The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 02: In Hell

Reality twisted.

Existence bent, warped, and smeared.

Somewhere, Watts heard screaming, a discordant swirl of damned souls that bled slowly into some kind of stuttering, electronic feedback.

A cold wind shrieked through him, flash-freezing his soul.

Red and orange and black swirled before his eyes, slowly coalescing into images...into faces. Faces not of this universe, not human.

Pure evil.

And then everything seemed to snap. Like a soap bubble popping, he found himself standing on a rocky surface.

Watts cried out, stumbling, falling to one knee, as his whole body seemed to twist and writhe in a million different directions. What felt like cold electricity whispered across his skin, sending millions of pinpricks stabbing into his flesh.

"Little warning would have been nice!" he snapped, struggling to keep from vomiting.

"You're fine, Corporal. Suck it up," Kaplan replied from somewhere nearby.

It took him a few seconds, but the man's words helped ground him back to his own body. He couldn't remember all the times he'd been told to suck it up or get the fuck over it by a superior. And usually they were right.

It's not like you had a lot of choice in his line of work. Either you sucked it up or you died. Or, worse, someone else died.

Watts got back to his feet, clenching his fists. He quickly scanned his environment, then wished he hadn't. He spied eight armored figures, men and women transformed into faceless green statues wielding weapons. To his immediate right was a rock wall with an opening near the middle, to his left, however, was something vastly different.

They were standing atop a small plateau that was set several hundred meters up the side of a mountainous cliff sheer. Beyond the plateau was an immense landscape that went on for untold miles. The landscape was...

It was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Most of it was made of an immense plate of black rock that slowly gave way to what seemed to be a desert wasteland. There were jagged, broken mountain ranges, making up a kind of backdrop to this environment. Dotting the landscape were curious constructions, structures that must be truly huge. One, to the far right, was what looked like an ancient fortress, built like a layered cake, the flat gray exterior dotted with windows. Closer to his position was what seemed like an immense coliseum. Presiding over all of this, to the far left, was a titanic black tower that struck pure fear into the deeper parts of his heart and soul.

But what truly terrified him was both the fact that rivers of what appeared to be blood cut through this landscape and the fact that all of this was beneath a bloodred, constantly shifting sky. It was like he was looking into a nightmare.

"Where are we?" Watts heard himself whisper.

"Less you know, happier we'll all be, now come on!" Kaplan snapped.

He began leading them through the opening in the cliff. Watts made himself follow. He had a job to do, orders to follow, and he intended to do so. But this was so jarring that questions kept popping up at a seemingly exponential rate.

Namely, where the hell were they!?

He didn't like that this place reminded him of...well, of Hell.

And that transition, that portal...he shuddered at the memory. How long had these people been doing it daily? How long was he going to be here? What would he be expected to do here? And where the fuck was here!?