Doom 3™: Maelstrom

by Matthew Costello

  But with the air came the noise, and having seen what happened last time, Uri pressed tight against the wall, neatly into a corner, and waited for the inevitable, waited for what came next.

  In Delta Lab, Dr. Kellyn MacDonald tasted something on his lips. His tongue was dry, a cracked leathery thing, but it could still move. The stuff on his lips moist, sticky. Blood? he thought. My blood? Someone else’s? Or something else, some new substance from, from—

  The Other Place.

  That’s what he called it, the place where all these things came from. The parade of creatures emerged from the teleportation pod that Kellyn could see—oh so clearly now—was a portal.

  Yes, a portal. A door. And doors led somewhere, right? So what was this place? Where—for the love of God, if there was a God anymore—did the portal go? He brought a hand to his cheek and rubbed the stuff off his lips. There, gone. He had long ago passed being desperately thirsty. Now he had only one message he kept repeating to his brain: If you stay still, if you don’t move, you maybe—maybe—can still live.

  Though he was smart enough to know now that that was highly unlikely. Improbable, as they say.

  He had hoped to get another message to Kelliher, telling him the answers were all in his previous encoded messages. That there was an explanation there. Now MacDonald imagined that there would be no more messages out. And his family? They would have seen by now his last transmission, his sad words of love, how he had done all this for them. Telling them how he had believed in the importance of it all, how it could have built their future. From Earth to Mars, a future together that he knew now was gone forever.

  He could so easily start crying again, but a small part of his brain overruled that indulgence. After all, he knew that just past this small alcove, the lab was now filled. The parade of creatures building, the room hitting capacity, ladies and gentlemen.

  Delta had been locked down, sealed off. Did anyone on the outside have a clue what was happening here? Were there still any a/v feeds out? He doubted that. The place was sealed tight as more and more things…just poured into it.

  He wanted to cover his ears because, even though the killing in here seemed to have stopped, even though there were no more human screams begging release from whatever horror preyed on them, he could still somehow hear them. Hear the sounds, the grunts, the muffled roaring and guttural sounds. An unearthly horror that, well, had anyone ever heard before? Outside of a madhouse, that is.

  Then, so quickly, everything changed. He saw the room glow as if a lurid orange-red beacon had been turned on, an alternate sun now streaming into the room, blinding in its bloodred light.

  The chattering and garbled roars began to assume a rhythmic quality. Were they trying to talk? God, were these things trying to communicate? And what triggered the sounds?

  MacDonald knew he should stay there, curled up like one of the yet unrevived corpses. But how could he? If any role was assigned to him, it was that of observer, someone to record what happened here. Would that save others? Could others even be saved?

  He didn’t torture his mind with those questions.

  Slowly his shaking hands locked on the edge of this lab table, off in a dark corner, shielding him from the red sunlike glow that filled the room. He started even more slowly to bring his head up, knowing that his skull would emerge before his eyes could see…

  Until he had his eyes at the table edge, squinting at that brilliant sick glow, and he could see everything that happened next.

  17

  I HAVE A NAME, HE THOUGHT. EVEN AS A ROARING train of sound and light rocketed past him, almost ripping him away from his crouching position at the wall, he kept thinking, I have a name. I’m, I’m—

  And he knew that if he couldn’t recall his name now, and who he was, that something would begin to slip, that whatever still roared past him would somehow be able to touch him, capture him—

  Change him.

  So he absolutely knew he had to fight to keep coming back to that point. My name, my life—I had it just a few seconds ago. It’s just there, sweet God, it was just there. Please don’t let it just vanish.

  And for a moment he thought it was hopeless, that there was no way he could recover such information, now lost, so distant, perhaps unimportant in whatever new way of life was about to begin.

  But then the roaring noise seemed to ebb, and with it, the light, the color, began to fade. The roaring express moved on, seeing other corners, other people. And then—there it was:

  I’m Uri. And I’m okay.

  The thought was enough to make him giddy, the realization that somehow he had survived, that he had resisted whatever force had been in the corridor with him. Was he spared because he had plastered himself into a corner, the angle of the reinforced metal walls protecting him? Was that why he was untouched?

  Like any survivor, for those few seconds he stood in that magical moment when you realize you’ve been given a great and wondrous gift. Yet for any survivor, those seconds are just that, so brief, as reality and its demands come roaring back. Only in this case, the reality that Uri faced probably deserved another name.

  Because he stood facing Graver and TM. At least, he imagined that’s who they were…or what they were. The upper part of their uniforms hung off them in shreds. Both had open gashes, and while there was something seeping and gleaming in those long open wounds, it wasn’t blood.

  His two fellow marines had something else under their skin. Questions flew into his mind quickly. How could that happen so…fast? Their blood transformed or replaced. And the ultimate survivor’s question: why them, and not me?

  Only seconds, and then they both turned to him. Their faces barely recognizable. Twisted and broken masks of what used to be the way they looked. TM’s jaw hung open as if broken and detached. But a sudden quick snap, as if he were trying it out, showed Uri that this new configuration worked just fine.

