The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 40: The Catacombs

Reality shattered, disintegrated, tore apart.

He was a leaf before a blowtorch, dry and brittle.

Jack hurtled screaming through a nothingness, a void that was not a void. A place that was not a place. A time that was no time at all.

And then suddenly he was somewhere else. All sense of motion and momentum stopped so abruptly that he stumbled, even though he was standing perfectly still. Knowledge of his situation remained and forced him to act, to move.

He raised his weapon.

Except he didn't have his weapon. For a moment, pure panic. He slapped his chest, expecting to feel nothing but skin, but relaxed as his gauntleted hand clanked against his chestplate. He heard something groan and the panic returned. Stone surrounded him, gray masonry, torchlight flickering. He was in Hell.

As he hunted fervently for a weapon, finding his holster empty, his shoulder vacant of a rifle sling, a wave of pain did a slow roll through him and he groaned in sick agony. Had it been like this the last time he'd come to this wretched, godforsaken place?

At this point, Jack couldn't even remember. The memories were like so much paint hurled onto a canvas, mostly different shades of red, running together in a bloody ruin.

There. His double-barrel was still on him. He got it into his hands and cracked it open, saw the two shells still in there, and snapped it shut again. Jack took in his surroundings. It wasn't masonry, he saw, not exactly, but it was gray stone. There were niches in the walls around him, each holding a brass pedestal that was home to a flickering fire. When his initial sweep revealed nothing but four strange walls and no exits, the panic surged.

"Stop," he muttered. Obviously he was alone, in the immediate sense at least, and he needed to calm down. He forced himself through a few quick breathing exercises and ran multiplication tables in his head for fifteen seconds. When he was finished, he felt better. He still hurt, but the panic was abating, at least.

Jack activated his radio as he began hunting more calmly for some sort of way out. "This is Ward to anyone, do you copy?" He listened. Nothing but dead air. He repeated the message twice more before giving up and leaving his radio on. He was hoping that this time he would have appeared with his friends, even one of them would be nice, but no. The portal had seen fit to steal some of his gear and scatter them to the demonic winds.

He paused as he considered that. That was definitely new, or he thought it was. Never before had a portal been so selective. It had either been all or nothing. With this in mind, Jack quickly searched all his pockets and was frustrated to find that his gear now consisted of his uniform, his armor, his shotgun, twenty shells for it, and...

The duck? For some reason, the wooden carved duck miniature he'd taken way back at that farm was still with him.

Why?

He supposed it didn't matter for now. Jack stopped as he realized one of the corners was different from the others. It stuck out, like someone had shoved a rectangular pillar up into it, and then fixed it in place with four shiny steel beams. Two of the beams didn't reach to the floor, the inner two, while the outer two did. The missing part was about human height. He walked over and checked it out. After a moment, he kicked the pillar.

With a grinding sound that startled him, it abruptly began lowering into the floor. He kept the shotgun raised as it continued disappearing, coming down lower and lower, and then suddenly the top was there, level with the floor, and he saw the shadowy-wavery optical illusion of a Spectre. As it roared, Jack yelled and reacted on instinct, blowing it away by giving it both barrels and spraying the walls with its demonic gore.