said, squatting down and pointing at the nearest mound of dirt. He held his hand a few inches over it. "There's a small hole at the top, and I can feel gas escaping from it. That's weird; it should be freezing, but the gas is actually warm." He leaned over and sniffed the air just above the hole. "Jesus, that reeks," he cursed as he stood up and rubbed his eyes.

I reached down. There was a surprisingly large flow of gas coming out of the hole. I looked around at all of the other mounds of dirt dotting the ice on which we were standing. "Shit," I exclaimed. "We've got to get the hell out of here."

"Why?" he asked with a confused look on his face. "We just got here."

"Prudhoe Bay natural gas is about three fourths methane. One eighth is ethane, propane, and other heavier hydrocarbons, while the remaining eighth is carbon dioxide. I'm not worried about the methane and ethane; they're lighter than air and will drift up and out of the hole. But carbon dioxide, propane, and hydrogen sulfide are all heavier than air and build up in low areas."

"Like the bottom of this hole," Mark said as the nature of our danger dawned on him.

"Like the bottom of this hole," I agreed.

Although I was breathing rapidly, it was becoming increasingly harder to catch my breath. Both were early signs of carbon dioxide poisoning. Meanwhile, my eyes were really watering, my nose was running, and my lungs were starting to burn. Hydrogen sulfide combined with the water on their moist surfaces to form sulfurous acid. I had a dull headache and was becoming increasingly nauseated. Worse, the stench of sulfur had begun to disappear: a classic symptom of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. "We have to head back up and strap on oxygen tanks and full-face respirators before we come back down."

"Okay, Professor," he replied, looking at me with concern. "You're definitely not looking so good."

Weak and increasingly clumsy, Mark had to help me reach the rope and secure it to my climbing harness. Then he said into his walkie-talkie, "Angela, there's hydrogen sulfide and excessive carbon dioxide down here, and we need to get out of here right now. It's made the professor sick, so I'm sending him up first."

"Understood, Mark," Angie replied, her voice indicating her concern. "Is he ready?"

"Yes, all hooked up," Mark replied.

A second later, the rope began pulling me up. It sped faster and faster until I was practically running up the side of the hole. Soon, I was up to where the permafrost gave way to damp dirt. I slipped going over the boundary, and the rope dragged me face first over the short muddy slope. Bill helped me climb over the ridge of dirt surrounding the edge and unhooked my climbing harness.

Coughing and unable to catch my breath, I stumbled into Angie's arms. The caustic gasses at the bottom of the pit had set off one of my ordinarily rare asthma attacks, leaving me gasping for air. I fumbled through my pockets, found my rescue inhaler, and had to give myself three puffs before my breathing became easier. Meanwhile, my eyes were still burning and watering so heavily that I heard rather than saw Bill throw the end of the rope back into the pit and use the winch to lower it rapidly into the hole. After helping me wipe the mud from my face, Angie wrapped me a bear hug, totally heedless of the muck she was transferring to her own face and clothes.

"It's down," Jill said, her voice amplified through our walkie-talkies.

Bill stopped the winch, and we waited for Mark to tell us when he was ready to come up.

"Okay, Mark's ready," Jill said. "Bring him up."

Bill restarted the winch, and the rope began winding itself back around its spinning shaft.

Feeling stronger, I let go of Angie and turned back towards the pit so I could watch Mark being raised over the edge. It was at that moment, through eyes still somewhat blurry from tears, that I saw Kowalski. He was standing near the edge of the hole, a few feet downwind so that the smoke from his cigarette wouldn't bother us. He took a final puff and carelessly flicked away the still smoldering butt.

"Stop!" I croaked, my voice raspy and painful from coughing. Time seemed to slow as the remains of his cigarette flew over the mound of dirt ringing the crater and tumbled into the pit.

Kowalski turned towards me, and our eyes met. Unaware of what he'd just done, he was completely confused by the expression of horror on my face.

After seconds that seemed to stretch into eternity, the cigarette butt tumbled past Mark and eventually reached the depth where the concentration of methane and hydrogen sulfide reached explosive levels.

There was a deafening whoosh, and a huge fireball the size of the hole erupted from the pit. The blast from the explosion blew us backwards, away from the hole. That was the only thing that saved us from the intense heat radiating from the colossal swirling ball of fire and smoke that had roared up from the crater. It felt like I was standing next to a hundred heat lamps, and I heard the sizzling sound of my hair and beard beginning to burn on the side of my head that faced the flames. Turning my back to the hole, I immediately used my hands to extinguish my burning hair before it could seriously burn me. Disgusted by the stench of a mixture of burnt hair and rotten eggs, I picked myself up and looked back towards the hole. Above us, a huge pillar of smoke rose like the ash cloud of an erupting volcano. Looking back down, we saw the burning nylon rope continue to rise until its end slipped over the edge of the hole. Only a little of Mark's smoldering body harness was still attached to its end.

"No!" We heard Jill's horror-filled scream coming loudly over our walkie-talkies, followed less than a second later when her anguished cry reached us from across the pit. I could just make out Jill's wavering form through the turbulent superheated air rising up between us as she raced back around the hole.

"Get me some rope," I demanded. "I've got to get a look down into the pit."

"Jack, stop!" Angie commanded, moving to stand between me and the hole. "You can't go over there until we get a new rope. Bill, there's more rope in the trailer."

Bill took off and returned seconds later with a new 50-foot length of rope, which he secured to the winch. Terrified by both the danger and what I would see, I nevertheless tied the other end around my waist and stepped up to the edge of the hole. Together, Kowalski and Bill slowly fed out the rope hand over hand until I had worked my way over the edge and down the muddy slope.

The intense heat and overpowering sulfur stench rising out of the hole formed an invisible wall, and it took all of my will power to push through it to where I could look directly down into the hellish pit. Dozens of methane and hydrogen sulfide fires rose ten feet above the steaming bottom of the pit. Their bluish flames illuminated Mark's blackened body, which lay motionless 50 feet back from the side of the hole. One arm and both legs were bent back at odd angles, and I could just make out the ends of broken bones sticking through his charred flesh and what little remained of his clothing. Small guttering flames licked at the blackened fabric and flesh, sending up thin ribbons of smoke.

Oddly, given the circumstances, I found myself remembering my basic chemistry, quickly working out the products produced by the burning of hydrogen sulfide and methane: sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and water in the form of steam. The sulfur dioxide and water would further combine to produce sulfurous acid. Between the heat and the noxious gases, there was no way an unprotected person could be in the hole and live. Beyond all doubt, my young friend was dead.

Forcing myself to look away from the horror of his body, I realized that the intense heat was melting the frozen sides of the hole. A slurry of small rocks, dirt, and melted ice flowed down its near vertical walls. Pooling around the bottom of the pit, the dirty water flowed steadily inward until it reached Mark's body, slowly carrying it into the middle of the pit. The raging fires turned the once ice-covered floor of the pit into a hellish lake reflecting the bluish flames that continued to burn above its boiling surface.

"What the hell are you doing, wasting time with that short rope?" I heard Jill scream in anger and fear as she ran back around the pit. "Get the goddamned backup rope! Hurry! I've got to get down there to him!"

Instead, Kowalski and Bill pulled me back up the muddy slope and helped me climb out over the raised edge of the hole. It was clear from their faces they already knew Mark was beyond saving. Standing next to them, O'Shannon looked miserable and tired as if she'd somehow aged decades since the explosion.

Then suddenly, Angie was in my arms. She hugged me tight and then drew back so that she could look into my eyes. Her expression was one of dread mixed with the tiniest spark of hope that somehow – by some impossible miracle – Mark had survived the explosion and fall. I shook my head. The hope vanished from her face, replaced by tears streaming down her cheeks. Finally, I forced myself to look over to where Jill was still frantically disconnecting the 50-foot rope from the winch. She looked up. Our eyes met, and I watched her soul shatter, turn to dust, and blow away.

"No, no, no, no, no..." Jill wailed.

Angie rushed over and caught Jill just as her legs buckled beneath her. Then, Angie carefully lowered Jill until the two were sitting on the ground. Angie held Jill in her lap and gently rocked her back and forth, as though she were a child. Speaking too softly for us to hear, Angie did her best to provide what little comfort she could.

I looked over to where Kowalski was standing, staring in disbelief at the fiery pit his thoughtlessness had created. I was beyond furious. The next thing I knew, I had him by the jacket and was screaming in his face, "You goddamned careless son of a bitch! Weren't you listening? Didn't you hear me say there was hydrogen sulfide in the pit?"

"Buh, buh, but..." he stammered as he tried to back away from me.

Without realizing it, I was slowly backing him up to the hole. I might have backed him over the edge had Bill not forced himself between us. "That's enough!" he commanded.

Suddenly, I realized what I was doing and let go. It was clear from Kowalski's expression that he'd had no idea that the gasses in the bottom of the hole were flammable, let alone sufficiently concentrated to be explosive.

My fiery rage died as I turned my anger inward. Kowalski hadn't killed Mark. I had. I was in charge and responsible for the lives of my team. I should have recognized the danger sooner. Mark was my student, so I should have sent him up first. Worst of all, I had seen Kowalski smoking next to the hole and done nothing. I turned my back on the hellish pit and wearily walked away across the empty tundra.

Sometime later, I realized I wasn't alone. I heard footsteps next to me, turned, and was surprised to see O'Shannon walking silently by my side.

"What do you want?" I demanded. "Come to interview the professor whose incompetence killed his student?"

"Good heavens, no," she replied. "I just needed to get away from the damned hole. Sometimes, solitude helps me think and distance provides perspective." She glanced back the way we had come. "Oh my, take a look at that. Is it not strange how far we can get from where we ought to be when we only look inward instead of watching where we are going?"

I glanced back. Our tents were tiny triangles on the horizon next to a narrow column of thin gray smoke.

"Dr. Menendez is worried about you. She would have come herself were she not doing her best to comfort Mrs. Starr. Your wife and your student need you. It is time for you to head back."

"I can't," I said. "How can I face them after what I let happen? Mark would be alive if not for me."

"Nonsense. Mr. Starr was killed by an unfortunate conjunction of a huge hole, combustible gasses, and a careless spark. Did you dig the hole, supply the gasses, or light the cigarette that caused the explosion? No, you did not. What happened was a terrible accident, the final link of a chain of numerous events, the lack of any one of which could have broken the chain."

"But..."

"Now is not the time for buts, Dr. Oswald. Now is the time for you to go back and do what must be done: comfort the living, mourn the dead, and learn from your loss so that it never happens again."

I nodded. Then we turned around and walked back in silence.

When we got back to camp, my wife and Jill were still sitting on the ground. I sat down next to them, and Angie squeezed my hand and gave me a sympathetic smile. I put my arm around Jill's shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," was all I could think to say.

I half expected... Hell, I half wanted her to curse me or hit me. Blame me for getting Mark killed like I blamed myself. But she didn't. Instead, she leaned up against me and cried on my chest while my own tears silently ran down my cheeks to drip onto her hair.

I thought of Mark and of how much I was going to miss him. Mark, the student who always came to class with a question that made it clear he had really studied and wasn't just memorizing facts for a test. Mark, the grad student who could not only use all of the equipment in the lab, but could also diagnose and fix most of it when it broke. I remembered Mark and Jill's wedding the first weekend in June when we'd all driven over to Denali Park and stayed at the beautiful Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. I remembered their vows to share their lives 'til death do them part. The inseparable couple was now forever parted.

Eventually, I got up and walked over to Kowalski, who was still standing at the edge of the pit. His crumpled pack of cigarettes lay crushed into the muddy ground. His grief-stricken expression turned fearful when he realized I was approaching.

"I'm... I'm sorry... so goddamned sorry," he said, his eyes bloodshot and his ashen face still wet with tears. "I didn't think. I didn't know. How could I have known?"

