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Doom: Evil Unleashed - Special Edition

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A little more than a month and a half I finished my very first Doom story called Doom: Evil Unleashed. Since it was my first stoy and since there were a couple things in it that I didn't like after having completed it, I decided to do an improved version.
Well, here's the first whole episode (an episode in this story is made up of several "parts", so this is a long read - consider yourself warned), the others will follow in this thread. Enjoy.

__________________________________

Prologue

The marines sat closely together. There was no room to lie down, so those who slept were sitting upright. The sleeping marines were snoring peacefully and only one marine was awake – me.

I stared out in the air in front of me, motionless and emotionless, thinking about my past.

I remembered my first time in combat. I wasn’t even a soldier, only a kid.

I remembered the horrible feeling of fear clutching at my chest after the bombs had turned miles of the city into ruins. I was constantly running and hiding from the foreign soldiers moving into the city. After constantly running and hiding for hours, I came across an American soldier – a marine, whose leg was broken. He was tired and didn’t look too good.
We both quickly understood that we needed each other badly, so he handed me a pistol and told me how to use it.

And use it I did, because the area was full of enemy patrol groups. I remember the unreal feeling of firing the pistol at another human being the first time an enemy spotted us. I remembered as if it was yesterday it happened how the soldier had stared at me with wide eyes and an expression of complete surprise as this little kid emptied three rounds into his chest. He hadn’t been wearing armor, so the bullets had torn right through his body, and his death yell had filled the air.

Three days later, reinforcements had finally arrived and had evacuated the marine and I. We hadn’t slept for those three days and together we had killed a few enemy troops that got too close. I received a medal for bravery. I remember the slight surprise of receiving the shiny metal piece that I had thought only soldiers could get, yet I had also felt a total indifference to the whole thing, because it didn’t really matter.

And now I was a marine myself.

My thoughts were interrupted by the loudspeaker.
“Heads up guys, we’re touching down on Mars in a minute”

The other marines groaned sleepily and slowly woke up. I remained indifferent and stared into the air in front of me.

Welcome to The Red Planet, welcome to the Hell of boredom! I thought.

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Doom: Evil Unleashed


The Beginning to the End – Part 1

Three years later..

"I wish something would happen for a change" I muttered as I relieved my buddy, Chris Andrews, who sat near the buzzing computer panels in the communication room of the main base. He was a tall, muscular, black-haired guy, who had ended up on Mars because he had wrecked his C.O.'s jeep. The C.O. never liked the marine so he arranged a "fitting holiday" on Mars for Andrews. He accepted his fate, but truthfully, he loathed the place as much as I did.
"Aw come on", he said, trying to smile at me. "Constantly bitchin' doesn't make Life easier. Why don't you look on the brighter side of things?"
I sighed, but he was right. Constantly moaning over one's fate only lowered the morale of the other troops, so I decided to keep quiet. "Relax", he said, looking over his shoulder as he walked out of the room. "Only three more months!"

Three...! I thought to myself, as images of the past entered my brain.

For three years I had been sucking dust on this sleepy base. The base was the main command and control center for the Union Aerospace Corporation's Martian base labs. The UAC, a multiplanetary conglomerate that had revived the now defunct NASA's space program almost a century ago, had originally been mining minerals and other materials on Mars along with conducting a few space-based research projects. Later they discovered the potential of the conditions on Mars, and as the UAC began having success in making a number of technical advancements, the military got interested. Now the military was largely involved in the research projects that the UAC had going.

I have never known my parents. I was told that they were killed in a UAC experiment that they were involved in and the only memory I had of them was a picture.
I joined the U.S. Marine Corps at an early age, and soon proved to be exceptionally tough and determined. Helen "Crash" Kaminsky, the boot camp instructor, an athletic, tough woman, whith whom it was best not to mess around with, was a brilliant combat instructor and I was quick to learn every aspect of weapon handling and using my survival instincts. After two years with the regular Marines, I joined the newly formed Special Space Drop Unit, an elite unit within the Marine Corps, which quickly achieved the reputation as one of Earth's toughest elite units.

I had better buddies in this unit, but some of my superiors were total jackasses, especially 1st Lieutenant Frank Stevenson. He always seemed to hate me, even if I pleased the rest of my superiors, and he seemed to be satisfied only when he could cause someone pain.

That man became the cause as to how I ended up on Mars.

-

"Still sulkin', huh?" Steve Henderson asked, ripping me out of my gloomy thoughts. "Well, Henderson's here to the rescue!" he grinned. I narrowed my eyes and gave the blond-haired marine a quick, hard look. He was probably the single most annoying person among my comrades here on this God forsaken ball of red rock with his tendency to poke fun of me. I hated when people made fun of me. Henderson was slightly shorter than I and his curly hair gave him a boyish look. I could usually identify him from miles away, because of his roaring laughter when he told one of his jokes and his bright hair. I disliked him mainly because he seemed to enjoy being here and always made me feel how much he liked it. He had volunteered to be transferred here, I hadn’t.

I left the well-cleaned comm. room after having been relieved by Henderson and made my way to the rec. room – the only place where I could relax properly and bury my anger, except when Henderson was there which he wasn't now.

...

The Beginning to the End – Part 2

-

Rain was pouring down on the fateful day, where my SSDU platoon was suddenly called in on an unsuspected mission.

A horde of rioters had stormed a UAC weapons factory on Earth, trapping a number of UAC employees and workers inside. The rioters, most of them unhappy with the placement of the factory, were surprisely well organized and had overtaken some of the completed weapons, which made them a considerate threat. It soon became clear that some of them were extremely dangerous criminals, who were there just to ruin UAC property to show their distaste towards the corporation and its employees – or just because they were bored, looking to cause trouble. What had started out as a riot at first had now turned into a chaotic nightmare.

The SSDU was the most capable unit to deal with the problem, as they were trained to land on bases and take them by force among other things, which included hostage rescuing and sabotage missions. The SSDU marines were the best in close-quarters fighting, and this mission demanded close-quarters combat specialists, so my buddies and I were sent in to retake the base and stop the "marauders" from causing further harm. But it turned out that the UAC didn’t care much about the workers’ safety - they just wanted the base "cleared" as it was an important factory to them.

1st Lt. Stevenson was in charge of the operation and he only cared about that one order: To wipe out all resistance no matter the cost...

The Armored Personnel Landing Pod landed softly on the roof. It was an all-purpose personnel transport craft, as big as a house, which was usually launched from a larger carrier – some of those were really gargantuan. But this time it had been launched from a nearby airfield. The khaki-colored, bulky ramp lowered with a muffled, hissing sound and we ran out of the pod armed with stun-grenade launchers as well as assault rifles – two soldiers carried assault chainguns and two others had high-caliber sniper rifles. I carried a shotgun, and we all wore light-ampflication visors attached to our faceplates – those allowed us to see clearly in the dark, but they were very power-consuming and only worked a short while, before they needed a recharge.
At that time I was a Sergeant and second in command of our platoon on this operation. I had just been promoted and Stevenson seemed to dislike me even more than ever. He was probably envious that I was being promoted so quickly and he was certainly not happy about the possibility that I one day could rise to a higher rank than him.

"First squad check sector Bravo 1 through Bravo 3, third squad Charlie 1 through 4, squad 2, follow me, move out!" Stevenson growled in his radio.
The teams swiftly proceeded at their designated routes and entered the factory from different angles, while everyone covered each other's back.

We moved down a dimly lit hallway. We could clearly see that the "rioters" had messed up the place – several lights were smashed and occasionally we saw graffiti-text that read things like: "Death to da UAC fuckas!" and "We don't need no monopoly crap – fuck off UAC!". Trash littered the floor in a lot of rooms we looked into and a few computers and monitors had been smashed.

Aggressive yells ahead of us brought us to a halt. One of our pointmen looked around a corner, but immediately stepped back as a hail of high-caliber shells almost blew the wall next to him to pieces. "Sir, they have a mounted chaingun-cannon! They’ll rip us apart if we advance, Sir!"
"Sergeant!" Stevenson barked at me and then lowered his voice as he continued. "Pick a man to distract them!" I turned to face the rest of the men in the squad
"Goliath!" I called hoarsely.
"What can I do for ya, Sarge?" the soldier with the called nickname grinned in reply.

Private 1st Class BX045 "Goliath" was my partner while I was private and my best friend too. He was a black man with close-shaved hair. He was somewhat taller than I and immensely strong. I knew that I could always trust him, no matter how tough the challenge seemed. The best thing about him was that nothing seemed to ruin his good mood, which annoyed the Lieutenant. His Real name was, like with all the other soldiers in our special unit, a secret to me. All soldiers below the rank of Lieutenant in the SSDU were all assigned a letter and number combination that would serve as their name while in uniform. It all served to strip us of the feel of being human.

"Go and get the laser torch from our APLP and draw the suckers' attention by starting burning through the roof above 'em, but DON'T proceed to burn all the way through, just draw their attention away from us and get the heck outta the way, got it?!"

"That's affirmative, you can count on me, Boss!" he replied in his deep bass-voice and ran off.

We waited tensely, watching everyone's back in case our enemies would counter-attack, while I kept following "Goliath's" position on my Friendly Unit Tracking Device or FUTD. I had instructed the others about what would happen, so that there would be no confusion among our boys. After a while "Goliath" reached the spot and I gave him the okay. Sparks lighted up the hallway above our enemies' heads and they all looked up. They were only distracted briefly, but it was enough time for our pointmen to pick off the guy manning the chaingun cannon. We rushed around the corner opening fire at them, one of our soldiers rushed up and launched a stun-grenade at the mob, blinding and confusing them making us much harder targets. Moments later we were through, leaving dead bodies behind us without losing a single man. I had felt that our mission was a really dirty one from the very beginning, but especially now. "Goliath" returned to us and we proceeded through the hallways.

*

The three squads assembled outside a manufacturing hall, which was crowded with people – our pointmen reported that civilian workers were being held there and if we opened fire, we would certainly down a lot of those civilians, but Lt. Stevenson didn't care.
"Move in and shoot into the crowd. Bag the heavily armed freaks first" he ordered coldly, his eyes narrow and his voice hard.
"What!?" I replied shocked. "You mean to risk killing innocent civilians just to bag some stupid troublemakers, Sir?!"
"You got a problem with that, Sergeant?" he asked angrily.
"But that's against the rules, Sir!" I said, my voice getting firmer.
"Now, you listen to me, prick" he hissed in a low, but cold voice, gritting his teeth. "Our orders are to take this base, and it damn Hell doesn't matter HOW we do it! It's an order and when I give you an order you had better follow it, soldier!"
"Fuck orders! I ain't killin' no innocent civies!" I snarled.

He suddenly swung the butt of his rifle at me.
He was quick, but I was a lot quicker, ducking before he could hit me. My fist hit his jaw with a crunch, before he even realized that he had missed, sending him crashing into the wall. His head banged into the wall and knocked him unconscious.
I turned to the men, who all stared wide-eyed at me.

"What are you, looking at dammit? Get the snipers up here and await my orders" I snarled in a low voice.

*

I was able to accomplish the mission, without getting a single civilian injured or losing a single man. By using well-placed sniper fire, taking out the more heavily armed troublemakers, we "persuaded" the rest of the mob from offering any resistance. It appeared that a lot of the more dangerous of these people had been marines before and were either educated to handle these weapons or could easier adapt to them than the regular troublemaker.
I couldn't care less about what had caused the "riot", because as I returned to the pod, the MPs had arrived, having responded to Lt. Stevenson's radio call...

*

"Refusing to follow orders, assaulting a superior and taking charge without permission."
The result was that I was busted down to private and transferred to Mars. I was lucky that I had such a good reputation and had completed the mission without making things look ugly, as it saved me from the firing squad. But unfortunately there were apparently enough people after my scalp to get me booted to the UAC base on Mars. After all, the fact was that I had assaulted a superior officer "at a very critical moment" as they said.

None of the marines on Mars knew my real name, or which unit I really came from. All they knew was that I was from the Special Forces and that my “name” was TX056. They had long given up pressing me for more interesting answers.

And now there was “only” three more months left before I could return to Earth.

...

The Beginning to the End – Part 3

-

I stepped into the rec. room and saw Andrews sit at a table with some of the other marines from the squad I was currently assigned to. They were talking in hushed voices. I grabbed a chair and sat down next to Andrews.
"So what's up?" I asked.
"One of the boys got called up to Phobos yesterday" Andrews replied promptly. He sounded a bit worried.
"Again?" I asked.
"Yeah, and we still haven't seen the others return yet, or even heard from 'em. I wonder what the heck is going on up there..."
"I hear that they have weapons labs up there, perhaps the boys are there to test some prototype weapons!" Graham suggested. He wasn't too bright.
"Do you really think that it takes weeks to TEST weapons without sending them back down here even ONCE in a while?" Moore asked irritated. "Nah, they've probably discovered breaches in the security, requiring some extra guards until it's fixed" she suggested.
"It's odd" Lewis said. "The Skipper even claims that he hasn't been told anything about what's going on up there"
"Really?" I replied a bit surprised. "Well, the other officers don't like him, so it doesn't surprise me that they don't talk too much to him, but this is a more serious matter, one that he ought to know about"

'The Skipper' was our nickname for Captain Bill Howard, a rather short, but well built, muscular black man with a small, well-trimmed beard. He had only just transferred out here, but he had already made my day up here a bit easier to get through. He was one of the few officers I respected and generally, he was quite popular among the men as he was rather cordial, yet he could be harsh when necessary.
He didn't mind that we had given him the nickname 'Skipper'; in fact he even seemed to enjoy being called so. While he was popular among the grunts, most of the other officers disliked him and I knew that he detested them in turn. The reason for their mutual dislike could be the fact that Captain Howard originally came from an elite unit – the US Rangers. The other officers generally didn't like us Special Forces troops, which I had felt quite often since I arrived on this "palace of Boredom". The Skipper had transferred to the regular marines for reasons unknown to me, but I liked the guy for the simple reason that he wasn't a smartass like most other officers I had had over me.

"Well, the Skipper's only responsible for the security on this base" Moore replied, shrugging her shoulders.
"And keep us under control don't forget!" Adams added with a broad grin.

The rumors kept buzzing around the table. I didn't really care about what the guys thought, but it did puzzle me that none of the boys sent to Phobos had returned yet. Normally, they would inform us what our buddies were assigned to.

The UAC had together with the military used the remote facilities on Mars' two moons to conduct a number of secret projects, none of which I or the rest of the marines knew anything about. None of us had been told anything about what really happened on Phobos and Deimos.

****

Colonel Elliot T. Hauser, the Officer in charge of the military forces stationed on Mars and its two moons, looked over the report.
His eyes narrowed. "Another failure" he grumbled, gritting his teeth. But this time the incident was a lot worse than any of the earlier He thought to himself. He decided to stop the testing, and order a full system check, not returning to the testing phase until everything was certain that there were no technical malfunctions.

The Colonel sighed, put the paper down and scratched his head, as was his habit whenever he faced a problem.
This project could turn out to be the biggest achievement in his whole career, but it constantly ran into problems – problems which even the best of the scientists at the bases couldn't have foreseen. If it continued along those lines, his career would soon be in serious jeopardy.

Elliot Timothy Hauser was a tall 69 year-old man, with stern, narrow, gray-bluish eyes.
Hauser was very interested in science himself, which was the reason why he ended up in charge of the military's interests on Mars. A few successful projects, gave him a bit of recognition in the first couple of years, but then little success was achieved in the following years. However, four years ago Peter Winston, the chief scientist on Mars, made a sensational discovery, which started the biggest project, Colonel Hauser had yet overseen. Unfortunately, the project had begun to go downhill within the last few months, as several "incidents" happened.
It's vital that the regular employees and the marines don't get wind of what is going on he thought to himself The less they know, the better!

The Colonel ran his right hand through his gray, shaved hair and typed his orders in on his tiny mini-computer, which wasn't much bigger than a watch, and pressed the "send mail" button. The mail was transmitted to the main stations on both moons.

We have to fix those damn problems before things get any worse...

****

I sat at the table, drinking coffee with Andrews in the guardhouse next to the docking bay of the base. Two days had passed since our little discussion in the rec. room.
Henderson had just relieved me and I was glad to have gotten out of the same room that he was in – his smartass remarks drove me crazy.
The problem was that I was the only one who tended to get irritated by his remarks, and because of this small thing my relationship with most of the marines wasn't a particularly good one.

Now I was slurping coffee, trying to stay awake, while Andrews sat staring out of the window, looking at the docked spacecrafts.
"Still bothered 'bout those marines?" I asked him casually.
"What?" he asked, snapping back to attention.
"The boys sent to Phobos, does this still bother you?" He gave me a scrutinizing look.
"What if something nasty is happening up there?" he asked after a short while.
"What should that be?" I asked him, wondering why the Hell he always saw trouble in everything.
"I dunno, just...", he paused briefly, thinking. "...Something bad"

"I think they've just been assigned the security force up there" I said after a moment considering the possibilities, taking a sip of my coffee. He paused a long minute.
"Hm, Guess I'm just a little worked up about my friends not returning"
"Yeah, probably"

-

I sat alone for a little while, thinking about our conversation. Eventually, I began to think about Life – why we were here and what would happen when we died. I wasn't afraid of death myself, as I really didn't care much about my life, which had never been a particular happy life, but the whole Life after Death issue was one that I was somewhat fascinated with.
"Is there any life after Death?" – a question I had often mentioned to some of my buddies from my old squad back home. They would usually say that I thought too much.

Now the question suddenly popped up in my head.
If there was Life after Death, where would my parents be now?

...

The Beginning to the End – Part 4

-

I was heading straight to the marines' quarters. Nearly one week had passed since I sat in the guardhouse talking with Andrews, but our conversation still floated somewhere in my mind. His concern about the Phobos moon was beginning to bother me too.
Entering the room, I saw Andrews lying on his bunk next to mine. He was still awake.
"Can't ya sleep?" I asked.
He looked at me with that worried look of his. "Nope"
"What's keepin' you awake?" I asked curiously.
"I don't know" he replied. "I just feel strangely uneasy – as if something's gonna happen tonight"
"You sure it ain't the lousy dinner which is bothering your stomach?"
"No" He answered quitly.
"Well, I don't think there is anything to worry about. I think you should get some sleep, so that you'll be ready for guard duty tonight"
I lay down on my bunk, giving Andrews a reassuring look. The truth was that his uneasiness had me worried too, but I was able to hide it – no need to make my buddies too concerned.

****

Private Johnson was on guard duty in the communication room. It was close to midnight and he had just been pulled out of his bed to do his shift.
"This is the most boring piece of crap they could possibly assign me to do!" He yawned out loud, staring at the many computer panels, with colored, blinking lights. Nothing ever happens here
He felt extremely sleepy, and his shift had only just started.
One hour he thought.
Oh God, I'm never gonna make *one* friggin' hour!
He rubbed his eyes, trying to stay awake, when suddenly an aggressive beeping noise kicked in and a bright, red light started to flash rhythmically.
Johnson sat up in his chair, no longer feeling sleepy, and stared at the flashing light. It took him a moment to realize that the red flash combined with that God-awful noise, was a notification of an arrived SOS message.
He pressed a button on the control panel in front of him and he could see the words: "incoming message from: Phobos Command Control Station"

****

The sharp, beeping sound tore me out of my sleep. I sat up wide awake, noticing how the interior of the room periodically flashed red. For a moment I wondered what the heck was going on. Then I realized that this was a 'Red Alert', which meant that all troops should report immediately to the Assembly Hall in full combat suit and with readied side-arm.

-

I flung my locker door aside.
Attached to a couple of hooks was my personal combat vest – a khaki-colored assault vest combined with a life-support system on the back of the vest. The vest was impervious to most low-caliber projectile-based weapons, but still offered good protection against more powerful weapons. Next to it was my base-belt with my side arm – the mx215, which fired 9mm standard rounds, but only held 10 bullets per clip. I grabbed the shiny, black pistol, checked if the clip was full, checked if it had a bullet in the firing chamber and holstered the gun when I had readied it. After that I slipped into the combat armor. The light weight of the armor and the feel of its shoulder plates touching my bare shoulders as well as the feel of the pistol against my hip made me strangely excited - even more so than when I had to wear the armor and pistol for guard duty, as I could feel that we were going to get a task, which probably included something with the likelihood of combat, seeing as there was a Red Alert situation.
I grabbed my combat boots from the bottom of the locker and after putting them on, I attached the leg armor to the boots. The armored plating was composed of the same material as the combat vest and offered protection for my lower legs.

Finally, I picked up my combat helmet and slipped it onto my head. It was a combined combat helmet and NBC mask with an air-filtering system in front of my mouth combined with a radio microphone. The helmet not only protected my head and allowed me to communicate with my squad, it also had a tiny computer inside the helmet, which could analyze the combat situation and provide suggestions for an effective course of action, as well as display a map view over any areas, which the computer had recorded. It worked by displaying either map or text on the inside of my faceplate. Also the faceplate had a Heads Down Display, telling me how much ammo I had and how badly damaged my armor or life support system was.

I was ready before my buddies.

-

I sat inside the cramped cabin of the landing pod with the guys in my squad, wondering what was in store for us. The interior of the pod was currently lit by a dim, orange light, which meant that the pod would only be safe to leave if one was wearing a space suit. It would turn to red once the pod was launched and green when it had landed safely.

I thought about the uneasiness that Andrews had felt before I went to bed. He had been right that something nasty was happening on Phobos, or at least it had happened now. But we had no idea about what had really transpired.

Our briefing back on Mars went through my head again.

*

All troops stationed at the Martian base facilities were gathered in the Assembly Hall.

The Colonel explained the situation in a cool voice as if it was just a routine situation.
"Ok, listen up! Something bad has happened on Phobos, but we don't know exactly what" He told us, going straight to the point. "We received a mostly incoherent message from Phobos requesting military reinforcements, but it was cut off very abruptly, so we don't have much info for ya"
This was where I realized that Andrews' fears had come true.
"Shortly after this transmission, Deimos disappeared from our screens. Personnel at other stations on the planet report that there's no trace of the moon, neither on their screens nor on the sky anywhere"

There was complete silence. I already began to think that this situation was totally absurd – how could a 12-mile long rock vanish like that? Colonel Hauser continued the briefing.

"The only thing we know is that you can't rely on the computer systems up there - the message revealed something about the computer systems having gone berserk, so we fear that it's all a mess" He paused, looking around at us, trying to spot a reaction of sorts. Then he continued.

"So here's your orders: Investigate the base on Phobos and find as much info about what has happened - I'm sure that you may find clues as to what happened to the Deimos moon as well as what happened on the Phobos moon.
Kill off any opposition, should you encounter hostiles.
Reestablish contact with Mars H.Q.
And lastly, rescue any survivors you might find. We'll probably send you to Deimos afterwards if we find out where the damn rock is. Any questions?"
Nobody said a word.
"One last thing: we don't know what we're up against so stay frosty and be prepared for the worst!"

Like the bastard cares about us! I thought in a moment of bitterness. The Colonel was on my list of hated Officers.

*

The Colonel's voice seemed like ghostly echoes in my mind. I briefly closed my eyes, thinking about the missions that I had accomplished in the past. I could hear radio chatter in the cockpit and I knew that we were closing in on the Drop Zone. I realized that we were only about a hundred marines against an unknown enemy and that made me worried.
I wasn't worried about my own safety. I had been in many hairy situations before where all odds seemed against my fellow SSDU marines and me. But I was concerned about my buddies.
Only the Captain, who was in charge of this operation and I were elite soldiers, the others were just regular marines, who had no experience in being outnumbered.

Why are two elites put together with regular marines for crying out loud? I thought bitterly.

Our squads were going to be landed at different Landing Zones and would enter the base from these zones. Our LZ was at the Hangar & Shipping Installation at the outmost corner of the Phobos base.
"All right marines, heads up!" Our squad leader yelled. "Brace yourself and prepare for drop, we're approaching the DZ. And let me make one thing clear: I don't wanna hear any complaints about sickness from you crybabies, is that understood?"
"Sir, yes Sir!" We all replied in chorus.

The bay doors on the side of the troop transport craft slowly opened, the sound escaping in the empty void of Space. I could feel that the air inside the pod got colder and I braced myself as well as I could.
"Zulu-squad ready for drop!" Our squad leader yelled in his radio and the pod began to vibrate, then shake viciously and the next moment we were on our way. The launch usually made one's stomach churn.
I was used to it as I had tried it several times before, but I think my comrades all got a little sick. The pod hurdled downward with insane speed and we could feel how the outer hull of the APLP turned hot as Hell, as the landing craft broke through the outer layer of Phobos' artificial atmosphere.
Shortly afterwards the pod landed safely at our LZ – the Hangar & Shipping Installation of the Phobos base. The craft shook when it landed on the landing field next to the building, then calmed down as the engines were turned off.

We were now in territory unknown to all of us, including myself.

...

The Beginning to the End – Part 5

-

We had been instructed, while aboard the troop transport. Our orders were to meet with the other squads at the Phobos Command Control Station, located at the center of the base in order to reestablish contact with Mars H.Q. We were to investigate the Hangar & Shipping installation, the Nuclear Testing Plant and the Toxin Refinery on our way to the Command Control Station. The squad leaders on the team were the only ones who had been on this base before, so we knew that we had to stick close to them.

The UAC had Atmosphere generators on both Mars and its moons, so this meant that the base areas had an earth-like atmosphere, which not only made it possible to breathe and move about near the base without a spacesuit, but it also made the temperature warm enough to survive. But it was still a bit chilly.

Corporal O'Brien, our squad leader, turned to me. "I've got orders to assign you to monitoring the sensor systems, Private"
I stared at him, hardly able to believe his words. He continued, indifferent to my expression of surprise. "We don't expect any resistance outside the base areas, so we don't see a reason to leave you with heavier weapons. They'll be of more use inside. If you do see unidentified movement on the screens, call us over the radio and we'll send you some backup"
Knowing that I was one of two elite troops in the security force, I was completely baffled by my orders to secure the perimeter instead of taking part in the action.
"Permission to speak freely Sir?" I asked puzzled.
"What is it?"
"Sir, you know that I'm better educated to deal with a potential enemy inside this base than any of those marines here. Why shouldn't I help the rest of the unit deal with any potential enemies inside, Sir?"
He gave me a long look O'Brien had been through my papers so he knew that the unit I came from was a special forces unit. He sighed. "Sorry soldier, Colonel's orders. I'd have preferred to have you with the rest of the squad, but I just can't ignore my orders"
"I understand, Sir!" I replied grimly.

I watched as the rest of the squad grabbed the weapons. There was quite a variety of arms available to us: From regular military shotguns to the newly developed high-tech plasma guns. I stared at my pistol, which was all I had to defend myself with. It had served me well before, but maybe this mission demanded something more powerful and if I found myself face to face with a dangerous enemy out here I wouldn't be in a good position.

"Stay frosty, soldier" The Corporal said addressed at me, before he turned to the rest of the squad.

"Adams, Lewis! Take point at the entry! Henderson, Moore! Cover the pointmen! The rest of you, secure the area!"

I listened to the Corporal barking orders, while I stared at the monitor in front of me. Nothing on the damn monitor. I swore horribly. Ever since I arrived on Mars I had been assigned to guard duties. I was sick of guard duties.

