The following story is a work of fiction. Apart from being based on Doom 3,
the work itself has no ties to id Software whatsoever.
No parts of the story should be used without consent.

by Nick P.

Special thanks to Tim Corwin for helping with the story and of course, Paul!

“Holy—” Tim began.

            “You know, I wouldn’t mind having a chat with the bastard who runs this place before I blow him away—”

            Why did I say that highly-thought out, imaginative and expressive thought? Well, ahead of us floated three human heads. In mid air, no strings attached. Of course, their faces were modified to a level where they barely resembled those of a human; their eyes were a shining white. The jaws had been replaced with a row of needle-like 3 centimetre teeth that protruded outward. The lower jaw was wide and muscular, definitely not human.

            From the back of their heads sprouted some metallic parts that were unmistakeably a stout rocket engine out of which a dwarfish fire burned. What the hell?

            What will the pervasive minds who make these things think of next?

            These awkward yet equally creepy monstrosities slowly drifted through the air, seemingly ignoring us.

            And then the one thing at the very front jerkily turned to our little gang. It opened its mouth, baring its fangs, hissing. Next thing I knew there was the sound of an explosion and fire billowed out of its jet engine in bountiful amounts. With this, it shot towards us at a blazing speed.

            No filthy flying head was taking a chunk out of Nik Taggart’s ass!

            I fired and to my pleasant, and unpleasant surprise, it exploded.

            The pleasant part was that it was gone, dead, unmonsterised. The unpleasant was that the explosion threw me back, my exposed flesh burned, my clothing smoking.

            I had the energy to finish off the other two things. And I did.

            After that, however, I collapsed. Jesus, it hurt.

            “Are you ok?” Asked Tim in a worried voice.

            “Nah, it’s not much. Just some third-degree burns, that’s all.”

            Tim hoisted me over his shoulder. “We’ve got to get you a medikit,” he said.

            I handed him the shotgun. “Make good use of them. Or we’ll have to resort to banging imps upside the head with my flashlight.” I laughed, then added, “Why do I think we’ve been through this before?”

            Tim smirked. “We have.”

            “Ah, you stole my weapon. Again.”

            He grinned.

            “Hey, Fred, it’s safe to come out now.”

            Frederick came tottering around the bend.

            “Don’t call me Fred.”

I couldn’t help but sniff my burnt hands. It was a disgusting smell, heavy and putrid. The thought that prisoners in Nazi death camps were forced to endure the same smell as their friends were scorched in large furnaces gave me a new outlook on what they had suffered. The smell on its own was quite a torture instrument.

            But if we didn’t hurry, the Holocaust would be dwarfed in proportion by hell’s arrival. I urged Tim on.

            By then, Tim had grown quite accustomed to carrying other people. Fortunately, his services were not required for too long a period of time; we found some medikits laying scattered around.

            “Hmm, what do you think happened? Why are they lying around like that?’

            “I don’t know,” said Tim. “It’s almost as if someone was looking for something and threw these over his shoulder in his hurry.”

            I shrugged but didn’t complain. I wanted some medical attention badly.

            Thank God for modern medicine!

            A few minutes into my treatment, I felt all pain leave me. My hands were still burned and smelled grotesquely, but I had energy, and that mattered. It was all gonna be over soon. Very soon.

            I retrieved my shotgun from Tim.

            As we walked on, Tim jabbed me forcefully in the ribs. This usually meant that something was awry.

            I looked in the direction he was pointing, and saw that my instinct was correct.

            To our left was a small hallway, with a dead end. This end was not to be seen, however. As the end of the hallway drew near, the walls turned a fleshy pink. I strained my eyes and saw that it was made of flesh, wet slimy flesh, pulsating slowly while some unknown light source backlit it. It was revolting.

            And as a final touch to the decoration, a human corpse hung from the ceiling, twitching lightly so that it was hard to notice. The corpse seemed somewhat decomposed, and was yet glossy and fresh at the same time.

            I looked away. I could gaze on no longer.

            “What the hell… ?” muttered Tim.

            “Hell,” said Frederick loudly. “Hell is starting to take over. It’s coming, it’s eating away at the station. It’s here and there now. But within days, the entire human outpost will be transformed into what could only be a bad dream. It starts with this,” he said motioning towards the corpse.

            Tim and I looked at him awkwardly.

            “Come on, we have to move on.”

Not a whole lot happened after that. We ran into several imps and even encountered several more ‘fleshy’, organic areas. We must be drawing near, I thought. The train brought us close, or so Frederick said. Our arrival must be at hand. I simply couldn’t see it any other way.

            But these thoughts were broken by the next interesting event in our little quest.

            No new monster.

            It was a zombie that came blundering around one corner.

            Better yet, it was none other than Commander Briggs himself, or what was once Commander Briggs.

            I couldn’t help but grin. I finally had an excuse to send him where he belonged.

            “Permission to terminate entity?” I asked Tim jokingly.

            To my surprise, he answered, “Permission denied, corporal.”

            “Why?”

            I saw the same smile etch itself across his face. “I want to do this.”

            “Come on, let me!”

            While we argued, Briggs started firing away his pistol. Tim and I continued to argue, not even bothering to duck. See, even when dead, Briggs was a horrible shot.

            “But… But… All these years… He’s mine! Besides, you were a perfectionist! You liked Briggs!” I had a pretty strong argument.

