degreelessness: chapter four

[jute]

degreelessness:chapterone
degreelessness:chaptertwo
degreelessness:chapterthree

degreelessness:chapterfour

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
when chester finally got to the big fucking tower, there was a black marble plaque above the two huge wooden doors that served as an entrance, and that’s what it said. chester had to laugh, had to grin at that, because he had done a lot of thinking in the desert, and if what he was thinking was correct, and, maybe he was just crazy, but he was pretty sure it was, then that sign was hilarious. ‘fuck it’ he thought, looking at the tower, seeing the bodies up close, standing ankle-high in blood and shit and meat. he opened the goddamned doors and stepped into hell itself.

it looked like something out of a david cronenburg movie, complete with sub-par special effects. the walls on the inside of the tower appeared to be flesh fused with metal and circuitry, and there were tapestries made of skin and covered with arcane symbols hanging decoratively. everything inside appeared infinitely too large to fit in the tower he had seen from outside, and the whole place was basically a huge spiral staircase that seemed to coil and rise forever. dante had it wrong. the circles of hell were actually parts of a single spiral, and they went up, not down. chester wondered what was at the top, knowing he would have to eventually find out because it was absolutely important that he reach it. but he didn’t have much time to ponder this, because the place was also totally fucking full of demons, which were busily trying to kill the shit out of him. chester pulled the machine gun he had pilfered from that ss guard son of a bitch out of his backpack and, hoping that he would have better luck winning a war with it than they did, started spraying. a pink demon, frothing and snorting, all teeth, beady little eyes registering a mind too stupid to even hate, rushed towards him as fast as its stubby little legs could carry it and chester shoved the gun in the things mouth and pulled the trigger, watching it shake and dance like an epileptic on uppers, the crescendo of gunfire transforming into a series of wet smacks as they connected with flesh until eventually they wore a hole through the demon and started ricocheting off the parts of the wall that weren’t organic and finally they hit the bits that were and disappeared, embedded in tiny little puckering wounds. a herd of zombies advanced and he mowed them all down until he heard a click and pulled out his chainsaw to finish the bastards off, covered with blood, screaming. cacodemons hissed their arrival and hovered down to attack and he shoved the saw into their radiant green eyes and watched them die, unable to defend against such an attack. chester felt reborn amidst all the chaos, the tower his anti-womb. this was hell: an absolute value gone negative. but he was used to that feeling by now. a huge, immensely corpulent beast that would almost appear humanoid if it wasn’t for its sheer repulsiveness lumbered towards him and started firing rockets out of the guns that served for its hands, and chester let them hit him and kept on walking towards the bastard, pulling a double-barreled shotgun out of his pack and shooting the thing point-blank six times, watching as its flesh collapsed and seeing its deformed skeleton protruding through the immense exit wound on its back. more and more demons came, and he kept on killing. after a while, they were all dead, and chester, literally soaked in blood, seeing red, ears ringing from all the gunfire and explosions, reloaded the shotgun and started up the stairs.

after about half an hour of climbing, chester was attacked by two brown humanoid creatures covered in spikes that he instinctively knew were called imps. they somehow threw fire from their hands that he dodged and watched hit the wall, leaving a black crater on some circuitry and searing nearby flesh. after he unloaded his shotgun, killing them both in the blast, three pink demons teleported in with a green flash of plasma and charged at him, so he blew their fucking heads off too. then all was quiet again and he continued his ascent. thirty minutes later, he would run into another 2-3 group of imps and demons and slaughter them too. it was, just as he had expected, like clockwork. the horrendous monsters weren’t the only thing that repeated, either. the walls were all the same pattern of metal/flesh/metal/flesh and the arrangement of blasphemous tapestries was constantly recurring. he thought about the trees at the edge of the desert, and the sky that never changed. after about 5 days worth of climbing and killing, he arrived at the top of the stairs to a cast-iron door just like the one in the nazi dungeon he had somehow teleported to. preparing himself for the absolute worst and praying for death, he hit ‘space’ and the door opened with an mechanical whoosh.

it revealed a small rectangular room with circuit board walls and a dirty metal floor. at its center was a head on a stick that stared at chester with mild apathy, blinking at the harsh shock of light that the open door allowed in.

[Guardian]

The head! The head returns! I'm assuming at one point you just had to use NOCLIP to find out what was behind that huge demon head in DOOM II, eh? So did I, heh.

I just love this. You can never tell for sure if it's 'real' or the game we so love. At one point our beloved chester is pressing CTRL, or he's pressing SPACE and trying to open doors with handles that don't really work.

And here, he practically eats three or four rockets from a Cyberdemon and doesn't die! Degreelessness Mode On fer sure!

I'm sorry, I'm going off on a tangent, but for some reason this series of yours is just bringing up all those wonderful memories I have of watching my dad beat the crap out of anything and everything that moved on that computer monitor of his so many years ago . . . Okay, I'll stop now; sorry if I scared anyone, heh. *grins sheepishly*

But yeah, this is great; I can't wait to see more, and I definitely hope more is coming. Things just keep getting better an' better.

[DaJuice]

a pink demon, frothing and snorting, all teeth, beady little eyes registering a mind too stupid to even hate, rushed towards him as fast as its stubby little legs could carry it and chester shoved the gun in the things mouth and pulled the trigger, watching it shake and dance like an epileptic on uppers, the crescendo of gunfire transforming into a series of wet smacks as they connected with flesh until eventually they wore a hole through the demon and started ricocheting off the parts of the wall that weren’t organic and finally they hit the bits that were and disappeared, embedded in tiny little puckering wounds.

Lol that rocked! This one is definitly my fave so far. The desciptions and details are beautiful, I think the writing in this one is even better than the first three, or maybe it just appeals to me more. The head-on-a-stick is a nice way to end this chapter.
Well done!

[jute]

thank you both an insane amount for all your comments. it's really great that you like the story so much. as for more, the next chapter is going to be the grand finale, which hopefully will satisfy everyone else as much as it does me. maybe i'll write more stories based on doom after this. it's a lot of fun.

and yeah, i totally had to use idclip to find that head the first time through. how could you otherwise? those treacherous bastards at id.

[Guardian]

Wasn't it supposedly some sortah caricature of one of the head-people on the DOOM programming projects or something? Carmack keeps coming to mind . . . But anyway, yeah, those brats. My dad once spent a half-hour or so just pumping the thing with pistol-bullets.

Aww, so soon? Ah well, that's okay. It's been a fun read, and no matter how much I'll cry at seeing any sort of THE END, I'm sure it'll be a fitting one. ;)

[Dingus Khan]

I believe it was John Romero's head. I'm not sure if i spelled it right. Oh well.

[Guardian]

You did spell it correctly, and thank you for clarifying. :)