A Slaves Revenge
Hell Holes Book 4
by Donald Firesmith
Genre: Sci-Fi, Paranormal Horror
An epic story of love, loss, friendship, and survival under the most hellish of conditions, Hell Holes: A Slave’s Revenge is the award-winning prequel to the Hell Holes series of alien invasion novels.
After killing his father, alien demons teleport a fifteen-year-old boy, his mother, and his sister to Hell, a desert world in the Demonic Empire. With survival far from certain, they have just two choices: to live as useful slaves or die as demon food. As the boy becomes a man, he must decide just how much he must collaborate with his demon masters to survive. But can he live long enough to take his revenge and regain his freedom without losing his humanity and his very soul?
Winter 2022 Pinnacle Achievement Awards – Winner – Science Fiction Category
2021 Top Shelf Magazine Book Awards – Runner-up – Fiction/Fantasy Subcategory
July 2022 BooksShelf.com Book Awards – Finalist – Fiction Category
2021 The Wishing Shelf Book Awards – Finalist – Adult Category
ReadFree.ly – 50 Best Indie Books of 2021
Excerpt:
One of the imps carried a thick cord coiled diagonally around his chest. Slipping it over his head, he used his serrated, triangular teeth to bite off a couple of feet from one of its ends. He handed it to the other imp, who tied it tightly around Mom’s wrists. The pair repeated the process twice more, binding Sarah’s hands and then mine. I tried pulling my hands loose, but the knot held tight, and the cord didn’t stretch. Then, the imp took the remaining length and tied it to the bindings around our wrists so that Mom, Sarah, and I were roped together with about six feet left over.
Whatever the demons had planned, it apparently didn’t include killing us, at least not immediately. At first, I thought that they merely wanted to restrain us, but I was mistaken. But the devil barked out another unintelligible string of alien syllables and walked out the door. The imp holding the cord gave it a sharp yank and followed the devil, dragging us behind him.
“Please, please, don’t do this,” Mom begged as she pulled back on the cord.
The heartless demon holding it paused but only to make clear that he would tolerate no disobedience. The imp pointed first at what remained of Dad’s body, then at us, and finally at the open door. The other imp drew back his sword as if preparing to strike her. Pausing their terrible feasting, the two hellhounds turned their bloody muzzles towards us and made a strange sound I took to be growling. Our choices were clear: follow the demons or die like Dad.
Mom’s defiance disappeared as her shoulders sagged in defeat. “Come on, kids. We have no choice; we have to go with them.” Then, she turned and followed the imp out the door, dragging Sarah and me behind her.
Although it was not quite four in the morning, we were so close to the Arctic Circle that the sun skimmed just below the southeastern horizon. It provided enough light for us to clearly see the trail and our demonic captors.
“Look at their feet,” I whispered to Sarah as the demons led us along the river trail away from town. “They match the tracks we found by the dead moose.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” she whispered back. “It wasn’t a hoax. It was real! Monsters are real!”
“Demons. They’re demons. They have to be.”
“You mean, like in the Bible?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know! I guess so. What else could they be?”
“But if they’re demons, really honest-to-God demons, then where are they taking us?”
I had no idea. None of us did.
It was just before dawn, chilly but not terribly cold. The devil led us upriver, away from Kobuk and any chance of rescue. The imp holding the cord, Mom, Sarah, and me followed the devil, walking single file while the second imp walked behind us. Bringing up the rear, the two hellhounds growled menacingly each time that one of us stumbled or started to lag behind.
For the first ten or so miles, we followed the Kobuk River trail. Then when we came to a stream that seemed no different from any other, the devil led us off the main path and up into the foothills of the Brooks Range. The hike grew progressively harder as we climbed ever higher above the river valley. We followed deer trails when we could and walked cross-country when we couldn’t. I had naturally explored the area around our cabin, but soon our surroundings were new to me. The footing grew more treacherous, especially when we traversed talus fields of broken stone. The sharp rocks shifted underfoot, threatening to twist our ankles because we were all wearing loose-fitting house slippers instead of our usual hiking boots.
The devil and imps, on the other hand, had no such problem. Their cloven hooves gave them the sure-footed traction of mountain goats, and the thick pads on the hellhounds’ paws enabled them to follow us with the stealth of a mountain lion.
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Book Trailer:
To Hell and Back
Hell Holes Book 3
The beautiful young photojournalist, Aileen O’Shannon, is not who she seems. For centuries, she has been a demon hunter, a sorceress who has tracked and killed small bands of demons that occasionally crossed into our world. But that changed when she joined Dr. Jack Oswald’s expedition to study one of hundreds of huge holes that mysteriously appeared overnight in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.Instead of small sporadic incursions, hordes of demons now pour from these hell holes like water from a sieve. With bombing little more than a losing game of whack-a-mole, Earth’s armies are unable to destroy the portals. When Jack suggests a desperate plan, he is drafted to join Aileen and a team of other sorcerers and Army Rangers to travel to the demon homeworld. Once there, they will unleash a plague virus and set off a nuclear bomb to destroy the portal complex. It’s a suicide mission. But Aileen has given Jack’s wife her word to bring him back safely, and the demons have already killed three men under her protection. Just how far will Aileen go to avoid losing another?
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Demons on the Dalton
Hell Holes Book 2
When hundreds of huge holes mysteriously appeared overnight in the 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 1,700-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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What Lurks Below
Hell Holes Book 1
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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Book Trailer:
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About the Author
Donald Firesmith is a multi-award-winning author of speculative fiction including science fiction (alien invasion), fantasy (magical wands), horror, and modern urban paranormal novels and anthologies of short stories.
Prior to retiring to devote himself full-time to his novels, Donald Firesmith earned an international reputation as a distinguished engineer, authoring seven system/software engineering books based on his 40+ years spent developing large, complex software intensive systems.
He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Becky, his daughter Sera, and varying numbers of dogs and cats.
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