The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 30: House of Pain

This time, when he snapped back into existence, he wasn't knee-deep in the shit.

Jack stepped off the red pad, shotgun in hand, but saw that Green had already secured the area. They had appeared in an octagonal stonework chamber. There was evidence that the UAC had been here at one point. He spied a few foldout tables and chairs, a shredded and sparking workstation, and a lotta blood. There was just one door in the room, a wooden door with metal bars built into it. It looked weirdly medieval.

"This place is utterly insane," Green said as he moved to join her. She was poking through the remains of the workstation. "I mean...it's all so inconsistent. Some sections are...I guess you could call them 'natural'. The stone, mostly. But then there's like...the weird green brick, the iron bars, the strange wood. Sometimes it seems like they built it. And then there's the UAC crap. And then there's stuff that I don't even...I don't get it at all. Like those rocks with the glowing red or blue veins. The coral formations. Those vines. Shit, I don't know. I hate thinking about it. It feels like..." She hesitated, seemed to gather her thoughts.

"Like what?" he asked. The others had teleported in.

"There's this thing in video games I used to play when I was a kid. They all had different names, but basically it boiled down to an insanity meter. I always thought that was bullshit, but...I don't know, I feel like I'm slowly losing my mind. It's harder to focus and keep my thoughts, and sometimes there's weird thoughts in my head, almost like they aren't my thoughts..." She realized that they were all focused on her now.

She sighed and shook her head. "Just ignore me."

"No, I know what you mean," Jennifer said and Stratton nodded.

"Well, that's good to know at least."

Jack felt like he was close to cracking, but he wasn't sure if he was actually going crazy. Well, beyond the parts where he raged out and saw red. He was glad he hadn't been experiencing that recently.

"We all ready? I'd like to get through this miserable fucking shitpile of a place as fast as humanly possible," Green said.

They all nodded. Jack found himself getting a little worried. Green seemed to be letting herself go more now, when before she'd been pretty good at keeping everything about herself in check. Was she cracking up? Honestly, he'd be surprised if she wasn't. He was actually impressed that they were all doing as well as they were. But it didn't matter. Circumstances didn't really matter. What mattered was how well they held up, despite all the odds. Even if they were doing pretty well, all things considered, this place didn't care.

The demons wouldn't stop just because they were impressed with their resolve of perseverance or bravery. They'd keep coming whether or not they were at the top of their game or coming apart at the seams. So they had to just keep going regardless. The four of them gathered at the only exit in the room and tried to prepare themselves for whatever lay beyond. And it didn't sound good. He could hear moaning, and not the kind that came from zombies, but rather the kind that came from someone in pain. Bad pain.

Jack took point, moving up a broad stairwell of ugly red brickwork. As he crested the top, he hesitated, really not wanting to go into the next section of this hellish structure. For a number of reasons it made his stomach churn. Although he'd grown used to the awful scents in this wretched place, but the reek of blood and slowly rotting meat and exposed guts suddenly became overwhelming. The walls were still made of that same bland gray stonework, but the floor and the ceiling was constructed of hard-packed intestines.

And hanging from the ceiling, from rusty chains and hooks, were several more UAC personnel. And they weren't strung up by their arms this time. Because they didn't have arms. Or legs. They were just heads and limbless torsos. The hooks had been jammed through their skulls. Each of the bodies swayed slowly back and forth, dripping blood, as if caught in a light breeze. Jagged points had burst from foreheads or noses or eyes, wherever the hook had been jabbed in. Some of them had foamy red-and-purple entrails hanging from their torsos.