The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 39: Shores of Hell

                                          -PART FIVE: HEART OF DARKNESS-

It could definitely be worse, but it could also certainly be a hell of a lot better.

Kyra scowled at the teleporter pad she'd finally managed to locate and decided to put it off just a little bit longer by searching her armor one more time. Just to make sure that she did indeed truly have full stock of her supplies.

It didn't take very long.

All of her pockets were empty. Every last one of them. She hadn't overlooked anything. No spare bullet, no overlooked grenade, nothing.

She looked over her weapons.

A damaged pump-action shotgun with a single full load of eight shells.

And one plasma rifle, decent condition, with one third of a power cell left.

Kyra let the rifle hang and gripped the shotgun, reminding herself that it had been worse before. There had been a time, not all that long ago, when she'd woken up in Hell, completely naked and defenseless. She still had her uniform and armor, and a few weapons. Just no sidearm, no spare ammo, not even a fucking combat knife.

She looked behind her, down the short stonework corridor. That initial huge room she'd had to fight half a CyberDemon in had given her a false impression that she'd have a lot to investigate. But she hadn't. There were three ways out of that room, and two of them had been caved-in completely. This little corridor with a teleporter at the end of it was all she had to go off of. And it was going to be a hell of a gamble.

Kyra had already tried her radio more than once while searching the place over, but either it didn't work or no one was there.

"Okay," she muttered, staring at the odd silver square sporting a pentagram, "I gotta do this. There's no other way."

Stepping up to the edge, she frowned intensely as she stared down at it. "Shit," she whispered, shaking her head.

She really didn't want to do this.

Finally, Kyra reached for that steel resolve she'd strengthened and sharpened over the past few decades, squared her shoulders, gripped the shotgun, and prepared herself for the worst. Then she stepped onto the teleport pad.

In a flash of light, she was suddenly somewhere else.

Kyra swiveled around, stepping off the pad as she did, and scanned the area for hostiles. She was in an enclosed space, not very large, and no roof.

And the walls were...

"What the shit?" she muttered, staring. The walls resembled the exterior of an apartment building. Tan brick, too many windows covered with blinds. Something about it, besides the obvious, set her on edge. There was no clear exit, beyond a pair of teleporter pads. The walls were maybe fifteen feet across each, and all of them were covered with those windows. It almost looked like someone who had seen an apartment building, but had absolutely no concept of why it existed, and was trying, poorly, to recreate it.

But why?

Why the fuck would this be happening?

It almost reminded her of some kind of procedural-generation software going haywire. Taking things it already had templates for, like walls and windows, and just creating them at random.

And then she turned around in another direction and froze.

"Okay, what the shit?" she whispered, her voice harsh.

She shared this space with someone else. Someone else who was dead. Whoever they might once have been in life, now they were strung up, hanging from the ceiling with both wrists bound above their head. They hung almost like a side of beef, and their legs and part of their torso was flayed of flesh. They were so mutilated that she couldn't get any real kind of sense of what they had looked like originally.