The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 04: Friendlies

They were back outside again, sticking to back alleyways for the moment.

They had six blocks to go through heavily contested enemy territory. Kyra was trying to keep her focus, but she had to admit that this felt utterly surreal. Even after all the shit she'd gone through, fighting in countries and cities all over the world, fighting actual demons on the moons of Jupiter and literally fucking Hell, there was something absolutely bugfuck crazy about seeing them outright ripping into a city on her home turf. As much as she honestly didn't buy political bullshit or patriotic garbage or other propaganda, she still felt like America was her homeland, and she'd never fought here. For over fifty years, no one had, because no one had launched an attack directly on the country. It wasn't unprecedented, it had happened before, but it was before her time, definitely. Seeing a huge metropolis in the Midwest like this being ripped to bloody shreds was just...

Gut-wrenching.

It also just felt like a nightmare. A waking one. Maybe a hallucination. But she fought, and fought very hard, to rouse herself from that mentality, or rather lack of mentality. She was here, this was real, and billions of lives were on the line. The entirety of her own species was on the chopping block and they were going to need every last human to fight tooth and goddamned motherfucking nail to keep from edging over into the black abyss of extinction. Even then it might not be enough, but she absolutely refused to do anything but go out fighting and take down as many of the fuckers as physically possible with her.

Right now, fighting the good fight meant getting her shit together and reporting to that Marine outpost so that she could pass off the crucial data Jensen had given her all the way back on Io. Kyra suppressed a sigh of frustration. She was still tired, even after the rest she'd had on the moon and that farmhouse. Though, admittedly, the night hadn't been restful. Quite the opposite. She was used to her fellow Marines being good in bed but these two were...something else. It was obvious that they were in love and very much on the same wavelength. Part of her envied them, but another part was glad of her singleness.

It made life easier, in some regards.

Kyra shook her head. She was getting off track again, and the end of the alleyway they were traversing was on rapid approach. They would have to cross the first of about half a dozen streets. The alleyway afforded great cover, but the streets were painfully open. She held up her fist as she came within two meters of the end and then slowly crept up the rest of the way. Cautiously, she scoped the situation out. The next street looked clear, just some wrecked cars and a lot of dead bodies and blood. She waved them forward.

They hurried across the street and plunged into the next alleyway between a gas station and what might have been a gym. The next several minutes passed by in terse, tense silence, broken by the distant, and not-so-distant, sounds of combat that seemed to enshroud the metropolis. Her mind was continually bombarded by the desire to disbelieve what she was seeing. Kyra had seen warzones, really bad ones, really fucking bad ones, but this was of a magnitude that she hadn't ever really considered possible. Even after she'd discovered that demons were real and Hell was an actual place you could stroll around in, even after it dawned on her that these horrific things might set foot on Earth in vast numbers...

She apparently hadn't truly believed that it could happen.

Because this seemed impossible. In a way, it was amazing how much your mind wanted to take something and just twist it into something else, without your own input. It was almost like her mind was a separate force, as automated as her heart in its attempts to somehow, someway shift her focus from the unmitigated, wretched, stomach-churning horror that she was currently mired in. But Kyra fought bitterly to keep her focus on the here and now. Even in the face of such unthinkable, vast, bloody chaos she probably didn't have to fight as hard as some people. Because she'd been through so much, even before hitting the moons of Jupiter, and she knew that the simple reality of war was: you had to stay in the moment.