The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 15: Unruly Evil

Plus, not a bad reentry into fucking Hell itself.

Kyra took a moment to search the area. There wasn't a whole lot around. Besides the one lonely corpse in the middle of the room that had clearly been there for awhile, which had nothing, there was one other body and a few crates tucked away in a darker room accessible through a rectangular hole in the wall in the upper right corner. The crates had nothing of use and the second body, some poor Marine bastard, had only a single spare magazine for the rifle, which she salvaged. She took the opportunity to feed another eight shells into her shotgun and decided to stick with the rifle for now. Kyra came back into the central room and looked up.

That skylight really freaked her out. Overhead, she saw nothing but a square of burning orange-red skies. Man, this place truly was a nightmare. Tearing her eyes away from the sky, she scanned the room one more time. For a few seconds, she was stymied. There didn't seem to be anywhere else to go. Her eyes were drawn to that fenced-in second story. Blood was dripping down the green-brown wall from the dead fiends, but there didn't seem to be any way to get up there. Then she noticed that one section of the wall ahead of her was different from the rest. It was what looked like a collection of iron girders welded together.

Then she noticed a button on the wall beside that and walked up to it. Pressing it, she jumped back slightly as that iron girder section of the wall lowered into the floor. It was a lift, she realized, and stepped aboard it just in time before it went back to its original position. Her stomach rolled a bit at the rapid ascent, but otherwise nothing bad happened. Dead ahead of her was another medieval door with another red button, but she left that alone for the moment. To the right was just a dead drop back into the previous level.

To the left was the entirety of the second story, which was really just an L-shaped corridor. She moved slowly down it, pausing to look out of what served as a window in the form of three more of those weird iron girders set into the wall with about six inches of space in between them, and saw an outdoors courtyard. More sounds came to her: the groaning of zombies, that weird gurgling sound that had to come from the fiends. Ignoring that for the moment, she finished her sweep of the second story and found nothing more.

Eager to get this over with, and to kill some more monsters, she returned to the door and opened it up. More of that bloody light spilled in as she stepped out into the courtyard. There was a little raised area directly in front of her, kind of like a porch, if the porch were made of patchwork, flat gray stones. Broad stairs led down to the courtyard proper ahead of her. As she looked at a pool in the exact center of it, she was reminded of the UAC's name for this place: Acid Prison. She supposed there were enough bars around here, and that was definitely a pool of acid. And there was another pool of acid off to her right, in the corner.

In fact, all but one of the corners had drop-offs into pools of bubbling green acid. From where she was standing, she couldn't see any hostiles, but she could definitely hear them. One was to her right, so she decided to investigate. Couldn't have enemies that she couldn't quite see hanging around. As she edged closer to the drop-off into the pool of acid, she finally saw it: there was a corridor down there missing one of its walls, and there were a trio of fiends lurking. One of them saw her and shrieked a warning to the others.

She rewarded it with a three-round burst right in its fucking face.

The others began hurling fireballs at her and she sidestepped while firing, putting them down as well. This was going pretty great so far. Having the high ground was awesome. She killed one more that came out from an opening in the left side of the open-faced corridor, from where it gained its missing wall, becoming a proper hallway. Once they were put down, she finished checking out the courtyard.