****

The pointmen peeked inside the guardhouse.
Empty.
The computer for recording a status on events had been smashed. It looked like some blunt object had been hammered into the screen. Private Lewis guessed that "someone" had smashed the computer with the butt of a rifle. "Someone must've been interested in whatever project the UAC had goin' here" Lewis whispered to his partner. "And they ain't interested in revealing who they are"
Other than the broken monitor there was no trace of combat. The second pointman, Adams, reported to the Corporal that the coast seemed clear.
The Corporal gave orders to move in and the marines went inside with their weapons in firing position, pointing their guns at all potential ambush locations.

The squad entered a hall, with the typical blue carpet, which could be seen in most UAC bases. This was probably, where High-ranking personnel were received. The light-brown walls were well cleaned, indicating that there had recently been an inspection here, and the floor had a pleasant feel under the marines' feet. There was no sight of people anywhere.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

Corporal O'Brien assigned two-man teams to check the surrounding area, they soon returned, reporting that they had found nothing, neither survivors nor info. All computer monitors seemed either dead or were displaying nothing but snow and there simply wasn't any people anywhere inside the installation.

"Hmmm, odd" was all the Corporal had to say, but his face revealed a deep concern. He was frowning and had the look of a man carefully considering the possibilities of solutions to a mystery – like a detective. O'Brien had always been fond of detective novels and it affected his personality. It was therefore not surprising that the other marines often called him "Detective" instead of "Corporal".

"It's clear that we wont find any solutions here" He said. "On your feet! We're moving on to the Nuclear Testing Plant. I want you to stay close together, move out!"

The squad cautiously advanced further into the base.

****

I listened to the radio chatter of the squad. Strange I thought to myself. The squad had encountered no opposition yet, but the SOS call had requested reinforcements, which indicated that a battle or something like it had been going on up here. Seemed like we had arrived too late to assist the guards. Had the enemy left? What was their goal?
The whole situation seemed incredibly weird. Then I remembered that we knew absolutely nothing about what the UAC had going on the moons, so basically everything could have happened here.
I also wondered about Deimos. What had happened? Had they removed the moon? Seemed unlikely. How could someone 'remove' a whole moon with a base on it?

The monitor suddenly flickered aggressively, then returned to normal. It seemed that there was some sort of interference bothering our sensors. I called the Corporal up on the radio.
"Sir, I've got interference on the monitor"
The radio crackled as he replied. "How bad is it?"
"The screen was flickering for a moment, but it's fine now"
"Anything else?"
"No Sir"
"All right, it probably ain't anything serious, but call me up again if the sensors stop responding, you got that soldier?"
"Acknowledged Sir!" I replied in the affirmative. The Corporal signed off.

I wondered what could have caused the interference. It had to be some very powerful source interfering with our equipment, as the military sensors were highly advanced and designed to withstand heavy interference in particular. I was beginning to get a bit worried.
I listened to the radio chatter of my buddies inside, while keeping an eye on the monitor.

The sensors told me that they were approaching the building's monorail station. The monorail would transport them to the Nuclear Testing Plant and normally it was primarily used for transportation of goods.

I could hear a few of my buddies whisper to each other. They clearly didn't like the situation.
I had to admit that it all seemed pretty spooky.

One of the boys suddenly brought news over the radio in a muffled voice.
"Corporal, we've found a body!"

...

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Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 1

****

The body lay on its face. Corporal O'Brien could see from the neon green lab coat that the man had been a scientist. The Corporal kneeled next to the corpse and turned it over. He stared surprised at the mask of horror that stared back at him.
Corporal Timothy O'Brien was a hardened veteran who had seen a lot of terrifying things, but he had never seen such an expression of utmost terror on any corpse he had seen before.

The scientist, who looked like he had been around 40-45 years of age, had been shot as could be seen from two bloody holes in the upper part of his torso, but O'Brien asked himself why the scientist's face was so distorted of terror – something was clearly not right.
The scientist lay with his right arm stretched out in front of him. It seemed that he had tried to reach the elevator a few feet away from the body – the same elevator from which the marines had just arrived

"There's another one 'ere, Sir!"
The squad leader went over to the other corpse. His torso was a mess of blood and chunky, shredded flesh – he had been shot at close range with a shotgun. Again the distorted look of utmost horror in the man's face. He had been fairly young, probably a lab assistant.
Adams found a spent shotgun shell lying next to a crate a few feet away from the dead lab assistant. It would seem that the murderer with the shotgun had been hiding behind the crate and jumped out of his hiding spot, when the lab assistant came running towards the elevator, and fired at the victim at close range.

A few spent bullet cartridges were found about 20 feet from the dead scientist nearest to the elevator and a few more were found further away. Apparently, the older scientist's killer had pursued the poor wretch, firing a couple shots in his direction before hitting the victim.


-

The squad entered a larger hall. They had just arrived at the nuclear plant – a building where they made experiments with radiation, trying to shorten the half-life of radioactive materials. The end wall was covered with consoles and monitors. The monitors showed nothing but rows upon rows of flickering numbers, but that wasn't what caught the squad's attention at the moment.

Scattered around on the floor lay several dead bodies.

"Jesus!" Henderson exclaimed in a low whisper as he entered the room.
Andrews knelt down beside one of the corpses lying on its back. It was a marine. As he turned the corpse around, he could see that the marine's armor had been penetrated by something hot, as Andrews noticed the scorched black area on the front side of the dead soldier's armor. He took off the body's ruined armor and saw that the torso had been burned everywhere. He looked at the face – same look of horror on his face. Things were beginning to look really grim. Andrews knew of no weapons, which could make such burns. Even the plasma rifle didn't leave quite the same burn. These scorched areas on the corpse were made by fire, but they weren't left by a regular flamethrower either.

The other corpses had either been shot like the first two bodies the squad had encountered, been burnt like the marine Andrews had just checked or seemed to have been ripped apart as if some animal had mutilated them. Two of the corpses had had their chests torn out and a third – a red-haired woman – had had her torso separated from her legs. O'Brien took a closer look at these corpses.
The first one was another marine. His armor was almost burnt away, but his chest was nothing but a gory mess and some of the dead marine's ribs protruded from the wound. The other body was a scientist with a gray, full beard. His spinal cord had been ripped out of his back and the rest of the victim lay on his face. The woman was apparently another lab tech. Her mouth was terribly distorted in a scream of terror and agony.

Henderson went up to the computer monitors displaying rapidly changing numbers.
"The computer system must be pretty fucked up, Detective Sir."
O'Brien looked briefly at the monitors, and then nodded slowly as he saw the rolling numbers rapidly flicking on the screen. He had no answers to what could've messed up the system.

The Corporal sent a couple of two-man teams out to check the area. They all returned reporting that they had encountered several corpses lying around, but no sight of whatever had killed them.

"All right troops" O'Brien said, doing his best trying to hide the strong uneasiness, which he felt. "Let's move. We've still got a job to do"

-

The squad finally arrived at the Command Control station. On their way they had found several more corpses, but had met no resistance or found no clue as to what had happened. All the computer screens the squad had come across either showed a blank screen, lots of weird symbols, numbers or snow. All computer systems seemed to be malfunctioning.
Some of the other squads had arrived at the station as well. O'Brien's squad was ordered to guard the south side of the station.

Captain Bill Howard, who was in charge of the unit sent here, was at the communications station of the building, trying to gather information. A radioman was busy working on repairing the communications systems. The systems had been burned out completely and the cause was unknown. Something must have overloaded them.

Second Lieutenant McDowell, who was second-in-command of the marine contingent sent here, went up to the Captain after receiving Corporal O'Brien's report. The Captain's radioman was busy repairing the comm. System – it had been ruined completely and was a mess of wires and other internal machinery.
"Sitrep, McDowell?" The Captain asked routinely, trying not to reveal how tense he was.
"All squads have encountered several dead bodies and no survivors or info whatsoever, Sir. Some of the people here have been mutilated beyond recognition. None of us have a clue as to what the Heck has killed them"
"That's exactly what my own squad found. What do you think McDowell?"
The Lieutenant thought for a while.
"Frankly, Sir, it scares the shit outta me. We're up against a pretty ruthless enemy and it seems like they have a sort of trained killer animals, judging from some of the corpses. They sent in those critters and then they went in and mopped up the rest after calling back those animals, seeing as most of the corpses found at the outer base installations have been shot. But I can't really come up with a suggestion as to what has transpired here, which makes any real sense."
Howard thought out loud. "Let's hope that we can extract some info from those computers once my radioman has fixed them" The Captain replied, looking over his shoulder at the soldier working on the machines.
"Are all squads assembled, Lieutenant?" the Captain asked looking at McDowell again.
"All except one, Sir. Echo squad hasn't shown up yet!"
The Captain looked speculative for a moment. "They were sent to check the research facility at the far end of the base" the Captain mumbled to himself rather than to McDowell.
"They could be here any minute, Sir"
"Call them up, Lieutenant. Tell them to speed up a bit. We'd best get ready A.S.A.P!"
"Right on to it, Sir!"

...

Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 2

-

Adams and Lewis could hear most of what the two officers were saying where they stood.

"What do you mean that there is no reply!?" the Captain asked.
"Sir, I've been calling them up repeatedly, but there's only static!" McDowell explained quetly so that the two marines could barely hear it.
The Captain thought out loud for a while before he spoke.
"Seems like whatever killed off the personnel up here is still around and they probably got the whole of echo squad, we'd better stay frosty and keep the troops assembled!"

Both marines looked at each other. Lewis’ face was a mask of fear and Adams didn’t feel too comfortable either.

"Any luck with that thing, soldier?" Captain Howard asked addressed to his radioman
"The damn thing is a bit troublesome, Sir, but it doesn't look as bad now as it did when I started with this thing. I'm recovering data now, but it's a slow process"
"Good! Carry on"
"Sir, Wait!" the radioman cried.
"What is it private?"

The voice of Corporal “Detective” suddenly barked the two marines’ names and they didn’t hear the rest.

“Adams, Lewis, get your asses over here! We need two guards at this hallway!”

Adams and Lewis jogged over to their new station. They were now looking down a narrow, shadowy hallway that made a bend before leading into the crew quarters. The squad was positioned in a large hall with dark green walls and tan, hexagonal-tiled floor. The hallway that the two soldiers were guarding now was the gloomy entry to the crew quarters. The two soldiers were both pretty freaked out, due to both the awful discoveries that their squad had made earlier as well as the stuff they had just overheard, so they were both on their toes.

All of a sudden, Adams noticed movement in the shadows of the adjacent hallway. He felt his heart pound. Was this an enemy?
He decided to alert the others and whispered into his radio that he had seen something.
The form suddenly moved towards Adams and he could see that it was a human, wearing a US military combat uniform.
Adams lowered his rifle and took a step forward. Light fell upon the lower part of the marine in the hallway, revealing that his camouflage pants were bloodstained.
"Jeezus, you ok?" Adams asked when he saw the blood. The shape moved into the light.
Adams' eyes widened.

****

I heard a single gunshot ring out on my radio. A number of firearms began to open fire and then all Hell broke loose.
I heard panicked squad leaders yell orders to their men, incoherent yells of rage or fear, numerous weapons firing, screams of pain and calls for help. The radio also picked up some strange distorted sounds that reminded me of animals howling or roaring, but these could be screams, which were distorted when transmitted - such things occurred.

My buddies needed help and I just stood inside the landing craft, doing nothing to help them in their hour of need. I decided to forget about my orders and enter the base, even though I knew that my pistol wouldn't be sufficient. At least it would be better to die in combat than to just remain behind, without lifting a finger to help one's colleagues.

Corporal O'Brien had followed his orders and had done nothing wrong, I, however, had decided that the best I could do now was to not give a damn about my orders and go inside to help my buddies.
I checked my pockets and was glad to find that I had remembered my knuckle-duster, as I figured that it might come in handy. The knuckle-duster had a tiny energy-gathering unit, which could draw energy from any power source, including sunlight, and use it to shock the victim once the spikes were rammed into whatever my victim might be. The knuckle-duster was a "souvenir" from a close encounter I had with one of the violent "rioters" on my last mission on Earth – he had suddenly attacked me with it while my men were busy disarming the rest – but he wasn't particularly successful.

I set my radio to "directed transmissions", so that the radio could only pick up signals directed at me, shutting out the sounds of the raging battle. This meant that I might miss some valuable information, but on the other hand, the noise of combat would only ruin my concentration. I ensured that my helmet was secured, peeked outside of the pod to check if the coast was clear and ran over to the wall of the hangar installation.
It bothered me that I didn't have a FUTD to help me track down my buddies if some had survived. Finding at least one of my buddies alive was imperative as I couldn't pilot the APLP alone – it took two men to pilot that thing, not to mention that a third guy was normally needed for navigation.
It was also necessary to find extra fuel for the APLP, as the craft only had fuel enough to return to a troop carrier in orbit around Phobos and I knew that our troop carrier wouldn’t return until at least ten hours had passed, which was too long.
I felt my heart pound as I approached the entryway to the installation. I recalled what my SSDU drill instructor used to yell at us: "SSDU marines don't know the word 'fear' – remember that ladies, you don't understand the word I just used!" Of course it was bullshit – all humans fear, but as a highly trained combat soldier, it was important to learn to control one's fears. The ability to control one's fear usually separated good soldiers from bad soldiers.
One of the reasons why I had become the best marine in my SSDU Company was that I was extremely capable of keeping my fears under control – I simply wasn't afraid of Death.
But now I felt a sting of fear. I was suddenly isolated from the rest of my platoon, not knowing if they would survive. I did not want to be stuck on a remote spot, without anyone to accompany me.
And on top of that, this “something” that my buddies were fighting wasn’t a normal enemy.

Entering the building, I suddenly heard a number of strange, wheezing sounds from within. The sound reminded me of hoarse, ragged breathing, but there was something strange about it. It was so creepy that cold sweat broke out on my forehead. And then I heard another sound.
Like the growling sound of some flesh eating animal.
I held the pistol firmly out in front of me. I was good at handling pistols no matter which hand I used, but I preferred to hold my sidearm with my left hand - it somehow felt better. But right now, I felt strangely helpless. I had none of the calmness I usually had in hairy situations.

I reached a shiny, gray steel door. Occasionally, I heard the strange wheezing sound again.
My gloved hand pulled the handle and the door slid open.

The hall I had entered was very clean but dimly lit – some of the lights apparently didn't work. The floor was covered with a pleasant, blue UAC carpet. To the right was a glass pane. Looking through it, I saw an open courtyard. Ahead I saw a bending hallway and to the left was another hallway. I heard the wheezing sound again. It came from the hallway on the left.

I peeked around the corner and looked into the room. I had decided to try and find out what that strange ragged sound was.
Stairs led up to what looked like an observation post with windows on every side. This would probably be the control tower. I saw a marine with his back turned on me, busy operating the panels. But there was something strange about him. His combat suit and armor was all filthy and covered in blood, he wasn't wearing a helmet and his hair had a strange greenish color – coloring one's hair was strictly prohibited in the US Marine Corps. I took a step forward to look closer at him.
The marine suddenly turned around and froze as it saw me. I stared at it for a long second – there was definitely something wrong. He had pure, white eyes and his skin seemed to be in a state of rot.

The marine let out an animal-like growl and then I knew that he wasn't friendly.
I quickly fired four bullets at the creature – two struck him in the chest of his armor, one made a wound in the side of its neck and the last bullet hammered right through its forehead, spilling brains on the consoles behind it.
Two growls told me that there was two more of them in the room and they rushed out of their hiding place behind two pillars on each side of the stairs.
The first one barely saw me before three bullets from my pistol hammered through his unprotected chest. The thing fell with a howl, its blood spilling out on the floor, while the other creature, which wore a ruined armor vest, raised its assault rifle, but got its brains blown out before its finger even touched the trigger.

I ejected the almost spent clip and inserted a fresh one, saving the nearly empty clip for later use. I went over to inspect the corpses of my enemies, pointing my pistol at the nearest one in case it got back up at me.
They were almost definitely humans who had somehow been turned into mindless killers. All three had gray-greenish hair. It wasn't colored. Their mouths were filthy, covered with a disgusting, yellow sort of saliva.
I relieved the bodies of their ammunition, grabbed the assault rifle that one of them had been using, checking the firing chamber of the weapon.
The M16AX3 assault rifle was a dark gray, magazine-fed weapon, which fired caliber 5.56 rounds. This ammunition was compatible with the fast-firing assault chain guns. I wished I had such a chain gun now. I wished it badly.

So far, I had to be satisfied with the assault rifle. I checked whether the scope worked by pressing a button above the safety catch. A small, narrow, box-shaped scope popped up with a muffled click. This allowed for long-range shooting, but I clapped the scope back into the rifle, as I didn't think that it would be necessary inside the base. I needed close-combat weapons like shotguns.

I also picked up an extra pistol from one of the corpses, knowing that an extra pistol would be nice to have if the other one got ruined..

I had almost collected what I needed, when I heard a growling sound in the larger hall, which I had entered first – it drew nearer and I realized that I had heard the sound before. A sound like the snarling of some sort of flesh-eating animal. I peeked around the corner, trying not to be seen, and saw a humanoid shape moving in the shadows towards my location. As it moved into the light I saw what it looked like – a brown, thorny thing with a few larger spikes protruding from its ugly hide around its shoulders. It walked upright like a human being and had many things in common with a human, but its behavior seemed to be that of an animal. Its head moved from side to side, searching the area. Its wrinkled skin looked a bit like leather and its eyes glowed like fire.
The thing reminded me of a mythical demon from Hell, which I had read myths and other fairy-tales about and the thing somehow seemed to be formed of pure evil.
It suddenly turned its ugly face towards me. I didn't duck back into hiding in time and the monster let out a loud hiss, but before it could attack me I opened fire at the thing with my assault rifle, firing in short bursts.
It howled with pain as the bullets hit it and staggered backwards. I fired three bursts at the creature before it went down with a guttural sound, while its red blood splashed out of the holes in its brown hide.
I stared at the thing for a moment. The corpse stank horribly. The monster had no nose or any holes to breathe through and its mouth was lined with tiny, sharp teeth.
What the Hell is this thing? I thought to myself, feeling confused.
Where did these bastards come from?
It was like a nightmare. I was alone and my enemies seemed to be straight from Hell or somewhere like Hell.

I steeled myself to keep moving instead of gawking at the dead monster and went up to the bending hallway. It led to an armored door, which was as clean as the first two rooms I had visited.

As the door slid open, revealing another big room with lots of computer consoles and other equipment, I noticed three former humans with their backs turned on me. I fired at them and one of them fell screaming to the floor, where it jerked around, while screaming in pain. The sound was unlike any scream a known animal would make. The other two turned around, but I shot another one before I leapt back behind cover.
A swarm of shotgun pellets ricocheted off the wall behind me, but luckily, I wasn't hit. I retrieved one of my pistols, pointed it around the corner and fired at the last enemy, killing it.

I emptied a bullet into the wounded former human soldier on the floor, spilling its brains onto the blue carpet. I traded my assault rifle for the shotgun that the last soldier had used, and checked if the weapon wasn't damaged.

The weapon was a standard single barreled, pump-action shotgun using clips, which the weapon could automatically eject when the clip was emptied. Each clip held eight shotgun shells. The shotgun had a sophisticated firing system, which made the shotgun able to use a variety of shells. The standard shells fired projectile-shaped pellets, which the weapon's special firing system made spin like rifle projectiles, causing the pellets to "drill" into their victims, which did tremendous damage. There were only seven pellets in one shell, but the effects were spectacular nonetheless.

The distinct hissing noise from one of the brown fiends made me turn around. The creature stood next to me, glaring evilly at me with its hellish eyes. I hadn't finished reloading the shotgun in my hands, so I was defenseless for the moment. The monster wound its right claw back as if it was preparing to throw something at me and I noticed that its hand began to glow with an orange light.

I hurled myself aside as a ball of flame whizzed past me, while I quickly pumped a shell into the firing chamber of the shotgun. Before the thing could attempt another attack, I aimed at it and pulled the trigger.
The swarm of pellets sent the monster flying through the air and it crashed against a wall, its blood painting the dark metal wall red. It gave me a strange, joyous satisfaction to blow the thing away as I knew that it and its peers were responsible for the slaughtering of a lot of innocent people.
The ragged breathing sound of the once human soldiers told me that I got company...

...

Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 3

****

Captain Howard could see that the situation was hopeless.
Inhuman creatures had suddenly attacked the marines from everywhere and taken the Captain's men by surprise. They attacked in a bloodlust that he had never seen before, and they would soon overrun the position. They had to get out of there.

He had tried to contact Mars H.Q. in order to request evacuation, but strangely enough there was no reply.
The Captain sprayed bullets from his assault chain gun into a hallway, mowing down a few of the brown bastards with controlled burst fire.
"Head for the Research Facility!" he shouted in his radio, while shooting steadily at nearby monsters.
"Follow me!"
He waved at those of his men who were facing him and ran into the hallway with some of his soldiers right behind him.

*

Colonel Hauser stared at the screen.
This was unlike anything he had even experienced in his dreams or nightmares. Nightmarish creatures were everywhere to be seen on his monitors and the screams of the dying soldiers reached his ears. He saw a panicking soldier shoot wildly at a group of terrible monsters storming at him. One of the monsters went down with a deep growl, but the others pounded into the unfortunate soldier and his terrible scream filled Hauser's ears the next instant.
They were eating the soldier alive.

Despite the disturbing situation, Colonel Hauser was quite happy.
The troops had been able to repair the communication systems enough to allow visual monitoring of the base thus making it possible for Hauser to watch the chaotic battle. And they didn't even know that they were being watched as Hauser had neglected to tell Captain Howard that there were hidden security cameras inside the buildings, which would automatically activate when the basic systems went on-line.

The Colonel was satisfied, because he realized that these creatures could prove to be a powerful weapon, if only they found means to control them. He had decided to let his men die on Phobos, not wanting to take the risk of losing expensive dropships, trying to evacuate them. The troops were expendable, but the dropships were fairly new and enormously expensive. Besides, this was an excellent opportunity to see how effective these killers were. Hauser believed that he would learn more about these creatures from watching the battle on the screens, than by pulling the troops out and study the reports which the officers would write about these monstrosities.

The Colonel was already planning his next move.
He would find means to capture one of the creatures and conduct experiments on it. He had not responded to Captain Howard's request for evac, as he wanted the Captain to believe that the comm. systems were failing. Hauser didn't want the troops on Phobos to realize that they had been betrayed, so if any of them actually did find means to escape Phobos, which Hauser highly doubted, then he could just tell them that Mars H.Q. never received any calls for help.

There was another matter, which pleased Hauser more than the news of those killer-monsters.

Among the troops on Phobos was a single soldier, who was not just an ordinary marine. Hauser had known about this soldier since the man was born. The Colonel had ensured that he would be separated from his buddies, by ordering that he be positioned outside the base to secure the perimeter. He was convinced that 'subject TX056' would die there as he was alone and had little equipment to aid him.
"That's the best way to get rid of him" he thought to himself with a broad smile. And he was right. If the soldier died in combat the Colonel wouldn't be held responsible if he could hide the fact that he had made it harder for the soldier to survive. It shouldn't be a problem to hide this fact.

The soldier had injured Hauser's nephew as well as disobeying the nephew's orders. This was the reason why the Colonel held a lot of grudges towards him, but there was another, more valid reason as well.
Hauser smiled, as he knew that the time of his revenge had come and that an old problem, which had constantly been nagging him since 'subject TX056' began to show lack of obedience towards his superiors during his basic marine training, would now be solved.

****

The lift reached surface level.
My previous encounters still flashed through my mind. I had encountered several former human troops as well as more of those brown demon-like bastards on my way, but I still hadn't found a single clue as to where these creatures came from. Hopefully, I would find more information if I reached the Command Control station.
For now, having made my way from the Hangar & Shipping installation through the Nuclear Plant, I needed to get through the refinery, as none of the sub monorails led directly to the Command Control building.
I knew that I had to go through very hazardous environment within this particular building. Corporal O'Brien had told us a bit about some of the facilities here during our trip to the moon.
The Refinery was a facility, where the UAC sent their special chemicals through a "purification" process, during which the chemicals were rendered quite dangerous, so it was likely that there were pools of dangerous liquids scattered around inside as well as hazardous waste materials.

I opened the door in front of me and stepped back with my shotgun in firing position.

There was nothing hostile behind the door, at least not in the immediate vicinity.
The room I was looking at was dimly lit like most of the rest of the base. A few feet ahead of me I saw a basin filled with a disgusting green liquid. Metal fencing surrounded the pool, except for a hole in the fencing in front of me. It looked like someone had been hammered through the fencing with great force. The brown, metallic floor was filthy and the hexagonal-tiled walls were damp-covered.

A deep grunting sound suddenly came from somewhere on the left. I carefully peeked around the corner to be met with a horrible sight.

On the floor near the pool lay the dead body of a technician. He was already torn to shreds.

Over the mutilated body stood a big, burly, pinkish-gray creature and plucked at the corpse's belly with its sharp, misshaped teeth. It suddenly jerked its head backwards, tearing out a huge chunk of flesh from the corpse. The thing stood on two hind legs and now, while eating, it carried most of its weight on its muscular front limbs that looked like immensely powerful human arms. Its hind were legs somewhat smaller than its powerful front limbs, but still immensely muscular. Its deformed head sat on its chest. The monster had sharp, bull-like horns protruding from the side of the ugly head and I could see its eyes, which were glassy and lifeless.

I felt a chill down my back once again. These creatures were pure evil – I was convinced of it. The realization that I was up against purely evil beings suddenly make me feel incredibly angry. It was Anger unlike anything I had ever felt towards any human person.

Try eating some lead instead, fiendface! I thought, grinding my teeth, tightening my grip on the shotgun.

I leapt out of hiding and sent a shell into the thing's flank, giving it a large wound in its side. It let out a roar of pain, but remained on its feet, and the next instant it roared at me in rage and charged me.

The surprise from seeing that the monster wasn't killed by the blast dulled my reflexes and I reacted far too late.
The monster rammed right into me, sending me crashing to the floor. The thing was much faster than I had first anticipated.
My armor vest kept me from getting any ribs broken, but the shotgun flew out of my grasp. I heard it clatter on the filthy floor not far from me.
The creature made a short leap and landed just in front of where I lay.
I could feel the weight of its body as it landed. The thing was immensely powerful and the way it moved gave the impression of an enormously strong and surprisingly agile creature. It stared at me with glowing yellow eyes, which had been but dark and glassy before and it opened its bloodstained mouth. Its teeth were a dirty, yellow color and were covered in the blood of the corpse, which it had been chewing on. Its breath stank of decay.

Before it could react any further, I whipped out both of my pistols simultaneously and fired at it, gritting my teeth while emptying both pistols into its ugly face and backing away from it as best as I could. The thing fell to the floor with a heavy thud. Dead. I had blown half of its mug away, revealing a small area inside its thick skull, with a disgusting, grayish substance, mixed with red blood – the perforated remains of its small brain.

I quickly got up, holstered the two pistols, picked up my shotgun, flipped up my visor to take a closer look at the dead abomination. Touching its skin, I could feel that its skin was rubbery, but its muscles were also so hard that they seemed to be made of steel.
I left the dead thing and walked over to a bulky metal door on the right side of the pool. I tried to open the door, but it would not open, so I flipped down my visor and activated my helmet computer, hoping for an explanation.

Printed in red letters, the words "Door locked by security – security code required" appeared in front of my eyes. I swore. This meant that I needed to bypass the security system somehow, or...? While wondering about what to do, my computer printed the words: "Suggestion: Shutting down toxic purification process may deactivate security locks"

I stared thoughtfully at the letters in front of my eyes for a brief moment
Lucky thing that I had a helmet computer to analyze the situation for me – I might have searched the other areas for means of shutting down the security measures, but I had probably never figured out what to do without the computer.