I stopped well back, raising my hands palms upwards to indicate I was over my anger. "I'm sorry I lost it, Kowalski. I know you didn't mean to harm anyone. Hell, I didn't even think of the danger until after it was too late."

"It's the damn stress. Headquarters is demanding I tell them what's going on. Reporters are demanding answers, and the execs don't have any. Everyone's pressuring me to tell them everything's going to be okay." He looked up into my eyes, pleading for forgiveness. "And I quit smoking; you know I did. And I'd never smoke within a hundred feet of an oil well or pipeline; you know I wouldn't. How was I to know a damned sink hole would explode?"

I nodded. Still, how could I forgive him when I couldn't even forgive myself? O'Shannon was right. Somehow, I had to find the strength to continue and do what must be done.

"Kowalski, you didn't pack any fire suits and breathing masks with compressed air like the ones used for fighting oil fires, did you?" I asked.

"What?" Kowalski asked, an expression of shocked surprise on his face. "You can't be thinking of actually going back down into that hellhole, are you? That's crazy."

"Believe me, going back down into that damn hole is the last thing I want to do, but I have to. Mark's body is still down there, and somebody has to go get it. He was my student; he's my responsibility."

"We can call the Air National Guard," Kowalski argued. "They rescue lost hikers and injured climbers all the time. Let them do it."

"There's still doesn't address the problem of finding out what's causing the holes. You hired me to discover the cause, and I have to go back down to do that. I'll bring Mark's body back up when I return."

"Forget about the damn job! Somebody's dead! I already have one life on my conscience; I'm not going to have you on it too. You're not going down. It's too dangerous."

"Kowalski, somebody's going to have to do it. If not me, your company is just going to hire someone else. No, Mark wasn't a quitter, and I neither am I. I have to do this. I need to do this so that Mark's death won't have been for nothing. Did you, or did you not, bring any fire proximity suits and breathing apparatus?"

"Of course not. Why would I? There was no way I could have known we'd need fire suits. The closest place I know that has them is our facilities in Deadhorse."

"How about Pump Station 2?" I asked. "It's only about five and a half miles away. We could probably get there, grab the equipment, and be back in less than thirty to forty minutes."

"I'm not sure," he replied. "It's inactive and has been on standby since 1997. I suppose it's possible there's a skeleton security or maintenance crew there. If so, then there'd be no need for us to go there ourselves. I'll call them on my satellite phone and ask them to bring their fire gear and a couple of new ropes if they have any."

While Kowalski was making the call, I looked around. Angie was still consoling Jill, and Bill was sitting in the Raptor with his head in his hands. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash through the hot hazy air that continued to boil out of the hole. Our reporter was slowly walking away along the edge of the pit, looking down, and occasionally taking pictures. I hurried after her. She was almost to the far side of the hole by the time I caught up with her.

"Can't you wait a while to do that?" I asked. "At least until Angie walks Jill back to camp so she won't have to see you taking shots of Mark's body."

She put her camera down. "What now, Dr. Oswald?" she asked.

"We'll have to recover Mark's body," I replied sadly. "Kowalski is trying to get us some protective firefighting suits and breathing gear from Pump Station 2."

"And your research here?" she asked.

"We still need to discover what's causing the holes and determine the degree to which they put the oil wells and pipelines at risk. There's too much at stake to quit now. Once we've recovered Mark's body, we'll send it back up to Deadhorse with Jill. They were married only a couple of months ago; she'll undoubtedly want to stay with him."

O'Shannon turned and headed back towards camp, leaving me alone to keep silent vigil over the body of my graduate student and friend. Eventually, I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

"Jack," Angie said softly, wrapping her arms around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"No," I answered. "This should never have happened. I should have recognized the danger sooner. He was my student and my responsibility. I should have sent him up first. If I had, he'd still be alive."

"And you'd be dead," she answered. "Besides, you'd been down there longer and the gases were affecting you more. Mark made the right call sending you up first. None of us considered the possibility of an explosion. Sometimes bad things happen, and nobody's to blame."

I heard what she said, but it didn't make me feel any better. "How's Jill," I asked.

"Not good," she answered. "She's stopped crying for the moment. Now, she's mostly in shock. She's just lying in her tent, holding on to Mark's pillow, and staring off into space."

"Do you think she's okay alone?" I asked.

"Frankly, towards the end, I don't think she realized I was even there. Still, she did tell me one thing before she quit crying."

"What's that?" I asked.

"She's pregnant. She missed her last two periods, and her home pregnancy test came back positive. She was going to wait until her gynecologist confirmed it before telling Mark. Now, he'll never know he was going to be a father."

"Damn, that's hard," I said angrily. "No child should ever have to grow up without a parent. When this is over, I'm going to talk with the University and Kowalski and make sure Mark was covered by their insurance. With her student loans, Jill's going to need a lot of money if she's going to be raising their child alone."

Angie nodded sadly. "I think I'll head back to camp and check in on her, see if she wants company. Are you coming?"

"Not yet," I answered. "I think I'll stay for a while longer. Even if Mark can't hear me, I still need to talk to him, tell him how sorry I am, and that we'll find some way to make sure Jill and the baby will be taken care of."

Fifteen minutes later, Kowalski walked up and said, "I tried calling Pump Station 2, but couldn't get an answer, so I called our office in Deadhorse. They told me that Pump Station 2 only has regular firefighter suits, not the specialized breathing gear we need. They've sent someone to get the equipment, and they should be here with it in a couple of hours."

Eventually, we all made our way back to camp. By now, it was long past lunch, but nobody felt like eating. Jill was still in her tent. The rest of us pretty much just sat there silently waiting, thinking about Mark and the horrific way he died.

Almost four hours later, a truck arrived bringing the fire proximity suits, breathing apparatus with several spare air tanks, and three long lengths of rope. Kowalski talked to the driver, while we unloaded the equipment. He walked over as Bill and I were replacing the singed rope with a new one.

"It's not just happening here," Kowalski said. "The driver told me that it's happening all over the North Slope."

"What's happening?" I asked, realizing for the first time that the unexplained behavior of this hole might not be unique.

"All of the holes they've checked have methane and hydrogen sulfide concentrating at the bottom, and at least a dozen have exploded. New holes are forming all along the coast, and one just opened up directly under a well in the Kuparuk River Oil Field. In addition to the well, it swallowed three workers, a couple of vehicles, and a midsized oil storage tank. Apparently, there was also some ignition source, maybe pieces of metal banging together, and the gases ignited, setting the oil ablaze. So far, there's been no way to see into it, and the workmen were presumed dead, their bodies incinerated." Kowalski paused for a second to gather his thoughts. "That's why the driver couldn't stick around to help us. The whole North Slope is going to hell, and we need every one we can spare up there to deal with it."

I lost sense of time. At some point, the sun had started to sink towards the western horizon. It was dinnertime, and Angie and Bill started making sandwiches. Everyone went through the motion of eating, though for the life of me I can't remember what kind of sandwich it was. Afterwards, I walked back to the edge of the hole. The fires were still raging, hydrogen sulfide in the gas painting the bottom of the pit an unearthly shade of blue. I hoped that the flames would die down soon, or at least by tomorrow morning. I certainly didn't like the idea of descending into the hole to retrieve Mark's body, but I liked leaving it down there even less.

Everyone was physically and emotionally exhausted. I called it a day, and we crawled into our sleeping bags, hoping that sleep would eventually bring some relief from the pain. Holding Angie, I fell asleep listening to Jill crying softly, alone in the tent she'd shared with Mark.
Chapter 3

Hell Day

Just after one in the morning as the sun slowly burrowed westward just below the northern horizon, the deep rumble of thunder woke Angie and me. Groggy from sleep, it took us several seconds to realize that the sound came from underground and not the sky. The rumbling rapidly grew louder until it sounded like a thunderstorm was raging directly below us in a subterranean cavern. Simultaneously, the ground started to rock, rapidly shaking harder and harder until the soil beneath our tent was rolling like waves on a stormy Arctic Sea.

"Earthquake," I yelled, redundantly I realized, as by then it was obvious to everyone what was happening. "Everybody up and outside. You don't want to get caught in your tents if there's soil liquefaction."

I heard shouts and curses as Angie and I grabbed our boots and coats and stumbled outside. I looked around and was relieved to see the others were also out. Watching Kowalski frantically trying to pull up his pants, I was glad that Angie and I were still wearing our clothes when we'd crawled into our sleeping bags. The ground rolled us violently back and forth, making it nearly impossible to stick our feet into our boots. Kowalski was trying and failing to walk while the rest of us stayed safely on our hands and knees.

The shaking steadily forced the ground water from the frequent rains and melted permafrost to move higher until the soil beneath us grew wet and soft. By three minutes after it started, we were beginning to sink into the silty top soil when the shaking and deep underground rumbling stopped.

"Everyone okay?" I asked, glancing at each member of my team to ensure that no one was hurt. Everyone seemed fine and just as you'd assume after being woken up unexpectedly in the middle of the night: rumpled clothes, bleary eyed, and sleeping bag hair. Everyone that is except O'Shannon. Somehow she'd managed to crawl out of her tent looking like she's just spent an hour in the bathroom getting ready for a night on the town. Her clothes looked slept in, but her hair and makeup were again flawless.

I was just about to say something when Bill spoke up. "I banged my shin on the damn barrel of my rifle getting out of my sleeping bag. I wacked it pretty good, but I think I only bruised it."

Then, I realized that Jill was shivering. Her red-rimmed eyes wide with fear, she was teetering on the edge of panic. "Jill Starr, give me an estimate of the quake's intensity," I demanded, trying to shift her mind onto an unemotional topic.

"Uh, maybe a seven on the MMI scale," she answered tentatively as she focused her eyes on me. "It's hard to tell without buildings to check for damages."

"MMI?" O'Shannon asked. Kowalski and Bill looked at me expectantly, clearly confused by the geological jargon.

"The Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale," I explained. "When it comes to earthquakes, most people think in terms of the Richter scale. That measures the earthquake's absolute magnitude – that is, the total amount of energy it releases. But you need to know the quake's location to calculate it and that takes several seismometers to triangulate on the quake's epicenter. On the other hand, the quake's local intensity – what you feel and the damage you see – depends on additional factors, like how far away it is, how deep it is, and how solid the ground is. The MMI measures the local intensity of the earthquake, and because it's calibrated to what people feel, it's much easier to estimate, especially now, given that we haven't set up the seismometers yet."

I was just about to explain the soggy ground and soil liquefaction when I was interrupted by the sound of an extremely loud explosion followed by the heat of a blast furnace striking the side of my body nearest the hole.

Instinctively ducking and turning our faces away from the intense heat, we were again knocked off our feet by a blast of hot air that sent us tumbling across the ground. Several of our tents began rolling away across the tundra, the force of the explosion having ripped out their stakes. Dazed, we looked back towards the hole. A huge column of rolling flames and dense black smoke mushroomed hundreds of feet into the air, while enormous flames danced in and out of the billowing smoke. A weak summer wind carried the dissipating column east, while flames rose some 30 feet into the air above the hole. The stench of sulfur mixed with burning oil grew stronger as some of the smoke drifted our way.

"Not good. Not good at all," our reporter said as she stared in awe at the fiery spectacle in front of us.

"That isn't any methane explosion from natural gas or decaying vegetation," Kowalski said. "I've seen enough oil fires to know that much black smoke means there's crude mixed in with the natural gas."

Drawn like a moth to the flame, we slowly approached the hole. About halfway from camp to the pit, our reporter turned back and started running towards her tent. "I forgot my damn camera," she yelled over her shoulder.

Ignoring her, the rest of us cautiously continued towards the hole until the heat from the flames forced us to stop, some 20 feet back from the edge.

"Jack, have you ever seen anything like this before," Angie asked.