  Graver’s arm, twisted and corkscrewed around, still held a gun. While the muscle and tissue connecting the upper arm to the lower looked like it could break apart, that too also worked well as Graver started raising the weapon at the same moment as his tongue snaked out, tasting the air.

  They weren’t human anymore.

  Uri raised his own weapon. Shooting them was not going to be hard at all. But while he took aim at Graver, whose muzzle now was leveled at Uri, TM reached out and grabbed at Uri’s shoulder, the move quick and unexpected.

  TM’s hand began to close on the indentation of Uri’s right shoulder. The pain was overwhelming, blinding. Uri knew that if he let it get to him, then his brief moment as survivor would be over. And in fact, his fate—since he was fully conscious—could be worse than theirs.

  He fired at Graver, their guns only a meter apart, and as he did, he ducked to his left. He felt a chunk of his flesh being ripped off in that move as the TM thing held tight.

  And his shot didn’t seem to stop Graver, who merely pivoted and started spraying the wall with bullets. But as Uri fell back, he realized something: that whatever his buddies had become, whatever shreds of weapons knowledge still resided inside their misshapen heads, it wasn’t the full deal.

  Maybe they were taking directions from somewhere else. Human instinct—the basic reflexes drilled into them in Quantico practicing close-quarters firefights—had vanished. Sure, they could move, and grab and pull triggers and even have some kind of goddamn aim.

  But Uri was still human. And amazingly, that still counted for something.

  Rolling onto his back, completely vulnerable, he raised his weapon and fired a circular burst into TM’s head. The shots proved effective, as TM stopped moving and then fell to his knees as if being called to prayer.

  A quick few inches over, and another blast at Graver, a bit off the mark this time, but the first round pushed the zombie marine back until Uri could use the thing’s head for target practice.

  And that’s exactly how he thought about it. Just another target, real close, and—
<
br />   Don’t even think that if you screw up, your life is gone.

  Graver dropped his weapon, then its two hands—and Uri could see that they no longer looked like hands—went to the bullet-riddled face as if it could pick out the bullets, like removing a dust speck from an eye.

  Until Graver too fell to his knees, and then fell forward, right at Uri’s feet.

  Then, for the second time, Uri had the same feeling as before. With his heart still racing, chugging his breaths in and out as though gasping for his last breath, he had the feeling: I’m alive.

  And having had that miraculous feeling twice now, he told himself, I’m going to keep it that way.

  But that would require allies. So he scrambled to his feet and started to plan where he had to go and how to get there without losing his life.

  Dr. Kellyn MacDonald stared at the edge of the metal lab table. He made sure not to move his head. He sat in the shadows here, but even the slightest movement might get their attention. So he had to hold his head perfectly steady and let his eyes scan the room, taking in everything that he could see that way, and thinking—

  Make no sound. I must not make…a…sound.

  His eyes swung back and forth. For some of the things that filled the lab, he could only make out shapes. Some of them had once been his peers, the other scientists, now only recognizable because of their white lab coats. Other things lumbered near them, pushing them aside, moving to the opening that led out of Delta.

  And MacDonald thought: It’s open, the lab is open again!

  His eyes swiveled back to take in more of the creatures, the things that had emerged from the pod…the portal. He focused on one that—at first—he thought was a group of spindly-legged things walking together. Until, even in the smoky shadows of the lab, he could see it was clearly one creature.

  One creature. And those spindly things, the legs, how many of them were there? He tried counting…one, two, three, four…but it moved, and he started over, as if getting the number of legs right was somehow important.

  But then he got distracted by what sat atop the spiderlike creature—which was the only thing MacDonald could compare it to, with all those legs moving together, carrying the creature forward.

  Something sat on top of it, he saw. But no, nothing rode this thing. What he took for another creature was part of it, attached to it. And just then he watched the spiderlike creature’s head turn, as if it sensed something scrutinizing it.

  MacDonald dared not move. But he could close his eyes, cutting off the possibility of any reflective glare from the pools of milky white sclera and the dark horrified pupil at each eye’s center.

  And in that moment the thing might have spotted him, stopped, and used those spindly legs (which MacDonald imagined surely must have the spiky hairs he had seen only under a microscope, but now each inches long, leathery and sharp) to scramble over toward him.

  He waited, holding his breath. Then, as if the action could make any noise at all, he slowly opened his eyes.

  It had moved on, followed by others. MacDonald let his eyes slowly move right, back to the portal that had allowed these beings in.

  When he did, he saw another shape coming out, indistinct at first, but slowly resolving itself into something—at first—reassuringly human.

  Dr. Betruger. Only now Betruger no longer held the artifact U1—the so-called Soul Cube. It was gone, having been carried by him into wherever the portal led.

  And MacDonald felt a hopelessness that made the very thought of escape, of the future, of planning, as absurd as the death struggle of an ant with its legs removed, fighting somehow, for some reason…to stay alive.

  18

  KANE STARED AT THE IMPLODED DOOR OF THE elevator shaft. He tapped his earpiece, but there was still no signal. He had heard the roaring sound of a new blast racing through Mars City, and had pressed himself into an alcove, hoping it would miss him.

