Doom - Evil Unleashed 1.4

[dsm]

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.

Something on the floor caught my attention. The sparse light above the consoles fell upon the cold metal of a steel gray 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. 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. "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 a bit of doubt in my mind.

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 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 further.

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.

Most of the fears I had felt when I first entered the base were mostly gone now. I only felt a wicked satisfaction from killing the 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 any longer.

I had grown 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.

...

[pritch]

Great story, comfortably better than the novels.

I am almost inspired to write myself, but it's ten past one... in the morning.

But well done, dsm. :)

[Blood Lord]

I have never read the novels but I would have to agree after hearing how crap they were...

[Revenant_]

Doom Novels????