"I don't think anyone has," I answered. "I can't remember ever hearing about a massive oil fire forming in a sinkhole or..."

I was interrupted by the distant howling of wolves, seemingly coming from somewhere beyond the hole. The deep-throated howls turned into yelping screams that sent shivers up my spine. It sounded as if they were being tortured.

"That sounds similar to wolves, but the pitch is way too low," Bill said, his brows knitted together with puzzlement. "It sounds more like it's coming from something the size of a grizzly, and I've never heard a wolf or bear scream like that before."

We strained to look through the tongues of fire and rippling air rising from the hole, but no one could see any wolves, or any other animal. "Where are they?" Angie asked. "Surely they'll stay away from the fire." She glanced nervously at the rifle in Bill's hands.

"You're quite safe, Dr. Menendez," Bill said. "Wolves will avoid people, especially this time of year when there's plenty of game to eat."

The fire died down, so that the tops of scattered flames only occasionally poked above the edge of the pit. The howling grew louder as we cautiously crept closer.

"What the hell?" I cursed when Bill and I were finally close enough to see the pit's bottom. The bottom of the hole looked like it had dropped another 50 feet, but the increased depth was not what had captured our attention.

A flaming fissure fifteen feet across had opened in the far side of the pit's floor. The shallow lake of melted water from the fire's thawing of the sides of the hole was rapidly draining out of sight, leaving behind a muddy floor dotted with black pools of burning oil.

Suddenly, impossibly, several wolves came into view as they loped around the edge of the bottom of the pit. Several more wolves climbed out of the chasm through which the water had drained, their eyes glowing red with reflected light from the fires. The pack circled the fiery floor of the hole, howling and screaming in pain. Their fur appeared to have been burned off leaving nothing but raw red skin.

"Bill, please tell me you can see that," I said.

"I see it," he answered, shaking his head as if that could make what we were seeing go away.

"How in hell did they get down there?" I asked.

"And why the hell aren't they dead?" our biologist added as we watched the wretched beasts circling the crater.

One of the wounded wolves stopped, howled, and ran to the center of the pit. It had noticed Mark's mud-covered corpse. Several more members of the pack joined the first. Growling and snapping at each other, they ripped into his body.

Horrified, I turned away just in time to see the others moving forward to join Bill and me at the edge. "Jill," I yelled. "Stay back! Angie, keep Jill back!"

Angie stepped in front of Jill, holding her tightly until the terrifying sounds from the pit ceased. I turned back. All signs of Mark's body were gone, and the wolves resumed their relentless circling. Several times, they jumped up the vertical walls of the hole only to slide back down, their paws unable to find footholds on the pit's steep slippery sides. O'Shannon returned, carrying her camera, and started taking pictures.

As she circled the pit, her camera clicking, a strong aftershock shook the ground, and parts of the edges of the hole began to drop into the ever-widening pit. We turned and ran as the winch and generator fell into the hole, followed by the pickup truck and its trailer. The crashing roar of the landslide grew louder as more ground slid into the hole.

As we dashed towards camp, a new spectacle suddenly stopped us in our tracks. A large circular plug of earth some 50 feet in diameter started to rise under our two Range Rovers, our supply tent, and the tent Angie and I had just shared. The ground slowly rose, lifting them two, four, six, eight feet above the surrounding tundra. Then the huge cylinder of ground stopped and began to fall, rapidly dropping half of our camp down into a new second smaller hell hole. An incredibly brief flash of brilliant blue light ringed the new crater before it also exploded with a fireball that rose hundreds of feet into the dusky air.

With all three of our vehicles swallowed by the earth, we were suddenly on foot in a landscape gone mad. Dumbstruck, we just stood there looking, not daring to approach any closer to what little remained of our camp.

Behind us, louder howls erupted from the first hole, now nearly twice its original size. We turned back just in time to see the first creature bounding over the edge of the pit. It was more terrifying than any beast I'd seen in my worst nightmares. It was gigantic, easily four times the size of a normal wolf, but it was neither normal nor a wolf. Its head and jaws were grotesquely large, and it had long yellow fangs that extended a good inch below the bottom of its muzzle. But its most uncanny characteristic was its total lack of fur. Instead, we could see its raw flesh, the color of dried blood and crisscrossed by dark purple arteries and veins. Its massive naked muscles glistened wetly in the light of the flickering flames from the two burning pits.

A dozen only slightly smaller ones quickly followed the enormous alpha male. He spotted us, howled once and deliberately strode towards us, trailed by the rest of his pack.

"Get behind me, everybody!" Bill yelled as he turned to face the hellish creatures. "We'll never make it if we run." He took a step forward to place himself between us and the monsters, brought his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The bullet hit the alpha male in the center of its chest. It screamed as it dropped to the ground, twitched, and then lay still. The other wolves stopped and snarled viciously, their reddish eyes looking at us with malevolent hatred rather than hunger or fear.

"Look at the blood," Jill exclaimed. "It's black."

Mesmerized, we watched as the bullet hole slowly stopped bleeding its unnaturally dark fluid. Then, as if pushed by invisible forces, the bullet slowly slid out of the entry wound and splashed into the small puddle of the oil-like liquid.

The wolf struggled to its feet, flung back its head, and howled in defiant fury. Still, when it started forward again, it did so more slowly and cautiously and the other members of the pack followed its lead.

Bill lowered the end of his rifle and stared open-mouthed at the seven-foot long wolf that wasn't a wolf, bleeding blood that wasn't blood. "What in hell is that thing?" he murmured to himself.

"Don't just stand there, Bill," O'Shannon ordered, having stepped forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with our biologist. "Shoot it again, but this time in the head where it will do some good."

Bill glanced at the beautiful woman standing bravely beside him, then turned back and did as she commanded. The second bullet took off the top of the wolf's skull and this time it dropped and stayed down. Snarling and snapping at each other, the remaining wolves took only seconds to select their new leader. They started forward again, more tentatively, though no less viciously.

"How many bullets do you have?" our young photographer asked the biologist.

"Eight. No seven," Bill answered, his eyes glued to the slowly advancing monstrosities.

"Drop two or three more," she commanded. "Let's see if they are smart enough to take the hint."

Bill nodded and dropped two more with headshots that sprayed black blood and brains onto the creatures behind them.

The ten remaining "wolves" spread out to our left and right, encircling us and showing no signs of retreating.

"Damn them," O'Shannon cursed. "I was afraid of that. Hellhounds aren't the smartest of demons."

"What?" Bill asked, briefly glancing away from the horrifying creatures to look at the woman standing beside him. Showing no sign of fear, she reached her right hand down the front of her shirt and pulled out something hanging from a long golden necklace. She held it out from her body, pointing it first at one hellhound and then another, almost as though she were aiming a gun. Now that it was no longer hidden by her hand, I could see that it was the same amulet I had seen on the airplane, a circular crimson crystal ringed by a narrow band of gold.

The hellhounds growled menacingly but paused their advance, their yellow goat-like eyes locked on the crystal as Aileen swung it back and forth. If I could ascribe human emotions to such hellish creatures, I would have said they both hated and feared the thing that Aileen held in her hand.

"You'd better keep firing," Aileen said as she started to spin around. "This may take a few seconds."

Bill shot another three wolves in rapid succession as she chanted words we only partially understood.

" _Salva nos a demonibus! Salva nos a demonibus! Salva nos a demonibus!"_

"What the hell is she doing?" Angie asked, stunned by the reporter's bizarre behavior.

A stream of tiny crimson lights flowed from the crystal in Aileen's hand, weaving a web that hung suspended in the air like a giant bubble between us and the monstrous wolves. I heard Angie gasp, while I just stood there, frozen with amazement. Sparks crackled between the dense network of lights, and I could smell the sharp odor of ozone.

One of the mutant wolves jumped forward, only to be thrown back a dozen feet when it struck the electrified barrier. It yelped in pain as drops of black blood dripped from its injured muzzle and fore paws. The odor of burnt meat and the smell of burning sulfur mixed to create a stench that gagged me, forcing acid from my empty stomach up into my mouth. It backed away with its naked rat-like tail between its legs. Several others attempted to force their way past O'Shannon's barrier, but were also driven back. The smell of ozone and burning meat grew stronger each time another tried.

_What the hell?_ I thought, as they began circling us, searching for a break in barrier. The strange object in O'Shannon's hand seemed to have formed a force field around us. Except, no known technology existed that could create such a field. What the hell was it? A device using some kind of super-secret military technology? Oh, wow! Was it alien tech? Was O'Shannon a time traveler from the future? Then I remembered the Latin incantation she chanted as she whirled it around her head. Was it possible that it wasn't a device at all? Could it conceivably be something else entirely? Could it actually be a... a _magic amulet_? Then again, perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was correct when he wrote that a sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. Whatever it was, it existed and had created an effective barrier the monsters couldn't cross.

The largest of the remaining wolves howled in rage and frustration, interrupting my harried hypothesizing. Distant howls answered from the north and west. The new pack leader paused briefly to growl at us – the prey it could see but couldn't reach – before turning and loping off to the northwest. As the rest of the pack followed it out of sight, a horrible thought occurred to me. "I think they're headed for Deadhorse and the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay."

"Well, that could have gone worse," O'Shannon remarked, sounding pleased with herself. Still, I couldn't help but notice the sweat on her forehead and the slump of her shoulders.

"What the hell do you mean, it could have gone worse?" I demanded. "We were attacked by some kind of mutant wolves..."

"Hellhounds, Dr. Oswald," she interrupted. "They are called hellhounds."

"Well, whatever the hell they were, we could have been killed..."

"But we weren't, Dr. Oswald," she interrupted again. "We were not killed. I would say that makes the glass rather more than half full, wouldn't you?"

"B-b-but," I sputtered, not caring if I sounded like an old lawn mower. "Who the hell are you?"

"More importantly," my wife added. "What in blazes are you, and what did you just do?"

"I am just who I said I was back in Fairbanks, Dr. Menendez," she calmly replied. "I am Aileen O'Shannon and work as a freelance reporter and photographer for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. As for what I am and what I did, well that – as they say – is another matter altogether."

"Which is?" I demanded.

"Which is what I shall be more than happy to tell all of you," she replied. "But first things first. I don't think we need my protection spell any longer, and it is rather exhausting to keep up. Besides, our biologist looks like he's going to explode if I don't let him out so he can examine the dead hellhounds for himself. Also, I'm a good deal older than I look, and if they haven't completely blown away, there are several folding chairs back at camp that will be much more comfortable than standing here. _Recedemus_!" she commanded, and the barrier of scintillating sparks winked out with a soft crackling sound. Then she slid the necklace down the top of her shirt so that it was once again hidden from sight.

We walked back to what was left of our camp, all of us that is except for Bill, who remained behind with the bodies of the hellhounds he'd shot. We picked up the remaining lawn chairs, carried them several yards further away from the second hole, and sat down.

"Okay, Miss O'Shannon," I said as I warily eyed the new pit and listened for the howling of hellhounds. "Now that we're all sitting down, I think you owe us an explanation."

"I am what you might call a sorceress, although we do not use that word amongst ourselves. And please do not call me a witch; far too many of my people were murdered due to that unfortunate label. More formally, I am a _curatrix_ , a guardian of the _Tutores Contra Infernum_ , the ancient and noble order charged with protecting our world from the infernal demons of Hell."

"Demons?" Angie asked. "Hell? As in the hell of the Bible?" Like most scientists (myself included), my wife was a secular humanist. Neither Angie nor I had believed in the Christian god – or any other deity for that matter – since we were teenagers old enough to seriously question the religious dogmas of our parents and pastors. Even after what we had just witnessed, neither of us was prepared to admit that we could be so incredibly mistaken about religion and the existence of the supernatural.

