The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 10: Sever the Wicked

Kyra reappeared beneath a maddening, bloody sky.

A few things became immediately apparent to her. The first was that she had come through this teleporter intact and armed. The second was that she was facing two zombies with their backs to her. They were growling and muttering incoherently to each other, or to themselves. Either way, she cut their conversation short by putting a bullet into the backs of their skulls.

And promptly woke up half of Hell.

Kyra felt her whole body go cold as she heard a symphony of monstrous voices roar, scream, shriek, and wail. She was standing on a raised wooden platform. All around her she could see more walls of wood and stone bricks. A small flotilla of flying skulls was off to her left, and about ten feet below her, mainly in the other directions, was a vast expanse of wood that was host to about two dozen fiends and zombies that had suddenly become aware of her presence. And promptly opened fire on her. There were a lot fireballs, but she noticed a fair amount of lead being hurled at her, too. The zombies were armed.

And apparently knew how to use their arsenal.

Definitely bad.

But those flaming skulls were worse, and the fireballs were easy enough to dodge. Though really it was luck with the bullets and occasional shotgun shell being hurled at her. She really needed some damned armor. Kyra took aim and counted targets. Half a dozen. She squeezed the trigger as she zeroed her sights on the first skull. A three-round burst hit it hard and popped it into a spray of charred bone. It fell into a bubbling collection of lava below it. There seemed to be a river of the stuff dividing the local area.

Great. She'd have to find some way across that probably.

Kyra fired and popped the rest of them, emptying a magazine and then barely managing to avoid another pair of fireballs as she slapped a fresh one in. The fiends were getting impatient, shrieking wildly at her as they kept trying to hit her. She moved fast, strafing as she flipped to single-shot and began popping targets with extreme prejudice. A fiend went down. Then another. Two more. A zombie bit the dust as old blood sprayed out of its ruined cranium. Kyra's heart pounded harder, her blood pumping like fire in her veins, her head crystal clear and screaming with battlelust and the pure, unfiltered thrill of combat.

She split skulls and spilled demon blood. Alien blood. Whatever the fuck it was, by the time she'd emptied a second magazine, the wooden platform below was awash with the damned stuff. Two dozen corpses lay sprawled out and Kyra realized she was laughing. Only this didn't feel like 'I'm-losing-my-shit' laughter, this was the semi-crazed but still coherent laughter she'd had to bury deep and hard inside of her when she was sometimes in the thick of battle. Only here she didn't have to hide anything. There was just her and the inhuman monsters that would kill her at the earliest possible convenience. And there was something liberating about that.

There were no moral quandaries, no ethical debates, no hesitation, no uncertainty. No rules of engagement, no war crimes.

She had serious doubt the Geneva Convention covered literal goddamned monsters.

"You're enjoying yourself, you crazy fuck," Kyra whispered to herself as her laughter died away. Distantly, something howled.

She looked up at that bloody sky, then around her at the fortress of wood and stone she'd come to. Well, if she intended to keep fighting this war and get back home, she was going to have to keep her head on straight.

Something much closer growled.

Well, on a swivel, anyway.

The first thing she noticed was that there was a bridge on the platform with her, and it was apparently the only way across the lava river, and...it was in a cage of black metal that looked old, but sturdy.