The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 46: The Spirit World

"Whoa..." Jennifer muttered.

"All right, see, this is what I imagined Hell looking like," Cortez said quietly.

Jack said nothing as he slowly walked forward, coming to the edge of a small drop that was ringed with green-burning torches and let out into a huge cavern. It all looked strangely incongruous, but Cortez had a point: it looked kind of like Hell.

The walls were random green-white rock and the ceiling was made of manufactured-looking gray cobble, smooth and strangely uniform. The floor was made of what looked like baked, cracked desert earth, dark green in color. It was broken occasionally by much larger cracks that revealed a glowering red rock, cracked by pressure and heat, that looked like magma but was clearly too solid to be. To confuse matters more, farther off in the room were huge, thick pillars of dark rock covered in an intricate spiderweb of cracks, through which a pale yellow light shone. And even farther on, all the way on the other side of the room, he saw what appeared to be a channel of running blood cut into the wall.

"Jesus shit, man," Hollenshead muttered.

"Where is everybody?" Jack asked finally. "Besides the handful of idiots in closets we found..."

"Maybe they're busy elsewhere," Jennifer replied. "Either way, I'd like to get on with this while the getting's good."

Jack sighed heavily. "Yeah. Hollenshead, with me. Cortez, Jennifer, watch our backs from up here."

He and Hollenshead hopped down. Jack expected some riotous uproar to happen the moment he did, but it remained silent. Eerily so. They began their search, moving through the area, checking out a few alcoves and sections tucked away behind the curving rock walls of the confusing cavern. They found...

Nothing.

There was some evidence of UAC occupation, but not much. The demons seemed to have not just trashed the stuff they'd left behind, but destroyed or removed a lot of it. In the end, they wound up near the blood channel cut into the wall, because it was their only way forward. There was supposed to be another way out, according to the map, but it was blocked completely by a solid rock wall with no obvious way around or through.

"I really, really don't wanna go down there," Jennifer said.

"Yeah, I mean, it's on fire," Cortez muttered.

"And covered in blood," Hollenshead added.

"I know, but it's the only way we could find," Jack said. He crouched down. There was an opening they could just make it through in their bulky armor that dropped into a narrow hallway, and really it was more of an alcove, just barely big enough for them to move through in a single file. The problem was, the walls were literally flames, the floor was what looked like blood. As was the ceiling. But it also might not have been blood...

He couldn't be sure. But what mattered was that he had a weird feeling, an intuition. There was something artificial, something unreal about the fire on the walls. Carefully, he reached his hand into the opening, prepared to snatch it back. Even with the fireproofing on the armor, he would be able to tell if it was actually a corridor filled with fire.

But there was no change. Jack typed something into his wristpad, getting a read on the ambient temperature. It was around fifty five degrees in the main cavern, and it was only a few degrees warmer when he stuck his hand back into the opening.

"It's bullshit," he said.

"How?" Cortez asked.

"No idea, but it's just a trick...I'm going down."