"Yes and no," Aileen answered cryptically. "Our Order has no knowledge of any heaven, and we do not believe in the god, devil, and demons of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. On the other hand, these demons are quite real as you yourselves have just witnessed, and they come from a place we have, for lack of a better word, chosen to call Hell."

"Unbelievable," Kowalski said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Mr. Kowalski," O'Shannon said, "you will find that demons do not care whether or not you believe they exist. It is enough that they most definitely know you exist and will kill and eat you if given half a chance." She stared at the oil company representative until he was forced to look away. "Unfortunately, Hell is the home of a whole hierarchy of demons. Low demons, like hellhounds and gargoyles, are merely the mindless beasts of Hell. Far deadlier are the high demons, such as imps, fiends, and devils. High demons are humanoids, thinking beings with the ability to use dark magic."

O'Shannon paused briefly to let the full import of what she'd said sink in. "So you see, Mr. Kowalski, the hellhounds that attacked us are some of the most minor demons: relatively weak and totally lacking in intelligence and guile. They did not come here on their own; the devils that rule Hell sent them."

"But if all of these demons exist, then why doesn't everyone know about them?" Angie asked, not yet willing to leave the topic. "Why are we just hearing about them now?"

"Because the _Tutores Contra Infernum_ does not wish that knowledge to be known," O'Shannon replied matter-of-factly. "For thousands of years, demon-fueled fear has caused your ancestors to blame us for the evil the demons wrought and to persecute us for their crimes." She paused and sighed. "You did not know because until now, demon incursions have been rare and easy to contain. For millennia, they have only occasionally risen out of Hell, and even then only a few at a time. Unfortunately, devils can make themselves much harder to recognize; they can glamor themselves to look like us and can even cause people to ignore or misinterpret their stench of burning brimstone. You did not know because we discovered and killed the demons before they could cause more harm than we could cover up."

"But now," I started to interrupt.

"But now," she continued, "after hundreds of years of relative peace, the situation has dramatically changed. Over the last year, captured devils and imps have informed us that their Supreme Leader, their so-called Empress of a 144 Worlds, was planning a great invasion to begin in the far north. She has gathered her armies from her subjugated worlds and set her hungry eyes on Earth. And now she plans to make it the demons' next feeding grounds."

"One hundred and forty-four worlds!" Kowalski exclaimed in dismay. "Just how big is her army, and what chance do we have if the demons have already conquered so many planets?"

"Actually, we think that the number is an exaggeration."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Devils don't count in base ten like we do; they count in base 12."

"Really?" Jill asked, probably curious because she had minored in mathematics as an undergraduate. "Do you know why?"

"Probably for the same reason we use ten," Aileen answered. "Anatomy. Devils have four fingers on each hand, and because they have cloven hooves, only two 'toes' on each foot. Add them together and you get a total of 12 fingers and toes."

"I see," Jill said, nodding her head. "Twelve times twelve is 144."

"Exactly," O'Shannon continued. "Saying their Supreme Ruler is the empress of 144 worlds would be like one of us saying that someone was the empress of a hundred countries. Such a round number seems too unlikely to be true."

"So how many worlds have the devils conquered?" Kowalski continued.

"It is hard to know for sure. Devils are basically immune to torture: it's almost as though they relish the pain because of their shame over letting themselves be captured. Imps on the other hand are none too bright, especially when it comes to numbers. However, both love to brag, and since they are fearless, they see no reason to lie. So far, they have mentioned 68 worlds by name. Given what we know, we estimate the number to be somewhere between 80 and 100."

"That's still a damn lot of worlds," Kowalski complained, not the least reassured by O'Shannon's explanation.

"Do not worry, Mr. Kowalski. All is not lost, and it may not be as bad as it sounds. From what we have been able to learn, all of the worlds they have conquered had pre-industrial societies. Our technology gives us weapons they have never dreamed of. And their arrogance makes them greatly underestimated us.

"Anyway, once we learned of the hell holes, my superiors decided to send someone to investigate. As the nearest member of my Order, they sent me."

"You lied to me," I said, finally realizing that the local Fairbanks Daily News-Miner could never afford to have sent one of its reporters to Russia, especially for a story having little if any relevance to Alaska. "Why should I trust you now?"

"Yes, Dr. Oswald, I lied. You know as well as I do that much of the North Slope is leased to the oil companies. One cannot just roam about freely up here. It requires permission, and that is hardly something they would grant a reporter under the current circumstances. Besides, it is not safe to travel alone this far north, even in the summertime. I surmised that an oil company would call in outside expertise, and you were the closest. I don't know whether it was fate or luck, but I found you in your geology building just as Mr. Kowalski called. The rest – as future chroniclers will hopefully survive to say – is history."

"And that phone call you made outside the restaurant in Deadhorse, when you were speaking Latin," Angie added "Those spells of yours sure sounded like Latin to me. You told us you were talking to your younger brother, who's studying to be a priest at the Vatican. That was a lie too."

"That was no lie," O'Shannon countered forcefully, "although I will admit I was happy to let you believe Mr. Kowalski's mistaken assumption. I was talking to a member of the _Tutores Contra Infernum_ , a young novice I sponsored. He is still learning Latin, a language he will need to master, both for speaking incantations and for reading the many books and scrolls in our library. And the High Council of my order sits in Rome, just not in Vatican City."

"Forget that," Kowalski interrupted. "I don't give a damn what was a lie and what wasn't. What did you mean when you said invasion? Surely, you don't mean there is going to be more of those creatures coming out of that hole?"

"Exactly that," O'Shannon replied. "The demons have long coveted our world, and now they have apparently finally found the means to come in sufficient numbers to take it. This is clearly only the first wave of a full-scale invasion, meant to sow fear and panic. They will be followed by the enemy's main forces, probably over the next few hours or days. I am afraid that this is the Armageddon that was foretold several millennia ago, and humanity's very survival is at risk. More powerful demons will undoubtedly follow these hellhounds, which is why we must leave this accursed place as soon as we can. Trust me when I say that we do not want to be here, alone and unprotected, when the high demons arrive. There are much worse fates than being eaten alive."

"But where are they coming from?" I demanded. "The Earth isn't some hollow ball or riddled with gigantic caverns inhabited by hordes of demons. Below its thin crust, the Earth has a solid rocky mantle surrounding a core of molten iron. The immense temperatures and pressures prevent any deep void from forming. The very idea of a subterranean Hell filled with demon armies is preposterous and disproven by the evidence of tens of thousands of seismic readings."

"You are of course correct, Dr. Oswald," she agreed. "While we once believed Hell to be a physical place at the center of our planet, modern geology has made such beliefs untenable. For that and other reasons, we now believe Hell to be somewhere not of this world but rather connected to it via underground portals. With their wormholes and parallel universes, physicists and science fiction writers may have come far closer to the truth than have all the theologians and philosophers who preceded them. Hell is not the mythological place described by religions. It is quite real and so is the threat it poses."

"So what do we do now?" I demanded, deferring to the one person who seemed to understand the situation.

"What now, indeed, Dr. Oswald," O'Shannon replied. "My original mission was to investigate and assess the danger, but that has obviously been overcome by events. By now, the whole world will be learning of hell holes and hellhounds. The Magisterium of the _Tutores Contra Infernum_ will be contacting world leaders to educate them about the threat we face. Isolated up here, I cannot help them but with luck and your help, I just might be able to save you." She pointed to the remaining tents. "Gather what you can easily carry. We'll leave in five minutes, make our way as fast as we can to Pump Station 2, and hope that once there we'll be able to find shelter and the resources we need to head south. If our luck holds, we might be able to stay ahead of the invading hordes and reach the Fort Wainwright Army Base in Fairbanks. If we make it that far, we can continue on to the larger Fort Richardson Army Base at Anchorage and then be evacuated south by boat or by air from the nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base. Then, I must bid you farewell and go where my Order sends me."

With our tent swallowed by the second hell hole, Angie and I had nothing to collect.

"I'll go help Jill pack," Angie said with a worried look at the girl standing by herself, gazing back at the hell hole that had made her a widow. Meanwhile, I hurried over to where Bill was examining the bodies of the beasts he had shot.

"Look at this, Dr. Oswald," he said as I walked up. With a hand drenched in black blood, he pointed at one of the creatures he'd partially dissected with his hunting knife. "This is absolutely astounding. These hellhounds are much more than members of a species that's new to science. They're utterly unlike anything on this planet." He pointed to the strangely shaped purplish organs visible in the dismembered body at his feet. "It may look vaguely like a wolf, but it's not even a mammal. It has a three-chambered heart, a single four-lobed lung, and God knows what its blood chemistry is based on." The gory sight and sickening stench of sulfur rising from the body gagged me, making me grateful that I hadn't eaten since the previous evening.

"Bill, you need to stop now. We're leaving in a few minutes, and you need to get ready to leave."

"We can't leave now before we find out what we're up against," he argued. "For example, I just learned the damn thing's bite is venomous. Its fangs are hollow, and there's a large venom sack in the roof of its mouth."

"Doesn't matter," I countered. "O'Shannon says this is just an incursion, and there's a full-scale invasion coming. And these hellhounds are only minor demons compared to what's coming next. We've got to get out of here now, or we'll be the ones being dissected." That got his attention, and he reluctantly headed back to camp with me.

"Please tell me you have more weapons and ammunition," I said as he stripped off his stinking, gore-soaked shirt and dropped it on the ground outside his tent.

"Some," Bill said as he led me inside. Picking up a large camo carrying case, he took out a shotgun and handed it to me. "You can take my Remington. It's an 11-87 Sportsman Semi-Auto. I use it for hunting birds, not demons, so I'm afraid all I have are sport loads, no slugs. You'll want to reserve it for close-quarter defense. Fire it from too far off, and it's more likely to piss them off than to do any serious damage." He opened a small ammo box, pulled out a couple small cardboard boxes, and handed them to me. "Each of these holds 25 sport loads. Unfortunately, that's all I brought, so make them count. Of course, if you need more than fifty shotgun shells, we've got bigger problems than lack of ammo and aren't likely to make it out alive anyway."

I slung the shotgun over my shoulder and stuffed the boxes of shells in my coat pocket.

Bill rummaged around in his duffle bag, pulled out a large pistol in a black leather holster, and handed it to me. "This is my Desert Eagle .357 Magnum. I carry it in case I need to drop a polar bear intent on getting into my tent. As for ammo, I always carry more than I think I'll ever need, but then, I've never been in this situation before." He reached back into his ammo box and retrieved a couple of boxes of 50 rounds each. "I hope it's enough 'cause it's all I've got."

Again, he reached into his ammo box and pulled out a couple of boxes of shells for his rifle. "Your wife any good?" he asked.

"My wife?" I asked, clueless as to what he was asking.

"Your wife, can she shoot a pistol?"

"Oh, actually she is. She was a better shot with a handgun than I was when we were out at the range last May preparing for our summer field work."

"Good. Give her the Desert Eagle and its ammo. I've seen Kowalski shoot, and he couldn't hit a tree in the middle of a thick forest. Jill is in no shape to hold a gun, let alone fire it, and our witch, or whatever she calls herself, is likely to be more dangerous with that amulet of hers than with my gun."

"About that," I said. "She hates the term 'witch.' She said she's a... uh, a _curatrix_ or some such Latin word. Seems she's some kind of sorceress and a member of an ancient society that's been fighting demons for centuries. She said that up until now, they've only been able to cross over from Hell one or two at a time, and her organization has managed to kill them without anyone being the wiser. Something has changed, and it's the start of a full-scale invasion. Apparently, these hellhounds are only the initial shock troops, and there are worse demons coming."

"You believe her?"

"I don't know what I believe," I admitted. "An hour ago, I'd have laughed if you'd have told me the hole was a hell mouth and we were about to be attacked by a pack of monstrous demon hounds. But now..." I shrugged my shoulders. "Now, I'm all out of answers, and she's the only one who seems to know what we're up against. Until I have more evidence, what she says is the only working hypothesis I have. So yes, I guess I believe her when she says this is just the beginning of an invasion."

