The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 08: Hell Unleashed

The world fell away from her.

A void of pure, abyssal obsidian didn't so much consume her vision as it did engulf her very essence. She thought there would be pain, but there was just cold, a sapping, draining cold that seemed to suck the very life from her. Cold was its own kind of pain. She was tumbling, flipping, twisting through a negative space.

Kyra would have screamed, but she was paralyzed.

Things chattered around her. Things she could not see. They muttered and screamed and bellowed and panted and spoke in a language that felt like icy black spiders crawling across her brain to hear. Kyra Morgan didn't know how long she flew through that inky, midnight abyss, only that at some point, some small quantum of mercy was delivered to her, and she lost consciousness.

* * *

Something groaned.

What might have been a few seconds or a few minutes, or even a few hours, passed.

It groaned again.

Kyra slowly came to realize that she was the one making that noise. Then it occurred to her that she was still alive enough to make a noise. That got her to open her eyes. A roiling crimson sky awaited her, and she screamed when she saw it. Or she tried to, anyway. Her throat was painfully dry. Coughing, she jerked and tried to get to her feet. Wherever she was lying, it was hard and painful and cold. Her body was stiff and unresponsive, protesting the request for action. She ignored the vague pain and the numbness, letting her frustration (and fear) fuel her body. Kyra sat up and tore her eyes away from that endless bloody sky.

She surveyed the place she found herself in.

Unless she missed her mark...this was clearly not Obsidian Station.

She was on a peninsula of dark, pockmarked rock. Ahead of her and to either side...

An ocean of bubbling, boiling, noxious green liquid. It reeked like toxic waste. And there were other reeks too, she realized, buried in that stench: blood, shit, piss, sweat, decay, death. And...sulfur. Sulfur like...

Brimstone.

As in fire and brimstone, as in burning skies, as in...

"Hell," she whispered. Henderson's words came back to her in a rush: You're going to have to go through Hell to get there and she felt her control slip. Trembling, breathing heavily, she turned slowly around, praying that this plot of land she initially took for a peninsula was not, in fact, an island, leaving her stranded in a sea of toxic sludge. No, she realized as she turned around, it wasn't quite that bad.

Though it almost was.

The land spread out and pressed onward ahead of her. A lot more dark, mottled rock that was cut through in some places by rivers of more of the bubbling, toxic sludge. In the distance, to the right, most of the view was taken up by jagged black mountains. A red mist curled around their peaks. To the left, the landscape dropped away at a shallow grade. There were strange rock formations dotting the land, big, misshapen boulders that looked like they were covered in red or blue glowing veins. And she saw stands of dead trees, too, with barbed branches that thrust up through the rock. Further on, she saw what might have been a swamp.

And there were more mountains in the far distances, always more mountains.

She could see structures, as well. Huge stone structures of bizarre design.

What held her attention, however, were two things. The first was one such structure, dead ahead of her, maybe half a football field's length of distance away. It was made of blocky, pale green, almost gray stone bricks. It looked a little like an old fortress or a castle from medieval days. It didn't seem particularly large. There were rusted iron bars serving as windows and what might have been torches were stuck to the walls, burning with a malignant green light. Kyra stood there staring at it for a long time.