The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 19: Opposing the Decomposition

"The one shooting plasma? Yeah! Fuck! Can't believe there's more of them," she muttered.

"I'm calling them Arachnotrons, for the record."

"How the fuck do you come up with these names?" she asked.

"Yeah, that's a cool name," Harper murmured.

"I don't know, just...comes to me. Like reaching into a hole and pulling it out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

"Okay, what do you call the big fat brown fuckers that vomit Lost Souls?" she asked.

"Pain Elemental."

"Hmm...okay, yeah. I guess so. Like from that old game?"

"Yeah! I can't remember the name..."

"Monsters and Mazes, it was based on that old tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons. I played the shit out of the video games when I was growing up."

"Oh my God, I love you."

She laughed. "I know."

Up ahead, past a collection of dark, complicated-looking machinery, he saw the entrance to the storage wing. Okay, really time to focus up. They passed several dead Imps and zombies. Jack got to the door, waited for everyone to get in position, then opened it. It disappeared into the ceiling, revealing a long passageway where the walls were made up almost entirely of rectangular openings. He immediately hated the layout.

Besides the tons of openings, he could see a few cross-corridors cutting across the main one. He could see boxes and crates and shelves in a lot of the openings, but most of them were obscured and several had flickering lights, putting him on edge. He couldn't hear anything but the distant chatter of gunfire and the occasional explosion, now very muffled by the layers of walls between them. Jack waited for a few seconds.

"Come on," he muttered finally, slowly stepping forward.

They were looking for a stairway just off the back of this storage wing that would take them back down into, oh boy, the underhalls again. Though this time for only a relatively short trip. Jack could sense something in the area with them, though he couldn't be sure of what. Please, not more fucking Arachnotrons.

As he passed between the first of the two openings in the walls, it happened. A roar went up. Not just one, not just a few, but a dozen, dozens possibly. And he recognized the source: zombies. A shitload of zombies. A stack of boxes to his left tumbled over and a pair of shotgun-wielding ex-security guards appeared. Jack yelled, turned, and fired. His own shotgun thundered in his grasp and blew the head clean off one of the zombies. The second missed as it returned fire, barely, and he adjusted, pumped the gun, and repeated the action.

All around him, gunfire opened up.

Jennifer let out a scream as she aimed the chaingun down the main passageway and let that six-barreled beast off its chain. As over a dozen and a half zombies sauntered and stumbled into the central corridor with them, almost all of them wielding weapons now, an array of red hot lead spewed into them, blowing bits and chunks of decayed gore and blood-smeared armor off their bodies. More zombies were coming in behind them. Wells and Harper were covering the rear. Jack spied more zombies spilling into the central corridor from the side passageways. She was going to have to reload soon, and he didn't want them overwhelmed.

Jack opened fire.

He blew a head open like a watermelon. Pumped the shotgun, shifted aim, turned a sneering face with glowing green eyes into so much free-flying pulpy gore. A bullet glanced off his armor, another punched into his dented chestplate, another barely missed his head. He fired again, the shell taking one of the zombies in the neck and decapitating it. He had to admit, after facing down goddamned Revenants and Arachnotrons, and with not just three Marines backing him up but Jennifer with a chaingun, he was almost relieved to be fighting a bunch of zombies. Even a few dozen of them in close quarters was better than most of the shit he'd gone through so far. And so they finished the cluster of undead bastards off in record time.