"Bizarre," Bill said, shaking his head. "Well, it looks like I'm going to have more opportunities to dissect demons. Almost makes me wish I were back in grad school. This would make one a hell of a doctoral thesis."

By the time we stepped out of the tent, the others were waiting. Unslinging the shotgun from my shoulder, I placed it on a nearby folding table someone had set back upright. I put the handgun and ammunition next to it so that I could put on the backpack Angie handed me. She already had a smaller backpack on her shoulders as well as Mark's rolled up sleeping bag and pad. It would be a tight fit for the two of us, but I was grateful we had something to sleep in.

"I filled yours with food, a couple of bottles of water, and some of Mark's clothes," she said, resting a hand on my forearm. "They're too big for you but they'll keep you warm and dry until we can get something that fits better."

"Thanks. Bill gave me these for you," I replied, picking up the handgun and its ammo and handing them to her.

Angie nodded her thanks to Bill, who returned her gesture. After pocketing the boxes of ammo, she silently threaded her belt though the holster and took out the gun. She pulled back the slide to verify it had a round in the chamber and then removed the nine-round clip to make sure it still had eight bullets in it. Satisfied, she holstered the gun. "Now I don't feel so damned defenseless," she said with determination.

"Okay, everybody," O'Shannon called out. "We need to get away from these holes and find someplace we can pick up supplies and put some walls and doors between us and the demons."

"How about Pump Station 2?" Kowalski asked. "It's that little group of buildings on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline we passed on the highway four miles before we turned off the road to get here. It's our closest shelter."

"Exactly what I was thinking," O'Shannon said. "We'll head for it."

"Okay," I agreed, picking up my backpack. "Let's go."

"Not so fast, Dr. Oswald," O'Shannon ordered. "Going off half-cocked could get us all killed." She paused for a second before continuing. "We need to think about how we are going to get there. As I see it, we have two choices. We can either cut straight across the tundra to the pump station or we can follow the car tracks back to the highway and then follow it pretty much straight northeast to the station. The cross-country path will be a little shorter, but walking on the tundra will be slower and more tiring than walking along the highway. Cutting cross-country up here without clear landmarks can be risky; it would be easy for us to end up walking in a large circle rather than a straight line. On the other hand, if we go to the highway first, it's not that much farther and we just might be able to flag down a convoy fleeing south towards Fairbanks." She paused for a second, considering the pros and cons of the two alternatives. "The possibility of flagging down a ride south is too important to ignore. We'll head back to the highway."

"Hey, wait a minute," Angie interrupted. "Who put you in charge? My husband Jack's leading this study."

"Yes, Dr. Oswald _was_ in charge of the study," O'Shannon replied, emphasizing the past tense. "But the study is now over. Our new job is to stay alive and that means evading demons and killing any we can't avoid before they kill us. Except for Bill here, none of you have any experience dealing with demons, and his experience is minimal." She turned to the biologist. "No offense."

"None taken," Bill replied.

"Jack?" Angie said, looking to me for direction.

"She's right," I said. "I'm in way over my head. I can't protect people the way she can; none of us can. We may not like it, but she's the most qualified to get us out of here alive. I'm more than happy to follow her lead if that's what it takes to keep us all safe."

Aileen O'Shannon turned and started leading us along the tire tracks back to the highway. Although she was now the actual leader of our group, I still felt responsible for my team and so I joined her at the front. Angie, Jill, and Kowalski stayed in the middle, and I was keenly aware of the void next to Jill where Mark should have been. Bill with his rifle brought up the rear, his eyes constantly searching the horizon for signs of danger.

As we walked, we listened for howling, but all we heard was the soft sound of the breeze blowing over the short vegetation of the tundra. Whether because they were lost in thought or afraid the noise might attract nearby hellhounds, no one spoke. The silence grew more and more oppressive until I couldn't stand it and had to say something.

"Miss O'Shannon, I realize you belong to a secret order, but I'm trusting you with the lives of my team. I'm depending on you even though I know almost nothing about you. Please tell me something to convince me my trust isn't misplaced."

"What do you wish to hear, Dr. Oswald?"

"I don't know," I answered. "I'm not sure where to begin. I guess I want to know that you're truly the best qualified to lead us to safety."

"And how am I to convince you of that? Was it not enough that my protection spell saved you from the hellhounds? That I knew what a hellhound is and what the demons are planning?"

"I don't know. I suppose so, but I want to know more. How long have you been a guardian?"

"Remember when I mentioned that I am older than I look?"

"Yes," I replied, abruptly realizing her simple statement might mean far more than I understood at the time.

"To safeguard its secrecy, our order has always been small. This is why the life of every individual _curatrix_ is so precious to us. It takes years of training before an initiate completes her apprenticeship and earns her rank of _curatrix_. Once granted, the title is bestowed for life. We do not retire, Dr. Oswald. We serve until we die, whether naturally or killed by demons." She paused briefly to let the ramifications set in.

"With so much depending on so few of us, it is crucial that we remain active and strong for a great many years. Thankfully, our amulets and spells are not the only weapons in our arsenal. There are also potions, some of which have effects bordering on the miraculous. One such potion, the _elixir vitae_ , extends our lives indefinitely, granting us youth regardless of the number of years we have served."

"But that means you could be..."

"Very old indeed," O'Shannon interrupted, completing my thought. "I became a _curatrix_ during the reign of Constantine the Great, the emperor who reunited the western and eastern Roman Empires in the century before the final fall of Rome. I have been fighting and killing demons for over seventeen centuries. If I cannot save us, then we are truly lost."

"Oh," I said, trying to reconcile what I had just heard with the youthful beauty of the woman walking beside me. We walked on in silence.

The rest of the mile-and-a-half hike across the green tundra to the road was uneventful. Luckily, the vast majority of the hell holes were closer to the coast, and the hellhounds seemed to have headed north to join forces for their attacks on Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse, and Barrow.

Although just about everyone living north of the Arctic Circle owned rifles for hunting and protection from wolves and other predators, I figured the odds of survival were pretty bleak for people living along the coast, particularly those in isolated villages like Atqasuk, Kaktovik, and Nuiqsut. I was especially pessimistic because hellhounds were unlikely to give the inhabitants time to realize they had to shoot the demons in the head to make them go down and stay down.

"Mr. Kowalski," O'Shannon called over her shoulder. "Come up here and tell me what you know about the pump station. I'm afraid I did not pay much attention to it on our way down, and now I need to know what to expect when we get there."

Dirty and with most of the hair on the front of his head singed off, the tired oil company representative looked like he'd aged ten years since we left the little town of Deadhorse. "Well, Pump Station 2 is one of 11 stations that were built to pump oil from Prudhoe Bay down to Valdez. If I remember right, it was commissioned in the fall of 1979. It was ramped down and placed on standby during the summer of 1997, and it's been inactive ever since. Like the rest, it has four pumps, but the pipeline bypasses them now."

"Mr. Kowalski," O'Shannon interrupted, the tone of her voice indicating her annoyance over his mostly useless history lesson. "I don't need to know the station's past; I need to know its present, what it's like now."

"Oh, right," he answered. "I think there are about 10 buildings. There's the main pump building, main turbine building, pig launch building, metering building..."

"What?" O'Shannon asked, confused by the strange oil pipeline jargon. She turned to Kowalski and asked, "I'm sorry, but did you just say pig launch building?"

"Yes, I guess that does deserve an explanation, doesn't it?" the oilman replied.

"It's probably irrelevant, but I have to ask," O'Shannon said. "I'm guessing it's not because Pump Station 2 is where they filmed the _Muppet's Pigs in Space_ episodes."

"No, I'm afraid it has a much more mundane meaning. It all has to do with cleaning and inspecting a pipeline while oil is flowing through it. Pigging is the industry's practice of using a launcher to put a Pipeline Inspection Gauge – or PIG – into the pipeline. The pressure of the oil pushes the cylindrical pig down the pipeline until it's caught by a pig catcher. They're also called pigs because of the squealing sound they make as they move through the pipeline. The upstream pump stations typically have pig launch buildings and downstream ones have pig catcher buildings."

"Ok, I guess that makes sense," O'Shannon said as she started walking again. "Continue."

"Anyway, Pump Station 2 also has a maintenance building, shop, control room, office building, and a garage, which typically contains a firetruck and one or two other vehicles. There's also a large satellite dish and a large oil storage tank. Finally, there is the bunk house, which also includes a kitchen, mess hall, showers, and a place for the crew to unwind."

Map of Pump Station 2

"Crew?" I asked, quickly realizing that we may not have to fight demons by ourselves. "How many people work there?"

"I don't remember," Kowalski replied. "The active stations are typically manned by ten to twenty-five employees working 12-hour shifts, one week on and one week off. Given that Pump Station 2 is inactive, there may be a small maintenance team of two or three people. More likely, there won't be anyone there. All I know for sure is that no one answered when I called yesterday about the firefighting equipment. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The crew could have been anywhere in the station and not heard the phone in the office. I just don't know."

"Well, we'll find out soon enough," O'Shannon said. "What's the best way to get inside without being seen?"

"The station's about a hundred yards east of the Haul Road. The main entrance is on the north end and blocked by a locked gate. The station itself is surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain link fence that has several small gates for people. One is in the middle of the south fence. Since we'll be coming up from that direction, I'd say we enter through it and head for the bunkhouse. It'll be the closest building to the gate."

"Sounds good," O'Shannon said. "Tell me more about the bunkhouse."

"Well, it's two stories and connected by a short covered passageway to the single-story office building. Together, they form an upside-down letter _L_ with the longer bunkhouse running north away from the fence and the shorter office building running west towards the highway. They're both raised on pylons about five feet off the ground to keep their heat from melting the permafrost and sinking into the ground."

"Great, that'll make it harder for the hellhounds to break in," she said. "Speaking of which, how can we get in? How many doors are there?"

"I'm not sure; it's been quite a while since I've been there. I think there might be three: one at the south end of the bunkhouse and one on each end of the office building. You go up a short stairway to a little storm porch that helps keep out the cold air. Oh, I almost forgot. There's also an incline that leads to a garage door in the middle of the office building's north side. It opens onto a small garage and loading dock."

"Which door is least visible to the rest of the station?" she asked.

"That would be the one on the south end of the bunkhouse. It's also only about twenty feet from the opening in the fence."

We walked on in silence, as O'Shannon made her plans and the rest of us worried about what we would find there.

After crossing a couple of small streams, we reached the road in less than an hour, turned left, and started walking the remaining four miles northeast to the pump station.

"Here comes someone," O'Shannon called out, pointing north towards Deadhorse.

There was a small brown dust cloud on the horizon. It rapidly approached, morphing into a big rig that barreled down the Dalton towards us. Bill stepped into the middle of the gravel road and began waiving for it to stop as the rest of us moved to the side. The driver let out a long blast on his air horn. The truck neither slowed nor swerved to the side. If anything, the driver floored the gas pedal, and Bill had to dive to the side to avoid being run over. It was clear the driver had seen the horrors from the pits and wasn't stopping until he reached Fairbanks or ran out of gas trying.

"Damn bastard," Bill cursed as he reached down to pick up his rifle from where he'd had thrown it to keep it from being crushed under the truck's massive tires. "I bet he had enough room in the back for all of us."

"Did anyone catch the number on his license plate?" Kowalski asked, his face red with outrage. "I'm going to report his ass the first chance I get."

"It would probably do no good," O'Shannon said. "I think the police will have more to deal with than some truck driver too scared to stop for people by the side of the road. Hopefully the next time, we will have more luck, and the driver will stop long enough to pick us up."