            Tim had a pretty strong defence. “I wanted to get up there. I never really liked him; no one did. The whole Martian base thing, the control he had over the flow of information, his secret meetings—”

            “You may hate Briggs as well, but Briggs liked you. Likewise, he hated me. I have an excuse to do this!”

            “No, oh fine.”

            Tim turned away angrily.

            I blew Briggs away.

            “Man, that was a release.”

            “Oh?” said Tim angrily. “I stepped down cause I’m wiser.”

            “You may be wiser, but who got the pleasure of pulling the—”

            “Shut up.”

            “—trigger, feeling it sink into the handle—”

            “Shut up!”

            I stopped. I didn’t want Tim’s complaining to lure any other zombies in. “Alright. I’m sorry Tim.”

            He sighed.

            “What did it matter who did it? At least we know he’s gone for good. A tyrant removed from his throne…”

            “Yeah. But I’ve got dibs on Hemming if we run into him.”

            I grinned. Why are we so mean?

“Alright,” I said, recalling our drill sergeant. This was getting fun.

Our sightseeing was enlighted to some more varying scenery (besides the few other fleshy walls and hanging corpses, in one of which we were treated to a pentagram made of liquid tissue…) that made time pass faster. Areas became slightly more open, still supported by a colossal and intricate work of metallic beams and panels. We walked down a hallway with horizontally-placed tanks with transparent tops, beneath which blue water churned. We thought we’d seen pipes before, and yet their frequency grew exponentially.

            At one point, we stumbled around a large roughly pentagonal room with a gigantic tank in the centre, stretching from the metallic floor to the no-less metallic ceiling. The bottom of the gigantic cylinder ended in a metallic base with the essential computer consoles, whilst the top fell into a metal cone that widened. All of this was covered with intricate lines where panels came together, tubes, wires, and glowing lights, of course. Some of these tubes and wires led to minuscule versions of the larger tank that were scattered to the sides of the room.

            Something quite distorted by the water ran through it.

            I was just thinking, ‘I don’t wanna know’, when Frederick said:

            “Oooh, the cooling facility!”

            Throwing him a somewhat dirty look, I wondered why he was getting so excited about some damn cooling facility.

            “So?” said Tim, apparently thinking along the same lines.

            Great minds think alike.

            Frederick didn’t look away. “Oh, I’ve never been here before. Still, though concealed from me, this room was essential to our experiments. Had it not been for the cool water plates and constant ventilation, the accelerated particles in our portals would lead to an uncontrollable reaction that would blow a chunk out of Mars ten times the size of this place.”

            And this place was pretty big, too, I said to myself in my mind.

            “Why didn’t it happen when there was the power outage? Surely electricity is somehow involved in the processing of this water.” Tim said this with a thoughtful expression. I thought about it. It really was a thoughtful thing, thus his expression was justified.

            “I really can’t say. Then again, when the power went out, the portal should’ve shut, but it didn’t, did it? Apparently, something is somehow operating the our portal from the portal on the other side.”

            “This side being hell, right?” I asked. Of course, I already knew. Why I asked this, I don’t know. It felt appropriate to do so.

            Tim let silence linger for a while longer, before saying, “Let’s go.”

            I agreed. Humankind was at stake.

            And the odds weren’t too good, either.

            I glanced back at the door through which we had entered. The doors were bent and torn from their foundation. So that’s how we had gotten inside this secure hall, meant for authorised personnel only.

            A shadow spilled over the floor from that very hall.

            I urged Tim and Frederick silently to get going. And so we did.

            We never found out what exactly cast the shadow. It could’ve simply been some zombie, but it’s not good risking it. Besides, our ammunition was highly valuable and unnecessary gunfights were to be avoided.

            We had long since steered clear of the shadow, when Frederick shouted (well, excitedly whispered), “This is it!”

            He led us forward until we came to gaze upon a steel cage. I bit my lip looking at it, then realised it was a lift. An elevator. Coolness, we didn’t have any back in our base. I hadn’t seen one since I left Earth, and that was ages ago. Literally.

            One might be surprised that I found it so interesting. It was a very Spartan lift, with cables and tubes running through here and there. But it fascinated me nonetheless. Get over it.

            Frederick led the way. “Where’s my security clearance?” he asked as he fidgeted with his pocket.

It took me a moment to remember that I had taken it a while ago. I quickly fumbled through my own pocket and pulled it out, handing it to Fredrick. “I saved it for safety reasons when you were knocked out a while ago,” I unnecessarily explained myself. He said nothing.

After scanning the card and his hand, he got in, and Tim and I followed.

            It seemed that the scientist was going through what was once his daily routine when going to work. Only now it was a bit different.

            The steel doors shut and the lift began to rise with a jerk and a whole lot of screeching and whirring. The latter part made me wince. We were nearing the portal to hell. I didn’t find it necessary to shout, ‘Hey, we’re coming!’. But if any hell-prodigy was hanging around, it was bound to have heard us. It was too late. So I didn’t say anything, though quite a bit of comments came to mind.

            The lift stopped and the doors fell to the sides with a hiss. Ooh, hydraulics.

            And as the doors came to a rest, my mind was overloaded with information. We were there, I immediately knew it.

            We all knew it.

            And we all knew that it was going to be all over soon.

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