Hell
Holes: What Lurks Below
by
Donald Firesmith
Genre:
Apocalyptic, SciFi, Modern Paranormal
166
pages
It’s
August in Alaska, and geology professor Jack Oswald prepares for the
new school year. But when hundreds of huge holes mysteriously appear
overnight in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle, Jack
receives an unexpected phone call. An oil company exec hires Jack to
investigate, and he picks his climatologist wife and two of their
graduate students as his team. Uncharacteristically, Jack also lets
Aileen O’Shannon, a bewitchingly beautiful young photojournalist,
talk him into coming along as their photographer. When they arrive in
the remote oil town of Deadhorse, the exec and a biologist to protect
them from wild animals join the team. Their task: to assess the risk
of more holes opening under the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the wells
and pipelines that feed it. But they discover a far worse danger
lurks below. When it emerges, it threatens to shatter Jack’s
unshakable faith in science. And destroy us all…
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My phone rang. 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.”
Hell
Holes: Demons on the Dalton
218
pages
When
hundreds of huge holes mysteriously appeared overnight inthe frozen
tundra north of the Arctic Circle, geologist Jack Oswald picked
Angele Menendez, his climatologist wife, to determine if the record
temperatures due to climate change was the cause. But the holes were
not natural. They were unnatural portals for an invading army of
demons. Together with Aileen O'Shannon, a 1,400-year-old sorceress
demon-hunter, the three survivors of the research team sent to study
the holes had only one chance: to flee down the dangerous Dalton
Highway towards the relative safety of Fairbanks. However, the
advancing horde of devils, imps, hellhounds, and gargoyles will stop
at nothing to prevent their prey from escaping. It is a 350-mile race
with simple rules. Win and live; lose and die...
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That was when I noticed it: the faint sulfurous smell that was a sure sign I was sitting next to a demon. Somehow a demon had disguised himself as a human! I was too shocked to hide my sudden panic, and he realized he’d been recognized.
His appearance shimmered for an instant, and then suddenly, the injured man disappeared and I could see his true form. He was a devil, one of the higher demons that commanded the hellhounds, gargoyles, and imps. Now I could see him for what he truly was: hideously ugly and doubly naked. Not only was he sitting there without any clothes, he was grotesquely nude because, like all demons, he lacked anything we would call skin. Under a transparent membrane, his dark red muscles and the purplish arteries and veins that fed them were clearly visible. Still, it wasn’t the small horn-like projections of bone on either side of his skull, his yellow goat-like eyes, or even his repulsive body that terrified me. It was the demon’s impossibly large mouth. The monstrous creature was like a python, able to dislocate its jawbones to swallow animals larger than its head. His upper and lower jaws formed a near perfect circle of triangular serrated teeth. He leaned towards me, and I did what any reasonable person would do when facing imminent death by being eaten alive. I screamed.
A
computer geek by day, Donald Firesmith works as a system and software
engineer helping the US Government acquire large, complex
software-intensive systems. In this guise, 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. He is also proud to have been named a
Distinguished Engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery,
although his pride is tempered somewhat worrying whether the term
“distinguished” makes him sound more like a graybeard academic
rather than an active engineer whose beard is still more red than
gray.
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 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, his son Dane, and varying numbers of dogs, cats, and
birds.
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