There was another door on the left side of the bubbling slime pool, which thankfully wasn't locked. But there were a lot of ugly monsters inside the gloomy room behind it.
I let out a loud battlecry and opened fire, while retreating backwards, avoiding the gunfire from the former humans.

Positioning myself behind a metal block holding up the fencing, I systematically picked off the advancing monsters one by one. There was a varied mix of former human troops and the smaller, brown aliens. I was a bit surprised at the former humans' stupidity. Even though they used standard combat tactics typically seen with trained infantrymen, which consisting of providing covering fire for each other, they just ran mindlessly out of the door, only to get their bodies blown apart by my shotgun's shells. My position did not allow them to bring their weapons to bear on me and I simply slaughtered them.
The aliens, however, seemed somewhat smarter. After killing two of them, the others kept away from the door. I could hear them snarl with frustration in there.

The flow of monsters stopped, but I could still hear the brown bastards growl inside. I moved towards the door, with my eyes on it, pointing my weapon at the center of the opening. A monster popped out behind its hiding spot behind the door and raised its clawed hand. Seven pellets made a big, ugly hole in its stomach, before it could throw the scorching mass at me, and it flew backwards with an agonizing howl, crashing limply onto the floor. Another brown thing leapt out from the other side of the door and hurled a flaming missile at me. Feeling the adrenaline rush in my veins, I rolled sideways, dodging the fireball, which scorched the floor a few feet away from me, and I blew the creature's head off.

I got up and carried on, still feeling anger coursing through my veins.

...

Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 4

-

The room was quite dark. The only light in the room came from a light over a few computer consoles. A red light was flashing rapidly.
I moved closer but stumbled over a dark shape on the floor.
I quickly got back up with my shotgun at the ready. Having assured myself that there were no hostiles nearby I bent over and inspected the shape on the floor in front of me as best as I could in the darkness.
It was the corpse of a marine. I couldn't see how bad the condition of the body was, but feeling around with my hands, I felt that the corpse had several gashes and wounds and I could smell burnt flesh as well.

I had made my way to the toxins control room after killing a few more monsters. There had been more of those bull-like monstrosities among those. I had quickly found out that these "bulls" weren't too bright, but it was best to keep a certain distance to them, as they were capable of rapidly closing this distance.

The soldier lying here had probably tried to reach the room in order to shut down the purification process like I was intending to do, but he had encountered resistance, as could be seen from the dead bodies of several of these brown things, whose dark, lifeless shapes I now noticed lay scattered around in the room. The poor bastard had clearly died from his wounds and burns after killing the monsters.
He had been a tough soldier, who had been fighting until his body gave up. The sight gave me another shiver, and I bit my lip hard to counter the sense of fear which rushed over me again.

Something on the floor caught my attention. The sparse light above the consoles fell upon the cold metal of a steelgray object lying next to the dead marine. Upon inspection, it turned out to be an assault chain gun – the dead marine's weapon.
I slipped my shotgun into the shotgun holster I had on my back and picked up the six-barreled machinegun on the floor.
The assault chain gun was a deadly weapon - a small, manheld version of the mounted high-caliber chaingun cannon. The assault chaingun fired caliber 5.56 standard rounds at a breathtaking cyclical rate of 3000 rounds per minute. The current version used by the military was toned down from the original 6000 rpm, because the older versions proved to be too difficult to keep a steady aim with and ran out of ammo too quickly.

I closed my hand around the top barrel of the weapon and cranked it down one notch clockwise. It gave a satisfying metallic click – the barrel drum was now reset and fully ready to spin.
I smiled, all my fear gone for now. This weapon could deal out tremendous damage, so it would make it easier for me to take down those crazy things which infested the base. The readout at the bottom of my helmet's faceplate told me that I had three hundred rounds for this baby. And I knew that I could find more ammo for it on some of the now re-killed reanimated soldiers.
But then I remembered that several of my buddies had chain guns and even more destructive weaponry at their disposal and yet they were in deep shit - if they weren't already dead.
It seemed that I had only encountered light resistance and that heavier resistance was waiting ahead.
I clenched my teeth tightly.
"Well then" I told myself with a whisper, barely aware that I was thinking out loud. "They can just bring it on! I'll lead 'em a pretty dance no matter how many they are!"

The bold words were an attempt to encourage myself, but I could still feel the nagging fear. The knowledge that I was utterly screwed kept unnerving me.

I let my helmet computer scan the brightly lit consoles. It identified the right button for me, which I pressed without hesitation. A low, rumbling sound kicked in and told me that the machinery had stopped. The toxic liquids were being led out of the purification basins.

The light suddenly went out and the room went pitch black.

A trap! I thought, feeling my heart pound faster.
The UAC had some very clever security systems, which included traps at certain places. This was definitely one such trap.

A door, which I hadn't seen in the darkness, opened behind me with a horrible whining sound. I spun around.
In the doorway stood a brown "fire-thrower" and two more of them behind it. I saw the yellow saliva from its wide open mouth drip on the floor in the dim light from the room behind the door.
They had caught me by surprise and I didn't react fast enough to shoot first. The three beings rushed into the dark room and the first of them threw a ball of hot, orange flames at me. I leapt aside, brought my newly acquired weapon up, and sprayed about fifty rounds into the small group. The many bullets cut through their wrinkled skin, quickly turning their bodies into a mess of blood, ruined organs and shattered bones.

I laughed evilly as I saw their ruined remains fall to the ground.
Despite the horrible situation I stood in, I actually felt strangely well after getting my hands on some serious firepower. I briefly began to worry whether the whole situation was slowly making me insane, but I decided that the situation was far too dangerous to begin to worry.
I had to keep going and always look at the brighter side of things as Andrews used to say when I was pissed.
At least now I get some action I thought, trying to encourage myself and kill the sense of dread.

Another thing had me wondering too. Why would the security systems be set to activate defenses when a marine accessed the computers? One would have thought that a US marine was allowed to access at least these basic controls.

I could only find one answer: The monsters had a finger in this. These things certainly were remarkable – remarkably evil and with remarkable abilities too.

I didn't want to think of the possibility that the other marines were all killed off, so I tried to think positively.

Hopefully, the security door was now open and I could move on

-

Returning to the area around the pool, where I had killed the first "bull alien", I saw that the security door was indeed open, but a number of former human soldiers had entered the room with the pool. I made short work of them with the shotgun, but the sound alerted a small flock of "bulls", which soon charged into the room.
I pulled out my chain gun from my back with a grimace and sprayed death at them, firing in long but controlled bursts, cutting them to pieces in a matter of moments.

Mowing down the monster with the chain gun raised my spirits tremendously. I felt a wicked satisfaction from killing those monsters, which had taken so many lives already.

I proceeded towards the entrance to the monorail leading to the Command Control Station. Several wheezing sounds, which I could identify as the ragged breathing of the reanimated soldiers, echoed throughout the rooms ahead, but they didn't scare me as much any longer.

I was growing used to them already.

****

"Damn, where's the friggin' evac!?" McDowell cried as he sprayed blue energy pulses from his plasma gun at a flock of pink monsters charging the troops. The bright balls of energy burnt into the flesh of the monsters and caused small, bright explosions of plasma energy, ripping the creatures' faces and bodies apart.
"Something must've happened!" Captain Howard replied, yelling through the battle. "They were supposed to dispatch a pickup if we didn't give a SitRep once an hour after our arrival here and we've been here for at least two hours without reporting back to base!"
"Then they should have been here by now!" Corporal O'Brien responded, while pumping shell after shell into the advancing monsters. A fireball almost hit him, but he was able to dodge it.
"Oh shit, oh shit we're screwed!" Lewis yelled, panic entering his voice. He was breathing very quickly and his eyes were wide open with fear.
"Shut up Lewis!" Moore barked angrily. "The last thing we need now is a panicked trooper!"
"She's right. Get hold of yourself soldier!" Lieutenant McDowell yelled at Andrews. "We're not dead yet and we damn Hell don't want to make things easy for these critters!"

Lewis calmed down a bit and continued fighting for his life with renewed energy.

Moore sent a rocket into a group of brown fiends on a raised platform. The rocket exploded at the middle of the group and the blast hurled three of the monsters over the ledge of the platform and the bloody corpses fell to the ground beneath the platform.

They were in an outer courtyard of the Phobos Labs Facility, desperately looking for any sign of the pickup ships. There was nothing to see, and the monsters were relentlessly charging their position. The troops had been scattered, trying to retreat from the monsters and were getting further and further away from each other. Captain Howard was currently together with Lieutenant McDowell, Corporal "Detective" O'Brien, Private Andrews, Private Lewis and Private Moore.

The marines had all been well trained to deal with opposition, but they were trained to counter human opposition. The kind of combat tactics, which the soldiers were trained in, were not the most useful against the aliens – only against the wretched, humanoid soldiers, who through some unknown process, had been turned into merciless killers.
The marines were not used to fight ravenous animals and these creatures were not only animal-like, they were like frightening demons from Hell. Every marine knew that fear was a soldier's worst enemy and unfortunately, these terrors were enormously fearsome and instilled most of the troops with a paralyzing dread.
When fighting a human enemy, the soldier knows that the enemy has feelings. Fighting a race different than humans was surprisingly terrifying in itself. To the non-human enemy, humans were just like bugs which needed to be squashed. Seeing a fearless enemy rushing mindlessly at them without the slightest trace of emotion unnerved most people.
Howard realized how true all this was, now that he was in this nightmarish situation.

Several of the human marines were dead already and the remaining troops were scattered in several directions, unable to reach each other.
The six-man group would certainly die if they stayed where they were, so Howard took the decision to try and break through the hordes of monsters charging them from all sides in order to escape the monsters.
"This way, move it!" the Captain hollered, leading the five marines into a gloomy hallway, which disappeared into the building.

...

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Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 5

****

The big hall at the comm. station in the Command Control building was littered with corpses. I had just killed off a horde of enemies and was now looking for traces of surviving marines. The place had been assaulted from all sides as could be seen from the many corpses of monsters lying on the floor at several inlets and outlets of the building. Several bullet marks could be seen on many of the dark gray metal walls and I could tell from the patterns of these that the soldiers had been firing in blind panic at the enemy.
This was where the initial contact between my buddies and the uglies had occurred.

After a bit of searching, I could safely conclude that there were no survivors left. With my mind filled with dark thoughts, I went over to the mutilated bodies of my friends. The sight was horrendous. One of them had had his skull and a great deal of his face crushed - one of his eye sockets were empty and looking around, I saw the eyeball resting on the light brown, hexagonal tiled floor a few feet away. Another soldier had been eaten alive – doubtless by one of the "bulls" – his torso was nothing but bloody ribs and small chunks of shredded flesh and his face was still distorted in painful agony.
Most of the other guys would probably have lost whatever they had eaten at this sight, but I had seen mutilated corpses before. I had even seen worse than this, but I knew that these aliens were completely emotionless and apparently very sadistic too, so I was sure that I would see worse sights later.

I found the body of Henderson. His eyes and mouth were wide open in surprised horror. His body was full of bloody bullet holes, which showed that he had had a more pleasant death compared to some of his buddies.
He won't annoy me anymore I thought to myself, while sadness flowed over me as I relieved the corpse of ammunition.
I had been annoyed with him all the time I had known Steve Henderson, but now he was dead and I couldn't help thinking about his parents. Most of my buddies up here had a family, only I had no parents or family and I was still alive.

Dear God I thought. It just seemed so horribly meaningless to me that I didn't die, but a lot of people with a family died instead. I of all the marines on Mars should've been the one who died. I felt awfully empty inside and a sting of guilt, but I quietly told myself that staring at what had been my comrades wouldn't bring them back and that I had better move on instead.

I looked at the slaughter once again and then it occurred to me that there were surprisingly few corpses of my friends. What had happened to the rest of them?

I reached two conclusions after a bit of thinking.
The first possibility was that they had been turned into those mindless "zombies", but I hadn't recognized a single of my buddies among the former humans I had encountered this far, so if they really had been "reanimated" then they had moved away from this station.

The second possibility was that my buddies had decided to split and flee the Command Control Station. I decided that the latter possibility was the most feasible, which meant that I still had a chance of finding some of them alive.

I went up to the comm. station to look for clues as to what had happened to the rest of my comrades. Much to my surprise, I noticed a computer screen with some text on it. Most of the text had been turned into weird symbols, but some of it was readable. From what I could make out of it, it was a list and short descriptions of the projects here. Most of it was too incoherent, due to the fact that some of the text had been turned into symbols and numbers, but then I saw something, which drew my attention:

"Pr/mary project
Project: Intertravel
Loc%tion: Ph@bos Resea¤ch 5[cility and Deimos R+search Facility
Description: Two translocators ("gateways") will be activated on M{rch #9."?§<5. =ne source translocator is locat\> *; the Phobos Researc8 Facility and one receiving tr?<slocator is %@!½ted at the Research Facility on Deimos. By creating a type of d]£l black holes, kn[}]0 as a "wormhole", the translocators §$£ transport perso6&el and cargo from one place to another almost instantly.

P0wer c§nsumption: Tr¤nsl2cators 6re powered by a cla§s C3£@ po#er generator"


The rest about the project was just meaningless scribbling.

I stared at the screen again. From what I could make from this, the UAC had found means to create some sort of teleportation device. My guess was that the class "C3£@" power generator referred to in the text file was one of the new class C325 power generators, in which case these "translocators" had an enormous power consumption.
I activated the computer's main menu, happy that I had been through that boring computer course one year ago, and barely managed to find the comm. recording program – a computer program, which recorded and stored radio transmissions within a log file. Having found the log file, I touched the "replay" field on the screen and a panicked voice broke the eerie silence as the last recorded message was played:

"Heelp! We require immediate military support! Something frigg..*screech* evil is coming out of the gateways! Most ..*crackle*.. guards *fzzzzt* dead! Computer systems *kzz* .. gone beserk *crackle* *fzzt* out of control! *screeeeeech* nowhere *buzzzzzz* security failed *fzzzzztz* backup, NOW!………"

The radio went silent.

I stared grimly at the machines in front of me. I had now found answers to some of my many questions, but I still had lots of unanswered questions. I believed that the gateways had somehow been messed up and were the source of those critters. It was also quite possible that it was the Phobos translocator, which had caused the disturbance on the monitors back in the landing pod, before my friends had been assaulted.

"They" had come from the gateways, so the only way to stop them, would be to shut down the machines powering the portals.

Having digested the information I had just found and fueled by the anger of seeing the corpses of my comrades, I proceeded onward through the base with senses all alert. My helmet computer, after having downloaded data from some of the bases computers, had notified me that there was a direct rail connection all the way to the Research Facility from this building.
I decided to go straight for the gateway – shutting it down as quickly as possible would eliminate the possibility of the uglies getting reinforcements, which could give the remaining marines a fighting chance wherever they were – if there were any human marines left at all.

-

The monorail station below the Command Control station was a mess of dead bodies. Looking around, I noticed a working monitor. It showed a computerized image of the whole base seen from above. The map also showed some glowing green lines indicating functional monorail tracks. I noticed that the line leading directly to the Research facility was red, indicating that the track was broken.
This meant that I was forced to take the monorail train to the Labs Facility and from there fight my way through both the Central Processing Plant and the Computer Station before I reached the Research Facility.

Dammit! I thought angrily as I entered a train locomotive on the track leading to the Labs Facility.
This would delay me a lot.

---

The once human soldiers fell backwards with several ugly holes in their bodies, as I let loose a swarm of bullets in their direction.
I had just stepped out of the elevator from the monorail station beneath the Phobos Labs Facility when a bunch of unfriendly guys saw me, but they were put to sleep now.

I ran as quickly as I could across the canal of toxic waste which flowed across the room. The slime burnt my feet, but I bit my teeth firmly together and avoided attracting attention by yelling in pain.
Damn slime I thought as I shook my burnt feet as I put the chain gun down on the floor and whipped out my shotgun from the holster on my back. Now I need a Goddamn stimpack!
Lucky thing that my boots offered some protection against such things or my feet would've been far worse off now.
The slime probably meant that there was a leak in the waste disposal systems of the Labs Facility, which warned me that I could expect more such slime pools around.

A guttural grunting sound somewhere nearby made me bring my gun back up in firing position, but I couldn't find out where it came from exactly. I looked cautiously around in the room and noticed a barrel of waste next to a bulky metal door. A label warned against smoking near the container, as the thing contained explosive chemicals. I stepped further into the room, but stayed clear of the barrel.

Just then the door opened and one of these brown humanoids accompanied by a "bull" rushed into the room. I swung my gun around faster than they could perceive and fired at the barrel, which exploded in a flash of pyrotechnics and smoke. The brown thing's ruined body was hurled backwards by the force of the explosion and the pink monster staggered sideways roaring out loud in pain. I quickly pumped another shell into the firing chamber and killed the "bull" with a well-placed shot in its wide-open mouth, ripping its jaw apart in a cloud of blood.

The welcoming party of the Phobos Labs Facility was now taken care of and I cautiously moved on.

...

Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 6

-

The former human stood with its back turned. Its head was bald and its arms very muscular. It held a shotgun and wore a battered combat armor vest, with several bloodstains on it.

I withdrew my "souvenir", the energy-powered Knuckle-duster, slipped it onto my left hand and stealthily snuck up on the shotgun guy. I hammered my metal-covered fist into the creature's temple. It let out a low grunt of pain as blue sparks leapt from the side of its head, leaving a burnt wound. It turned to face me in time to receive my metal-spiked fist directly on the underside of his nose, hammering its nose bone into its brain and the force of the electricity ripped its face apart.

I looked grimly at my handiwork. By now I had seen so many grisly sights that it didn’t bother me anymore.

To my delight, I found a stimpack on the corpse. The stimpacks contained syringes with an advanced drug that could enhance the human body's regeneration functions to a degree. It only had a slight healing effect, but it was enough to save lives. All soldiers were trained in determening when an injury was slight enough to only require a stimpack. I gave myself a quick injection and soon felt the pain in my feet disappear.
After getting what ammunition the corpse could yield, I checked the lab I had just entered. I saw lots of tools hanging on one of the walls on hooks – tools for repairing or building weapons. There were a few computer screens as well – all showing static. At the far end wall was what looked like an armored weapons container for special weapons and to the left was a thick glass pane. Looking out through the glass pane, I could see a sort of firing range – I noticed several piles of burnt ashes out there.

This was obviously a weapons testing lab. I found a printout lying on the light gray, square-tiled floor. Picking it up, I saw the headline: "Test results for prototype Plasma Beam Frequency Gun model 9000"

I stared at the sheet, not knowing what to think. Apparently they had developed a new type of beam frequency guns or BFGs as they were generally referred to – the marines had nicknamed them Big Freaking Guns, because the weapons were enormous handheld guns that dealt out death like nothing else. The BFG was a fairly new type of gun – the most advanced version this far emitted an invisible death ray in a cone shooting out from the barrel of the gun – annihilating everything organic in its path and messing up electronic circuits as well. A number of different versions had been made before this one, but they had all been too unstable. The BFG model 8000 was the only beam frequency gun to be deemed stable and safe enough for troops to use.

From what I could read, model 9000 shot out a large ball of plasma energy, effective against armored vehicles, and once the ball had been ignited upon impact it would initiate the type of death ray that the older version of the BFG fired, but this seemed to be more advanced as the BFG 9k could determine how "solid" the target was and "distribute" more power to disrupt better protected targets.

This was an improvement of the Target Identification System already implemented in 8k version of the weapon. This system could identify friendly units and somehow instruct the weapon not to zap them.
It was also written that "Model 9000 has proven to be the most stable beam frequency weapon developed this far. So far, model 9000 hasn't had any jams or other malfunctions and it is as simple to use as model 8000."


"If I could get my hands around that gun..." I mumbled to myself, while looking around in the brightly lit laboratory. I noticed that one of the container doors was slightly open. I flung it aside – nothing.
It appeared that someone had already taken the prototype gun, probably one of my buddies, as the "converted" killers were too mindless to figure out how to use such a weapon. I had noticed that the former humans only seemed to remember the stuff, which they were trained for as real humans. I let my eyes run over the sheet one more time. This new gun was fired exactly the same way as the less advanced version, except that it had a delay before firing the plasma ball. This was indeed good news because that meant that I was basically educated to handle this weapon already as I had received training in the use of the BFG 8000.

If only I could find that gun and some cells for it.

I continued my search for the exit elevator to the monorail.

-

I entered an office. It was dark in there, but I noticed a monitor on a desk near a window, which seemed to be working. I peered curiously at the screen.
"Record of past projects" it read.

I scrolled down the screen looking for something interesting. There were a lot of projects, which meant little to me, but then I found something: "Genetic enhancement"
I touched the screen on the field and watched as the screen changed. I gasped.

Most of the text was turned into symbols and numbers like the active projects list I had seen in the Command Control station, but a picture caught me attention.
It was a picture of a young man, probably 25-30 years old, with light brown hair and thick eyebrows. He had blue eyes and they looked like mine. I had seen another picture of this man before.

It was my father.

I read through the messed up text and realized that my dad, a decorated marine like myself, had participated in an experiment to test a chemical drug of some sort which I couldn't make out from the text, and this drug could enhance his reflexes, strength and pain tolerance after a few weeks. Unfortunately, as the report stated, the dose had fatal side effects. My father died a year after receiving the injection – his brain simply stopped working. But the drug had in fact improved his combat abilities only weeks after receiving the dose.

This was the last place I expected to find information about my dad and I couldn't really digest the news.

A strange eerie sound brought me back to the harsh reality. Feeling my heart pound against my ribs I spun around, looking down a dark hallway adjacent to the office. It sounded like something was moving down the hallway – I heard a rhythmic thumping sound drawing nearer, like heavy feet pounding on the tiled floor – but I couldn't see anything. The sense of dread returned to me. If only I had a light ampflication visor attached to my helmet.
I heard the eerie sound again. It sounded like some sort of ghostly, muffled howling.
And then I noticed movement. I couldn't see the shape, but something was moving towards me. I instinctively pulled the trigger of my chain gun, spraying a deadly burst at whatever was in the hallway. I heard an inhuman scream followed by a hellish howl of rage. The thing swiftly moved closer and closer. I backed out of the office into the lighted area outside the office.

Then I saw it.
It had a burly shape, a little like the "bulls" but it was slimmer and walked on its hind legs. I fired again and again, pumping several rounds into the thing, until it fell with a ghostly howl. It was tough, but not as tough as the "pinkies". This thing gave me the willies, but at least it wasn't clever enough to move silently. Otherwise I could've been dead. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Ghosts inside the base? I thought a bit shocked. Oh brother, what's next?

-

Having encountered a few more of those ghostly "spectres" I reached the monorail track leading to the Processing Plant. The fact that the one rail track, which could have brought me straight to the Research Facility from the Command Control Station, was broken only made me depressed. I could have been at the Research Facility by now, but instead I had to fight through every single building in the base, which greatly slowed my progress.

There was no train available, but I just needed to press a button to call the train to the station.
While waiting for the train to arrive I reflected a bit about the news I had gotten about my dad. Had I inherited his "enhancements"? It seemed very likely, but it meant that the side effects didn't affect me - I hadn't experienced any symptoms of any kind.

There was another nagging question which I tried to find answers for: Why had my dad participated in this experiment in the first place?
He must have been given a big, fat bonus as well as a bigger life insurance.
I looked around with my eyes and ears fully open, still on the lookout for more of these "spectre" monsters. But the monorail platform was as silent as the grave.

What a depressingly sad way for a soldier to die I thought to myself, shifting my mind back to the fate of my dad.

The train arrived, interrupting my thoughts.

...
Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 7

---

"Captain Sir, do you read me?" I inquired in my radio microphone. There was no reply.

I was at the Computer Station, the last base installation before the Research facility. I hadn’t found as much as a single living human on my way through the Processing Plant nor at this station and I was beginning to be extremely worried. I knew that my buddies had been at the Command Control Station where they had been attacked. I hadn’t met any of them on my way to that station, so they had obviously moved towards the Research Facility, but I hadn't found anyone alive and I hadn't found enough dead marines to prove that they had all been killed, so there must still be some alive. Or would there?

I had finally decided to attempt a radio call. I had tried all the frequencies and attempted to get in contact with everyone of the guys in my platoon. I had even tried to contact Lieutenant McDowell and now Captain Howard, but the radio yielded nothing but empty static.

I stared emptily down the hallway ahead of me.
I felt incredibly alone all of a sudden. If I couldn't get in contact with the others, then it meant that they were either dead or out of range. If they were all dead then they must have met their fate at the Research Facility, which indicated that the facility was a much more dangerous place than any of those other monster-infested installations.
But maybe they were all still alive at the Research Facility, fending off the monsters from there? Seeing as they had left plenty of opposition for me to clear up, they had probably used evasive tactics as much as possible trying to get to a place where they could regroup. That place must be the Research Facility. The Facility was too far away for my small radio to reach my comrades if they were there, so it was possible that they were there.

I decided that I had better hurry up.

-

I was jogging through a room with a large machine, which was no doubt the central processing unit for all the advanced supercomputers in this station. Unfortunately, the computers were all messed up through some unknown disturbance. I had realized that this could be the very same disturbance which had messed up the sensors in the landing pod. The same disturbance which prevented me from seeing the monsters as red dots on the monitors while they were closing in on my comrades.

I casually glanced out of a window while I ran past the CPU. There was a large courtyard out there, which was now littered with dead zombie soldiers I had killed a short while ago.

I suddenly noticed a reflection and my instinct told me that I was in trouble.
I threw myself to the ground, hoping that my reaction wasn't too late.

It wasn't too late. Something made a small hole in the window glass, and I felt something whiz past me just above my head.
Someone, or rather something, was sniping at me – most likely a former human.
Looking around, I noticed a dead former human lying next to me. I had blown its head off earlier and I lay very close to the pool of blood flowing from its decapitated neck. I hadn't emptied its rifle of ammunition, because I currently carried as much ammunition for the chain gun as I could have, but I figured that the best way to counter a sniper would be to snipe him before he could pull the trigger. I put down my chain gun on the floor and picked up the assault rifle, while keeping low so that I didn't give my position away to the sniping monster.

Crawling behind the solid wall next to the window, I got up and slowly peeked around the window frame out into the courtyard.
I noticed a building with similar windows on it. One of the windows had no glass in it and I briefly noticed a human figure, holding a weapon in its hands.
I quickly pulled my head back into cover as another bullet made an ugly hole in the glass next to where I was standing.

I had to take him before he could take me, which meant that I had to change my position. The other window on the other side of the full wall section I was standing behind was out of the question. The sniper "zombie" could bag me first. I had to take him by surprise and the safest way to do it was by taking an evasive route.
I got down on my belly and crawled beneath the window with the bullet holes until I reached safety behind the big CPU. I quietly got back up and snuck stealthily away from the windows. My plan was to get to another series of windows I had been past before, which gave a nice view to the building where I had seen the sniper. And I had to get there without being seen and fast.

