The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 43: Bloodfalls

For once, Kyra didn't appear in the middle of something awful.

In fact, as she snapped back into reality and looked around, she was so surprised by the change in pace of her luck that she nearly forgot to step off the pad. She did, with two seconds to spare, and Carpenter appeared behind her.

"Wow," he muttered, "talk about luck."

"Yeah, what's the catch?" she replied as she looked around.

The teleport led to a place that looked so normal, so human, that she for a second wondered if they had actually teleported back into their own reality. The room had a security checkpoint built around the teleport pad, and beyond that rounded wall of lexan glass (that was now bullet-riddled and blood-splattered), she saw workstations and lockers ringing the exterior wall, and a few doors that had been torn open, leading to other rooms.

"I'm sure there's shark-toothed demons lurking somewhere nearby, hungry for guts and gore," Carpenter said, hefting his weapon.

"Let's introduce ourselves."

They checked out the area room by room, moving carefully. As they investigated, it became clear that this was a bit more permanent of an outpost, though it had held up no better. One of the rooms led to a barracks, another to a small mess hall, another to a control op/security area that had been thoroughly ransacked, and finally...

"Oh shit, this may actually help us a lot," Kyra said as they came into a motorpool and found a mostly intact ATV.

"If it runs," Carpenter said.

"Yeah, and if there aren't any other teleports around that'll bring us closer."

There were a lot of corpses around, but nothing alive. Despite the ripped-up state of the outpost, they did managed to find a small surplus of weapons. She finally found more cells for her plasma rifle, and they each got shotguns with lots of shells.

Carpenter laughed as he loaded his up.

"What's funny?" Kyra asked.

"It's just...shotguns as we know them have been around since the eighteen hundreds. Over three centuries. We have literal lasers now, but at the end of the day, these things are still pretty much the same, and they're widespread. You can find shotguns everywhere. I'm sure we've already put down hundreds of thousands of the demonic fuckers with shotguns alone, as a species. We have all this crazy tech, and a lot of us still come back to this thing," he replied.

"It's a solid gun. What I wouldn't give for one of those double-barrels," she said.

He grunted. "Yep."

They kept up their search. When they found a workstation in ops, Carpenter set to bringing it back online. While he did that and once she was sure they were secure, or as secure as they were going to get, (one door led deeper into the structure and she had closed and locked it after taking a peek out and seeing candles and blood, and the other doors in the motorpool let out onto a vast landscape of black sand beneath a bloody sky), she set to work checking over the ATV. It was a good model, United Marine Corps standard.

It could hold four fully armored Marines with some room to spare, had a chaingun mounted on the roof, and had some decent cargo space in the rear. It was obvious that someone had been working on it, though, and recently. How recently, she couldn't be sure, but the hood was popped and some repairs had been made to the engine. Even more, she realized as she slipped into the driver's seat and checked the dash-mounted onboard navigational database, someone had replaced the battery and run a diagnostic on the whole vehicle, and apparently had gotten through most of the necessary repairs. So the question was...