Doom - Evil Unleashed 3.3

[dsm]

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, it turned out to be 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.
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 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 prototype weapon which was almost revolutionary.

“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. 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.

...

[nightmare imp]

Superb work DSM,cant wait for the next chapter!