-

I threw myself to the floor. I was getting near the window. The area around the window was ideal for sniping purposes. The hallway near the window was dark and shadowy and would make it hard for the former human to see me. I got up next to the window with the rifle in my hands. I had activated the scope.
If only I had a spotter I thought bitterly to myself. I had to do without.
Quickly detaching the box-shaped scope, I pressed a tiny switch on it, linking the scope's view to my helmet computer. A small screen, showing the view from the scope appeared at the far left corner of my faceplate.
Pointing the scope around the window frame and at the building with the sniper in it, I was cautious to keep the scope in the shadows so that the former human wouldn't see the scope if it looked through its own riflescope in my direction. I could see the bastard clearly now. It was still pointing its gun toward the spot where I had last been. It wore combat armor, so I had to hit it in the head to take it down without risking directing its shots in my direction.
Having reattached the scope to the rifle, I put the butt of the gun up against my shoulder, pointing the gun upwards as to not scrape the muzzle of the gun against the wall.
I crapped sideways into view, staying three feet away from the window screen itself, and brought the rifle in firing position with the scope pressed firmly against the faceplate in front of my right eye.
Looking through the scope I saw the former human turn. The crosshair was right on top of the reanimated soldier's forehead. I squeezed the trigger and felt how the gun kicked into the shoulder plate of my armor vest as the gun fired. The "zombie's" head jerked backwards and a cloud of blood and brains stood out from the back of its head as it fell backwards.

I got up and resumed my search for the exit, which I believed was in the building from where the sniper had been firing at me.

-

I peeked around the corner, looking into a fairly large room.
A few shotgun toting reanimated grunts were lying in wait for me on my right, either standing or kneeling near a doorway. They clearly knew that I would come this way sooner or later. The door itself appeared to be sealed by security, as three metal bars lay across the door with security locks keeping the door firmly shut.

I had found the entrance to the building where the former human sniper had been shooting at me.
I hadn't been able to see the other former humans through the rifle's scope because they were in hiding so that they couldn't be seen from the courtyard.
I could see that they were all alert, with their weapons at the ready; some of the shotguns were aimed in my direction.
To my left was a darkened room behind a glass window. I noticed movement inside.
Ahead of me was an adjacent hallway. Checking my map view, I could quickly confirm that this hallway led into the dark room – I had been looking into the same hallway a while ago, where I mowed down a large group comprised of the brown S.O.B's and former human troops.

I peeked into the room again. The former humans were moving their heads slowly to the left and right. I reacted just as they were looking in any other direction than mine and ran sideways into the room, firing a spray of deadly lead at the surprised humanoid soldiers, which weren't given time to react before they were hit by the bullets, and I leapt down next to the dark room's window, while keeping myself out of sight of any monsters inside that room.

I could hear them breathe in there. My attack had been very successful, as not a single of the shotgun guys had survived the deadly rain of bullets. I waited a moment, while listening to the ragged breathing of the grunts behind the wall, before I took a quick step out of my hiding place behind the window frame, sending another burst through the window, killing two former humans.

In the brief moment where I killed the two grunts I noticed that a third trooper was running out of the darkness, heading my way. I spun around and ran sideways behind cover, just as the last former human rounded the corner, with its gun raised.
It never knew what hit it, as I pulled out one of my pistols and fired around the corner, blowing its brains out.

I found the elevator to the monorail station beneath the building after collecting the ammo from the dead mutants.

I really hoped that I would find my buddies at the Research Facility and I was already considering what course of action I should take when I arrived, while waiting for the elevator to reach the underground level.

...

Knee-deep in the Dead – Part 8

-

"What the...!?"

The train arrived at the monorail station beneath what was once the Research Facility. It looked like a base, but in front of my eyes flashed the words:
"Entering Phobos Anomaly"

Why did my helmet computer call this place a Phobos Anomaly? Wasn't this supposed to be the Research Facility?
I looked around in bewilderment. The place looked like a normal base, with metal walls, tiled floor and regular doors. The building was as silent as the grave, which had me worried. No sounds of combat meant that my buddies might be dead which left me without the option to navigate off the moon. But maybe they had killed off the remaining opposition and where just preparing themselves for the monsters in the other buildings to attack this facility or whatever it was. My buddies wouldn't know that I had killed off most of the creatures singlehandedly, so the last option seemed feasible enough for me to cling to the hope that they were still alive.

I walked cautiously into the elevator and activated it. It rose with a muffled mechanical sound like any other elevator.
The elevator took me to a small room with a red switch in front of me. The switch lowered the wall in front of which I found strange – this didn't look normal.

I found myself looking down at a big room with a boiling pool of toxic slime at the center. The pool was surrounded by fuel barrels and a crowd of "pinkies" growled at me in unison as they saw me.

I wasted no time, but sent a long chain gun burst of death at the crowd, hitting a few barrels and some of the monsters. The following lightshow was spectacular. Three of the fuel barrels exploded and created a chain reaction of bright orange explosions as the exploding barrels ignited the barrels next to them.
Several creatures where ripped to shreds in the explosive reaction, but I kept firing at the remaining monsters while the rest of the barrels exploded all around them.

When the last monster was dead, I leapt down into the room.
Avoiding the pit, I proceeded cautiously through the room, went down a staircase to a door and opened it. The hall on the other side of the door had two adjacent rooms on each side. On the hexagonal-tiled floor lay two corpses of my buddies. It was Graham and Lewis. It looked like something big had thrown them around, and torn out their guts. Their weapons, a chain gun and a shotgun lay separated from the bodies. What was equally disturbing, was that I saw two candelabras next to the entrances to each of the adjacent rooms.

Candelabras on a space station? I thought puzzled.

Moreover, the candelabras looked pretty diabolic with tiny skulls carved into their base.

Two growls echoed out at me from the two rooms and a "bull" leapt out at me from each of the rooms, only to be met with heavy barrage of bullets that tore its bodies apart. I spun around and perforated the other one which stormed at me with open jaws.

After both creatures were dead, I gathered the ammunition from my dead buddies and walked down the hallway - more cautiously than before - the thing which had killed my two buddies was definitely more powerful than the "pinkies". I felt my heart pound as I realized that something big and nasty resided here. Something which I hadn't encountered before. At the end of the hall was a lift with a green, arrow-shaped button pointing upwards.
The lift brought me to a big star-shaped Hall.
The ceiling looked like it was made of slimy ooze, the floor was covered in some sort of red sand and in front of me, I saw two huge statues carved out of reddish rock.

The statues resembled some sort of ugly goatmen, about three and a half meters tall. The demonic creatures had horns bending forward from the back of their big goat heads, their almost skull-like faces ended in a goat-like snout and they had a pair of fangs protruding right beneath their mouth.
The things looked immensely muscular, their powerful hoofed legs bended backwards and the legs seemed very hairy. Both statues stood with their fists clenched and their muscular arms hanging down the side of their body, while they seemed to be looking at the floor in front of them.

Behind the statues I saw the body of a marine, still clutching a gray gun in one of his hands – a rocket launcher.

Several eerie growls told me that there were a flock of spectres here. I began to spray bullets into the area. Inhuman screams and howls told me that I had hit some of them. I continued firing. I noticed shapes approaching me from the right and aimed my chaingun in the direction, gunning down the ghostly figures. I turned to face right and saw a translucent form charge straight at me. It didn't last long. It stumbled and fell with a chilling howl as my chain gun ripped it apart.

The place was cleared. I stepped forward toward the marine's corpse.

I had barely taken my first step, when the statues suddenly collapsed in a cloud of dust, revealing two real demonic monstrosities behind the stone "skin", which they wore before.

Seeing them as real "demons" was a horrible shock.
Their torsos were a pinkish-red color, darker than the color of the "bulls", and the fur on their legs brown – like the fur of a camel. Their fists glowed with an eerie, green light and several filthy dark hairs protruded from their rough skin. They both raised their fearsome heads and stared at me. Their eyes were holes in their faces - a small, yellow light glowed in each hole.

They both let out an earsplitting roar, an otherworldly scream, which hurt in my ears. The terrifying roars made the ground itself tremble under my feet.

Seeing the two statues turn into demon-like monsters had me initially paralyzed, but I quickly recovered and reacted.
I swung my Chan gun around and aimed at the left monster. The one to the right raised its right arm and its huge hand started to blaze with a sort of green glow. A strange, green fire began to enshroud its raised hand. I pulled the trigger and sent a short burst of bullets into the left one's face, while I ran in between the two horrors, just as the other hurled a bolt of a disgusting green goo shrouded in a similar greenish sort of fire at me.
The goatman which I had fired at, let out a dissatisfied grunt; my bullets had barely harmed it.

The bolt thrown by the one on my right, hammered into the ground were I had been standing a moment before. The goo evaporated, leaving a scorched mark on the ground, from where a stinking greenish smoke rose. I spun around and opened fire at the one I had first assaulted to little effect.

Dodging another two bolts, I quickly put my chain gun down on the ground, because I believed that it wouldn't do me all that much good as I was running low on ammo.

The Monsters advanced upon me and kept throwing bolts at me. I dove down next to the corpse of the marine and yanked the weapon out of his grasp.
The rocket launcher was a small, compact, collapsible weapon, which fired small, but effective rockets. It was a belt-fed gun.
The soldier had apparently just loaded a new belt into the launcher when he had been killed. I noticed dried remains of that green goo on the scorched, burnt area on his back.
These rockets were anti-personnel rockets, which simply exploded in a blooming cloud, tearing everything within the vicinity of the rocket's blast area to shreds.

I quickly leapt up and fired a rocket at the first monster. The gun let out a deafening roar, followed by the sizzling noise of the rocket whizzing through the air on its way to its target.
The rocket exploded with a satisfying orange flash as it pounded into the monster's chest, stopping the thing briefly, but it wasn't dead yet. It seemed that these creatures' skin was very solid indeed. Another green bolt whizzed so close past me that I could feel its heat.
I pumped three more rockets into the monster's torso, before the "demon" suddenly fell apart with a horrendous death roar. Its torso shriveled up, its dark green blood splashing onto the sanded floor and its ruined remains collapsed onto the ground. But there was still one more to deal with and it was closing in fast.

The huge goliath suddenly stopped in front of me, raised its right hoof and hammered it into the ground.
The ground beneath me shook, and I was almost thrown to the ground by the shockwave. The thing flung a bolt at me, but I rolled aside, which was difficult with my life support system on my back, and sent a rocket right into its face. The monster roared in agony and staggered backwards. The rocket had torn its face to shreds, leaving a large, slimy, green wound were its ugly face had been, but it was still alive and it began to hurl bolts in every direction, while roaring aggressively.
I finished it off with a few more rockets, turning it into a pile of limbs, flesh and hooves.

As the last goat thing's death roar faded away, the walls of the hall suddenly crumbled to the ground. I couldn't help staring at the strange liquid ceiling, which was now floating without any support. I looked around.
Surrounding the "arena" was a large courtyard and ahead I saw a strange object.

I left the place where I had defeated the two goat things and looked curiously at the object.

It was shaped like a big doorway. The "doorframe" was entangled by what looked like fleshy tentacles, but I noticed several wires and technical gadgets attached to the metallic frame, revealing that this object was manmade. A staircase led up to the "door" and I could see that the thing was situated on the machine powering it. The air had a strange stench like rotten flesh and a strange wind was blowing around the object. As I slowly walked up the stairs, I began to notice something at the center of the frame. It looked like a sort of whirlpool, distorting the air between the frames. Peering closer at it, I noticed that the whirlpool had a reddish color in the center.

This was no doubt one of the so-called translocators I had read about – the gateway to Deimos.

Of course! I thought to myself. Why hadn't I thought of it before? The surviving marines had no doubt fled into the gate, trying to get away from the monsters here.

A desperate last option I thought grimly. I realized how insanely small the chance of finding surviving marines would be now that they had gone through the teleporting gate. After all, the gateway was where the monsters had come from.

I looked at the machinery beneath me.
If I smashed this machine, I could properly disrupt the gateway, preventing more monsters to pour through it. It would trap my buddies on Deimos and me on Phobos, but it was better than letting the aliens pour into our part of the universe where they could ultimately become a threat to Earth. I stood for a few minutes trying to find an alternate method. I knew that I would be kept responsible for the death of my fellow marines, but I decided that I had to do it – to save human lives elsewhere. These monsters were dangerous beyond imagination. They seemed capable of everything.

Having made up my mind to sacrifice myself and my remaining comrades, I leapt down from the machine and backed further away. I pumped a few rockets into the thing, trashing it completely. Metallic pieces flew through the air as the machine exploded in a flower of fire and a cloud of smoke.

The whirlpool was still there.
"What the Devil!?" I growled in surprise.
I pressed a button on the side of my helmet and my helmet computer displayed the result of its analysis of the now trashed device. It reported that the gateway could only be shut down, when both machines on Phobos and Deimos were destroyed.

I felt my heart pound, but at the same time felt a burning rage inside me.

I had only one hope of shutting down the machine: To enter the gateway to Deimos and hope that the base had at least one Emergency Shuttle, which one man could fly.

Without hesitation I slowly walked up the stairs again and stepped through the Whirlpool.

...

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orion said:

If you read more than the first three sentances you're a hampster. =P

Excuse me, are you saying that my hard work sucks? Or is it another of your weird, easily-misunderstood jokes?

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dsm said:

Excuse me, are you saying that my hard work sucks? Or is it another of your weird, easily-misunderstood jokes?

Why would I judge your work when I didn't even read any of it? Just getting at the fact it has more writing than all the bible pages I used to roll joints out of, combined.

Plus it loaded slower than most of your 1000x1000 images. Meh, whatever, but you are right... I'm soo misunderstood, hmm, but it's ok, for it is almost time, so soon.

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orion- just smile and say "Your work is great dsm!" if you wish to continue having a relatively happy existence on these forums :p

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orion said:

Why would I judge your work when I didn't even read any of it? Just getting at the fact it has more writing than all the bible pages I used to roll joints out of, combined.

Plus it loaded slower than most of your 1000x1000 images. Meh, whatever, but you are right... I'm soo misunderstood, hmm, but it's ok, for it is almost time, so soon.

Sorry, my bad.

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Livo said:

orion- just smile and say "Your work is great dsm!" if you wish to continue having a relatively happy existence on these forums :p

WTF? Why? If I thought his stuff sucked I'd say it without a second thought. I doubt I'd be rude about it, because he could most likely use his mod powers to do something that I wouldn't like, and plus I'd just look like an idiot that's flaming someone for simply not meeting with my standards. But if I find a polite way of saying his works sucks there's not much he can do about it, maybe add me to his ignore list, I don't know. Point is I am allowed to say it because it's an opinion (opinions aren't alweys right anyway) and this is a forum. If it was otherwise AndrewB would have been long, long banned.

And no, I do not mean in any way that his work sucks.

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Simile (well, it wasn't really a one but you get my drift)= joke

Unfunny as it was, I was kidding orion. No need to get defensive.

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orion said:

WTF? Why? If I thought his stuff sucked I'd say it without a second thought. I doubt I'd be rude about it, because he could most likely use his mod powers to do something that I wouldn't like, and plus I'd just look like an idiot that's flaming someone for simply not meeting with my standards. But if I find a polite way of saying his works sucks there's not much he can do about it, maybe add me to his ignore list, I don't know. Point is I am allowed to say it because it's an opinion (opinions aren't alweys right anyway) and this is a forum. If it was otherwise AndrewB would have been long, long banned.

And no, I do not mean in any way that his work sucks.

Well, if you've got some constructive criticism, it's very welcome - what I wouldn't be able to stand is stupid posts like "This story suxx" without a decent or even the slightest explanation to why it should suck.
This forum is for posting your art/fanfics and replies are supposed to be feedback to the artwork/fanfic authors. That being said, I don't mind jokes as long as they don't directly indicate that the writer's/artist's work sucks (now don't misunderstand me orion - I am in no way pissed at you because of your comment. Actually, I wasn't sure what your comment meant, that's why I asked if you were saying that my work sucks).

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The Shores of Hell – Part 1

****

Colonel Hauser was a bit surprised that there was no sign of life on any of the screens, neither humans nor creatures, only corpses of either – mostly corpses of the monsters. Where were the monsters?
A thought struck him. Could it be “TX056”?

He recalled the old project on Phobos several years ago. He was a Captain back then. He had picked his best soldier for the experiment, telling him that the UAC was going to test a new climate adaptor – back then a syringe filled with a liquid, which could make the soldier adapt to different types of climate. The climate adaptors had later been made into special pills, which had to be swallowed. The troops usually carried two types – one that could adapt the soldier to cold climate and one for hot climate. Hauser's man had been told that this new adaptor drug was harmless and would make him adapt to both kinds of climate, but wouldn't make a difference in a regular climate.

In truth the drug would alter some of his genes to make him a superior warrior.

After receiving the dose and going through the testing fields, the subject was told that the drug apparently didn't work as he froze when he was in the "cold" area and was feeling hot when in the "hot" area. But the drug did work – just not the way the soldier was told it would work...

Unfortunately, the grunt died of a lethal side effect a year later. But apparently, he had made his wife pregnant after receiving the experimental injection and the wife gave birth to a child, but died soon afterwards, because the drug had affected her as well. The couple had not been informed of the potential risk of taking an experimental drug and as a result both paid the price of their ignorance with their own lives.

But the child had survived and had no health problems or misshaped genes whatsoever.
As the child grew older, his reflexes and persistence slowly improved, and ultimately, he became the most deadly fighting man the Colonel had ever seen or heard of. With superior reflexes, a high pain tolerance and a strong mind capable of dealing with mind numbing situations, where most other soldiers would be demoralized he was the ultimate warrior. As a plus, this one soldier had proven to be quite intelligent. But "subject TX056", as he was referred to in Hauser's secret files on this man, wasn't a complete success – he had a hard time obeying orders and was thus inefficient as a soldier.

The soldier was untrustworthy and even dangerous to his superiors as was proven three years ago, when he assaulted his superior officer, First Lieutenant Frank Stevenson – Hauser's own nephew.
This was the reason why the Colonel regarded 'subject TX056' as a failed experiment, which could be too dangerous for his surroundings. This was also why Hauser wanted to get rid of him. He had made sure that 'subject TX056' got separated from his platoon on Phobos, hoping that he would get rid of the "failed super warrior", before he made further harm or discovered the truth about the Phobos assault.

****

The moment I stepped through the whirlpool, a horrible feeling of nausea came over me. I felt as if I was falling downwards at an insane speed. There was a brief, red flash and then everything turned black. The next instant, I was surrounded by horrible creatures. They lunged at me and attacked. I couldn't move out of the place and I couldn't defend myself. I felt a burning pain in my chest as a fireball exploded on my armor in a cloud of flame. The next moment I felt their claws ripping me apart. It was awfully painful and I jerked and twisted in agony. I felt the sour taste of blood in my mouth. Blood was coming out of my mouth, nose and eyes and the thick liquid blocked my throat, preventing me from being able to breathe. Then suddenly, all went dark.

-

I opened my eyes and saw that I was inside what looked like a human base – the lost Deimos base!

Looking down at myself, I was surprised to see that my armor was undamaged and that I apparently wasn't even hurt. My journey through the wormhole must have given me hallucinations. But still, it had felt frighteningly real!

I sniffed, inhaling the harsh air. There was a horrible stench of rot and decay in the air and I could feel that same strange wind I had felt near the gateway on Phobos. It was unbearably hot. Something wasn't right around here. In fact it was even weirder than in the "Phobos Anomaly"
I activated my helmet computer and it told me that I had arrived at the "Deimos Anomaly" – it would seem that the monsters had infested and morphed this place as well.
I turned around and saw a similar doorframe and machine to the one on Phobos, but the whirlpool looked different, however. There was a white light at the center of the vortex and the whirlpool itself seemed calmer.
I stepped down the staircase and blasted the machine with the rocket launcher. The light at the center of the whirlpool instantly disappeared and the whirlpool slowly faded away.

With mixed feelings I realized that I had done it – I had shut down the infested gateway. But now I was trapped on Deimos, not knowing where the moon was or how I could navigate off it. I still wondered how the creatures had removed the moon out of range of our radars so quickly, but I probably wouldn't find out until I had retaken the Deimos base, which I was now determined to do.

I knew from our briefing that the Deimos base was smaller than the base on Phobos, due to the fact that Deimos was smaller than Phobos, which yielded less room for a base.

My thoughts were interrupted by the all-too-familiar wheezing sound of several former humans breathing. They were heading this way – obviously alerted by the noise I had made, while destroying the gateway.
I clapped the rocket launcher together, reducing its size to less than half a meter in length, and slipped it into the bag which the rocket launcher came equipped with and which was attached to the back of my armor – my back was getting crammed with weapons making it even harder to maneuver. The door opened with a sharp whine, just as I had pulled the shotgun from my back and brought it into firing position.

I could immediately see that something was different about the humanoid soldier in the doorway. Its hair had apparently fallen off and it seemed that its face had rotted away, leaving a menacing, skull-like visage. Its human ears were still intact and it still had eyes – but those eyes were as dead and white as the eyes that all the other former human troops I had encountered so far had had. It growled as it saw me, but a blast from my shotgun threw it into one of the troopers behind it before it could aim its pistol at me. One of the zombiefied soldiers had knelt down and now began firing at me with its assault rifle, but I had already sought cover. I put the shotgun down and whipped out my two pistols. Another former human ran into the room, while being covered by its fellow beings, but I quickly picked it off from my hiding place next to the doorframe. I leapt into view of the monsters and rapidly blasted them away with my dual pistols, spilling their blood and brains onto the floor. The two pistols were only effective because the enemies were so close to me. No more troops were charging through the door anymore, which likely meant that there were no more reanimated troops, unless the former humans on Deimos were smarter than those on Phobos.

I reloaded the two pistols. I was almost out of ammo for the handguns, but some of the former human grunts had sidearms, providing me with a little more ammunition for the two mx215's.
Picking up my shotgun after holstering the two pistols, I stepped out into the large hall. At the end of the hall, there was an upside-down-crucifix shaped opening in a wall of what appeared to be red glass, with a fiery light inside. It looked very satanic and I began to wonder if these things were really demons and not just aliens. I quickly dismissed the idea – demons are the product of human imagination I told myself, but I was beginning to doubt the truth behind that statement because of the strange sights that I had seen so far.

On the other side of the anti-Christian symbol I found what seemed like the remnants of a large computer room. On a trashed, filthy desk lay an access keycard with blue markings on it. Certain doors were locked by security until someone with a keycard could unlock them. It could also in some situations allow the holder of the keycard to access protected information on some computers if the holder inserted the card into the computer's keycard slot. The blue markings meant that I had access to low-clearance security – blue level, which was the lowest of three possible security clearance levels. I had found and used keycards on the Phobos base as well.

Unfortunately, standard UAC keycards only worked within the building where the cards belonged for security reasons, so I had no use of it once I exited this building.

Slipping the card into my pocket, I continued my stealthy surveillance.

I stopped for a moment, sweating like a pig. The awful heat was killing me, so I decided to digest a 'hot climate adaptor pill'.
I flipped up my helmet and gulped down the pill. It tasted awful and a short wave of nausea swept over me. I felt a short chill and then it seemed as if the temperature was dropping. The awful heat had dropped to a more acceptable level. The nausea had gone and I felt that I could carry on without getting exhausted too quickly.

Searching the big hall before the upside down crucifix, I found a strange big, red tile in the corner of the hall. Examining it I saw that it appeared to be made of solid blood. It had a weird symbol on top of it that looked like a half-drawn pentagram. I stepped curiously onto the elevated tile, checking the walls as the tile might mark a secret doorway – I had found a few secret areas on the Phobos base, so it was likely that there were secrets here as well. I had barely touched the tile with my foot, when I was briefly blinded by a green flash of light and suddenly found myself in an entirely different location of the building.

Surprised I leapt off the tile I was standing on – the same sort of tile that I had stepped onto before.
Several former humans, standing in the new hallway snarled at me.
"Ah crap!" I muttered to myself and backed away from them, stumbled backwards over the edge of the odd tile and suddenly found myself back where I came from – on top of the first tile.
I realized that this was a sort of teleporter – a magic teleporter created by these creatures.
In a flash of green energy, a human-like soldier stepped off the tile. I was ready for it and the creature had barely stepped off the tile before its body was perforated by a swarm of shotgun pellets, sending it into the wall next to it with a thud, splattering its organs and blood onto the gray hexagonal-tiled wall. The others would be here in a moment.

I waited for them with my shotgun pointed at the space above the blood red tile.

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 2

-

The gray metal door in front of me had red lights on both sides of it. These were sensors, which could detect if the person wanting to enter the door had a red keycard. I clapped my hand over the pocket containing not only the blue card, but a red one as well, which I had just found a short while ago. I wondered if the system still worked, seeing how the building had been distorted by some unknown infection. I pulled the handle down and the door slid open with a whine.

Three humanoid soldiers were waiting for me. They all raised their weapons, but I hurled myself aside, avoiding the spray of death. I pointed my shotgun around the doorframe and killed one of the bogies with a blast from my weapon. I quickly withdrew the gun before another hail of pellets hammered into the doorframe. Apparently, both of them had shotguns.
Before they could pump a new shell into their weapons I had leapt into view, taken the trooper on the right down, blowing its head off with a well-placed shot and had run into cover behind the other doorframe, where I pumped a new shell into the firing chamber.
I had moved so quickly that the last former human had barely noticed what hit its buddy.

The remaining baddie ran out of the room, but the next moment its torso was ripped apart by my shotgun. I ejected the shotgun clip, inserted a few new shells into the clip and slammed the newly loaded clip back into the shotgun.

I peeked into the room where the three former humans had been waiting and was surprised to see a carved drain in the floor filled with boiling blood.
I leapt over the bubbling pool, not wanting to get my feet scorched. I found out that this room had been an office of some sort, but it was completely transformed. The typical look of a militaristic research base was completely gone, as the walls had been changed into filthy, green marble walls.
"How the howling devil could the bastards have made these changes so quickly?" I couldn't help asking myself out loud.

My eyes fell on a bloody printout on the floor near the smashed desk. I picked it up and let my eyes run over it. My eyes widened.

It read:
”Col E T Hauser, Project Overseer and Martian Supreme Commander

Colonel,
I find that we are getting nowhere with the translocator technology. As you know, there was no problem, when sending dead objects through the wormhole – at that point the translocators worked perfectly, but as you are aware, things were much different when humans were sent through the wormhole. So far, it was believed that there was not sufficient power to ensure safe transporting of human beings and that conditions in the hyperspace between the gateways were hazardous to the human body. Several attempts were made to protect the subjects against these hazards, including outfitting the subjects with environment suits. Yet none were successful. However, the latest attempt was different, but still disastrous.

We had juiced up the power to maximum capacity and fixed a number of possible errors, which we believed had been the cause of previous failures. A number of other safety measures had been taken as well. This time we felt sure that nothing would go wrong. Unfortunately, the outcome was not what we had expected. In fact none of us had ever dreamed of something so horrid.

Unlike the other experiments, the subject did not just vanish in the vortex, but actually arrived on Deimos, but his clothing was covered in a slimy substance and he must have gone insane, as he was constantly babbling incoherent words. When the lab technicians approached the subject, he went completely mad and assaulted the technicians with wild kicks, punches and biting. All the while he was screaming vulgarities and mad babbling, while his voice seemed to become more and more distorted. But before the guards could seize him, he suddenly fell screaming to the floor, writhing in pain, and the next thing we saw, still haunts me in my nightmares: His body swelled up and finally exploded from the inside. I will spare you for the details.

Colonel Hauser, never in my long career have I seen anything like this. What exactly are these mysterious conditions, which affect humans in such a terrible way? Just what they might be or how we can avoid them escapes us completely at the moment. Our best scientists are at a complete loss as to what could be done and even I cannot come up with a good answer.

I therefore appeal to you, to request that further testing be postponed and that the future of this project is discussed thoroughly.