  Apparently this one not only took out communications, but it also caused new structural damage that was going to make getting to Alpha hard.

  He had hoped he could reach Maria and confirm she was okay. And he wondered: Back at Reception—what had happened there? Once again, he was alone, no way to contact anyone, and with an increasingly twisted maze of metal seemingly working against him all the way.

  Alone.

  Guess I better get used to it, he realized. Down on Earth he had always felt alone except maybe for those times he could share a decent bourbon with Master Sergeant Chadbourne. But watching his sergeant die in Terekstan, turned into a red cloud, just reminded Kane that you don’t connect to anyone. Not in this job.

  Is that what this was, a job? Some people sit at desks. Some work in labs. Some try to squeeze more food out of an ever-reluctant planet Earth. And what was his job? Kill or be killed? Use every bit of firepower that the government gives him to destroy things?

  He pulled up his PDA. It had been good thinking, making the core information system independent of any functioning network. In seconds, he was scrolling through the different ways to Alpha. He saw the nearby elevator shaft on the map, now useless.

  And then he saw the nearby emergency stairs leading to transport tunnels that went almost straight all the way through to Alpha before arriving at another row of supply elevators. Would they be functional? And what was waiting for him downstairs?

  If anyone was running this show, they’d probably order him back to Reception to fortify the position there. They’d want anyone who survived to regroup. But there was no brass telling him anything. And he had obviously shown he wasn’t too good at taking orders anyway.

  So it would be the stairs, and run to Alpha.

  No, he admitted. To Maria. After all, you’ve got to care about something in this “job.”

  Otherwise it’s just bullets and blood.

  Kane started for the closest stairway down.

  Theo didn’t move a muscle. They were down there. He could hear them, taking steps, like they might move away.

  But they just stood, waiting, like they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. And soon he’d make a sound, and they’d know where he was, and they—they—

  What would they do? He had tried so hard not to imagine it. But he could keep the thoughts away for only so long. Just like when he’d be in his bed at night, in the dark, and the things from his dreams would seem to be there, in his room, hiding, and he would force his voice to call out for his mother, so afraid that the call would make them leap out. Land on him. Grab him. Bite down….

  He could see them with only one eye through the tiny crack in the airshaft that went across this corridor. They didn’t talk or make any sounds. And these weren’t soldiers. No, they wore pieces of what looked like white shirts—like those his dad wore—hanging off them.

  One looked as though it held something shiny, metallic, in its hand. Scissors. But then the longer he stared at that arm with his one eye, the more he could see that the thing wasn’t holding the scissors. No, the scissors were part of the thing’s arm. A hand, or what used to be a hand, now attached to the scissors.

  Theo looked away.

  He felt something in his nose. A bit of dust. No, he thought. I can’t sneeze. Please, don’t make me sneeze. But he could feel his nostrils tingling, and the more he thought about not sneezing, the more it seemed that it had to happen. In only seconds, he’d sneeze—

  And they’d know he was there.

  He brought a hand up to his nose, moving it slowly because even that movement could be heard. He rubbed his nose, trying to make the sneeze not happen. Even as he did that, he felt that sudden intake of air. A burp of air, and then the explosion out.

  As soon as he sneezed, he looked through the crack, but the two things below him were gone. Had they moved away in that instant?

  But no, that would have been too lucky. And behind him, a few feet away, he saw something cut up and into the shaft. The scissors! Like a giant crab claw, cutting into the metal so easily,

  H
e looked away, ready to start crawling down the shaft as fast as he could in the other direction when he saw two clawlike hands jab through the metal like it was only cardboard, holding on to the ragged edges.

  And he was in the middle as one thing ripped at the metal ahead, while the other pulled out its scissors hands and started jabbing into the shaft, closer and closer to Theo.

  Uri trotted back toward Delta and what he hoped would be a sizeable force with Sergeant Kelly. Somehow he had just found the adrenaline to take out what used to be two of his buddies. But he guessed the odds down here for a lone human weren’t going to go from bad to worse.

  He heard sounds as he jogged down the long, seemingly empty shaft. More sounds than just his boots slapping down on the metal floor. Weird howls, moans, and grunts that came from animals that we certainly didn’t have on Earth. That is, unless they were sounds that humans could make.

  When humans were pushed to a strange new limit of madness and pain, was that the kind of sounds they made?

  But the corridor ahead remained eerily empty.

  He had been glad to get away from Delta when Kelly assigned the three of them to patrol down here. Now the only thing he could think of was to get back there. Such a human instinct, he realized. Get with more of the species. Maybe one of them will get picked off instead of you. Get near the center of the pack, and let one of them get taken.

  He held his machine gun in the raised and ready position. If anything got in his way, he’d shoot first and wonder what the hell it was later. No time for peering into the shadows. Just spray whatever moved with bullets, that was the plan. Got plenty of ammo. Just shoot and shoot and—

  He stopped.

  Ahead, a door. Nothing too dramatic about that. There were a few airlock doors between here and Kelly’s position outside Delta. No big problem, right?

  Except… Uri licked his lips, hating a terrible fact that he couldn’t avoid, a fact that came popping into his head, unwanted, persistent…and ultimately undeniable.