However, our lack of luck continued when five minutes later an SUV also roared past. It was completely packed with at least a dozen frightened people, most of whom were women and young children. Gripping a hunting rifle in his hands, the man sitting in the shotgun seat stared at us, practically daring us to make a threatening move. The woman sitting behind him sadly shook her head and raised her hands in a gesture that said, _Sorry but there's nothing we can do_.

Finally, another SUV slowed and pulled to a stop. The driver rolled down his window. "You're heading the wrong direction," he warned. "You probably won't believe us, but Deadhorse is being overrun by hundreds of killer mutant dogs that look like they've escaped from some secret government lab. They're attacking everything and everyone that moves. We're damn lucky to have made it out alive."

He may have expected us not to believe him, but we knew exactly what he meant. Instead, we looked hopefully through the car's windows. An elderly couple sat in back, while two children sat in the middle seats. I assumed the woman sitting across from the driver was his wife. That left one empty seat between the old man and woman in the back.

"We know. We are heading for Pump Station 2 just a few miles north of here," O'Shannon explained. "We lost our vehicles when a hell hole opened up underneath them. There just might be some kind of transportation there." She looked back at the empty seat. "Maybe you can help us out."

The man raised his right hand from where he'd been resting it in his lap. He was holding a pistol. "You wouldn't be thinking of taking my car, would you? That would be a serious mistake." His gun wasn't pointing directly at O'Shannon, but it wasn't pointed that far away from her either. His veiled threat was clear. He wouldn't give up his car without someone ending up shot.

"Of course not," O'Shannon replied, taking a step backwards and raising her hands to show she wasn't armed. "This is your car, and your family comes first. We get it." Her eyes glanced once more to the empty seat in the back. "But surely you could take one more person with you."

Without moving his gun away, the man glanced briefly at his wife, who nodded.

"Okay, but make it quick. I just wanted to warn you to head south, and we've already stopped longer than I intended."

"Which one of you goes?" Bill asked. "I'm staying. I signed on to protect you, and I'm not leaving 'til everyone's safe."

"Jill!" Kowalski, Angie, and I said simultaneously.

"What?" she asked, surprised by our sudden and unexpected unanimous decision.

"You need to protect your baby," Angie explained. "It's what Mark would have wanted."

Jill looked from Angie to me and then to Kowalski, who also nodded his encouragement. Then, she stood a little straighter, and a look of grim determination replaced some of the fear and doubt on her face as the imperative of protecting their baby overcame the terror and grief of the previous few hours.

"Miss, if you're coming, now's the time," the driver urged, glancing back up the Dalton towards Deadhorse with its distant horde of raging hellhounds.

"Dear," the man's wife said. "You need to give her a few minutes to say goodbye. There's no telling when and where they'll see each other again."

"Well..."

"We'll see you in Fairbanks," I said, giving Jill a quick hug.

"Call and leave us a message on our answering machine once you get there," Angie said. "That way, we'll know you got home safe. Then, we'll give you a call as soon as we arrive, and we can get together and figure out what to do next."

Then with a final look at the rest of us, Jill climbed into the SUV and sat in the single empty space in back. The car accelerated south and soon disappeared in the distance. Then, we turned and continued our slow hike north to the pump station.

That was the last car we saw on the road. Half an hour later, our luck finally failed us as the pump station eventually came into view. We were a couple of hundred yards away when several hellhounds came into view, circling the buildings and trying to get in through the doors.

"Damn," Bill cursed. "It's going to complicate things if the damned beasts have managed to breach any of the buildings."

"Everyone stop here," O'Shannon said. We didn't need to be told twice. "Gather 'round. I want all of you to know what's coming next so you'll know what your part to play is. The good news is that hellhounds are none too bright. They have a lousy sense of smell and poor hearing, which means they pretty much only hunt by sight. Luckily for us, they also have a one-track mind. They are totally concentrating on getting into the buildings so they are not going to be looking out over the tundra.

"So, here's what we're going to do," O'Shannon continued. "We'll head straight over to the pipeline so we can hide behind the pylons holding it off the ground. When we get to the chain-link fence, we'll go through the south gate and gather behind that big satellite dish."

"Won't the gate be locked?" Angie asked. "What do we do then? There's no way I want to be stuck standing there in plain sight while someone tries to pick the lock."

Kowalski nodded his agreement.

"Don't worry about the lock," O'Shannon answered. "I can unlock it with a simple spell. Anyway, there's a very good chance that if we're quiet, we can get within 50 feet of them before they even notice us. Once we're close enough, I'll kill any that see us. Then, we'll sprint to the back of the bunkhouse, run up the steps to the back door, go inside, and barricade the door behind us before any more of the damned demons even know we're there."

"You'll kill the hellhounds yourself?" I asked, remembering how weak she was after creating the barrier. I wasn't sure she could handle all three hellhounds by herself.

She looked at my shotgun and said, "Dr. Oswald, I don't want you firing that gun unless you absolutely have to. Every hellhound within a couple of hundred yards will come running if they hear shooting." Turning to Bill with his rifle and my wife with her handgun, she added, "The same goes for the two of you. It's damned difficult to hit one in the head, especially when it's attacking you. We need to handle this quietly, so leave them to me."

I must admit to being relieved. Bill might be an excellent shot, but neither my wife nor I had much practice shooting at moving targets, especially ones trying to kill us. Even with the shotgun, I wasn't sure I could hit a hellhound in the head.

With a worried look, O'Shannon paused before continuing. "There's a chance there may be more of them than I can take out at the same time. If we're spotted and one of them gives a warning howl, they'll be on us like flies on garbage. Those of you with the guns need to be ready to clear a path if I fail."

She looked at Angie and me, waiting for us to acknowledge the grave responsibility she'd just laid on our shoulders. We grimly nodded our agreement, though I really hoped our survival wouldn't come down to my shooting ability.

"Okay," she continued. "Here's how we'll go in. I'll take the lead, followed by Dr. Oswald with his shotgun." She nodded to Kowalski. "Since you're unarmed, I want you to come next. Bill and Dr. Menendez will bring up the rear. And remember, only shoot if you have to, and even then, wait until they're no more than twenty feet away. If you can't kill them, maybe you can at least slow them down long enough for us to get inside. And finally, we can't afford to waste ammunition so try to make every shot count."

Then she turned to my wife. "Once we're inside, I want you to close the door behind us and make sure it stays shut. Dr. Oswald and Mr. Kowalski, I want you to go find something heavy to barricade the door. Meanwhile, Bill and I will work our way through the building, checking the windows and other doors to see if they are still okay and killing any hellhounds that might be inside."

We left the road and made our way across the empty tundra to the pipeline without being seen. This close to the pump station, the four-foot diameter pipe was elevated just high enough for us to cross under it if we ducked our heads. Though we had to crouch to be able to watch the hellhounds and see if they'd spotted us, at least the pipe and its supports provided far better cover than the tundra's ankle-high grasses, sedges, heather, and caribou moss. The supports were 60 feet apart, so we had no choice but to move forward in increments. One by one, we ran to the next pair of pylons where we'd hide until the rest of the team caught up, and we'd repeat the process.

Closer to the pump station, the pipeline passed over the chain link fence east of the south gate. We had no choice but to leave cover and cross the 100 feet of open ground to the gate. We'd be completely visible to any hellhounds that looked our way.

The tension was intense, and I'm not ashamed to admit to being terrified of being out in the open. I briefly thought of Jill, incredibly grateful that she had gotten a ride and wasn't here facing the hellish monsters that had feasted on her husband's body.

As quietly as possible, we ran to the gate. As Angie feared, it was locked by a rusty old padlock. Before anyone could panic, O'Shannon raised her crimson amulet and whispered, " _Reserare ostium_." The lock popped open with a barely audible click, and the gate opened without a sound. We filed through the fence, and a few seconds later, were hidden behind the large satellite dish, amazed that we hadn't been spotted.

Two hellhounds were pacing at the foot of the stairs leading to the back door of the bunkhouse. A third was in the covered porch scratching at the door with long claws like those on a lion or tiger. Looking intently at the door, they hadn't sensed us crouching behind them.

Gripping my shotgun tightly, my eyes were drawn to the empty space beneath the building. I half expected another demon to jump out at us from behind the pillars that held the bunkhouse five feet above the tundra.

Holding her amulet out in front of her, O'Shannon whispered, "Everyone ready? Okay, let's do this." Reaching around the satellite disk, she aimed her amulet at the hellhounds and spoke the incantation, " _Demorior demonia!_ "

The three hellhounds dropped like marionettes with their strings cut: one second alive, the next lifeless on the porch and ground. O'Shannon swayed and her knees began to buckle. She might have fallen had I not been there to catch her arm and keep her upright as we sprinted for the stairs.

With one arm supporting our sorceress and the other holding my shotgun, we stepped over the bodies of the two beasts at the base of the stairs. The rest of the team were right behind us.

I had to help O'Shannon climb over the body of the huge hellhound that sprawled across most of the tiny porch. She aimed her amulet at the doorknob and once again said " _Reserare ostium._ " I heard the lock click, and the door opened.

While O'Shannon dealt with the door, I grabbed the hellhound's hind leg with my free hand so I could drag it out of the way. It was hot and slimy, and the beast stank strongly of sulfur. I was just about to pull it off the porch when a fourth demon came loping around the corner of the building, not twenty feet from the base of the stairs.

Two shots rang out. I couldn't tell whether Angie or Bill shot first, but one bullet struck the beast in the chest while the second severed one of its legs. It dropped with a yelp, and a third shot removed the back of its skull before it could heal itself.

An instant later, we heard several demons howl from the far side of the building. With a renewed sense of urgency, I tugged on the dead creature's legs but could barely move it. Recognizing that the huge hellhound had to weigh as much as I did, Kowalski helped me push it off the porch. It landed on the ground with a dull thud.

I moved to the side so the others could rush past me and in through the open door to the bunkhouse. I wasn't about to enter until Angie was safely inside. Soon, I was the last one outside. I just started to turn towards the door when two more hellhounds raced out from under the building and jumped onto the stairs.

Without thinking, I raised the shotgun and fired, blowing the head off the closest demon and peppering the second one's face with a dozen lead pellets. I hadn't had time to press the butt of the gun against my shoulder and the recoil rammed it hard into my armpit. Half deaf and feeling like the blast had nearly taken off my arm, I forgot the damned demons at the base of the stairs. Luckily, Bill hadn't and grabbed me by the back of my coat collar, jerking me backwards through the door.

Angie almost had the door shut when one of the hellhounds pushed his head and half of his neck inside, blocking the door. The beast swiveled its head towards her, snarling and snapping its vicious teeth. Angie jerked back her head and might just have even let go of the door had Bill not chosen that moment to ram the barrel of his rifle down the creature's throat. Making a strangling sound, it started pulling its head back. Bill fired and the hellhound's head blew backwards out of the doorway, leaving a splatter of black blood and bits of its brain on the door jam. Angie jumped forward, slammed the door shut, and locked it.

The narrow hallway where we stood was instantly thrown into semidarkness, the only light coming from the far end of the bunkhouse. Cold, dark, and silent, the empty building creeped me out, and I could easily imagine hellhounds hiding behind every closed door.

Angie had turned around and pushed against the door with her back. A series of loud bangs rattled the locked door as a demon hound howled in rage and threw itself against the barrier keeping it from its intended prey. Soon, we could hear several more members of the pack gathering outside, growling, snarling, and scratching the door with their clawed paws.

"Jack, hurry!" my wife yelled, reminding me that O'Shannon had tasked Kowalski and me to go find something heavy to push up against the door. "And be careful!"

I nodded, and turned to follow O'Shannon and Bill as they began methodically checking the bedrooms on either side of the narrow hallway running the length of the building. They left the doors open so that the weak sunlight could penetrate into the dimly lit passageway.

