The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 28: Slough of Despair

For the first five or so minutes, they rode in silence.

Jack stared out over the miserable hellish wastelands that surrounded them, unable to keep his attention inboard. It was just so...bizarre. So other. Mainly it was that crimson sky that was doing it. And the strange rock formations they were passing every now and then. They were basically granite boulders, or they appeared to be granite, but they also had these weird, shimmering red and blue veins growing along them.

And he could swear he saw what looked like red coral out there, growing straight up out of the rock and black sand ground.

Green was the first to break the silence.

"So I was wondering if maybe we should all talk about how we got here," she said. Jack looked back inside, at her, ahead of him in the driver's seat. "I mean, we're all here for a reason. We all fucked up. We all did something."

A beat of silence passed.

"Guess I'll go first," Green said. "It's really embarrassing, so I'm sure it'll make all of you feel better. I got drunk."

"What?" Jack asked, the word coming out of him before he realized he was going to say it.

Green chuckled. "Yep. Drunk. About a year and a half ago I was on duty over in...shit, I can't remember. Estonia, Czechoslovakia, somewhere around there. The region was hot with local 'freedom fighters' who were really just anarchist assholes looking to loot, pillage, and plunder anything and everything they could. But it had been quiet for close to a week around my firebase. And I just...needed a fucking break. I thought I was going to snap. I'd been tense for so long, and I'd just received news that my husband was tired of waiting for me, as I'd been stop-lossed fucking three times in a row. So...yeah, it was a bad time. I'd just signed the divorce papers digitally and I knew I was going to freak out if I didn't do something.

"So I got drunk. And ended up, uh, accidentally shooting the munitions reserve. Most of it was stable stuff, but enough of it was unstable that it blew a good sized hole through the munitions building. No one was hurt, thank God, and there were no real repercussions, but at that point they really didn't know what to do with me. They didn't want to get rid of me, but they could tell I was pretty messed up, emotionally, and I was liable to do something stupid like that again. So they had to put me somewhere else. Really, it was bad press. That's all they care about now: press. The public eye. So I got rotated up here, to Mars," she explained.

"I got half my squad killed because of a bad call," Jennifer said after a moment, and her tone indicated that that was all she was going to say about it.

"Oh...I'm sorry," Green replied.

"Yeah, me too."

Green looked in the rearview, her eyes meeting Jack's briefly. He sighed. "I was ordered to fire on a building that we thought held some insurgents. I was doing some scouting, saw civilians in the building, lots of them. Tried to report it, but my superior didn't care. I disobeyed orders, went in there, found nothing but civvies. No guns between them. Nothing. We would've bombed forty innocents just trying to hide into oblivion, but my superior didn't care. All he saw was that I made him look bad, and he had a lot of pull. Dad was a Senator, uncle a General. He squawked until they decided to do something, sent me up here."

"Damn, that sucks," Green muttered.

"Yep. Especially considering what happened...what about you, Stratton?" Jack asked.

"Nothing too special," he replied. "Got into a fight with my superior over something stupid. Fist fight. He was an ass and he was riding all of us over every little goddamned thing. You know how some guys can get. I just...snapped one day. Landed me out here." He shrugged. "But I'm not entirely sure I regret it."