The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 09: Perfect Hatred

Kyra Morgan marched across Hell, and felt...

She wasn't sure what she was feeling, only that it didn't seem right. She was in Hell. She should be feeling abysmal, mind-numbing, hitherto unexplored realms of blind terror. But she wasn't afraid. Okay, that wasn't true. She was pretty scared. But she wasn't panicking, she wasn't freaking out, at least not from fear anyway. Maybe from stress. Fuck, this was stressful. But more she felt...angry. And kind of curious.

Maybe it was because she didn't believe this was Hell.

It sure looked like Hell, and the things she'd been fighting could be called demons. But demons didn't die, right? Maybe in the real world, but in their own realm, on their home turf, she thought they were immortal. Demons were supposed to be fallen angels, and angels didn't die. Where would angels or demons go if they died? Would they cease to exist? That wouldn't be so bad. But she was getting off track. In Hell, you were supposed to be immortal, your immortal soul was being tortured. But she'd seen dead on both sides of the line now.

No, Kyra was far more ready to believe that the UAC had accidentally opened a door that led to an alternate reality, another dimension, and that dimension simply resembled Hell, and its occupants simply resembled demons. Sure, they looked demonic and threw fireballs, about what you'd expect, but otherwise...well, that's where the resemblance ended. Plus, that whole dying thing. If this was Hell, then Kyra had to admit, she was a little disappointed. Not that she was really trying to invite yet more difficulty into her life.

But above all that, or perhaps below it, in her core, she was pissed.

Mad at the UAC, mad at life in general, and mainly mad at these fucking abominations that so gleefully slaughtered and tortured her fellow humans. She was sure there were probably some people in Typhon and Obsidian Stations that deserved death, maybe not torture...well, maybe. The money-grubbing fucks who had let this happen, who had probably pressed on regardless of the risk. The cold, calculating scientists who'd enabled it to happen. And maybe some of her fellow Space Marines. Not everyone who was a Space Marine was there because they'd questioned orders once too often, or scored too low on a test.

Some were rapists that the United Marine Corps wanted to just sweep under the rug. Some had been caught (by someone willing to hush it up) maybe doing some sick shit to the locals of whatever wartorn country they were fighting in.

Yeah, there were some pretty sick bastards that had gotten thrown out into space. Kyra would've liked to do the same, only in a more literal sense, out an airlock, without a suit on. She had no patience or stomach for rapists and would just as easily castrated them with a rusty knife as toss them out an airlock.

But there were certainly innocents, people who were just trying to earn a living. Techs or chefs or custodial personnel maintaining the stations, or, fuck, families. God, had there been kids there on Typhon Station?

She didn't want to think about that.

Just about the time she was beginning to worry that maybe she might not find this underground complex, she spied what appeared to be ruins, and hurried towards them. So far, she'd only had to contend with a handful of the flying skulls, popping them to bleached bone bits with her pistol, having to kill a magazine to do it. She still had half a dozen, one in the pistol, five in her pockets, but she needed something with some real stopping power, and couldn't help but feel that she was going to run into something worse soon.

The ruins looked very old and she had no idea what must have destroyed them, only that there were just a handful of wrecked walls made of that same gray-green stonework as the previous structure. She moved slowly among the ruins, and this time found yet more evidence of a human presence. A few discarded food wrappers, an empty water bottle, some spent shell casings, a few dead fiends. She finally found what she was looking for near the center of the ruins: a hole in the ground, with stairs cut into the rock descending into torch-lit gloom.