The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 03: Outskirts

"Good chance you were just facing the wrong way," Kyra said.

"Hayden? That's...like the state capitol, right?" Jennifer asked.

"Yeah."

"It is?" Kyra asked.

"Yeah. The city used to be Wichita. They rebuilt it back during like 2087, after the first of the super-tornadoes hit," Jack murmured as they made their way slowly through the vehicles, approaching what looked to be an outlying neighborhood. It was eerily silent in the immediate area, though distantly there was a lot of gunfire, and an unthinkable amount of fires burned, spending pillars of smoke into the air.

"The super-tornadoes..." Jennifer murmured.

"I remember hearing about those in class. Fuck. Wasn't the first one the biggest in recorded history? What was it, an EF-8?" she asked.

"EF-9," Jack replied. "Destroyed Wichita wholesale. Killed one million people. Fucker was almost five miles wide, wind speeds of like six hundred miles an hour. They didn't even think it was physically possible for such a tornado to exist."

"You wouldn't have been born by then," Jennifer said.

He shook his head. "No. Not even close. My parents were kids at the time. Neither of them saw it, but they both heard about it. It did like tens of billions in damage, maybe even a hundred billion credits. Something crazy like that. I think that woke America back up. They rebuilt, renamed the city, and now we've got Hayden. Population was fifteen million last time I checked. And the biggest starport on Earth is built here, too."

"Oh yeah. Haydenfield. Supposed to be like five miles across or something," Jennifer said.

"If there's any kind of evacuation effort, you can bet Haydenfield's involved. Maybe we should start making our way there..." Jack said.

"Before we make any plans, our first objective is to link up with local forces. We have crucial information to share, and they're going to have use for us," Kyra said.

Jack nodded. She had a point.

So they all shut up and hurried on as they crossed the threshold into the metropolis. Signs of fighting were everywhere, and Jack was having a hard time digesting it all. Fighting all over Phobos and Deimos, and then Mars City, had been horrible, to be sure. It turned his stomach knowing that probably thousands of people had been brutally tortured, eviscerated, and murdered by the demonic entities that had poured out of the gateways.

But this...

How many millions were dead?

Hundreds of millions?

Billions? Could billions be dead? What percentage of the human population remained alive? How many more would be dead before the end?

Was this actually the end of the human race?

Jack felt like thinking something along the line of 'not if I have anything to say about it', but fuck, what could he do in the face of such destruction? It was like having a staring contest with the sun, or trying to wrestle a hurricane, or bench-press a mountain. What possible hope did they have? He shook his head angrily as they crept among the bullet-riddled, bloodstained houses and past dozens of corpses, shredded by gunfire or claws, and strengthened his resolve. He was going to have to have a will of tungsten, because every single living human, regardless of national origin, race, religion, economic background, or any of that shit was going to be needed to fight this. They were all going to have to get their shit together if they wanted to endure the coming darkness.