Sincerely yours
Peter Winston, UAC Chief Scientist”


I stared at the printout, reading it through again – this time a bit more carefully.
So, this is why none of the buddies ever returned I thought grimly, narrowing my eyes. In my mind I saw the unfortunate marine swell up like a balloon and ultimately exploding in a spray of blood, internal organs and limbs. I had been were my buddies had died long before the rest of us were sent to these damned moons.

Things became progressively clearer to me now, but there were still missing pieces to the puzzle.
Why hadn't I died when I went through the gateway? I had made it safely to Deimos, even though I had hallucinated about the monsters tearing out my own organs. But my buddies had died, going through the wormhole and this guy, who was mentioned in this printed mail, had died after arriving on Deimos.
And were did these horrid demon-looking creatures come from? I was getting more and more sure that there was a connection between the arrival of those horrors and the gateway incident in the letter, but which?

The only answer I could find was that the gateway had opened a rift into the monsters' own dimension and the bastards had somehow tampered with the gates so that they could go through themselves. The unfortunate test subjects must have ended up in the other dimension briefly, where the creatures killed them. But why was the last test subject insane when he arrived on this moon?
Something about that last incident made me think about former humans. Was there a connection?

I decided not to think too much of it now and instead move on.
I went out of the room and went up to a nearby door with blue sensors. Behind it was another red teleportation tile.
In a green flash of light, I found myself in yet another room with green marble walls and a group of brown aliens accompanied by a bull. I didn't allow them to last long.

I walked over to the bodies of my enemies, but stopped dead in my tracks and spun around as I heard a disgusting hissing sound behind me, like some big mutated snake. I was looking down a narrow hallway with a dead end. At the end wall and floating above the ground was the ugliest monstrosity I had yet seen.

It was basically a big floating head with one green, glassy eye and a huge mouth, filled with ugly, misshaped teeth. Its skin was composed of red, slimy, bulgy scales and several huge spikes protruded from the top of its body. It opened its monstrous mouth and I saw flashes of bluish electricity inside its horrendous jaw.
A ball of lightning flew out of its mouth and it was only, by sheer instinct that I managed to dodge it. I sent a single shotgun blast into its mouth and it let out a weird hissing sound as the pellets ripped into its scaly flesh.

I figured that the ugly one-eyed freak was solid, but the area was too narrow, for safe use of my rocket launcher, so I decided to try to kill it with my shotgun. I ran into view again and fired at the thing, just as it prepared to spew its lightning at me. The pellets hammered into its ugly, glassy green eye and a disgusting blue liquid squirted from its eye. The thing let out a hiss of pain and floated backwards. I could feel a great deal of static electricity around the thing. Standing behind cover, I fired around the corner and the thing let out another hiss, but a ball of lightning hammered into the wall with a sizzle, revealing that my shots hadn't enough paralyzing effect on the creature, but at least it was vulnerable to my attacks.
I fired a couple more shots at it.

To my relief, I noticed that my shots had an effect on the monstrosity, as a disgusting blue liquid flowed from ugly, big wounds in its slimy hide. I fired one more shot at it and the thing suddenly made a strange gurgling sound and crashed to the floor with a slimy thud.

****

"Sir, two APLP's are approaching the base"

The sudden radio message brought the Colonel out of his thoughts. What the...!? Where did those come from? He thought in disbelief. His thoughts went into a rapid pace. Some of his men must have found enough fuel for the return journey and escaped Phobos! "They are sure to demand an explanation why we didn't send an evac!" He thought doggedly.
He sent for Major Jefferson – his second-in-command on the Martian base and the only one Hauser had confided his plans with the aliens to.

-

The Major was a sly officer, whose decisions were usually sound. He was in his late forties, was always well shaven and had dark-brown hair, which was beginning to thin out. He greeted Hauser with a stiff military salute. Hauser returned the salute and began before Jefferson could utter his usual enquiry about how he could be of service.

"You're aware that survivors are returning from the Phobos moon. They could expose our plans, so I need your advice on this matter, Major"
The Major thought for a moment, standing with his right arm on his back and thoughtfully rubbing his left hand over his well shaved chin. Then he spoke in a low, chilling voice.
"My suggestion, Sir, is that we quarantine them, initially telling them that we fear that they have been exposed to doubtful conditions, before we find a way to silence them"

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 3

****

I stepped into a place filled with crates.
Ah, this place looks normal was my first thought as I looked around, happy to at least see something which looked like a modern man-made environment instead of that spooky occult surroundings I had seen in what was once the Deimos Research Facility. "This place" was the containment area of the Deimos base's Warehouse.
Hm, one could get lost here
The place was stacked with several crates of all sizes with the typical triangle-shaped UAC logo and other signs on them. It looked like a maze of crates. I could hear the brown freaks growl somewhere. There were quite a lot of them.
My HDD readout informed me that I didn't have too much ammunition.
Hopefully, this place contained storage for ammo as well, because I needed it.

I went over to a stack of crates and boxes and peeked around it to see one of the brown things standing next to the corpse of a marine.
So, at least one of the guys made it this far I thought, clutching my shotgun firmly.

The creature never knew what hit it.
Several aggressive growls, hisses and other guttural sounds echoed throughout the containment area in response to the roar of my shotgun, warning me that I got company ahead. I looked at the dead marine – it was Corporal O'Brien. The whole left side of his chest beneath the ruined, scorched armor was torn out, revealing his blood-covered ribs. His right leg was torn off above his knee. The bastard had toyed with him before it killed him off. I looked grimly at the body. The "Detective" was a good comrade; we could have become good friends if we had known each other longer. A few feet away lay his shotgun. I quickly emptied its clip and searched the body for more. Nothing. It was his last clip.

A growl made me turn around to see another of the brown "imps". It lifted its rough, clawed hand and hurled fire at me, but I quickly leapt aside, pumping a shell into its corpse, but the shot wasn't accurate enough and the thing staggered backwards with a howl, but survived. I whipped out one of my pistols and blew its brains out before it could come back at me.

Four more of them rounded the corner and I took them down one by one, dodging their attacks. As I blew the third away, the fourth creature leapt up next to me. I reacted quickly, and hammered the butt of my shotgun into its face and kicked it in the belly, before pumping the shotgun and blowing it away.

I looked down the Hallway, where the four "imps" had come from and saw more coming. My display told me that I had only 12 shells left including the remaining three shells in my current clip. I quickly looked around and saw a potential escape route through an opening in the wall of crates. Without hesitation I ran through the opening.

-

"What in the nine Hells...!?" I exclaimed with a hoarse whisper.
I had been able to shake off my pursuers and had just found the containment area's exit, leading out of the labyrinth of crates.
The walls of the hallways ahead of me consisted of green marble, like the marble walls I had seen at the Anomaly, but these weren't tiled. Seemed like this place actually had been affected by the creature's presence after all.
Behind me, I could hear the brown bastards growl. They were gaining on me!
I went into the green hallway, but after taking a few steps, a "bull" suddenly rounded a corner. It grunted as it saw me and its eyes began to glow yellow with Hellish rage. I spun around, intending to go back, but froze in my tracks as I saw one of the brown things approach me. It had apparently just snuck up behind me. I was trapped.
Behind me the "bull" charged and ahead of me I could see the brown thing prepare to throw a fireball at me. I hurled myself aside as the fireball flew past. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flaming ball collide with the pink monster's face in a cloud of flames. It roared with rage and to my surprise, I saw it leap on top of the brown freak, hurling it to the ground. The brown humanoid hissed in surprise and clawed the assaulting monster in its face. The pink horror reacted quickly. Its face snapped forward before its enemy on the floor could react, and dug its teeth into the brown chest, tearing out a large chunk of disgusting monster flesh. The wounded monster screeched in agony, but the next instant the "pinkie" bit its head off.

I pumped a shell into the "bull's" back, finishing it off, and ran past the corpses. I realized that I would only find ammo in the containment area, so I hurried back to the maze of crates, knowing full well that I might run into more critters.

-

I managed to break up a crate, with the words "Do not smoke" on it. I smiled broadly as I saw several ammo boxes containing shotgun shells inside the crate. I quickly grabbed as many clips as I could carry and started filling my half-empty clip with shells.
I had just slammed the full clip into the weapon when another "imp" came out of nowhere. I dodged its fireball and blew its head off, sending the head several meters through the air, before it landed on the floor and bounced a few extra feet. I activated my field map and marked this spot on the map electronically, so that I could remember the place when I needed more shells later. I also needed to find a crate containing bullets for the assault chain gun and clips for the pistol.

****

The camouflaged, army-green landing pods approached the hangar bay on Mars. A team of techs wearing environment suits was waiting with equipment to seal the doors on each pod as well as two transportation vehicles to move the pod to the sterilized disinfections chamber.

Major Jefferson stood in the watchtower, watching as the APLP landed on the landing platform and the team went up to it to seal the door. His mind was busy finding a method to dispose of the witnesses, but something else preoccupied his thoughts as well.
How did these troops manage to escape? There was no doubt that they had found fuel for the crafts on the Phobos base, but were any of them educated to perform a safe refueling procedure? It seemed that they had managed somehow.

He watched as the transportation vehicles lifted the two pods from the ground with their powerful cranes and drove off to their destination.

-

"WHAT? You can't get in contact with the people inside the pods?" Colonel Hauser bellowed into the phone in his hand.
"Sir, we've tried all means of communication, but there is no reply, I repeat, there is no..."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard you!" The Colonel replied irritably. "The personnel inside might be dead"
"Uhhh, that's a negative Sir, our sensors detect lots of movement in there, so they are definitely alive" came the reply. Hauser thought out loud for a moment. This was definitely getting weird.
"Can you see anything in the cockpit?"
"Negative Sir, the heat shield is still on, covering the cockpit windows"
"And you're saying the sensors pick up movement?"
"Lots of it Sir, it seems like they are eager as Hell to get out"
"All right, unseal the pod doors, but keep the disinfections chamber's door locked. Remember, they're under quarantine!"
"Acknowledged Sir!"
The Colonel signed off and sat down behind his desk. These people must be so crazed with fear that they forget standard landing procedures He thought to himself, scratching his head as usual.

*

Captain Pendleton hung up after his conversation with the Colonel. What a damn sourhead! he thought. He turned to the technicians with the laser torches. "All right, we've got go from the Colonel!" He told them.
The techs began to cut through the doorframe of the APLP, while the Captain watched with his shaded goggles on I wonder what the Colonel's up to he thought to himself while looking at the APLP. Those landing pods are insanely expensive and now we're ruining the door of two of 'em after having sealed it off first!
The Captain also found his orders strange. Why would they seal in those people in the first place?

The techs had almost cut through the door, when something heavy rammed against the door from the inside. The door shook.
Pendleton stared wide-eyed at the door. "Hold it!" He yelled, his voice trembling with fear.

The "something" rammed into the door again and this time the door piece fell with a loud metallic crash.
Pendleton gasped as did several of the technicians. "Mother of God!" one of the techs whispered. A terrifying creature filled the opening where the door had been. Its skin was a grayish pink, and the thing looked like a cross between a bull and a shaved gorilla. Its glassy, dark eyes looked around in the room, observing. Pendleton noticed several terrible shapes and even glowing eyes in the darkness behind the bull thing. The pink monster took a step into the light. It moved on its hind legs and it seemed frightfully powerful. Its eyes suddenly began to glow bright yellow.
It let out a deep growl.

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 4

****

The room I entered was dark. All lights, save one blinking light on my left, were out of order or turned off.
I had just arrived at the Deimos Labs facility after clearing out the Refinery beyond the Warehouse. The Refinery had provided another shock for me. Several of the walls there had been covered with a sticky, disgusting fleshy substance, which stank horribly of rot. I had also found walls of pure flesh and ceilings which appeared to be made of the same solid blood-like substance, which the teleporter tiles in the Deimos Anomaly had been made of. It had seemed that the whole construction of the building had been mutated and several devices had been either ruined or transformed. Several switches had turned into skull-shaped buttons.
I reconstructed the battles fought at the Refinery in my mind. There had been one particularly nasty surprise for me there.
I encountered yet another of these horrifying goat freaks that hurled goo shrouded in that green fire. It almost got the edge on me, because I wasn't expecting to encounter one of these bastards as I thought they were unique guardian creatures, but I prevailed and managed to exterminate it despite the shock. It had been surrounded by lesser monsters, and in a way, it seemed to command them. Did these demon-like aliens have an actual hierarchy?
At least now I knew that these things could be lurking within the bowels of the Deimos base and I was reminded that I might encounter more creatures, which I hadn't seen before as well as more of these horned nightmares on hooves.

Another disturbing find was the discovery of more candelabras. After having realized that the aliens where somehow infecting the base, mutating its interior, I wasn't surprised to find more candelabras like the ones in the Phobos Anomaly. What unsettled me was that an eerie, green fire glowed from some of these candelabras - like the fire shrouding the goo that the goat monsters used against me. This odd fire stank horribly of rot and decay and had none of the pleasant attributes of normal fire, like the ability to provide a cozy source of light, as the lighting emitted from this fire was spooky and unnerving.
There was something indescribably evil about this kind of fire.

I was beginning to become more and more convinced that those alien creatures were true demons from Hell, yet what were they doing here?
I remember that I retrieved useful info from the Phobos labs.
The Deimos labs might have some useful items for me to use.
Maybe I can a find a few nice presents here I thought, hoping that I might find the BFG 9K I had found written material about on Phobos.

Ahead, I saw another of these devilish teleportation pads and I stepped onto it without further deliberation.
I found myself in a gloomy hall with a thick, blocky pillar ahead of me. A few of the smaller creatures were standing next to the pillar. Regretting that I had been incautious and stepped through a teleporter without having my chain gun ready instead of the shotgun, I quickly took down the first former human I saw, while the brown "imps" charged at me, hurling fireballs. While I pumped the shotgun, another former human appeared into view. It raised its shotgun, but in the next instant one of the "imps" ran in the way, just as the grunt fired. I took a few pellets in the chest of my armor, but took no further damage even though it hurt a bit, while some of the pellets from the same shell ripped ugly holes in the "imp's" flesh. It howled angrily and turned its rage against its attacker.
Since my experience with the "Bull demon" and the "imp" in the Warehouse, I had learned to take advantage of pitting the monsters against each other – it worked wonders.

I could hear that several other monsters, including "bull demons", had become aware of my presence, as I heard sinister growls from a hallway on my left.

After disposing of all the monsters in the area, I took a closer look at the area. On the other side of the blocky pillar I saw a wrecked computer console. Behind the pillar was a lift. A sign read: "Lab XB98 - Special drugs"
I decided to check it out.

-

The walls in the room were covered in dirt – definitely not a typical clean lab. I saw a computer monitor on a desk. The monitor was miraculously still working and displayed text.
I walked towards it, wanting to read the info, but suddenly the wall ahead of me collapsed, revealing another of those weird, floating balls. I noticed some odd lights behind the cloud of dust that arose from the rubble – as if there were a few torches in the room, but I couldn't see it clearly and I was too occupied with the loathsome thing in front of me.

A ball of lightning flew out of its mouth but I easily dodged it.
I heard a terrifying, shrill cry and something fiery flew out of the dark room behind the floating head and hammered into the belly part of my armor. I felt a burning heat as well as the impact of the thing. I let out a suppressed grunt of pain and leapt behind cover as yet another ball of lightning flew at me. I heard the shrill cry again and the fiery thing flew right past me, but collided with the lightning ball, which made a flash of electricity upon impact. Now I saw what the fiery thing was.

At first it looked like a living cone of fire with a skull-like face within the flames, but then I noticed that there was a coal black skull amidst the flames, which appeared to be formed of solid ash or something like it. Two horns protruded from the sides of its head. I stared wide-eyed at the thing, wondering if it was possible to kill it. The thing suddenly spun around, facing the floating, bigmouthed head and suddenly, through some force unknown to me, flew straight at the head with great speed and hammered into the head.
The floating head made an aggressive hissing sound and sent a lightning ball into the fiery skull's face. The skull-thing was thrown backwards by the force of the lightning attack, screeching with pain.

Looks like it's vulnerable I thought to myself, slightly relieved and watched as the floating head spewed another glowing ball at the skull. The skull exploded in a flash of flame – I was glad that I wasn't standing any closer, because that might have hurt.
The area was too narrow for me to use the rocket launcher so I had to use the shotgun against the thing.
I fired a couple more shots at it before it died.
Another of these skull things flew into view. I immediately fired a shot right into its face, sending it backwards.
My clip was empty and I quickly reloaded it, while retreating.
I had just finished reloading, when the burning skull rounded the corner. The shotgun roared, giving a satisfying kickback and the burning thing exploded in a cloud of flames.

I went over to the computer screen.
The screen was showing weird symbols – apparently the static electricity, which had surrounded the floating one-eyed horror had messed up the computer, so I couldn't read a thing, but I saw a notification on my Heads Up Display that my helmet computer could download and restore some information from that computer. I clicked the "initiate" button on my helmet control pad - a small, flat item with buttons that allowed me to control the non-automatic computer functions in my helmet, and the helmet computer downloaded the info.

When my computer had recovered the info, readable text appeared on my faceplate. It was about a classified project. Not much info could be drawn from the text though – most of the text was gone and could not be recovered. The interesting part of the text read:

”...oject outcome: The experiments yielded a strange drug, which turned out to be a revolutionary healing drug. One injection tried on the subjects quickly regenerated all wounds and restored all health. Further info requires yellow security level and can be found on computer T354 in the testing room”

I briefly thought out loud, raising one of my eyebrows.
This could be something I might want to know more about

...

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Coopersville said:

By the two suns of Tatooine, who read all that?!

I'm not forcing people to read it all at once - I'm posting long posts consisting of four chapters (or parts) each in order not to post tonnes of smaller posts in this thread.

Nobody is saying that you have to read it all at once - read it in bits.

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The Shores of Hell – Part 5

-

The face looked insanely evil. The thing had horns protruding from the back of its head, pointing forward and its terrible eyes lay deep in its ugly, goat-like face. The eyes where dark holes with a small “bead” in each “hole”. I immediately recognized the thing pictured on the green marble wall. It was a goat “demon”, like the two I had fought near the gateway on Phobos.

“So this place has been screwed up by them as well” I mumbled under my breath. The sound of the wind, howling throughout the corridors unsettled me. I heard inhuman sounds in the distance and the typical humming of computer panels was gone. This place had begun to seem less like the Deimos Labs Facility it had seemed like just a minute ago.
I spitted on the wall with the picture of the goat thing’s face on it, holstered my shotgun and pulled out my rocket launcher, folding it out to its full size and raised it, pointing it at the wall, while stepping a few more feet away from it.
After my experience at the Phobos gate, I almost expected that this face would come alive. But nothing happened.

I had just found and cleared the Testing Lab. The room had been bigger than I expected and the place had been swarming with monsters. I had been quick to learn most of the creatures’ weaknesses – most of them were rather predictable, especially the ex-humans and the “bulls”. Unfortunately, the “goats” where less predictable as they were as intelligent as they were tough, so I had reasons to be especially careful if I encountered more of those. But the fiends on Phobos seemed to have been placed there as a kind of guardians, guarding the gateway to Deimos, so I expected that those creatures were posted only as “guards”, defending important things. The one I had encountered at the Refinery had been guarding the control area, so I had to be aware whenever I was looking for something important.

I looked around the corner next to the marble face and saw a door. I cautiously approached it. A small thought entered my mind. The marble face could have a certain meaning to it.
I pulled the handle and leapt back, gripping the launcher with both hands.

I was met with a horrific roar – one which I had heard before. A couple feet away from me stood one of those nightmarish goats.
Even though I had suspected the presence of this thing I was still surprised at how close it was to me. I reacted too late as the thing sent a glowing bolt of goo into my chest. It sizzled and a dark-green smoke arose from the scorched mark on my armor vest. I winced, gritting my teeth tightly as I felt an insane pain in my chest – this was far worse than getting burned by fire. The goo was apparently a sort of acid combined with a sort of fire which caused my flesh to slowly rot. I could feel a terrible stench of burnt flesh – my own flesh. I gasped in agony.
I was able to withstand the enormous pain and hobbled behind cover, dodging the bolts, which the monster hurled at me, and pumping two rockets into the minotauresque beast’s midsection. I could hear the fiend’s hooves against the blue, metallic floor as it drew closer to my position. It thought that I was too weak to fight back. It was wrong, for although the burned wound in the chest hurt a lot, I was trained to ignoring pain and I was indeed capable of ignoring the burning pain in my chest. Already being a very tough guy, my hatred towards the monstrosities was currently as strong as ever and seemed to increase my toughness or at least my will to resist the pain. I leapt to my feet and backed away as the clopping of hooves drew closer. I fired a rocket at the monster as it rounded the corner, its leg exploded in a flash of orange light and the leg disappeared in a cloud of green blood. It fell to the ground with a roar of pain and the floor shook as its heavy body landed.
I finished it off with three more rockets.
“Damn these things are solid!” I snarled, my face still distorted in pain. Now the fight was over, I noticed that I was bleeding out of my nose and mouth. Shit! I thought. I’ve got internal bleedings! I need one of those “miracle”-healing drugs now!

I went inside the room where the creature was residing before I disturbed it. A mangled body of a scientist hung on the wall next to a lift from a rusty chain. His feet had been torn off revealing the bones of the man’s lower legs. His guts had been torn out and were spread all over the floor near the body, his eyes had been perforated and the rest of his face torn to shreds. I gave the body a short look.
“The dead cannot be saved and are therefore not worthy of your attention” was what our drill instructor back home used to say. And we had seen a lot of mutilation before. I had once found the handiwork of a psycho mass murderer. The corpse had been stripped naked and hung upside down on a downward cross. Its tongue had been cut out and the man’s hands, feet and “unmentionables” had all been nailed to the cross with knives. We later got to kill that guy – he had been a totally maddened freak, obsessed with everything Satanic.
Luckily, I had a strong stomach and after seeing this horribly maltreated victim, I was rarely bothered by even the most heinously mutilated corpses I came to see later.

Seeing this body brought back the memories of that first encounter with the sickness of mad Satanism.

I found a yellow keycard beneath the mangled body and picked it up.
Not thinking clearly, I returned to the Testing Lab instead of investigating the building further in search of some sort of medical supplies.

In the lab I slipped the card into a slot next to the computer. I now got access to a lot of information. I skipped through it all until I found what I was looking for.

”The ZT09 drug is the most advanced healing drug, ever created. Test results showed an incredible healing rate. Subjects got fully healed after just one to three minutes.

ZT09 has yet another beneficial effect. It boosts the user’s strength, approximately by five times. Unfortunately, it has one potentially dangerous side effect: It makes the user extremely aggressive, giving the user a kind of “berserker rage”, which depending on the user’s personality could pose a serious threat to the safety of other personnel.
It is as of yet not determined exactly how long the boosting effect lasts, as it varies from time to time, but it seems to last from everything between 10 minutes to half an hour.

Current status: The military is extremely interested and we are working on the drug, trying to remove the ‘berserker rage’ effect. We have stored syringes with the drug in small, special black boxes, marked with a red cross and placed them at emergency stations throughout the base, because the enormous healing effect of the drug is deemed useful when serious accidents occur as most other medical means are not always sufficient.
...”


Interesting! I thought after reading the text. This could come in handy, when it comes to squashing these fiendfaces!
Realizing that the probability of finding any of my buddies alive was so small, I hoped that the ‘berserker rage’ effect was more likely to aid me rather than harm me as I was alone, surrounded by hostile creatures – creatures which seemed to have come from nightmares.
A surge of pain went through my body – a painful reminder that I needed medical treatment badly.

I searched the dimly lit testing lab a bit more carefully than last time.
Having found no ‘berserk packs’, medkits or stimpacks, I began to become desperate. It would seem that my buddies had taken all of the packs.
It occurred to me that some of the guards stationed at the Deimos base could have used all the ‘berserk’ injections when all Hell broke loose. I moved on, still with my eyes open for anything, especially black boxes, marked with a red cross.

I returned to the lift where I had found the keycard. I rode the lift to the next floor and proceeded down a hallway, which made bends all the time. I could hear an odd scraping sound and as I rounded a corner I saw what made the sound: Two heavy blocks where moving constantly up and down. They seemed to be the mutated remains of some sort of machinery, but what, I didn’t know. They would crush me if I weren’t careful. I pulled out my chain gun and checked it. I didn’t have too many bullets left for it, but it would be safest for me to have it ready, if something mean was waiting around the corner past the crushing ceilings. I slipped beneath the first block, just as it moved upwards, waited for the second one to touch the blood-spattered floor. I noticed the squished, meaty remains of an unidentifiable corpse under the second crusher. I rolled under the next one as it moved upwards and suddenly found myself face-to-face with a big, ugly, one-eyed face – one of those spiky, floating heads hovering inches above the floor. I gritted my teeth, feeling the burn in my chest sting, and pumped a swarm of caliber 5.56 into the thing’s mouth. I continued firing until it fell apart on the floor. I leapt around the corner, prepared to face more monsters, but the hallway was empty.
I proceeded cautiously and rounded yet another corner. I was greeted by a loud hiss and another “Cyclops floater” approached me. I noticed two burning skull things behind it.
I let the chain gun do the talking for me.
The big-mouthed monstrosity gurgled with pain as several rounds pounded into its slimy flesh, but suddenly my gun went silent apart from the metallic whirring sound of the gun’s spinning barrels. My ammo counter at the far left of my Heads Down Display showed a flashing red ‘0’. I had run out of bullets. I leapt aside as a ball of lightning flew at me. I felt a twinge in my chest and coughed up a bit more blood.
I didn’t want to go down without a fight, so I gritted my teeth, threw the empty chain gun aside on the floor and whipped out my shotgun.
The monster came into view and I fired, pumping a few shells into it before it died.
I finished off the two “screamers” as I had nicknamed the floating skulls. And moved on cautiously.

The floating terrors had been guarding a raised path, leading across a pool of toxic waste – I had already noticed before that the toxic waste in this facility was leaking.
The toxic levels were currently low, which was a good thing, as most of the building would probably have been flooded with toxic waste if the levels had been higher.

This place just didn’t look like a modern scientific facility – rather like some twisted, messed up deathtrap, which looked a bit like a human space station.
Across the pool was a raised plateau with the remnants of a closet. It had the symbol for biologic hazards stamped on it. Doubtless a closet holding an environment suit, or rather, had held an environment suit as the closet has been broken up. I looked down into the murky pool. Something down there caught my attention. Peering closer, I saw the body of a marine. He was lying on a small platform, which was just above the surface of the toxic goo. He was halfway inside an environment suit.
Apparently, he had tried to put it on, but hadn’t zipped up, before he met his fate – possibly killed by the one-eyed “pumpkin”. I jumped down onto the platform and pulled off the green environment suit.
After slipping into the suit, I investigated the corpse. I found a few bullets on him, but also something, which I hadn’t expected to find here.
A black box, with a red cross on it – a so-called ‘berserk’ pack!

Relieved from the realization that I had found something to treat my wound with, I opened the box and saw a black syringe resting inside a case, with a refrigerating device to keep it cooled down. I gave myself a quick injection without hesitation.

I was overwhelmed by a powerful sensation.
I felt the blood in my veins flow faster and I was shaking violently, yet the feeling wasn’t unpleasant. I felt stronger. A lot stronger. I felt enormously refreshed too, not feeling so tired anymore.
I also felt an anger I had never before felt and my mind was filled with thoughts of Death and Destruction.

