The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 29: Strata Station Slaughter

"So he's in there there?" Kyra asked uncertainly, staring at the door that led to the Specimen Storage.

That name did not inspire confidence.

"According to the sensors, yes. He's in there. In a room at the very far end of the area," Powell replied unhappily. "And as far as I can tell, it's legit. He should be there. Alive and kicking. My guess is he somehow got himself into a jam and had to lock himself up."

"God knows what's between him and us," Collins muttered.

"Everyone get ready, sooner we do this, the better, we don't know if he might be in danger or not, what kind of a burning fuse he might be facing," Kyra said as she pulled out her plasma rifle. This time, she was going to be blasting demons hard to the core.

She was fucking done with this place.

Everyone prepared themselves, and Powell got up next to the control panel beside the door. Which, suspiciously, wasn't locked. Just shut. His hand hovered over the button, waiting on Kyra's command. She gave it and he hit the button, then moved to rejoin them. The five of them stood lined up, guns in hand, fingers on the triggers, just like they had barely half an hour ago. The door slid open, and like before, a chorus of shrieking and roaring and growling met their ears. Kyra prepared to unleash a blue-white fury of plasma onto the shambling hordes, but stayed her hand as she realized the truth of the situation.

There was no horde to fight.

Instead, there was a horde on display.

The Specimen Storage bay was a massive, warehouse-sized room, long, high, and rectangular. It was about a football field's length and maybe a third that across, with a ceiling three stories overhead. Stacked in a grid of titanium and glass to either side of them, stretching down the entire length of the room, were cages. Hundreds upon hundreds of cages. Kyra saw that about half of them were broken or otherwise empty, but half of them weren't.

Slowly, they walked into the room, breaking the threshold and stopping a few feet in.

Kyra saw damn near everything in those cages.

Zombies, fiends, fly skulls, pumpkins, maggots, pinkies, and skull spiders. No skeletons, thankfully. Or chaingunners. Maybe they were unique to Earth, and they hadn't had a chance to make any down here since the invasion began. She estimated that, altogether, there were probably between a hundred and a hundred and fifty of the things, all locked up.

"I don't suppose you have any idea if there exists a master control switch?" she made herself ask after several moments.

"Knowing the UAC, of course there does and it's in Command Control," Falcheck growled.

"We're really doing this, aren't we?" Weldon muttered.

"We're really doing this," Kyra confirmed. She roused herself. "Stay sharp. Keep ready. We might luck out. We're making a beeline for Carpenter. Powell, get ready to get that door open as fast as you can. Everyone else, be ready to fight like hell."

They all gave tired but sharp replies.

And then they set off.

The main floor of the lab was a huge, empty, open space, broken only by corpses, bloodslicks, and rolling gurneys with broken restrains on most of them. Some still held corpses, or even living things, in place. Several held zombies, a few held fiends. Some of the fiends were still alive and thrashing madly against the restraining straps.

Kyra shot each of them in the head in passing. The fewer enemies, the better.

As they passed the twenty meter mark of the room, making steady progress to the great slab of a door at the far end, she realized there were other rooms off the sides of the primary area. They were placed roughly every twenty meters, opposite each other to the left and right, doors set into the walls among open spaces in the cages. The first one she saw that was actually open gave her an idea of precisely what they were getting up to down here: it led into a bloodstained, stainless steel surgical bay. Precision cutting tools and implements lay scattered across the no-slip tiled floor in great pools of blood, mixed in with body parts.