Read Hell Holes: What Lurks Below Page 5

  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 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 appeared uninjured 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. Several others nodded, likewise 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 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 came running 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 relentle
ss 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 oily 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 size and shape of a silver dollar hanging from a long silver 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 she held 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 was 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 chlorine 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 device 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? 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 the wooden rod 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 remaining wolf 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 could not 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 forehe
ad 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.” She commanded “Recedemus!” and the barrier of scintillating sparks winked out with a soft crackling sound. Then she slid the neckless down the top of her shirt so that it was hidden in spite of the top two buttons being undone.

  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 of 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?” r />
  “Yes, Dr. Oswald, I lied. You know as well as I 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 knew 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 write – 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 this 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 developed the means to come in large 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 this reason, 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 may not be the mythological place described by religions, but it is nonetheless 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,” he argued. “We need to find out first what we’re up against. For example, I just learned the damn thing’s bite is venomous. Its fangs are hollow, and there’s a 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.

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

  “Some,” Bill said as he led me inside. He picked 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 breaking 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, yes. 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 was 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.”

  “Bizarre,” Bill said, shaking his head. “Well, it looks like I’m going to have more opportunities to dissect some 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 and 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. 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 job now 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 beca
use hellhounds were unlikely to give them 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 didn’t pay 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 its 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 Dalton. 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.”

  “Sounds good,” O’Shannon said. “Tell me more about the bunkhouse.”

  “Well, it’s two stories and connected by a short 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 at 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 some kind 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 concentrating totally 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 supports that hold 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 it 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 support 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 the cover of the pipeline 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 throu
gh 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 open.

  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 round 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. We 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 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 they builder’s raised the bunkhouse on pillars to keep it from melting and sinking into the permafrost, 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 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 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 of demons: 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 us. 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 will 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 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 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 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 opene
d 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 by 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’ll not risk another.”

  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 dust and empty 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 the 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 sunlight 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 to eastern 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 garage 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 it’ll do, 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 news continued to go poorly. Finally around nine, O’Shannon turned off the TV, 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.