I wanted to kill. Kill like I had never been lusting for before. Despite the uncontrollable bloodlust which I felt, I was also able to think clearly, especially because now where the sharp pain in my chest had left my body. I felt as if I hadn’t even been touched, but when I looked down, I could still see the scorched mark on my combat vest. My Heads Down display also stated that my armor had been damaged. But the vest was still useful.

Feeling stronger than ever before, I waded through the slime and went down a flooded hallway.
I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. I noticed something blurry move a distance ahead of me. A spectre!
I moved closer to it, but it didn’t seem to move in my direction. It was rather moving away from me.
I pursued the thing until the hallway ended in a larger pool with an island in the middle. I found myself in a familiar looking place – the area near the Testing Lab, where I had found info on the ‘berserk’ drug. This place was flooded with slime as well. I had only just been able to leap over to the “island” in the middle of the toxic waste pool without getting hurt, when I went past this place last time.
I heard a sound to my left and turned quickly. I saw a burly, transparent, shadowy shape just in front of me, rushing right at me.
My reaction came immediately and I hurled my left fist with the knuckle-duster at it, without thinking.
My fist hammered right through its skin with enormous force. I heard the sound of a skull breaking. The monster fell backwards into the pool. It was dead, killed by one single punch. This was where I realized that I had just found a tremendously effective weapon against both spectres and “pinky bulls”.
I heard several inhuman screams around me. I recognized the sounds of spectres and “pinkys” and they came from all around me.
I waited calmly for them to attack.

****

Hauser ran down the hallway. The interior of the hallway was lit by rows of flashing, red warning lights beneath the dark gray ceiling.
The Colonel was terrified. Never in his life had he been so frightened. Seeing the monsters mutilate his troops far away on the monitor was one thing, knowing that they were inside the same base as oneself was an entirely different experience.

He had seen on his monitor how the monsters had rushed out of the landing pod and slaughtered anyone in sight. The more animal-like horrors were followed by reanimated humans. Hauser had seen a few former humans leap out of the cockpits of the two APLPs and join the bloody frenzy.

The Colonel had clearly underestimated these monsters. They used the former humans to operate human machinery and use the technology against humans. The former humans had piloted the APLPs and brought the monstrosities to the Mars base to wreak havoc.

The only thing he could think of right now was to run. His heart pounded like mad and he was sweating. He could hear the screams of the dying people and the roaring of the aliens behind him.
His feet made a rhythmical, metallic click-clack sound on the grooved metal floor and he breathed rapidly.

This can’t be happening! his voice screamed inside his head, while running down the corridors. Oh God what have we done, what have we done!

He suddenly stopped. He was exhausted from running. He hadn’t been running this fast since he was a young soldier and the physical exertion had worn him down completely. A thought entered his mind.
The emergency shuttle..!
He needed to get to the emergency shuttle. Unfortunately, that meant that he had to head back to the place where the monsters were, but he didn’t have much of a choice. He let out a heavy sigh and tried to steel himself as best as he could. He turned around and headed back from where he came, trying in vain to gather his shredded courage.

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 6

****

I sat down on the wooden floor and took a break.
The floor was made up of several dark brown and light brown squares, making the floor look like a wooden chessboard. The walls surrounding this room were all covered with the same odd growth of sticky, fleshy substance, which I had seen at the Deimos Refinery, and at the far end of the room was a small wooden door with a skull carved on it. I had seen lots of such skulls recently – several buttons had apparently been transformed into skull buttons. In front of the skull door was a big marble block with “goat” faces on them.
I had just killed off two of those “goats”, so my theory about these “goat” pictograms showing that the nearby place was “ruled” by these things seemed quite plausible.
Six steel spears placed in two parallel rows of three ran next to me. Each of them had an impaled head on them. The heads’ lifeless eyes had borne silent witness to the battle against a large amount of monsters I had just fought here. Now my enemies lay scattered around me on the floor.

I had cleared the Deimos Command Center, having avoided what had probably been the Main Control Room, until I had cleared off all the monsters in the other rooms. Now I felt that I needed a break. But I actually spent my break thinking about the whole situation and about what I had learnt so far.

The more I looked at the corpses of these things and at the unnatural surroundings, the more I felt that the monsters were truly demons from Hell.
I found it strange that most of the buildings on Deimos had been affected by some sort of mutational process and so far, the Command Center was the most affected building I had visited yet. It didn’t look like a base anymore at all. It looked like a place from a sick person’s nightmare and it affected me too. I had found a strange marble pedestal with a bloody heart resting on it. The scary thing was that the heart was still beating! I had also found mutilated corpses hanging from rusty chains or impaled on rusty steel pikes which still moved as if they were alive. Upon inspection, it turned out that they were as dead as they could possibly be, but it seemed as if the soul or whatever life force keeps us alive was still trapped in the body somehow. This discovery unnerved me more than anything else I had yet encountered. I wasn’t really religious, but these discoveries suggested the actual existence of a soul and a Hellish influence which could trap the human soul to its body regardless of the state of the body.

There was also the issue about Deimos’ strange red sky. Deimos’ atmosphere was similar to that of Phobos’ and the sky on Phobos hadn’t been red. It gave the place a very hellish atmosphere.

It seemed as if I was going deeper and deeper into Hell and the situation was going from bad to absolutely horrible.

But I had killed scores of these horrific “demons” and the knowledge that I alone was a danger to them actually heightened my morale, despite the pretty grim picture that was being drawn. My fears for these monsters were slowly but steadily fading, yet it wouldn’t go away completely.
Demons or not I thought doggedly. Nobody kills my buddies and gets away with it! Not even demons from Hell itself!
“Not even demons from Hell itself..” I said aloud, a small smile appearing on my face. The boldly spoken words helped me overcome the beginning tiredness and I really felt like nothing could ever stop me.

I got up and began to plunder the corpses of dead former humans. I found a few corpses of human marines too – this place had definitely been another major battle zone even before I came here.
One of the marines had had his head torn off, doubtless by one of the goats, but his armor was undamaged. I stopped and looked down my own combat vest.
The chest part of the vest was eaten away by the flaming goo which the “goat” at the Deimos Labs Facility had hit me with, it was scorched on the lower left part of it where a fireball had hit me and I had taken a few hits from former human gunfire too as was evident by the bullet marks in the plating.
It wouldn’t be of much use anymore, so I tore off the remains of my vest and relieved the headless corpse of its armor. The armor vest adjusted itself to my size and after putting it on, I felt strangely better – almost invincible.
I also found a backpack with some ammo and a medkit. I had recently been wounded by a fireball and a single bullet had penetrated my armor in my side, but luckily, the vest had taken most of the kinetic energy, so it was just a flesh wound – It could have been far worse. I put the contents of the medical pack to good use – it contained a few painkillers like in the smaller stimpacks as well as some more effective drugs. These worked similarly to the “berserk” drug I had tried earlier, but nowhere near as effective.
After giving myself some different injections and swallowing a few pills I felt almost like a new man.
The backpack contained some energy cell battery packs. I looked at the plasma rifle in my hands. I had found it on the floor during the battle, when these two huge “goats” suddenly broke through the ceiling and attacked me. In the heat of the battle I hadn’t noticed the perforated corpse lying next to the weapon, but now the room was cleared I had time to carefully inspect every single corpse. I went over to the dead marine who was the former owner of the plasma gun and searched him for more cell charges, which he had only a few left of, but my plasma weapon contained several energy cell units and the few charges were enough to fully charge the gun.

The plasma rifle was a state-of-the-art weapon; one of the newest infantry weapons in the military. It was a compact, black gun, with a brown coating around the middle of its strange, box-shaped barrel. It was the first weapon to use concentrated energy as means of destroying targets and it marked a revolution in weapons technology. The energy cell batteries, which were small black boxes with a glowing, green energy readout on its sides, were usually contained in larger packs with five batteries in each. These batteries were designed to store, maintain and charge a special, concentrated type of plasma energy into plasma weapons like the plasma rifle. The plasma energy itself, though less destructive than the plasma in the sun and completely stable unlike the Sun’s, was effective against everything from regular troops to highly armored vehicles.
The gun was capable of emitting hot plasma pulses at a quite high rate of fire, an estimated cyclical rate of fire of approximately 1100 pulses per minute and the pulses could fry most things as well as cause short-circuits in machinery. Armor was as good as useless against this weapon and I had already seen that it was highly effective against monsters with hard skin too as it had made my battle against the “goat-demons” much easier.
Another great thing about this gun was that unlike regular machinegun weapons, it was easy to keep the flow of firepower steady as the recoil wasn’t as bad as with projectile-based weapons and the recoil also didn’t push the gun upwards, only backwards, so it was possible to just continue pumping cells into the target without having to use burst fire.

The only problem was that I had no room for my newly acquired weapon, so I decided to leave my chain gun behind because I had nearly run out of 5.56 bullets.

After having checked whether I had forgotten anything of importance, I resumed my search for a way out of this hellhole, while being on my guard. I knew that these creatures were never at one spot at a time. They were constantly on the move, roaming around inside the base, searching for their prey, and a few of the bastards could just as well have escaped my initial sweep.

****

“Oh shit!” Hauser whispered under his breath as he dropped back behind a metallic wall. A small group of brown creatures with spikes and sharp claws were searching the area – doubtlessly looking for something to satisfy their lust for blood with.

He had reached the upper levels of the Martian Base H.Q. and was rather close to the nearest emergency shuttle. The frightened Colonel carefully peeked around the doorframe, but quickly pulled his head back as he saw a monster look in his direction. He was shaking uncontrollably.
He prayed to God that it hadn’t seen him and slowly slid further and further into the shadowy corner of the hallway where he was hiding. A menacing sound suddenly made him freeze in his tracks.

It was the sound of claws clattering rhythmically on the metal grated floor and it was drawing nearer to the door through which the huddling Colonel had just looking into the room with the brown things...

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 7

****

A lot of soldiers had been killed here.

My helmet computer had been unable to identify the installation – it didn’t even call the place a “Deimos Anomaly” like the morphed building with the gateway. It simply read: “Cannot identify structure” – just like it did at the mysterious structure after the Command Center.

This place did resemble a base in many areas, but the elevator from the monorail station was literally missing when I had approached it. There had only been a skull button on the rocky wall in front of me and the ground I was treading on was covered in small, white stones. When I pressed the skull button, I felt the ground rise below my feet and I wounded up in a rocky cave with wooden pillars with skulls carved on their sides.
But some of the other rooms looked like every other man-made installation.

I had just returned to the cave I had first been inside after riding the elevator. I had slaughtered lots of monsters already, but when I looked at my automap, it indicated that the installation was larger and that I had only cleared about half of the building. Even though the map only recorded the areas I had visited, it still gave a good outline of the building and from the looks of it, it would seem that there were many other areas to secure.
I entered a cave, which suddenly turned out to be a typical space station hallway ending in a small room with blue carpet. The room led into another darkened hallway, which had skulls on the walls.

A loud hiss echoed through the hallway as another floating one-eyed “ball” spotted me. I leapt back into cover, whipped out my rocket launcher, jumped back into the floating horror’s view and fired three rockets at it. Two rockets would have been sufficient as the monster already died after the second. The last rocket tore the monster’s already ruined body apart, sending chunks of scaly flesh all over the place and splattered blue blood on the walls.

I ran down the corridor, rounded a corner and found myself in a much larger hallway, filled with brown, spiky creatures. A deep roar in the distance told me that another of these goat “demons” resided here and I could make out its tall shape in the distance.
I began to kill away at the small brown monstrosities, blasting small crowds away with the rocket launcher and then shifting to the shotgun, when they came too close.

The huge goat man came at me fast. The ground shook beneath its hooves with every step. I blew away the last spike creature and retreated into the smaller hallway, quickly shifting to the plasma rifle.

The huge goliath entered the hallway. It was so large that it had to bend over to be in the hallway, seriously hampering its movement. It was a sitting duck and it didn’t realize its mistake until it was far too late. I didn’t give it a chance and its body soon lay crushed on the filthy floor.

I didn’t waste my time, but kept moving, running through the large hallway. The anticipation of soon having conquered Deimos raised my morale and made me eager to get moving, despite the fact that I had become seriously tired.

-

It was an ordinary human made switch with a red button. I looked around with my plasma rifle at the ready, only to confirm that there was no opposition left.
I was in one of the rooms of this bizarre building, which looked like the interior of a human base facility. There was a pool of radioactive waste, separating me from the door to the exit. Luckily, I had found a radiation-shielding suit. Without it, I would have been as good as dead by now. The monsters seemed to be immune to radiation, which I found really odd. But then again, humanoid creatures, which could conjure up balls of flame didn’t make a whole lot of sense either.
I better not get any holes in this outfit I thought to myself. One tiny hole would be fatal and spell certain doom for me, so I was probably tenser than I had been up to now.

I fist-hammered the switch, but to my surprise, the whole wall slid up with a horrible metallic screech, revealing yet another button in front of me. An angry hiss sounded behind me and I leapt aside and spun around in mid-air, with my plasma gun raised. A hidden doorway had opened, revealing a room filled with hellish flames and out of the flames floated a hideous shape – a red “bigmouth”.
My reaction had saved me as a ball of electricity scorched the button which had been hidden behind the first switch. I could feel the chaotic forces which allowed the abomination to float as a sort of unpleasant breeze.

My plasma rifle responded with a spray of burning hot death and the white-blue plasma burned into the flesh of the floating terror, melting it’s slimy scales and sending the thing backwards into the fiery room where it came from. It didn’t last long and it soon fell apart. I heard the distorted, gurgling sound of the dying creature as I saw its shape fall in like a tomato being squashed.

I stood for a moment, staring into the red, hellish fire – almost expecting the thing to be spawned again, but when nothing happened, I pressed the other switch and was glad to see that this one raised a footpath across the pool, leading to the exit.
As I stepped onto the path, I discovered that it was seemingly made out of bones – human bones. I stopped right in front of the door and gave the fiery room with the dead “bigmouth” one more glance. This place is turning into Hell! a tiny voice screamed in my mind. Impossible! I tried to tell the voice, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this base was indeed going straight to Hell.

I suddenly felt how sore my limbs really were. Hours of battle and only little time to rest. I had been on the move almost constantly – most other people would have given up by now. I promised myself that I would take a few hours of sleep once I had cleared Deimos of aliens or whatever they were, before I would go out and try and find means for radioing Mars H.Q.

As I expected, there was a switch inside a tiny room behind the door. I raised my hand to press the button.
I hope this button will lead me to the way out and not deeper into the shit

The result came faster than anticipated. I loud, sizzling noise reached my ears and I felt as if I was falling, not downward, but as if I was moving through the air at an unimaginable speed. My whole body went strangely numb and I couldn’t feel my arms, legs or any other body part. I recognized the feeling. It was the side effects of traveling through a teleportation device – but with all the other teleportational devices, the journey had been almost non-existent and had instantaneously brought me to the destination, but this was like a slow-motion teleportation experience. I had only experienced something remotely like it once before – when I stepped through the interstellar gateway between Phobos and Deimos. Only this wasn’t as nightmarish an experience and there were no hallucinations of any kind.

The last thing I thought before my vision briefly blotted out was: What the..? A hidden teleporter?

My vision quickly returned and I realized that I had arrived at my destination. The hidden teleporter must have been an advanced one, capable of transporting entities over longer distances. As I came fully back to my senses, I raised my head and suddenly woke up of my dizziness completely.

Oh shit! What is this place???

...

The Shores of Hell – Part 8

-

This scene caught me totally off guard.

I found myself materialized inside a small room with slime-covered marble walls, surrounded by grim decorations – dead goatmen hanging on the walls. There were four corpses on the walls surrounding me. Each of them had had their belly torn out and a huge slimy, green wound could be seen where their belly had been. What caught my attention in particular were the scratches in their skin, which clearly had been made by something even bigger than those goatmen. A chill went down my spine.
What could be powerful enough to kill four goat freaks like that? Cold sweat broke out on my forehead.

My fears returned. I fought I silent battle to control my fears and wild pulse.

At the center of the small room was a short, gray metal pillar. There were four red buttons on each side of the pillar. I could see that those were once man-made, but they were currently in an infected state. I pressed one of the buttons and I heard a scraping sound behind me. I spun around fast as lightning. A small staircase to one of the walls with a dead goatman had been raised as well as the wall itself, revealing a passage to another room.

It was probably best not to press the other buttons as I didn’t want to risk being surrounded by whatever was waiting on the other side of the walls, so I stepped into the room, looking around cautiously. Straight ahead was an opening leading out to a large courtyard.
I noticed a heavy grunting sound, but I couldn’t place it, because it made echoes. I heard a deep snort and then silence. I peeked out into the courtyard and saw a group of those floating skulls. Looking to the other side, I found a similar group of fire skulls.
I noticed several pillars in the courtyard and I realized that the courtyard probably surrounded the building, from where I came from.
My Heads Down Display informed me that my plasma rifle was almost fully charged, which comforted me as I knew that I would be well equipped to deal with whatever terror was inhabiting this tower.

I leapt out of hiding an let loose a stream of burning hot plasma, evaporating a few of the skulls.

A deep otherworldly roar, echoed out from somewhere in the courtyard. The hoarse roar made my blood freeze in my veins. It sounded as if the roar came from everywhere at once.

I dropped down behind the pillar. My breathing was beginning to be difficult to control. I felt my heart pounding like never before and the sweat of fear ran down my face.
The sanded ground beneath me began to shake rhythmically and I realized that something big and nasty was heading my way and that the weight of the thing made the ground itself tremble beneath its feet. I could also hear it now – a rhythmic clomp-clomp sound of heavy feet, almost like marching soldiers, except that there was only one thing making the sound and that it was very heavy.

I clenched my teeth and leapt to my feet as I could feel the thing close in on me. I leapt out of hiding with a loud battle cry.
I froze in my tracks.

Moving steadily towards me and towering several meters above the ground was a huge, slightly goat-like monster – the biggest thing I had yet encountered. It had two horns protruding from the sides of its massive head; they both curved forward and looked very sharp.

It had a hole in its stomach through which I could see a mess of wires and intestines. Its skin looked as if the monstrosity was shaped out of rock – even though its skin color was the same as that of a human. Its left leg was substituted with a mechanical steel leg, complete with a solid-looking metal hoof. The creature was incredibly muscular – as if it was carved out of pure muscles.

The thing stopped a few feet away from me and raised its right arm – or rather the mechanical crane, which was supposed to be its right arm. I saw what looked like some sort of big metal box with a barrel fused to its robotic crane-arm pointing straight at me.

This was the moment where I reacted. I ran out of the way, just as the ground exploded where I had just been standing. I felt the force of the explosion behind me. One blast would definitely kill me.
I hid behind yet another pillar, trying to settle my insane heartbeat and myself. I looked at my plasma rifle. Since this thing was cybernetic, there might be a chance that plasma energy could cripple the thing easily, as it could mess up the internal circuit of the monster’s robotic parts. Disabling mechanical machinery was the kind of stuff that plasma weapons were extremely capable of.

I ran out of hiding, spraying plasma pulses at the approaching cyber-monster. The hot plasma sizzled and exploded on the creature’s enormous chest with bright flashes.
The monster growled with a deep rumbling sound and opened fire. Three rockets shot out of the cyborg’s “gun hand” and flew straight at me.
A rocket launcher! I thought as I leapt away. That damn thing has a friggin’ rocket launcher and it’s able to use it!
To my disappointment, my weapon had had little effect on the creature. A deep, annoyed growl from the creature had been the only result of my attack.
I could hear it approach my position. I rushed out of my hiding spot pumping energy cells into its open belly, while I ran in between its legs. The thing roared angrily, and fired explosive rockets in all directions, but it was too confused to fire in the direction where I actually was. I rounded a big marble block, one of the corners of the “elevator” building, with marble pictures of a big goat-like face, different from the smaller, yet still big goatmen, which I had already seen marble face pictures of.
Orange flowers of destruction erupted behind me as I threw myself behind the block.

I had hoped that shooting at the exposed mess of wires and intestines had yielded some results, but those wires were apparently protected against plasma somehow and that horror’s own intestines were seemingly made of something extremely solid. Also, the skin had to be very strong if it could withstand so much burning plasma. Then it dawned upon me that the monster might as well be magically protected, as I knew that only few materials could withstand several hot plasma pulses for this long.

A chilling screech behind me made me turn around and pull the trigger of the plasma gun. Another “screecher” evaporated a few feet away from me. “Damn, these annoying things are here to make life a bitch for me too!” I swore out of the side of my mouth. I had forgotten that I had already encountered a few of those ghostly skulls here and that more of them might be around.

And indeed more of them were around, as I saw a small group of them approach from a doorway in the building. I ran towards the door, while blasting the skulls to oblivion.

Inside the room I saw the ruined remains of a marine. Moving closer, I recognized the marine as Moore. Her legs had been blown off, doubtless by the cybernetic terror outside, and she wore a terrible expression of fear and agony on her lifeless face. I found her rocket launcher loaded with a few rockets a few feet away from her and some more ammunition for the weapon on her corpse.

I had just equipped myself with Moore’s rockets when I heard the heavy ‘marching’ of the “cyberdemon” drawing closer to my position. I made a run for the nearest pillar outside the building.

I had almost reached the pillar when an explosion rocked the pillar and tore out a huge chunk of marble rock. The marble piece fell down and almost landed on top of me, but my instincts reacted before I even thought about dodging and made me throw myself aside. The force of the heavy marble piece pulled my legs away beneath me and the plasma rifle left my hand. I saw as the weapon flew in a shallow arch before landing a good distance away from me with a metallic clatter.

Looking up, I saw the huge monstrosity towering above me. It stopped. I rolled behind the pillar and onto my feet, stumbling as my equipment made it difficult to perform a proper roll, and only just avoided the explosion of the rocket that the cyborg creature fired at the ground. However, the force of the explosion sent me to the ground again. Luckily, my armor vest kept me safe and the blast didn’t send me into view of the gargantuan beast.
Leaping back behind cover, I quickly prepped the rocket launcher, launched a few rockets at the terrible goliath and ran for the next pillar.

I stepped into view, launched three rockets into its ugly mug and moved out of the way. My last attack had blinded it briefly and it hadn’t seen me run past it and drop down behind a pillar behind it. Peeking around the marble pillar, I noticed how it looked around with its evil, burning eyes. Searching. Trying not to make a sound, I waited until it had turned its back on me. I noticed how the monster opened and closed its enormous, clawed right hand. Its claws were a disgusting poison-green color and seemed razor sharp. It growled with a deep rumble, which I felt rather than heard. It swept the area with its burning gaze again. Then it roared in frustration. A terrible sound from another world, which made the ground quake beneath me.

When nothing happened, it turned its back on me. I leapt out of hiding and sent as many rockets into its back as I could before it turned. It roared with pain as several explosions scorched its back and it turned around.
Aiming at the hole in its stomach, I constantly pumped rockets into the thing, while running right past it, avoiding the rockets which it sent at me. I ran across the courtyard, zigzagging between the pillars and rounded another marble face block.
I heard an inconsistency in the otherwise rhythmic sound of its marching hooves and as I peeked around the corner, I noticed a few blue sparks from the hole in its stomach.
I smiled broadly as I realized that the thing was badly damaged as I couldn’t help noticing that it was limping and that it bled from several open wounds.

I stepped back and waited for the monster to round the corner. A few of its rockets hit the ground at the corner and exploded in fiery flashes. The monster apparently tried to clear out the ambush, but thankfully, I was several feet away from the explosions.

As the “cyberdemon” stepped around the corner, it was immediately met with explosive rockets. I aimed at its belly, because that was clearly its weak spot. It roared in pain and frustration and sent a few missiles at me to no avail. I had learned its weaknesses and had taken over the fight. Hit-and-run tactics seemed to work on this beast. Unfortunately, I had just run out of rockets, so putting some distance between me and the gigantic thing was probably the smartest move now.

-

Having run away from the creature, I managed to get to my plasma gun again and quickly picked it up. I was glad to see that the gun hadn’t been damaged. I could hear the monster's marching hooves, but couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from.

The thing suddenly rounded the corner a few feet behind me. Getting a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, I spun around and pumped energy cells into its belly, when the monster suddenly let out a deep, agonizing roar. Before I realized that I had won, the monster disappeared in a flash of several small explosions. Its body shriveled up, and metallic pieces were strewn everywhere. I threw myself to the ground, trying to avoid the flying metal.

All went silent.
I raised my head and saw that all there was left of the once horrific monster was now just a bloodstained hoof and a pool of stinking red blood.
I had done it.

I slowly rose to my feet and looked at the remains with satisfaction.
“Have a nice trip to Hell, freak!” I said aloud.

I put down my weapons, except the plasma rifle, which I kept on my back, and mounted the tower’s “elevator” building. There were lots of cracks in the wall so it wasn’t too difficult. When I reached the top, I stood up and looked around.

“No…” I whispered.
“This isn’t true!” I cried in despair. “This can’t be happening, this must just not be happening. This place doesn’t exist!”

I could see what lay below Deimos from where I stood and what I saw was immensely terrifying. A whole plane of torment. I saw blood-red smoke rise from several enormous cracks in the unbelievably unfriendly landscape of sharp, spiked rocks hundreds of meters below Deimos. Several mountains were carved out and shaped like skulls and I noticed whole seas of burning rock and fire or of a red liquid which looked like blood. What I was looking at was indescribably terrifying and evil.
No human had ever seen this horrific sight and returned alive to tell about it, but I instantly knew what this forsaken place was. The sight was enough to instantly strip me of my courage. No human soul had ever escaped from this place…at least not that I had heard of.

I was looking at Hell itself.

...

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Inferno – Part 1

-

I woke up with a gasp. Was it all just a horrible dream?
Looking around, I realized that unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream. I saw the remnants of the “cyberdemon” a few feet away from me.

The time unit in my helmet’s Heads Up Display informed me that I had slept for six hours since I saw the awful truth about Deimos’ whereabouts. The sight of Hell had ruined all hope for me. I was doomed. I would never return to my beloved Earth and ahead of me lay nothing but torment and evil.

After having climbed down from the roof of the tower’s central building, I had simply collapsed on the floor. Having realized that I was beyond salvation, I had suddenly felt how insanely tired I actually was, having battled terrifying monsters, which turned out to be nothing less than demons from Hell. I had fought for hours without getting any sleep. My body was sore from all the fighting and I felt dull.
And all the fighting had been in vain.

According to my time unit, I had been fighting almost non-stop for approximately 30 hours. It was now 36 hours since I leapt into the fray. I was thirsty. Horribly thirsty. I pulled out my drinking bottle and drank half of it.
I felt stronger now, but I realized that I was as good as dead.

“Oh God” I muttered. ”The damn bastards opened a gate to Hell! Hell of all places!”

I suddenly remembered the philosophical question I always asked myself before being sent on a mission. “Is there Life after Death?”.
I nodded slowly to myself as an answer to my own question.
The sight of Hell had been undescribable, but I knew the instant I saw it that it was truly Hell and I knew now that a kind of Life after Death did indeed exist. Unfortunately.

Since Hell had proven to be real, there was a kind of Life of eternal suffering after one died. I still didn’t know whether there was a Heaven, where good people would go when they died, but Heaven was also the least thing, which was likely to enter my mind now.
I suddenly saw all the faces of my fallen comrades before me and the feeling of hopelessness was substituted with a burning rage, which completely overshadowed my fears.

