The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 16: Dead Simple

Alone again.

He and Cortez had backtracked until they'd found a crossroads section that would take them to where they needed to be. And right now that meant hunting down a probably terrified and possibly dead young PFC named Harper. Jack had been trying to raise him over the radio, but so far there was still no joy in that department.

At present, Jack was as alone as he could be, stalking down a blood-painted passageway just below the surface of Haydenfield. He'd managed to find a shortcut that would chop away the need to pass through a maze-like network of maintenance tunnels up above. Once he surfaced at the other end of this tunnel, he would, theoretically at least, be within pissing distance of the section that Harper was supposedly at.

There was too much theory in his life lately.

And too much blood.

It was obvious that some kind of slaughter had happened in this hallway, which was broad, though short. Despite the fact that he didn't have to hunch to walk down it, Jack felt claustrophobic. The ceiling was barely a foot above his head. There were bodies along the walls to his left and right. It seemed as if some of the local security forces had been in a brutal battle with a metric fuckton of Imps at some point. Given how many had died, he wasn't sure who had won. Maybe no one had won. He stopped to scrounge for ammo whenever he saw an intact yellow-armored body, but none of them were packing anything.

Maybe someone had been through already. He reached the end of the corridor and found a trio of doors waiting for him. The one to his right was already open and showed a stark, white-tiled bathroom painted in blood, guts, and gore. For a few seconds, Jack simply stared. Someone was hung by their own intestines, swaying gently from a light fixture, dripping blood into a huge pool. He saw a human brain tossed carelessly into a urinal. Piles of pulped and shredded meat, skin and musculature, filled three sinks.

"Fuck," Jack whispered, and turned from the desecrated bathroom.

The demons were definitely getting worse.

He knew that the door ahead would take him to the little service lift that would get him back to the surface, but the map just showed a simple square room beyond the left door. He opened it up. Jack stood in the doorway and looked around, blinking, trying to determine if he was losing his mind or maybe just hallucinating from hope alone.

The room beyond was a storage bay of some kind, the walls covered in shelves that had crates of generic technical supplies. That was expected. What wasn't expected was the pile of guns and ammo in the center of the room.

After a moment, he determined it was real.

He also determined it was too good to be true. It had to be a trap of some kind. Had to be. He wasted two whole minutes staring at the room, trying to determine where things might be hiding. But he couldn't see anything at all. Finally, knowing that time was burning away second by second, he took a step into the room.

Nothing happened. Jack took another step.

Nothing continued to happen.

He ended up at the piles of weapons and ammo and still he remained intact, no monsters screaming out of popped-open wall panels or concealed compartments. Jack crouched and, after a second's hesitation, began scooping up ammo. In the end, he ended up with a dozen magazines for his pistol, a dozen for his rifle, and filling his pockets with shotgun shells. He walked out of that room without running into a single monster. It was the best thing that had happened to him ever since he'd hit dirt back on planet Earth.

Jack thought back to Kyra.

Okay, well, second best thing.

He wondered how she was doing, or where she even was. But that just led to him thinking about Jennifer. He still hadn't heard from her yet. He turned on the radio and began calling out to her, but as he entered the next room, cleared it, and rode the lift back up to the surface, he didn't get a reply. Jack tried to push the worry aside, but could only succeed in pushing it down, and not very far. He had spent a long time not really giving a shit about much of anything after his life had shattered into pieces the day the ducks died. Joining the Corps had at least given him an outlet to vent and a direction to aim, but until Jennifer had come along, he hadn't seriously cared about anyone in anything more than a basic empathic capacity.