The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 29: Pandemonium

"Onward and upward," Green muttered as she took the lead.

Jack followed behind her, with Jennifer and Stratton covering their backs, and hurried up the stairwell, which was made mostly of strange green brick. They hustled up it, Jack cresting the top barely after Green. The stairway opened up into a courtyard of granite flooring and more UAC materials for walls. The UAC stuff was really messing with him. It was bad enough they were in this hellish environment, but the juxtaposition of it with stuff he was used to seeing seemed to make it worse somehow, as if perverting it.

There were a few openings into the courtyard, the most obvious of which was the fact that it had no ceiling, and they saw that eternal crimson sky. And within seconds of them getting inside, a dozen Demons began stomping out. Cursing, Jack threw himself back into the fray, trying to line his shots up carefully, spraying bursts from the SMG into the gaping maws of the Demons as they came towards them with a mindless determination.

He put down one, saw another get a portion of its head blown off by a shotgun shell, watched a third go down under fire. They made short work of the Demons, forced to work fast in a bad situation, blowing the things away until the last one fell.

"We've got to keep moving," Jennifer said.

"There," Green replied, pointing to another, more narrow stairwell across the courtyard. They all hurried over to it.

It sounded like there were reinforcements on the way.

The next stairwell led to a tight corridor that made Jack's skin crawl. The walls were constructed of that same horrific pink flesh-and-bone he'd hoped to never see again. What was worse was the fact that the walls were barely three or four feet apart. He took point this time, SMG ready, just wanting to get through this, to keep going, to push on to the next teleporter and then do it all again, and again, and again until they were home.

If you looked at the big picture, it seemed impossible. Hell, putting your face up to the picture and just looking at where you were at right now was hard enough, but that's how you had to do it. Think about the whole thing and you would despair. Just focus on the here and now, and eventually this will just be a memory.

He'd gotten through so much so far. He'd killed his way across two entire moons and two areas in this hellish nightmare. There was a lot to go, but he'd already done so much, and even back then it seemed impossible. But he had made it. That's what counted. He hurried through the corridors, feeling his whole body tense up each time he came to a turn, because there could be anything around each corner.

After the fourth turn, he let out a scream as he heard a roar and actually saw the thing's breath fog his visor, and yet he couldn't see anything. But he knew what he was seeing. A Spectre. He aimed and fired dead in front of him, and gore splattered the walls. He was rewarded with a kill, and then another one as he emptied his SMG into a second Spectre and hastily reloaded. He waited a moment, then gave the all clear and pressed on.

He stopped when he found a stairwell heading down into what looked to be an utterly silver room. "Got a stairwell here."

"Ward, Taylor, check it out," Green replied.

"Affirmative."

Jack and Jennifer moved swiftly down the stairway. Jack came in first, finding an utterly bizarre rectangular room of brushed, highly reflective silver metal. All of it was silver: ceiling, floor, walls. Every last inch gleaming silver metal.

"What is with this place?" he whispered. It was weird enough, but the hell stuff kind of...made sense? It made sense in the sense that it was insane, but it fit with what he thought of as hellish, or at least what he'd come to expect from this dimension. But then they'd throw in something utterly out of place, whoever 'they' were.