I gritted my teeth with a sudden feel of determination. I was not a helpless damned soul, for the demons to play around with. I was an elite marine with weapons to vent my grievances on the critters with! And I was still alive and more determined than ever to stay that way.
I didn’t plan to give up my soul this easily. I also realized now that my battle with the demons hadn’t been in vain after all, as I had shut down the gateways, preventing the hellspawn from entering my own dimension and do more damage. I was trapped here, but that presented an opportunity to wreak havoc in Hell and give the infernal demons a little payback - something I had always wanted. I promised myself that I would make the bastards sorry they ever heard of me.

I suddenly felt my morale rise and smiled evilly.
My enemies were responsible for everything bad in my world, so now I could bring down blood-dripping justice onto the true evil, making those bastards get a taste of the evil they caused in my world. I picked up my weapons and began to explore the now empty tower. I found a hole in the floor, which hadn't been there before and noticed a spiraling staircase leading downward.

It’s time to hunt some demons! I told myself in my mind and went down the stairs.

-

The staircase led to a small, fiery room. At the center of the room was a large, hellish teleportation pad composed of a blood red marble tile with a pentagram carved in it. Stepping onto it and felt a horrible rushing feel in my gut.
A flash of green light and suddenly, I found myself in a strange hole. The walls appeared to be of large intestines and an evil eye in front of me stared lifelessly out in the air in front of it.

It was insanely hot down here. I decided to swallow yet another climate adaptor as my first one wasn’t strong enough to withstand the enormous heat. I felt better after swallowing it, but now I noticed the horrible sounds.
I could hear millions of wailing, screaming, howling voices, begging for mercy – the voices of the damned.
I realized that I could only hear them in my mind. It was the spiritual echoes of the tortured souls. It was very difficult to ignore the wails in my head and in addition, one other feeling returned stronger than ever before. Fear.

I didn’t know why exactly I felt so terrified, but the mere atmosphere was enough to frighten me. I realized that Hell apparently had an effect on me and was able to make me fear, despite my previous encounters and experience. Any man or woman, no matter how “fearless” the person was, would apparently feel this sense of dread in Hell.
Then I began to think of my buddies again, on all the evil that plagued my home world and on how I would gladly mutilate every demon in sight to get my revenge.

My hatred ultimately prevailed and my fears gave way to my growing lust for demon blood. I went closer to the disgusting eye and punched it hard with a wet thud. The eye closed and to my surprise, the disgusting, squishy floor beneath my feet began to rise.
A button? I thought casually. Now I was in Hell, everything seemed possible and little would surprise me anymore.

The floor stopped rising and I found myself in a large courtyard with the disgusting intestine floor and several scattered, dead trees, or rather what appeared to be trees.
Three brown monsters stood around me – fireball hurling things. They hissed at me, but my reflexes weren’t dulled, despite the insane babbling of damned souls in my head, and I blew off the nearest monster’s head with my shotgun, dodged the two fireballs, which were thrown at me from two opposite directions and took down the two other monsters one after the other.

I could feel insanity slowly clawing its way into my mind.
“Well now, my sleepin’ beauties” I grinned after my last kill. “As you are the weakest demons in Hell, I think I’ll call you Imps!” I kicked one of the “Imp” corpses in its side, then turned my attention to the fortress-like building ahead of me. It was made of red marble bricks and the entrance was a wooden door of a kind, I had already seen at the Deimos Command Center.

****

Andrews felt more dead than alive.

He was horribly tired and alone too. He had seen his buddies die one by one and now he was the only one left and what was far, far worse was that he was in Hell – the real Hell. The voices were driving him insane. He could literally feel his own sanity slip away while he tried to concentrate on his surroundings.

He didn’t want to look at the surroundings, but he had to – wherever he looked there was nothing but horribly mutilated bodies hanging from the walls and ceilings. Andrews had already lost whatever he had eaten before the landing on Phobos, because of the terrifying sights. An unholy wind howled through the bloodstained, marble green corridors, sounding like the moaning of the damned. Andrews was exhausted with the many horrible sights he had seen, sights more horrible than anything he had ever seen on Earth.

He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. As tired as he was, he was so much more frightened. Ever since he arrived on this cursed plane of existence, he had felt a paralyzing dread. It was a miracle that he had been able to keep fighting, but he knew that he wouldn’t last much longer.

Driven half insane by fear, fatigue and the horrible cries of pain and pleas for mercy in his mind, Andrews wandered aimlessly around in the terrifying labyrinth of horrors, while clutching a large, black, handheld gun in his weakened arms. The weapon looked highly advanced with several technical gadgets on it and the gun was very big, the biggest weapon Andrews had ever used.

He couldn’t take the never-ending babbling of souls in his head anymore.

“SHUT UP!” he screamed. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

As if it was a reply to his screams, several animalistic growls and roars echoed throughout the distant corridors of this nightmarish building.
“No, no, leave me alone” he whispered weakly as he heard the frightening sounds draw nearer. He backed away, then turned around and ran.

He could hear the monsters behind him. They were gaining. Andrews panted. He was so tired and he would soon collapse.
He headed down a wide, gloomy hallway and looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see them yet, but he knew that they would soon come out of nowhere.

Andrews almost crashed into the wall in front of him. He had run into a dead end.
He spun around. The inhuman sounds draw closer. Lots of yellow eyes suddenly glowed through the darkness in front of him. He lifted his gun and pointed the monstrous weapon at the approaching eyes, gritting his teeth.

He pulled the trigger and the gun started to vibrate, while making an increasingly noisier humming sound. A brief, green flash lit up the area around the marine and the next instant the gun let out a sizzling sound and a glowing substance flew out of the gun, almost immediately growing into a large, glowing ball of green plasma energy. Lighting up the hallway with an eerie, green light, the ball flew at the dark shapes moving rapidly towards the lone soldier. The ball exploded with a bright, green flash and several smaller flashes of green light turned the area into a lightshow.
The advancing monsters were all killed in the powerful blast and Andrews ran out of the blind hallway and raced down another.

-

Panting heavily, Andrews arrived at a large hall. The hall was full of terrible creatures and they all screeched and roared at him when they saw him. He let loose yet another green ball and blasted almost all of the monsters to cinders. Deep growls behind him made him turn around. A large group of bull-like demons charged at him, barking aggressively at him.
He pulled the trigger.
The trigger let out a clearly audible click and a low beep, but nothing else happened. Andrews looked at his ammo counter at the bottom of his helmet’s display.
His weapon had run out of energy cells.

Something heavy slammed into him from behind with an enormous force. Andrews felt the air disappear from his lungs and a sharp pain as he landed on the dirty, blood-spattered floor. The gun left his hands as the thing rammed into him.
He felt too tired to resist and was too dizzy to make out things around him. Something razor-sharp crunched through his already battered armor and tore out a chunk of his flesh from his side with such force that Andrews’ limp body was hurled around. He screamed in agony. The pain was unbearable.
In the fog flowing before his eyes, he could make out a big, burly, pink-skinned figure looming above him. He saw two penetrating, glowing, yellow eyes.
He felt a heavy foot pressing hard against his chest. He felt sharp claws penetrate his armor and skin and wanted to scream, but blood filled his mouth, making it impossible to let out a sound.
Andrews’ vision blackened. He felt a hot, stinking breath and in the next moment the creature’s teeth around his neck and most of his head.
He felt no pain as he heard rather than felt how his own skull got crushed between the thing’s powerful jaws.
Darkness...

Inferno – Part 2

****

Major Jefferson raised the pistol and pulled the trigger. He fired eight shots at the brown terror, before it stumbled and fell backwards, bleeding from a couple holes in the body. Jefferson had missed with two of the shots.

He staggered forward, with his left hand pressed against his side. A stream of blood flowed from beneath his hand. Another of these brown creatures had swiped its claw at him and had managed to rip a wound in his side.

Wearily, he looked around for something he could use to tend his wound with, but found nothing. The wound hurt and the Major felt exhausted. He couldn’t believe that all this was happening and he kept telling himself that it was just a bad dream and that he could wake up any moment.
But the pain from the wound seemed so painfully real.

He reeled like a drunkard and moved slowly down a hallway lit with flashing red light. The horrible noise of the alarm hurt in Jefferson’s ears and drove him crazy. It was difficult for him to make out things in the flashing red light. He bit his teeth firmly together and suppressed a moan of pain as he felt another sting of pain in his wounded side.

He had to locate the monorail leading to the West base. The West Base, a mining facility, was currently abandoned, partially because all the troops there had been sent to Phobos and partially because the mining operation had been postponed. The West Base was the newest part of the Martian base, but it had turned out that the mining systems weren’t quite safe enough yet. That was where the Major intended to go, as he was closer to the western monorail station.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Ahead, he saw thick smoke indicating that there was a fire – no doubt caused by these brown horrors. The Major knew that he had to continue, as this was the only way to the monorail station. He tore a bit of his uniform off and wrapped it around the underside of his face to protect his lungs against the smoke. He continued. The smoke began to annoy his throat and he coughed. He could now see flames lick up against one of the walls. However, he couldn’t really make things out too clearly because of the smoke.

Something suddenly swiped at him out of the side of his eye and he felt a sharp pain across his belly. He screamed in pain and staggered backwards, raising his gun. He saw a humanoid form with spikes protruding from its hide and burning eyes. The Major fell to the floor as his legs refused to keep him upright, and he felt his left hand touch something slimy, but warm substance – he was holding his own intestines in his hand. But he managed to opened fire at the creature. The creature howled in pain as three bullets hit it in its torso and the forth bullet flew right past it and ricocheted off a metallic wall a few feet away without doing further harm. To his horror, the Major heard the metallic, sliding sound of an empty clip being ejected, followed by a metallic clinking sound as the clip hit the floor. He backed away, desperately fumbling for a spare clip, but he was out of ammunition.

The brown thing hissed angrily, lurched and attacked, and before Jefferson knew it, he felt its claws tear into his flesh and he opened his mouth to scream...

****

I swung the butt of the shotgun into the face of the imp in front of me, spun around and blew away the advancing imp behind me. I pumped the gun and finished off the dazed imp which I had smacked in the face. Another imp popping out of nowhere on my left side was blown away before it even realized that I had moved around to face it with my shotgun in firing position.

The last enemy in the area was dead and I took my time to look at the nightmarish surroundings.

Above me was an odd marble block, with an evil-looking, goat like demon face which I had only seen in the strange tower on Deimos where I defeated the dreadful cyberdemon. The block was floating in the air some eight feet above the wooden floor. But what caught my attention was the human-like tech beneath the block. On the floor, just beneath the block was what looked like a sort of man-made teleportation pad. Looking more thoroughly at the floating marble block, I noticed a wire leading from the side of the block into the wooden walls on each side of the Hellish machine.

What in the name of the Devil is this shit? It looks like some sort of demonic attempt at making one of those translocator gateways

It then dawned on me that this thing was just that. Or so it seemed. The demons were apparently trying to create their own interdiminsional gateway through stolen human technology. I felt my heart sink as I realized that my efforts to destroy the Phobos and Deimos gates could have been in vain, but as I went closer, I discovered ruined metal pieces strewn on the floor around the machine and furthermore, the pad itself seemed to be completely ruined. Looking up at the machinery inside the marble block, I also noticed that it seemed to be ruined as well. The gateway seemed to be broken, but how?

While pondering on the vague possibility that one of my fellow marines might have destroyed it, another thought entered my mind. What if these gateways were unstable? I didn’t know much about the experimental human gateways, but it was possible that such a thing could blow up if things weren’t done right.
The demons could have had problems with making their machine work and it might have misfired, ruining the interior of it.

It might only be a matter of time before these bastards manage to build a functional gate, I gotta hurry! I told myself in my mind.

I went up a wooden staircase and suddenly found myself in a pink labyrinth made of some sort of strange flesh.

Deep roaring sounds echoed out of the cramped, stinking labyrinth. There were demons within the maze, but the fleshy walls gave me a bad feeling too.

I entered the maze with all senses alert, while trying to focus on the hostile environments instead of the mocking voices in my head.
The fleshy walls seemed alive and I had a feeling that invisible hands from the walls were reaching out for me, trying to drag me into the flesh to be eaten by something unpleasant.

Something suddenly rammed into my side with great force, and pushed me into the wall. Spectre! I could feel the squishy flesh around my back, felt how it tugged at me. I swiftly thrust the barrel of the shotgun into the side of the ghostly monster. The weapon roared and kicked my arm out to the side with such force that I almost dropped the gun. The ghostly figure howled with a deep, hollow sound and stumbled sideways, leaving me with enough space to use the shotgun probably. I swiftly pumped the weapon and thrust the barrel into the face of the spectre which rushed at me again. Judging by the disgusting squishing sound and the loud scream that the demon emitted, I had just squashed one of its eyeballs. I fired the shotgun and ended the creature’s unholy life.

I now realized that I was deep into the flesh wall and I was still sinking deeper into it. I could sense it’s muscles move. Full of disgust, I yanked my plasma rifle out of the bag on my back, pointed it towards the wall a few feet away from me at a spot that seemed to be muscles and opened fire. I heard a deep, otherworldly howl. It came from deep down. I fired another stream of bright pulses into the wall and I could feel how the wall seemed to release me. I leapt away from the wall and stopped firing.
I briefly looked at the wall. I could see where the burning hot plasma cells had scorched the wall, leaving ugly burnt wounds in the wall.

I turned around and caught a glimpse of something pink that rushed past in a crossing flesh hallway. Letting out a low snarl, I pulled out the shotgun and moved towards the spot where I had gotten the glimpse of the “pinky”.

...

Inferno – Part 3

Death.
That was all I saw. Dead bodies nailed to the green marble walls or hanging from chains attached to the ceiling. Their internal organs hanging out from large holes in their stomachs or scattered on the floor beneath them. Several of their corpses had their eyes perforated by rusty nails, while others had had the skin on their face torn away revealing a their bloody skulls with their lifeless eyes staring out into the darkness.
The ground beneath me was covered with burnt ashes mixed with the blood of unfortunate souls.
The terrible stench of death filled my nostrils. It was everywhere.

It felt as if death itself was watching my every move.

I stopped, feeling tired, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the never-ending combat and mentally because of the terrible moaning of the damned inside my head. It seemed as if their voices were calling for me to join their ranks.

A grunting echoed through the darkened corridors. It was answered by others – “bull demons” and they were heading my way.
I stared hopelessly at a corpse hanging from a chain in the ceiling. My fighting was all in vain. I would sooner or later die of fatigue if I didn’t run out of ammo first. Why didn’t I just give up?

The grunting of the demons raised to a series of aggressive growls. The sounds drew nearer fast.
Why didn’t I just put and end to the pain and let the demons finish me off?

The growling was getting close. The monsters began to roar instead of growl.

I looked at the corpse again. It was a marine. I had found mostly dead marines since I left Deimos. This one had a nail through his mouth, but the rest of his face was intact. He had been young – almost like a boy.
I sudden anger suddenly arose inside me once again.
What am I thinking? a voice cried inside me – a voice unlike the maddened babbling of the damned. My own voice.

I saw the first pair of blazing yellow eyes approach through the darkness. Soon other eyes became visible. They were very close.

Why should I give up? They wont make it any better for me when I’m dead! the voice continued.
No way!

The first demon came charging at me, with lowered head. Like an angry bull.

They tortured and killed my buddies along a lot of other innocent people. The least thing I could do was trying to inflict as much damage on Hell as I could.

The demon roared and leapt at me.
I reacted. I leapt aside and the demon flew right past me landing on the floor a few feet away. I spun around and fired my shotgun, sending a spray of pellets into the creature’s back. The pellets cut deep wounds into its pink skin. It roared with pain and turned around. But that was when I fired another shell into it. It fell to the ground with a heavy, snarling sound, whirling ashes up into the air. A group of three demons charged me from behind.
I whirled around and instinctively pulled the trigger at the nearest of them. It roared in agony as one of its blazing eyes got blown out, but kept moving.
All three monsters leapt at me. I threw myself to the ground and the three demons flew clean over my head. I rolled around, which wasn’t too easy with all my equipment, and fired another shot into the monster in the middle which I had already wounded. It grunted but remained on its feet and spun around. I quickly pumped the shotgun and fired again, killing the one in the middle.

I leapt to my feet as the other two tried to flank me. I blew most of the first one’s jaw away and ran around it, pumping my shotgun and firing again. It was still alive, but the other one bumped into the half dead “bull”, confused as it was, sending it to the floor, where it struggled to get up again. I emptied two shells into the other one which was closing in on me. It went down after the second shell. The last of the demons limped towards me – still fast, but a bit slower. I whipped one of my pistols with my left hand while holding on to the shotgun with the right hand and emptied three bullets into the wretched creature’s face, before it went down with a painful grunt.

I looked at my handiwork and felt a sensation of grim satisfaction flow throughout my veins, despite being so tired.

But I didn’t get any time to rest – several ghostly sounds accompanied by the angry growling of the imps drew closer. I faced the direction from which the sounds were coming from and walked towards the incoming monsters.
I could tell which monsters were waiting for me. There were both imps and flying fire skulls, which I had realized were souls of the damned brought back to a twisted form of nightmarish life – lost souls.
I could also hear at least one of those ugly floating balls with one eye and a big mouth. I picked the plasma gun as I could hear that there were quite a lot of these critters.

-

The body lay on its back.
It was all eaten up, indicating that a bunch of bull demons had had a meal out of the unfortunate human. The corpse was wearing a few ragged pieces of clothing with a military camouflage pattern, indicating that it was a marine. Upon inspection, I found a black haired head next to the mangled remains – Andrew’s head. No doubt, this was the remains of Andrews who had met his horrible fate here. His black, well-trimmed hair was blood stained and filthy and his brown eyes staring at me, revealed a look of insanity on his face. His features were so distorted that I almost didn’t recognize him.
He had clearly gone insane before he died. I wasn’t surprised about that because I was well on my way to go insane myself – unless I was insane already.

I felt a sting of emotional pain in my chest. Andrews had been a really nice guy, who had done his best to cheer me up. Me, who sadly had turned out to be next to impossible to cheer up. He had been one of the few guys on Mars which I had actually liked and now he was dead. A tear ran down my cheek, I looked away and then I noticed the "thing".

A large technical gadget next to the corpse was what caught my attention. It was approximately one meter and ten centimeters long and shaped like some sort of rectangular box. It was black and looked highly advanced. Its short, grated, square-shaped barrel indicated that it was a plasma energy weapon, yet it seemed more advanced and mean than the plasma gun.

It took me a moment before I recalled something I had seen at the laboratories on Phobos – something about a revolutionary prototype weapon.

“The BFG 9000!” I whispered in awe.

I had almost forgotten about this gun, but now I remembered the details. This weapon could make the fighting a lot more easy and I was certain that it was the reason for Andrews having lasted as long as he had.

I looked at the mutilated body again. “Rest in peace Chris, I’ll take over the fight for you!”

Having been trained in the use of an earlier model of the Beam Frequency Gun, I pretty much knew how to handle this monstrous weapon as I remembered that the description of the weapon I had found at the Phobos Labs stated that it was handled the same way as its predecessor. Since the BFG was empty I transferred the energy cells from my plasma gun to the larger gun and left the empty plasma gun behind, as it would only take up weight and space.

The stench in this place was horrible. Dammit, they sure need a ventilation system here! I thought. Then I realized that something wasn’t right. I was wearing a space marine combat helmet designed as a combined combat helmet and NBC mask. When the visor was flipped down, every smell should be filtrated from the air. My visor was flipped down, but I could still feel that awful stench. It dawned on me that the stench was so strong that my mask couldn’t keep it all out. This meant that the stench would be totally unbearable if I flipped my visor up or I might even die from breathing the air. I continued to gather my equipment and made a mental note not to open my helmet regardless of what happened.

Dammit! If only I had a chain gun now I thought bitterly. But thinking it over again, I realized that my decision to leave the chain gun at Deimos in exchange for the slightly more powerful plasma gun was the best decision I could have taken at that time.

But it did bother me that I would likely not find another chain gun here in Hell again.

At any rate, I felt that I had to at least try to get this valuable prototype weapon with me back to Earth somehow. I stood for a moment, wondering what I was thinking. There was no way I’d ever get home now – or was there? I remembered the strange machine I had found at the odd pandemonium-like building before I entered this slaughterhouse, this "house of pain".

It gave me a spark of hope and I packed the BFG together, placed it on top of my life support system, where I locked it onto some sort of hooks there, designed for a variety of equipment. I was glad that the BFG was compatible with these hooks so that I could easily carry the weapon, which, after having been folded up, wasn’t much bigger than 50 centimeters long and 40 centimeters wide.

I got out my trusty shotgun and moved stealthily deeper into the darkened marble corridors.



Inferno – Part 4

****

“Ahh safe at last!”

Colonel Hauser breathed a heavy sigh of relief as he slumped back into the pilot’s chair of the Emergency shuttle and pressed the “Shuttle door” button, closing the shuttle’s entrance hatch with a muffled clang.

The Colonel activated the shuttle and waited a brief moment until a soft female voice sounded in his headset.

“Shuttle system startup initiated – all shuttle systems nominal”

He activated the lifting rockets and the craft began to vibrate and shake increasingly more viciously, as the spacecraft lifted off from the Martian base.

Hauser laughed as he looked at a screen showing the surface of Mars disappearing more and more away beneath him.

He leaned back in the chair. He recalled his last frightening encounter with some of the aliens. In his mind he saw the hideous brown thing walk right past him. While having it’s back turned on him, he snuck up to the doorway and peeked around the doorframe again. The other humanoid creature was busy eating a dead tech with its back turned on him. Hauser remembered how his stomach churned at the horrible sight and sounds, but he slipped inside the room and snuck past the thing.

Hauser felt sweat broke out on his forehead as he remembered how close he had been to get killed by that monster.
He had just reached a door on the opposite end of the room when he heard a loud hiss behind him. Spinning around he had seen the humanoid shape raise it’s right claw.
The Colonel had rushed inside, pressed the switch next to the door and closed the reinforced metal door just as a ball of flame exploded against the closing door, scorching the shiny metal.

“But they didn’t get me!” He said to himself and smiled relieved.

A deep, rumbling sound suddenly caught Colonel Hauser’s attention. He wondered if the maintenance team had checked the engine properly. Sloppy bastards He thought irritably. They probably didn’t go through all the maintenance procedures as they should
Hopefully the noise didn’t indicate that something serious was wrong with the engine. He didn’t want the ship to break down too close to Mars.

The noise sounded again, but this time it appeared to me much nearer.

With a sudden jolt of horror Hauser realized that it wasn’t the engine rumbling. It was the sound of some sort of animal growling. Only it wasn’t an animal...

The Colonel leapt out of the seat and turned around, while grabbing frantically for his side arm.

A couple feet away from him stood a big, muscular, pink creature. It raised it’s head and in that very instant it’s eyes began to glow bright yellow. It snarled as it saw Hauser raise his pistol and lunged at the panicking Colonel.

Hauser fired blindly at the monster but it rammed right into him, knocking the air out of him and he could feel the big, sharp teeth of the creature bore into his stomach while he was falling backwards.

He screamed.

****

The door was made of rusty steel. Dry blood covered a few areas on the orange brownish, rusty surface.

I walked up closer to the doors. I could hear a number of scuffling feet and strange sounds on the other side. It sounded like there were lots of creatures in there so I brought out my newly acquired super gun, the “Big Freaking Gun” and unfolded it to its full size.

Let’s see if this thing’s really as good as it seems! I thought, kicked the door handle so it automatically clicked down and leapt aside as the door opened up with a terrible whining noise. Several surprised grunts sounded from the other side as the noise caught their attention. I depressed the trigger and held it down, while the gun began to hum as it charged up energy. A display at the back of the gun showed me how much energy it was building up.

Just before the energy level reached the point where the gun would launch it’s deadly sphere of destruction, I leapt into view. A small horde of creatures composed of former humans and “brownies” surrounding a “bigmouth” was waiting behind the open door. I pointed the barrel of my huge gun at the flock just as a loud sizzle sounded, followed by a bright green flash and a large, bright ball of green, transparent plasma shot out from the BFG. The green ball exploded in the middle of the flock of demons in a blinding flash and sent legs, arms and other ruined body parts flying. The sounds of cracking bones reached my ears. The next instant, the gun emitted another, but less bright green muzzle flash and most of the remaining creatures exploded from the inside in a green flash of plasma energy, melting their internal organs, shattering their bones and ripping their flesh apart. I let out an insane laughter at the spectacle.

I hurled myself back behind cover, threw the BFG to the ground with a hollow, metallic clank and drew my shotgun from my back.

A former human, which was fortunate enough to have survived the apocalyptic destruction of the BFG rushed through the door, but got its head blown off. The bigmouthed red ball came right at its heels, and I had to retreat further back to avoid its lightning balls, while still keeping it at bay with a few shells.

After the last monster was dead, I looked inside the large room. It reminded me strangely enough of a human military base, but there was something really strange about it all. As if the materials had been infested by a diabolic presence. The demons were obviously experimenting with human technology, slowly twisting it beyond recognition. My only guess as to why they would construct human-like areas was that they were familiarizing themselves with human tech. They must have used some sort of hellish magic to construct these areas so quickly.

I opened up one of the doors in the room - there was three of these apart from the rusty door I had entered the room through. It had been a typical, space base door, but now it was filthy and stank - almost like oil, but this was a downright horrible stench.

Much to my surprise, I saw boxes containing anti-personnel rockets and energy cell packs in the small room behind the door. What is all this ammo doing in Hell? I thought confused, but I knew the answer, just as that thought went through my tired mind. The demons were trying to figure out our weapons to perhaps even use them against us!

I gritted my teeth. They wouldn't get a chance to use the ammo in this room, because I would use it against them instead! I had indeed been lucky to find this small "ammo depot", as I was out of rockets and low on energy cells for my BFG.

...

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Inferno – Part 5

-

It looked like some sort of Cathedral; only it was filled with satanic symbols instead of Christian crucifixes. An unnatural darkness hung over the place and evil in all its forms seemed to be in the air around the building. Everything, even the air seemed to hate me here. In turn, I promised myself to justify this place’s hatred towards me by wrecking a little havoc here.


I was exhausted, but determined to carry on. I was not only exhausted from my physical exertions, but the souls of the damned yelling accusations and pleas for mercy in my head wore me down mentally too.
“You assholes deserve to be here in Hell – a lot of you were probably terrorists or something just as bad! You shoulda been good to your fellow human beings, but you just behaved like total morons and now you pay the price!” I whispered doggedly directed at the many voices in my head.

I tightened my grip on the shotgun and stepped forward towards the huge, dark building in front of me

-

*Zzapp!*

I found myself teleported to a rather dark area. I heard a doorway open up behind me and spun around to see a goat demon towering above me. It roared and raised its large hand to throw its gooey bolts at me, but I ran around it and behind a red marble wall before it could throw the bolt at me.
I retrieved the BFG 9000 and prepared it for action.
Only a hundred energy cell units left! I thought desperately. I had been too happy to use it at the last place and not been concerned enough about the ammo count.

The huge demon came stomping around the corner, only to be annihilated by a blast of green plasma. “That’s what you get from me fiendface!” I yelled hoarsely at its corpse.

Now when the demon was dead, I gave myself time to study my surroundings. It was too dark to get the full impression of the large hall I was in, but I got the feeling that there were at least a hundred meters to the ceiling. A horrible stench of rot hit me in the face as I sniffed to breathe the harsh air.
My eyes fell on a figure lying on the floor. My first impression was that it was the corpse of a human marine, as I thought I saw a camouflage pattern, but I dismissed the thought almost immediately.
You’re tired! I told myself inside my mind. Too damn tired! You’re making stuff up. For a moment, I felt more like just giving up and surrender my soul than anything, but I fought the spectral influence of the damned souls disturbing my mind and won.
Readying my shotgun, I went closer to closer inspect the shape.

