The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 29: Pandemonium

The sensation was definitely different than whatever he remembered when going through the Phobos Anomaly...not that he remembered a great deal. It was over in a split second. There was a great whooshing sound that seemed to blow through him and a brilliant green light and then, abruptly, he was somewhere else.

And that other place was absolute pandemonium.

Green was shouting, firing, into a crowd of zombies, Imps, and Demons in a large, open area. The details were lost as Jack raised his weapon and stumbled off of the red platform, spraying the general crowd with his SMG. He stitched a bloody line of fire across a quartet of zombies, spraying the crowd with blood, brains, and bone fragments. He emptied the SMG, ejected the spent mag, and slapped a fresh one in.

His last one.

He opened fire again, simply trying to keep them at bay. By the time his second magazine was dry and his SMG was functionally useless, there was another bright flash of green light and then Jennifer was there. Jack shouted a warning as she hopped off the platform and pounded out a slug shell, blowing an Imp's head clean off.

Frustrated that he already had to use his special gun again, Jack let the SMG hang and snatched up the Plasma Rifle. Aiming at the biggest cluster of enemies, which was a clutch of about a dozen Demons and Imps dead ahead, he held down the trigger and began moving the gun back and forth in a tight arc. Brilliant blue-white balls of light lit up the area as they hosed the enemies down. The stench of burning meat filled the air as the balls of energy smacked into the exposed flesh of the monsters, immediately blackening and crisping even their tough hides. The Imps shrieked and the Demons roared as they went down.

There was another flash of green light, and then Stratton had joined them.

"Aw, shit!" he cried, adding his own gunfire to the mix.

Jack ended up emptying his Plasma Rifle, but it cleared out a little over half of the enemies in the immediate area. Soon, there were over twenty blackened, charred, smoking corpses littering the strange, green marble floor. As soon as the gun was dry, he dropped it and yanked out his pistol, aiming and popping off enough shots to empty a magazine. When the last bullet was launched from its dark nest, it seemed they had finished off the horde they'd stepped into. Although, given the sounds they were hearing, the peace wouldn't last.

"Hurry up, find ammo," Green said.

Distantly, and not so distantly, they could hear growls, moans, shrieks, and grunts. Some of them sounded just in the next room. Things only got worse as Jack quickly scavenged for ammo, patting down the ripped, bloodied, burned uniforms of the Space Marines and scientists and techs that had been transformed into the lumbering, walking dead. The room itself was horrible: a godforsaken amalgamation of UAC tech and architecture and hellish environs. He saw bland chromed walls stamped with the UAC logo, but among these were stylized grinning skulls with glowing red eyes. And, placed seemingly at random, were square holes covered by rusty iron bars. Behind these bars were piles of real human skulls.

Worst of all was that, in some places, instead of skulls, there were what appeared to be scrolling sections of flattened intestines.

"What the fuck is this place?" Jack whispered, pausing momentarily as he caught sight of that particular horror.

"Insanity, just don't think about it," Green replied.

Jack nodded slowly, forcing himself to return to his duty. He managed to piece together two magazines for his pistol and two for his SMG. Although his Plasma Rifle was tapped out, he at least had his D1X1 frag grenade in case of emergencies. Once he finished, he and the others gathered at the base of a broad stairwell that led up. Hellish red light seemed to bleed from it. It was the only obvious way to go.