The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 30: Cyber Annihilation

"So what's Blair's deal? Is he possessed? Or just working with them?" Kyra asked as they made their way back to Command Control.

"I don't know if we'll ever know for sure," Carpenter replied. "I do know that I've never trusted the man, but then again, I've never trusted a UAC scientist or executive that I've ever personally met. I do know that about a month ago, he personally joined an expedition to the other place and he and his team went off the grid for a solid two days. When he returned, he was basically unharmed, but his team was dead. He said they'd been ambushed by a horde of demons and slaughtered, and he barely managed to get away, though he didn't seem all that upset about it. Something was different after that. He'd always been secretive, but he became a ghost half the time, the other half he was obsessively monitoring some of the experiments. As administrator of the building I had power, but not enough. The real power lay in the executives, who wouldn't come anywhere near this place, and the head scientists, namely him."

"Of course," Falcheck muttered.

"If he's possessed, there's no obvious way to tell. But I don't think he is. I think they promised him something during that lost expedition. Power, more than likely. Immortality maybe."

"Did you check him for this 'demonic energy'?" Kyra asked.

"Yes, actually. First thing I tried. Nothing. But it's not a perfect system, they were still working the bugs out, and it isn't capable of detecting small amounts of it. So the amount required to possess a human but not turn them into a zombie might not be enough to set them off yet."

"Wonderful," Kyra said.

They arrived at Command Control. Carpenter punched something into the keypad once everyone was in position, and the doors began to slide open.

"Special ultra-executive override I cooked up myself," he said, "once I began to get really paranoid about this place."

"Good idea," Powell murmured.

The door opened to reveal...a vacant security checkpoint. They passed through it quickly enough, checking it for signs of life, but there were just two dead guards, shot in the head. As they walked through a short corridor and came into a large control room. There were a lot of dead technicians, all of them shot through the head or the neck or the chest.

"Blair," Carpenter muttered as he walked deeper into the room.

Kyra and the others followed, checking the shadows, the corners, and the dead bodies for signs of life on either side of the line. But there was nothing. No Blair visible, and no survivors. Carpenter settled into place behind a large, rounded workstation and Kyra and Linaweaver joined him, standing nearby. Kyra thought he was on the level, but she no longer trusted her own senses on a person. Just how far did this possession or betrayal go? Admittedly, she sided with Carpenter's theory. So far, the only 'possession' she'd seen were the zombies and it was absurdly easy to tell if someone was a zombie or not.

If the demons were capable of possessing someone enough to successfully trick the average person, she thought they would've seen it by now.

Unless the zombies were intentionally designed to throw you off the scent and make you think exactly what she had just thought.

She suppressed a sigh. A problem for later.

"Aw fuck me," Carpenter muttered. "Blair's downstairs, in the gateway chamber, and the thing's powering up it looks like, drawing a shitload of energy, and rising."

"Are there levels beyond 'off' and 'on'?" Linaweaver asked.

"I believe so. Stronger portal probably means stronger demons coming through."