To my surprise, it actually turned out to be a marine – a human marine!
I searched the body and with a muffled cry of satisfaction, I withdrew an unused light ampflication visor from one of the corpse’s equipment bags in his base belt. I found no spare batteries for the visor, so I knew that it wouldn’t benefit me for long as these devices consumed a lot of energy. I quickly attached the visor to my faceplate and activated it.
Suddenly, everything went clearer and the place looked as if there was an invisible sun inside the hall, shining on everything.

The hall definitely looked like the interior of a sort of cathedral, but unlike an actual cathedral, this place was filthy beyond comprehension. I saw a large upside-down crucifix made of red glass hanging on one of the end walls, and there were more of these around of the other walls, only smaller.
On the largest crucifix on the end wall, hung a horrendously mutilated human body – the guy had been tortured so much that his features were all but gone, leaving only shredded flesh and he had ultimately been crucified.

I looked around and found more human corpses. They had all been marines and they had been armed with plasma guns, rocket launchers and to my joy, I discovered that one of them had a chain gun. I quickly swapped my plasma rifle for the chain gun and transferred the remaining energy cells from the other plasma guns to my BFG – I found it best to use a chain gun instead of a plasma rifle now that I had the BFG 9000.

I saw more corpses of humans. These hung on pikes. I went closer to the nearest corpse, hoping to find more supplies on it.

The impaled marine suddenly moved!

Surprised I stepped back and raised my shotgun. The impaled marine had jerked his left foot and moved his head a little. He’s still alive! I thought and went closer to help him. I went around to see his face. The man’s face was gone! There was only a mess of gory flesh to see where his face had been and a large hole where his forehead had been. I could safely say that he was dead. But how come he had moved? Was I hallucinating again?
The corpse moved again and then it dawned on me. Evil souls where trying to possess the corpse! And I suddenly remembered that I had seen this frightening sight before on Deimos, but worn down as I was, my memory wasn't working so well anymore.

I could hear them in my mind. Howling, screaming with anger and frustration, roaring. A thought entered my tired mind. I realized that this could be the explanation for the former humans. The former humans were no doubt humans who had been killed in action. They had then been “repaired” somehow and possessed by a spiritual demon or soul of some sort. I found that that was a reasonable explanation for it. But that didn't do me much good.

The corpse yielded nothing useful, so I staggered away from it. I realized how awfully tired I was and I could hear inhuman screams in the distance, telling me that there were still lots of demons here. I needed to rest, but I couldn't allow myself the needed rest and I stubbornly carried on.

-

I found myself materialized in a small courtyard. In front of me a large group of “pinkys” stood with their backs on me, all with their heads lowered to the ground and pointing at the same. Slightly puzzled, I stepped off the teleportation platform. And then I heard it. A disgusting set of gulping and chewing sounds along the sound of teeth gnashing, as if something was munching on something. This was where I realized what the pink creatures where doing. They were eating a corpse! Just like the first of these beasts I had encountered on Phobos had been doing.

I went closer as stealthily as my sore legs allowed me. I could see a pile of shredded flesh and bones. I noticed the ruined remnants of an armor vest and bloodstained pieces of green cloth with a camouflage pattern - doubtless what remained of a dead human marine. One of the monsters tore out a huge mass of intestines, before it threw its head backwards and swallowed the organs. My eye caught something else which was a far more pleasant discovery:
A black box with a red cross on it – a berserk pack! This soldier had apparently scooped up a berserk pack on Deimos but he had been killed here, before he managed to retrieve the pack and use it.
This was a major stroke of good luck to me as it could boost my strength enough to carry on a few more hours.

I had to run past these things to get to it. I pulled out my rocket launcher and aimed the gun at the ones on the far right, before I launched the rocket. One demon was ripped apart in the explosion and two of them next to it roared in agony as they where thrown to the ground by the force of the explosion.
I threw the launcher on the ground and ran forward.
The other monsters spun around. Their eyes glowed with hellish hatred as they saw me and charged. I nimbly avoided them, bowed down and grabbed the black pack as I ran past it, then headed for the teleporter.

I arrived back in the huge hall with all the corpses.

I quickly gave myself the injection and the wild sensation of some sort of enormous adrenaline rush came over me, refreshing me enormously. Now I felt ready to take on hordes of demons. Deep down, I knew that the refreshing effect was only temporarily. The boost in strength and physical persistence would eventually fade away, leaving me just as tired as I had just been, but at least it would keep me going for at least two more hours.

A loud sizzle sounded behind me and I spun around. A burly bull demon charged straight at me. I swung my brass knuckled fist at it and it stumbled to the floor by the force of my punch. It got back up and shook its large head. Its right eye had been squashed and blood flowed from the hole. I hammered my fist into its forehead and it staggered backwards, but charged me again only to get its ruined face squashed like a tomato by my bloodstained combat boot, slamming right into its ugly mug.

Two more demons came out of thin air and tried to rush me, but despite their superhuman strength and size, I was as good as invincible against them with my boosted strength.

...

Inferno – Part 6

-

Blood.
A lake of boiling blood lay before me with a tiny island of green marble rock in the center. I was inside a huge hall surrounded by walls of blood red marble bricks. The bodies of a large group of bull demons, which I had just perforated with my chain gun lay scattered in the boiling hot blood.

I looked at them with a dull expression on my face. It felt like I had been in Hell for an eternity.
It had been some time since I had given myself the berserk injection at that evil cathedral-like building and I had fought my way through a strange demon town, where the buildings had been situated on a couple of islands in a rather huge lake of lava. Getting through that town had been the greatest ordeal yet and had worn me down. It had been the hottest place in Hell this far and seemingly had the largest demon population in any of the areas of Hell I had visited until now. I had also found more small “munitions depots” there, which was the only good thing about that horrible place.

I had decided that I had better save as much of my heavy firepower as possible for now and only use my shotgun as much as possible. I was exhausted, yet still I felt a strange sensation as if I was nearing the outskirts of Hell. The incessant babbling and howling of millions of voices in my mind had subsided and sounded as if they were very far away.
I had left a trail of destruction behind me and despite the many unnerving experiences I had encountered and the fatigue in my body, I felt a strange eagerness to carry on. What if there WAS a way out of Hell? The souls of the damned had to arrive to Hell through somewhere, but could a living human hope to go through that same entrance and was it possible to get out through this entrance at all?
I couldn’t think too clearly any longer and I could only cling to the tiny hope despite the improbability of there being a way out of this insanely evil place.

I stared at the large hall with the blood lake. It seemed as though this place was about to be filled with blood. A moment I thought I saw the blood level raise, but nothing happened.

-

My boots made a splish-splash sound as I ran through the pitch-black maze. The floor was covered in a layer of blood. Luckily, the blood wasn’t boiling hot. I was glad that I had my automap function. Without it, I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting out of this maze, as the map drew up the walls that I was facing – even though I couldn’t see the walls with my bare eyes. Checking the map every two seconds or so, I could draw up a good picture of the maze and ultimately, I would be able to find a way out.
I was constantly alert, knowing that I wouldn’t have a chance of spotting a potential monster while having the map screen activated as the map blocked out all vision except for the computer drawn map.

I looked at the map again. I had found all the dead ends in the direction I was moving, and I was now heading down a narrow hallway. I shut off the map function to check for possible hostile movement, looking around, expecting a pair of glowing eyes to appear every moment. I didn’t see any evil eyes. Instead I saw a dim light ahead. I moved forward with the shotgun pointing towards the light. There was no need for the map now, because the light source gave me a hint at where to move.
As I moved closer, I could see that the light was the kind of light emanating from fire, meaning that there might be a torch or something.
The floor began to feel strangely soft. Something tugged at my left boot.
Oh shit!
I began to run, but something suddenly grabbed on to my armor-covered lower leg, so that I almost tripped.
It felt like a slimy tentacle of some sort and made me think of an octopus or a squid. Whatever was lurking beneath me in the blood was strong as I felt its grip tightening and slowly pulling me down. A sense of panic rushed through my veins – I hated the thought of drowning in blood, and my grip on the shotgun got tighter. I began to fire at the ground with my shotgun. The roar of the gun echoed throughout the dismal maze and the sound was amplified in the narrow space. I heard something like a distant howl. It rumbled up from deep down. The mosnter loosened its grip on my leg and I managed to pull myself free and sprint towards the torchlight. The hallway ended in a small room. I could see a demonic button, carved like a demon’s face.
A former human suddenly leapt out in front of and raised its shotgun. I dived towards its stomach just as it fired. The spray of pellets whizzed clean over my head and I rammed right into the mindless possessed. It let out a surprised grunt as I hurled it to the dirty floor. It fought back, trying to push me away. I suddenly sat right up and swung the butt of my shotgun into its head, before it could dodge my attack. I continued to hammer the butt into the possessed corpse’s head, maddened by all my mind numbing experiences, until the undead soldier lay completely still. I got back up and looked at my handiwork. Its head was bloody and smashed beyond recognition. Its skull was cracked open and I could see its brains flowing from the hole.

Something suddenly pulled my feet away under me and I crashed to the floor. The shotgun flew out of my hands and clattered against the floor. The tentacle which had pulled my legs away under me now grabbed firmly unto both my legs. It was red, but a bit brighter than blood red and had small, black hairs all over it. I reached for my pistol, but remembered that I had emptied the last round a good while ago. Instead, I struggled to get my knuckle-duster out of my pocket and put it on. I could feel the warm blood against my legs. I fumbled with the spiked weapon. I was being pulled into the blood - my legs was beginning to sink into the blood and the monster's tentacle would soon be under the blood surface. I finally managed to slip the brass knuckles onto my hand. I clenched my fist, bending myself into upright position and pressed the electrified spikes of the knuckle-duster against the disgusting tentacle. Blue sparks sprung from the slimy flesh and I heard the distant howl again, but this time it was a prolonged scream. I could feel the tentacle wiggle and squirm, trying in vain to avoid the burning electrical shock.
I managed to get loose again. And backed away from the place where the tentacle monster appeared to be. I quickly picked my shotgun off the floor and collected the ammunition that the humanoid soldier had been carrying.

I fist hammered the demonic button. The eyes of the carved demon began to glow a bright whitish yellow and the whole steel wall with the button on it opened up revealing a teleporter. I also heard a lot of clicking sounds, indicating that I had just started a chain reaction of mechanisms. That probably meant that this button had done more than just opened the wall in front of me.

-

The path to the strange mini-tower in the center of the pool of blood had been raised. I had been hunting several switches to activate mechanisms that would open up the path to what I hoped was a way out, and I had now activated all the mechanisms this far. I let out a long sigh and stepped out on the raised path, which was made of the typical green marble. The path led to a door in the mini-tower. I moved towards it cautiously. My experiences on Mars’ two moons and especially those here in Hell had taught me to be ready for creatures that might suddenly teleport in or other dangerous traps, but nothing happened and I made it to the door safely.

I was slightly pleased with myself. I had made hundreds of demons suffer for their evil deeds and all that alone without anyone to aid me. As the green metal door opened with a rusty whine, I briefly thought of all my comrades who had died at the claws of demons and I felt that justice must have sent me to Hell to settle a score with the Hell spawn.
Behind the door was a teleporter – a square shaped thing where a bright white light glowed, lightening up the tiny room inside this odd tower.

I wonder where I’ll end up next was the last thought that entered my tired brain as I stepped onto the source of the bright light.

...

Inferno – Part 7

-

The door in front of me was made of dried wood. A huge, demonic skull hung at the center of the door. It looked like the skull of a cyberdemon, like the one I defeated on Deimos.
Deimos I thought wearily to myself. Deimos was where I had felt an enormous relief and where I had thought that the nightmare had ended.

I stared at the door with a dull expression. I was so tired that every movement was a pain. I felt like I could sleep for weeks on end. My legs hurt and my feet felt like lead. My arms were sore as well and my equipment just felt terribly heavy. My own sanity was well under way to give way to insanity too if that hadn't occurred already.
There was no water left in my drinking bottle and I was horribly thirsty.
I knew that I wouldn’t last much longer, but I was determined to fight on until the end.

Wearily, I walked forward. I pulled the rusty handle on the left side of the door and the door opened, revealing a long hallway with walls composed of strange flesh fused with what seemed like manmade machinery. I could feel the vibration of the working machinery.
Then a thought popped up in my mind.

I remembered the ruined machine I had seen quite a while back. It felt like it had been ages ago. I had concluded that it was a failed attempt at making a portal, which had blown up. The bizarre machinery back then was dead, but here, the low humming noise and the vibration hinted that the machinery was still working. There was a slight chance that I could be transported home. But I reminded myself that the most important thing was to destroy the gateway. I remembered the manmade translocator on Deimos. The whirlpool hadn’t disappeared until a couple seconds after I ruined the machinery, which probably meant that the vortex could be upheld a very short while after the power supply had been terminated. If I were lucky, the demons’ gateway worked in a similar fashion.
If the thing works at all! I reminded myself. But I had gained a small hope and the hope gave me strength.

I walked slowly down the hallway, which led to a huge courtyard. I found myself on a level above the courtyard.
I gasped in awe.
Ahead of me was a huge machine. It was bigger than the demonic machine I had encountered before, but it was very similar in construction. It was composed of the same material, it seemed. Human flesh, magical crystals and man-made technology. Stairs led to a huge, Satanic platform of green marble, which had a pentagram drawn across the marble picture of a terrifying goat-like demon. The picture of a demon I hadn’t encountered in person, but I had seen similar marble faces on my dreadful journey.
An elliptical, spiked frame marked the gate itself. It was currently not activated, but the construction of the gate itself seemed to be complete.
My guess was that the power source was not yet big enough to transport large hordes of demons, but it should be sufficient for that one person who was going through it – me.

I checked the area, but found that the place seemed deserted. The courtyard had an X-like shape – each “arm” ending in a strange cavern that appeared to be eviscerated into the marble walls.

I didn’t feel like investigating the caverns.

Exhaustion took over again. My body screamed for some rest and some water, so I leapt down from the plateau and hurried over to the portal.

I had almost reached the machine when a wall of flame suddenly shot up, surrounding the portal machine, blocking any entry. I stared disheartened at the wall of fire. It seemed to be a kind of deadly force field consisting of hellfire.

A horrible sound echoed across the courtyard. It sounded like some otherworldly scream, high-pitched and horribly distorted. It was no physical sound, merely something I heard in my mind, yet it was so loud that my head hurt from it and it seemed to come from everywhere. I didn’t for a moment doubt that the sound came from a creature of some terrible form.

I heard a terrible grinding noise, like lots of huge metallic feet pounding on rocky ground and looked around feverishly. Then I saw it.

The most abhorable thing I had yet encountered emerged from one of the caverns. It was a very large, spideresque abomination.
A cybernetic nightmare, with a robotic body. The thing itself was basically an enormous brain with a terribly evil face at the center.

The actual monster itself was encapsulated within a glass-like dome and beneath the brain-head was the center of its cybernetic body, from which all four legs were connected.
I noticed a turret with a large, six-barreled gun – the infantryman’s worst nightmare: The chain gun cannon!

The chain gun cannon was basically a slow-firing version of the assault chain gun. It fired caliber 15.6 shells, which were highly powerful. Each round created an effect somewhat less powerful than a regular hand grenade, but it was enough to blow marines to smithereens despite their armor. Surviving a hit from a burst from one of these suckers was highly unlikely, so I knew that I was in deep shit when I saw that turret.

It was about a hundred meters away from me.The nightmarish being began to move towards me. The ground shook beneath my feet as the monstrous creature moved.
The turret swung around, pointing the six-barreled auto cannon at me and the barrels began to spin around with a heavy, metallic whirring sound.

I ran around the flame protected gateway, so that the force field obstructed the spider’s line of sight, and avoided the spray of certain death, which the auto cannon rained upon the ground where I had been a moment before.
The heavy grinding of its mechanical feet drew closer rather fast. I knew that it had reached the protected gateway.
I attempted to take the monster from the rear, but when I rounded the portal machine, I saw that the spider brain was facing me and that its turret pointed in my direction.

The thing had huge, insect-like fangs protruding from the side of its mouth, which was filled with row upon row of narrow, sharp teeth. The thing had a few small holes just above its jaw, which appeared to be its “respirational device” through which it breathed. Its eyes seemed small in comparison with the rest of its head, but each eye seemed to be about the size of a soccer ball and were blood red, but with black pupils. I could see how its nervous system in its huge, light-gray brain pumped blood around, making the brain mass wobble. It had two parallel rows of spikes with three spikes in each row protruding from its massive brain, almost like the spikes which the red, floating thingies had, but these were shorter and were covered with a slimy substance.

The monstrous spider demon glared at me with its horribly ugly eyes. It made an aggressive vibrating sound, like a sort of dangerous killer grasshopper, which had grown to a hundred times its own size.

I narrowly avoided the burst of shells, which blew up the floor in front of me. The thing could clearly sense me, knowing exactly where I was and I had only been saved by my quick reactions.

Damn! Now what!? I thought, feeling a spark of panic. It was out of question to try and flank the creature in any way as its brain seemingly gave it enormously high senses, which allowed it to track me easily.
Thoughts raced through my mind. I was desperately looking for a solution and put up suggestions in my mind. I could hear the spider’s four metallic feet draw nearer.

Must try and attack it before it fires at me! I was a good runner and capable of moving very fast, but it wasn’t enough. Out of question! It knows my every damn movement and it will be ready for me! The pounding feet seemed to be just around the corner of the flame barrier. I saw a huge, misshaped shadow fall across the green marble floor.
I must attack it from above! I thought. Can’t do that! There is nothing to climb and even if there was there wouldn’t be enough time! And I can’t fly!

Above... I thought again. I heard ghostly echoes in my mind and it wasn’t the incessant babbling of the damned. I saw fellow ISSDU marines inside an installation on Earth, waiting behind cover. I saw a wall be blown apart by the shells of a chain gun cannon.
I heard my own voice: “Go and get the laser torch from our APLP and draw the suckers’ attention by starting burning through the roof above ‘em, but DON'T proceed to burn all the way through, just draw their attention away from us and get the heck outta the way, got it?!”

Some of the words remained in my mind. ..draw the suckers’ attention..

The monster rounded the corner. It swung its turret around and fired at me, but I leapt aside and retreated further away from it. The creature made an eerie clicking sound with its hideous fang-teeth.
Draw the sucker’s attention! That's it! I thought and pulled out the BFG 9000. It was charged with 250 units. I grabbed one of my remaining rockets. I knew that it was possible to use them as a sort of hand grenade. The rocket could be armed by hammering the bottom hard against something pointy.

I looked over the shoulder. I saw the moving shadow of the monster on the ground. It was gaining on me. I pulled out a single bullet, hammered the bottom of the rocket against the pointy end of it as hard as I could, turned around and hurled the rocket into the air as far as I could. The rocket sailed in a tight arch above the spot where I estimated that the spider brain was.
The rocket exploded in mid-air and the grinding noise of the spider’s moving feet stopped briefly, before I heard it turn around.

I rushed around the fire barrier, while pulling the trigger of my monstrous weapon. The weapon hummed, charging up the energy needed for the plasma ball. I heard the heavy pounding of the chain gun cannon as the monster fired in the direction, where it had estimated that it had been assaulted from, which was in the entirely wrong direction all the same. I leapt out of hiding with a hoarse battle cry, which echoed throughout the courtyard. The Spider brain turned around just as the green ball of energy flew out of my gun, expanding while traveling towards the monster.

The plasma ball exploded with a bright, greenish flash and I heard the monster whine in pain. I wound up another shot. I make out the enormous shape of the creature. Smoke rose from its mechanical parts and its face looked pretty crushed, but it was still alive. The BFG fired again just as the spider demon aimed at me with its chain gun cannon.

Another blinding flash, but now, a shrill, otherworldly scream came from the monster. A death scream. I threw myself to the ground. Metallic parts flew from the cybernetic terror and some of them scratched my already battered armor.
The flash died away, but the robotic body of the monster began to explode in various places. The monster fell. In my mind a loud sound, almost like a sigh, reverberated throughout my brain. The creature’s prolonged death scream that ended in a sigh. The thing crashed to the ground and blew up before my eyes. I shaded my eyes against the fiery light of the explosions.

The noise died away and I slowly got up. Before me lay a mess of ruined flesh, brains, blood and metallic limbs. The loathsome Spiderdemon, which I believed was the one that masterminded the invasion of the Martian moons was no more. I felt a sensation of fulfillment.
A loud sizzling noise suddenly turned my attention towards the force barrier. The fire seemed to die away and the strange, translucent, red light behind the firewall slowly faded away.

It was apparently controlled by the Spiderdemon’s brain and since it was destroyed now, it could no longer hold the barrier around the hellish portal device.

Walking around the device, I found a skull switch at the center of a strange mass of slimy flesh, intestines and machinery. Finding no other means of activating the vortex, I placed my hand on the forehead of the skull and depressed it.

A rumbling sound followed and the machine started to vibrate.

Just as I thought that the machine was about to blow up a bright flash blinded me without warning. When my eyes could see again, they witnessed a strange, bluish elliptical shape inside the gate’s doorframe. The glowing shape vibrated and I could feel the forces which were moving around it.

I needed to arm another rocket and use it as a bomb to ruin the essential device and I believed that the vulnerable spot would likely be the central area at the portal switch, because I had blown up the Deimos gate with only one rocket aimed at the central device and the rocket had caused a larger explosion which ruined the Deimos gate completely.

I estimated that I had to move fast to make it.

I whipped out a rocket and hammered its bottom against a spike which stuck out from the mass of flesh and machinery, placed the rocket on the device next to the switch and ran as fast as my tired legs allowed around the device and up the stairs towards the glowing light.

The explosion of the rocket rang out just as I plummeted into the vortex...

With a brief, blue flash everything turned pitch black. I felt a strange, rushing feel. As if I was falling upwards. Horrible shapes appeared all around me. I couldn’t move. They tried to reach out for me but couldn’t and they slowly faded away again. Darkness.
Then suddenly light.

...

END

The weird sensation of moving at an insane speed had stopped.

I opened my eyes and saw a large grassy field before me. The sky above the field was a beautiful orange color. It was evening.
I was looking at a wonderful sunset on Earth. My home.
A pleasant breeze brought the wonderful fresh air into my face. This must be Heaven I thought. After the nightmarish experiences I had had in Hell, this place sure felt like Heaven. I felt relaxed.

It was over.

I had at last come home. Three years on a station of deep boredom and a trip to Hell, which forever would leave its scars on me. Yet I felt good. I had not only cheated the forces of Evil, but I had definitely made them sorry that they even peeked out of the interdiminsional gate. I had proven to be too tough a badass for Hell to keep and the realization of that felt good and washed all memories of the terrible experiences, I had just been through, out of my head. Now I wondered what had happened on Earth while evil had been unleashed on Mars.

I turned around and froze in my tracks. There was a smell in the air. The smell of fire and smoke.
But it wasn’t the smell that made me freeze.

Right in front of me was the severed head of a jackrabbit, impaled on a spiky, wooden stick hammered into the ground. It stared lifelessly at me with its big, cute, dark eyes. Fresh blood flowed from its mouth and ears.
Behind it was a huge city. Fire leapt from several of the buildings and I could see smoke rise from several places within the metropolis. The fire from the burning city was reflected in the side of the rabbit’s left eye.

I sank down on my knees. I suddenly felt the fatigue return and my experiences in Hell flashed before my eyes. My eyelids felt like lead and I could barely keep them open. I could feel how much pressure my body had been subjected to during my battle with the demons from Hell. I had never been so exhausted in my whole life. I had never felt that the situation was so hopeless before – not even when I stood on the highest spot on Deimos and looked down at the horrible sight that was Hell itself.

Oh no!

This has to be a dream, a nightmare
“This has to be a dream!!!” I yelled. I closed my eyes and opened them again. It didn’t help. The metropolis in front of me was still ablaze.

Evil had been unleashed on my home and all that was left was Hell on Earth...

-------------THE END--------------

(..So far..)

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DSM!!! This is the best thing i have read in many weeks! Man you have worked hard with this and all i can say is that i'm impressed and i hope that you you will make a DOOM II story just like you did with DOOM :)

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**Gawk** Great, simply outstanding work there Dsm. Like the others have said, I think you should publish and/or copyright this cause it is beyond the limitations of Bitchin' :)....On a different note, jw, if you dont mind me asking, how long did it take you to write that? Something of that magnitude and quality has to be noticed at the least, your work shouldn't go unnoticed to any extent. However it is your masterpiece of Literature and what ever you decide to do with it is one that we will all respect.**Still Gawking**

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Ultimate Demon said:

DSM!!! This is the best thing i have read in many weeks! Man you have worked hard with this and all i can say is that i'm impressed and i hope that you you will make a DOOM II story just like you did with DOOM :)

Don't worry, I've already been working on my next Doom story - the first chapter should be up soon :-)

On a different note, jw, if you dont mind me asking, how long did it take you to write that? Something of that magnitude and quality has to be noticed at the least, your work shouldn't go unnoticed to any extent. However it is your masterpiece of Literature and what ever you decide to do with it is one that we will all respect.

Well, doing this improved version of the original Doom: Evil Unleashed story didn't take too long. On avarage, I spent about an hour for each five parts (that is, the content of each of my story posts in this thread). The process of doing this one was more like looking for errors and inconsistencies in the old version and correcting them.

The original version, however, took about half a year, maybe less, to release all parts - on avarage I would release a part once a week.

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Kewl...I gotta print this up or something....then I'll have something above the perimeters of average to read, this beats the living hell outta any book I've read...All 3 of 'em...this is the first story that I've read without obliterating half of my brain cells cause of boredom, and sneezing:P..Despite I've already read this, I'd read it again, Hell its good enough to read past the number of times of what I can count...

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DOOM Anomaly said:

this beats the living hell outta any book I've read...All 3 of 'em...this is the first story that I've read without obliterating half of my brain cells cause of boredom, and sneezing:P..

Damn, those books must've been a waste of money.

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dsm said:

Damn, those books must've been a waste of money.


1. yea

2.Not that much of a waste of money, to the best of my recollection I dont use my brain all that much.

3. I wuz forced to read them...Damn School!!

4. nvm #1....the school paid for them...but then again, I paid to goto the school...The bastards!!! >:O

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*blinks in amazement

...woah.... this... is.... AWESOME!!! I read it all start to finish in one sitting. Took me a damn long while, but it was a very good read. I can't wait for you to do for Doom II what you did for Doom.
I see the first chapter is up already, and I have read it, and I must say, I like what I see so far. You should see if you can get this published. I'm sure if the other Doom novels can be published, yours can too.

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wow, lots of action,lots of gore, no female imps. A+

On a side note i think your sticking to the game to much, in the next one (if there is one) id like to see some different weponry.
I loved the part with the floor tenticle though it added somthing new that i didnt see coming like a uhaul truck on a texan road.

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Uhm, Black Hand, it is not a good thing to reply to threads older than 2 weeks (other Mods don't accept it if it's older than one week, but I'm not as strict in that respect). This is what we refer to as "bumping" and doing too much will certainly get you in trouble.

Thanks for the feedback anyway.

On a side note i think your sticking to the game to much, in the next one (if there is one) id like to see some different weponry.

I stuck to the game, because that is what I think it should be - true to the game in as many details as possible. And I did add assault rifles to the weaponry didn't I?

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