Kowalski and I found a chest of drawers in the first bedroom, carried it back, and pushed it up against the door. Being empty, it wasn't heavy enough by itself so we brought back a couple more. Only after we'd laid them on their backs and stacked them three high did we start to feel safe.

I spotted a light switch and flipped it. Nothing happened. "No electricity," I said.

"Yah, I already tried that," Angie responded. "The generator must be off."

"Each station has generators that run on natural gas," Kowalski said. "We just need to find the one for this building and turn it on."

"Not likely," Bill replied, coming down the stairs after searching the second floor. "For safety sake, they probably keep the generator outside in its own building so there's no risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. I don't know about you, but I'm in no hurry to go outside looking for it."

"On the other hand," O'Shannon said with a smile, "the good news is that this building's safe, or at least as safe as things are likely to be this far north. Luckily for us, when the builders raised the bunkhouse on pillars to keep it from melting the permafrost and sinking into the ground, they also raised the windows out of the hellhounds' reach. All of the windows are okay, we've seen no signs of any demons inside, and the door leading to the neighboring office building is locked. As Bill noted, outside is sadly another matter. We looked out the windows and counted at least a dozen of the hellhounds circling the bunkhouse, and some of them were running under the building."

Aileen inspected the furniture we'd piled up against the door and nodded. "That should hold them for the time being, and I could use something to eat. There is a kitchen the other end of the hall where we can have lunch. Maybe we can even find some supplies for the road."

We followed O'Shannon down the poorly lit hallway to the far end of the building where we found the kitchen and a pantry on the left and a mess hall and entertainment room on the right. The kitchen was clean and surprisingly free from dust. We also found a fair amount of canned and dried food in its pantry. Although most of the refrigerators were empty and they weren't working without electricity, I was still glad to discover that one of them still contained a six-pack of Alaskan Amber.

I went over to the sink, turned on the tap, and was rewarded with hot and cold water. Stepping up to the stove, I turned on one of the burners and was pleased to hear the hiss of gas, though it didn't light without the electricity needed to make a spark to ignite it.

"At least the water and gas are still on," I called out to the others as I turned the gas off. "We'll be able to fix a hot meal."

"Great," Angie replied. "You can help me fix lunch."

While we heated up cans of soup and baked beans, Bill, Kowalski, and O'Shannon explored the bunkhouse, something they hadn't taken the time to do properly while checking for broken windows and hellhounds. In addition to the lavatories and showers, they also checked out the mess hall and entertainment room, each of which had a big screen TV mounted on the wall.

"Damn TV's worthless without power," Kowalski complained. "We need news. We need to know what's going on up north, and I want to know what's being done to evacuate the 3,000 plus people working the North Slope."

"Don't forget the native villages," Bill said. "And we have no idea whether the invasion is localized to Alaska, North America, or extends all the way around the entire Arctic. Our chances of rescue may well depend on how thinly our military's resources are spread."

To say we were frustrated by our ignorance of what was going on outside the pump station would have been a huge understatement.

We ate our first real sit-down meal since departing Deadhorse in silence, each of us physically and emotionally drained by the previous twenty-four hours. As I sat there, I found myself really looking at my companions for the first time since leaving for the hell hole. I was struck by just how much we'd changed. Everyone had dirty faces and clothes as well as spots where our hair had been singed off by the heat of the hellish fire that had burned Mark beyond all recognition. And it wasn't just our physical appearance. We were bone tired, and not just from lack of sleep and the long hike from the hole. Fear, anxiety, and the shock of having our reality turned upside down had taken their toll, and you could see it in our eyes. Was it really only yesterday that we'd arrived at the North Slope? It seemed far longer.

Directly across from me, my wife sat quietly eating, lost in thought, while O'Shannon sat to her left, looking every bit as tired as I felt. I glanced to my right; away from his office in Prudhoe Bay, Kowalski was clearly out of his element, having totally lost control of the situation he'd initiated with his fateful telephone call. He kept looking out the window as if expecting at any minute a hellhound might burst through it.

Only Bill, sitting on my left, seemed little affected by the situation. I glanced down at his hands to see if they were as steady as his calm expression implied, and that was when I noticed the heavy gold ring on his right hand. The insignia on its face held two silver arrows crossed over a dagger and a black U-shaped ribbon with the motto _De Oppresso Liber,_ to free the oppressed. This insignia was surrounded by the words _US Army Special Forces_.

Our field biologist had been a true warrior. Battling demons might not be the same as fighting enemy soldiers or terrorists, but if O'Shannon was right, then we were at war fighting a foe far more terrifying than any he had faced.

"Where did you serve," I asked.

Bill followed my gaze to the ring on his hand. He took a long pull on his warm bottle of Alaska Amber, and replied, "My first tour was during Operation Enduring Freedom, mostly fighting Taliban in Kandahar. My second tour began in Iraqi Kurdistan prior to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I helped organize the Kurdish Peshmerga when we joined forces to defeat the Iraqi Army in the north. After the fall of Bagdad, I fought insurgents in the Sunni Triangle and took part in the Second Battle of Fallujah."

Bill paused, getting a pained look on his face. "Then, reports broke of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. It became clear that we'd lost the moral high ground and there would be no winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Eventually, I couldn't take the endless fighting anymore. I retired and returned to Alaska where things made sense again and I could get my head back together. Or at least they made sense until we arrived at that damn hole and all hell broke loose. Now, the world's gone crazy again, and the only consolation is that at least this time, it's obvious who the enemy is."

"Unfortunately, Bill, that is not exactly correct," O'Shannon said.

"What?" Bill exclaimed.

"You were busy dissecting a hellhound while I explained the different types of demons to the others. There are several kinds: humanoid high demons and beast-like low demons. Devils are one of the types of high demons, and they can use dark magic to glamour people into thinking that they look just like people. When devils emerge from the hell holes, it will be no different that when you were back in action, trying to differentiate Taliban fighters and Iraqi insurgents from ordinary civilians."

"Well, fuck," Bill cursed. "Isn't that just great." He threw he fork down, picked up his plate, and stomped off to the kitchen. "I'm having the last beer." It was a statement, not a request, and no one argued.

O'Shannon waited until we'd all finished eating before speaking again. "I don't know about you, but I didn't get more than an hour or two of sleep last night. I'm beat and in no shape to take on a single hellhound let alone a whole pack of them. While Bill and I check out the office building, the rest of you can collect sufficient supplies for the drive down to Fairbanks. Then, we can make an early night of it. Tomorrow, we will be in better shape and hopefully can find something to drive south in, even if it's the station's firetruck. With a bit of luck, maybe some of the hellhounds will even give up trying to break in and head north during the night."

"Thank God," Kowalski exclaimed, his expression one of profound relief. "I was afraid we were going to try to leave as soon as we loaded some of the food into our back packs."

I was sure he'd given voice to exactly what we'd all been thinking. I think the relief of not immediately leaving was what probably prompted me to say, "Okay, I'll help Miss O'Shannon and Bill search the office building." I even surprised myself by my offer. We hadn't heard nor seen anything through the small windows in the doors at either end of the short covered passageway that connected the two buildings. Perhaps I assumed the adjacent building was as empty as the bunkhouse, and we wouldn't be in any more danger there than where we were.

"Thanks," Bill said. "Between the desks and cubicle dividers, there's bound to be dozens of places in the office building where one of those damned demon dogs could hide. Your shotgun may well make all the difference if we're ambushed."

Angie gave an audible gasp.

Great, I thought. Just the kind of thing we wanted to hear before leaving the relative safety of the bunkhouse. But now that I'd made my bed, I was going to have to lie in it. There was no way I could back out of the offer without being ashamed to look myself in the mirror, not to mention considering what Angie might think. I grimly promised myself to consider the potential consequences the next time I thought of offering to help hunt demons.

Bill picked up his rifle, while I grabbed the shotgun he'd loaned me.

"Jack, you damn well better be careful in there," Angie said, giving me a quick kiss and hug. "You don't have anything to prove; you're already my hero. Leave the heroics to the experts."

Angie gave me a final hug, and followed us to the door from the bunkhouse into the short passageway to the office building. We peered through the door's small window and saw that the passage was empty. It vaguely reminded me of the kind of airlock you'd see leading to some monster-filled lab in a made-for-TV horror movie. O'Shannon and Bill entered the passageway.

"Angie," I said, stepping through the door to join them. "Lock this door behind us. We can't have any hellhounds making it back into the bunkhouse if there are any waiting when we open the door to the office building."

Nodding solemnly, she closed the door between us. There was a surprisingly loud click as she turned the lock. She stared at me through the small window, and I had to turn away before seeing her tears could cause me to cry.

"Looks clear to me," O'Shannon said, peeking through the matching window of the second door. Unexpectedly, she banged her fist several times loudly against the door.

"What the hell?" I exclaimed. "You just let any hellhounds in there know we're coming in!"

"Exactly, Dr. Oswald," she replied. "I'd much rather any hellhounds come to the door while it's still closed with us on this side of it rather than once we've shut it behind us."

"Oh," I said, feeling less than brilliant for missing the obvious. "You're right, of course, but next time let me know first before you do something like that,"

"Duly noted," she acknowledged. "You ready?"

Bill and I glanced at each other and nodded.

"OK, Bill, you and I will go first. Dr. Oswald, I want you to follow us and make sure that nothing comes up behind us." She opened the door and stepped through, followed closely by the biologist. I took a deep breath, walked into the dimly lit building, and shut the door behind me.

We'd entered at the south side of the building near its east end. Well-lit by several windows in the east wall, a dozen small cubicles separated by chest high wall panels divided the large open area before us. A desk, chair, and filing cabinet filled each cramped workspace. Bill had been right; there were dozens of places for hellhounds to hide.

"Look." O'Shannon pointed at one of the windows along the wall to our right. Through it, we could see a long building with one regular door and five large garage doors fifty feet away to the northeast.

"If there are any vehicles here, then that's our best bet," Bill said. "We can go out of this side door, run across, and be inside in just a couple minutes."

"We may not get that long," I countered, drawing back from the window as three hellhounds loped into view between the two buildings. "For all we know, there could be several hiding under the building where we can't see them. And since the garage is sitting directly on the ground, there may be windows we can't see that are low enough for hellhounds to break into."

"True, but we can't stay here," O'Shannon said. "Soon, there will be more than hellhounds to deal with; demons will head south once they've overrun the coastal villages. Look, we're taking a calculated risk staying here a single night, and I won't risk a second."

We tore ourselves away from the windows and moved as quietly as we could down the main hallway running the length of the building. Our soft footsteps and my pulse beating loudly in my ears were the only sounds that broke the deep silence.

To our right, individual offices lined the long north side of the building. Several of their doors were ajar, the deep darkness within indicating that there were no windows along that side of the structure.

We went methodically from cubicle-to-cubicle and office-to-office, finding nothing but empty dust-covered desks and filing cabinets until we'd reached a door near the middle of the building's north side. Bill pointed at the bottom of the closed door where a thin line of pale light shone between the carpet and the door. "Look," he said. "The other offices didn't have windows and there's no electricity, so what in heck is that?"

"Maybe the hellhounds have managed to force their way in through an outer wall," I suggested, worried that they had finally succeeded in breaking into the building.

"Maybe," O'Shannon said. "I don't know, but we're going to find out. Dr. Oswald, bring your shotgun up here; and Bill, I want you to watch our backs. We haven't checked half of this building yet, and I'm in no mood for surprises. On the count of three, I am going to open the door a few inches. Dr. Oswald, if there's a demon inside, shoot the bastard, and then I'll slam the door shut." She paused a second to make sure we were ready. When we nodded, she continued. "Let's do this."

"Okay," I answered, wishing that Bill was the one closest to the door.

"One, two, three, now!" She jerked the door open several inches.

I glanced around the empty room behind the door. "It's safe," I said with relief. O'Shannon opened the door the rest of the way, and we stepped through into a small loading bay. There was a garage door with a rectangular window a foot high by two foot across providing a view to the north. Dim light coming through the window had been enough to provide the strip of light we saw beneath the door.

O'Shannon walked up to the window and looked out. "There's another building north of us. It has four garage doors, but it's about twice as far away as the one we saw earlier. Unfortunately, the shortest path to it is through this loading dock; using this garage door will be slow, noisy, and put us in plain view of most of the rest of the pump station. The only good thing about it is that it's at ground level so we would not have to worry about anything coming up behind us from under the building." She paused, weighing the pros and cons. "No, I don't like it one bit. Still, if we don't find anything drivable in the garage, it can be our backup plan."

She stepped aside, and I put my face up to the window. If anything, it looked to me like it was three times farther away than the garage. And while the garage doors took up the entire west side of the garage, they took up less than half of this building to the north. Whatever it was, it was probably used for more than just protecting vehicles from the arctic winters.

I was just turning away from the window when there was a thunderous crash as something large slammed into the garage door. It blocked the sunlight through the window, plunging the loading dock into darkness. The window shattered, pelting the side of my face with shards of glass. Incredibly loud snarling and scratching immediately followed. I turned to find the muzzle of a hellhound sticking nearly a foot into the room, its giant jaws snapping mere inches from my face. It's a wonder I managed to raise the shotgun and point it at the demon's face before pulling the trigger.

Nothing prepared me for the unbelievably loud sound made by firing the shotgun inside that confined space. My ears were ringing, and my face was splattered by black blood and bits of things I shuddered to consider. I cried out in pain as the thick black ichor dripped into my eyes, where it burned like acid.

O'Shannon jerked me away from the garage door and the shattered window. I think she was asking me if I had been bitten, but I couldn't tell for sure between the ringing in my ears, the excruciating agony of my eyes, and the fear that I could be going blind. The extremely loud screeching of ripping and bending sheet metal joined the ringing in my ears, making it even harder for me to hear. She grabbed one of my arms, Bill grabbed the other, and they half led, half dragged me out of the loading bay. Someone slammed the door shut behind us, leaving me one hand free to wipe the gore from my eyes. It stung like hell, the stench of sulfur was almost overpowering, and I won't even try to describe the taste.

"Help me with this," I heard Bill ask O'Shannon. At least I think he was asking her, given how little I could see and how I was unable to do anything until I could clean my eyes. A second later, I heard the scraping sounds of a desk being pushed up against the door.

I wiped my face with my shirtsleeves and spit as much of the vile liquid from my mouth as I could. The pain slowly subsided over the next few minutes, and my vision – though blurry – returned. By then, Bill and O'Shannon had stacked several desks and file cabinets up against the door.

"What happened?" I asked, increasingly bothered by the urgency with which they were barricading the door.

"I guess you couldn't see what happened when you fired that shotgun," O'Shannon said with more than a hint of annoyance. "You didn't just hit the hellhound; you also blew several inches out of the window frame and garage door. As we were pulling you out, several of the damned demons were enlarging the hole by ripping broken slats out of the door with their teeth and claws. By now, I expect there are several hellhounds inside the building. Next time you fire that thing, you might try taking better aim first."

I nodded sheepishly, glad that it hadn't turned out worse. Hell, I was happy I hadn't pissed my pants when I saw that hellhound's massive jaws a hand's width from my face.

"That's okay, Jack. No harm, no foul." Bill said, smiling as he patted me on the back. "Just don't shoot this wall. We need to keep the rest of this building demon free until tomorrow morning, if we're going to use the side door to make a run for the garage."

"Okay," O'Shannon said. "Let's finish this building and get back to the bunk house. "I think we've all had more than enough excitement for one day."

Thirty minutes later, we'd worked our way around the rest of the building and back to the door leading to the bunkhouse. We were just about to cross into the elevated passageway when the office lighting switched on, causing me to close my irritated eyes at the glare.

"What the...?" Bill said, surprised by the unexpected illumination.

"Well, it looks like someone found out how to turn on the generator without going outside," O'Shannon said. "While having electricity may prove useful, we need to turn off these damn lights; we don't want to give the hellhounds any more evidence than necessary that we're still in the building."

I didn't take long to find the light switches and turn them off, plunging the office building back into relative darkness. Then, we quickly made our way through the short passageway to the bunkhouse.

Angie and Kowalski were sitting in front of the TV in the mess hall. The news was on, and it wasn't good.

"Over a thousand giant holes now encircle the arctic from Alaska though Canada, Iceland, and Scandinavia all the way across Siberia," the TV commentator reported as aerial shots of dozens of hell holes flashed across the screen. "The total number of the so-called hellhounds is currently estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. All of the small Alaskan and Canadian villages north of the Arctic Circle appear to have fallen, and unnamed White House sources speaking on condition of anonymity confirm that the town of Deadhorse is likely to be overrun within the next few hours. We can now report that US Army and National Guard ground forces are headed north from Fort Wainwright just outside of Fairbanks. However, our sources within the Pentagon admit that they are unlikely to arrive in time to save the embattled town. Meanwhile, the world's air forces are bombing the hell holes, but so far that appears to be having little effect. The hellhounds are only briefly stopped before the holes are dug out and they began pouring out of them again."

Angie finally noticed us. "Oh my God, Jack! What the hell happened to you? Are you okay?" I tried to hold her at arm's length so that she wouldn't end up covered in the hellhound's foul-smelling gore, but she wasn't letting anything get between us. Eventually, she stepped back and gave me a look that simultaneously conveyed love, fear, and anger that I had allowed myself to get close enough to a hellhound to be spattered with its blood.

"I'm fine," I said, hoping to prevent her from making it into a huge deal.

"He did good, Dr. Menendez," Bill said, coming to my rescue. "He killed a hellhound that was breaking into the office building. Took its head off with a single shot."

I will be eternally grateful that neither he nor O'Shannon mentioned the fact that we wouldn't have been attacked in the first place if I hadn't foolishly stuck my face right up to the window so that the demons outside could see me, that and blasting a hole in the loading dock door.

"The hellhounds managed to break into the office building?" Kowalski asked, looking horrified at the black blood smearing my face and splattering my chest. "What's to stop them from getting in here?"

"We've barricaded them inside a loading bay," O'Shannon said. "The rest of the office building is clear, and we have the two doors on either end of the passageway between here and the office building. Don't worry; you're safe, at least for the time being."

"In that case," Kowalski interjected, "what about the reason you went over in the first place? Did you find out anything that will help us get out of here?"

"That we did," Bill answered. "There's a big garage just east of the office building and another building with several garage doors a bit farther to the north. With any luck, we'll find a car or truck in one of the two tomorrow morning so we can get the hell out of here."

"That's great news," Angie said, breathing a sigh of relief. "While you were next door, I loaded everyone's back packs with as much food as we can reasonably carry. We should be ready to leave tomorrow morning at first light."

"And I take it someone found a way to turn on the electric generator," I observed.

"Yeah, that was Mr. Kowalski," Angie replied. "He was looking around and found the bunkhouse breaker box. It had a switch labeled generator, so he flipped it and a second later, we had power. After that, we were able to turn on the TV. Thankfully, the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company kept their satellite subscription current in spite of having mothballed the station. He said it's for the maintenance workers who come out a few times a year to take care of any damage and do regular preventative maintenance on the systems so the station can be started back up if it's ever needed again."

I nodded towards the TV and said, "The news looks pretty grim. Are they saying anything about what they think is going on? Have they mentioned Miss O'Shannon's secret order?" I turned to our leader. "What did you call it? The Tutors Con Infernal?"

" _Tutores Contra Infernum_ , Dr. Oswald," O'Shannon corrected. "The 'Guardians Against Hell'."

"Sorry," I apologized. "The Guardians Against Hell."

"Nope, they haven't said a word," Kowalski answered.

"That's hardly surprising given its long history of secrecy and persecution," O'Shannon said. "I expect they are working totally in the background."

"How about the news?" Bill asked, glancing over at the TV.

"So far, the governments of the world are mostly silent as to what's behind the invasion," Kowalski answered. "All of the news channels have been rerunning a few videos that people have uploaded onto the Internet and some footage taken from the air. Other than that, it's mostly just talking heads who haven't a clue and retired military discussing what the world's armed forces should be doing. There are lots of theories ranging from mass hallucinations, chemical warfare, terrorists, alien invaders, subterranean monsters, and religious leaders talking Armageddon and the End of Times. At least so far, only hellhounds are coming out of the holes."

"Once the other demons start coming through, I'm afraid this initial stage will seem pretty tame," O'Shannon predicted. "I hope it does not take very long for people to realize the magnitude of the threat and develop an all-out war mentality."

The others began drifting back to the TV. Angie took my hand and led me over to where she'd placed our backpacks.

"Jack, you need to get those clothes off and take a shower," she said. "You smell even worse than you look." Rummaging around in my backpack, she pulled out some clean clothes that had once been Mark's. "Kowalski decided he needed some kind of weapon, so I gave him a meat cleaver and a big butcher knife from the kitchen. Not sure how much good they'll do him, but at least it makes him feel safer and more in control." Angie pulled out clean clothes she'd borrowed for us from Jill and Mark's tent. "I'm afraid we're all likely to come out of this with some degree of PTSD, that is assuming we're lucky enough to come out of this at all."

"That's it," I said, giving her a hug. "No more talking about hellhounds, invasions, and what might happen tomorrow. We'll both feel better once we've showered and in clean clothes. Where are the showers?"

"This way," she said, heading down the hallway that ran the length of the bunkhouse. Once inside, we both stripped and took a long hot shower together. Angie helped me wash away the dirt, sweat, and stinking demon blood. Then we just held each other under the hot water until it had washed our stress and fear down the drain. By the time we'd finished and dressed, we felt good enough to join the others and face the rest of what lay ahead.

The others were still watching news when we returned. Later, Angie and I heated up cans of chicken noodle soup and some pork and beans that we found in the pantry, and we watched yet more news of the invasion, which seemed to be the only thing showing on all the major stations. The war continued to go poorly. Finally, O'Shannon turned off the TV around nine, having decided we all needed a good night's sleep before we faced tomorrow. No one felt comfortable splitting up, so we grabbed our backpacks and crashed together in one of the larger bunkrooms on the second floor. We pushed several dressers up against the door, and Bill took the first watch.
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. The amulet in her hands began to glow as she repeated the words " _Ostende mihi futurum_ " over and over again.

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. "Hellhounds are as dumb as dirt, but imps are more intelligent and can plan and work together. And though 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 in the air."

"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 vomit 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 also 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 their 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 an 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 shotgun 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 none of us 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 leapt forward. 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 mountain 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 its 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 up 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 remained 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 are 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'd 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 cougar/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

The story continues in _Hell Holes: Demons on the Dalton_ , book 2 of the _Hell Holes_ series.
Other Books by Donald Firesmith

Fiction

 Hell Holes 2: Demons on the Dalton

 The Secrets of Hawthorne House

 Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore

Nonfiction

 The Simulation Theory of Consciousness: or your Autonomous Car is Sentient

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

Visit the author's website for more information and pictures of the characters.

**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. _Hell Holes 1, What Lurks Below_ , the first book in the Hell Holes series, is told from his point of view.

**Dr. Angela Menendez** is a noted climatologist who also 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 professor and oft-cited research scientist, Angie is a fierce environmentalist. Dr. Oswald's wife, _Hell Holes: Demons on the Dalton_ , the second book in the Hell Holes series, is told from her point of view.

**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 is as at home crossing a crevasse as he is 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 razor-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 http://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: http://magicalwandshoppe.com.
Thank You

Thank you for purchasing and reading _Hell Holes: What Lurks Below_ , the first book in my Hell Holes 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 a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

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.

