Howdy everyone from coronavirus quarantine. How you liking Doom Eternal so far? I ask because I can't play it yet. My preordered copy is still held up in the mail due to how backed up the system is right now, but at least they gave me the code for my copy of Doom 64 to play while I wait for it. I should be getting the game any day now though.
I've noticed that I've had a slight increase of reviews on old fics and I'm presuming that this is because everyone's trying to find something to do. I figured I'd add something new so that you guys have something to read while you're in quarantine, especially if you, like me, can't play Doom Eternal yet. This way I keep busy by writing and you keep busy by being silent lurkers who read and don't post reviews telling me how great I am (I kid, I appreciate everyone, even the silent lurkers, for giving my stories attention, and as long as the traffic stats reassure me that someone has read it, I'm okay with this).
I guess this story takes place in the reboot universe, minus a quick mention of an enemy type that doesn't exist in the reboot universe, as far as I'm aware.
The door was unlocked, but that didn't stop the Doom Slayer from kicking it down anyway. It looked like he had just broken into someone's living quarters, but he'd be forgiven for thinking it was just another pocket dimension located within Hell as like everything else on Mars, it had clearly been overtaken at some point. One wall of the living area was overcome with a demonic black growth that pulsated and seemed to be alive. He pulled the cord on a lamp, bathing the area in an ominous red light.
The quarters were trashed. There were hoofprints and claw marks from one end to the other. One end of the couch was crushed from the weight of a considerably large demon. The Doom Slayer wandered through the room to the kitchen and found it to be in a comparable state of disarray. A foul black tar bubbled and oozed from the sink, and like the corruption on the living room wall, it appeared to be alive and yet not somehow. The fridge door was slightly ajar and was the only light illuminating the room.
He opened the door all the way and peered inside. There was a skinned goat head wrapped in plastic next to a pickle jar that contained a deformed fetus that periodically twitched and opened its mouth in an attempt at screaming. An eyeball floated to the front of a gray mass consuming what looked like a decomposing cow heart and watched him as he dug around inside with one arm, pushing past a jar of pig feet, a paper bag containing a dead dove, a dissected cat, a perfectly normal and untouched looking pack of hot dogs, and a jar of olives so old that they now looked like kombucha. He winced and withdrew his hand from the fridge before he could accidentally touch the grossest thing he'd ever seen...a carton of soy milk.
He began to go through all of the cabinets, not sure what he was looking for but hoping he'd find it anyway. There were dishes that looked like they'd been put away dirty, an oatmeal can that contained what looked like someone's house keys. The last cabinet was already wide open, the contents of which were spilled and scattered all over the floor. He looked among the piles of dented cans and spilled Kool-Aid mix but didn't see it there either. He drew a smiley face in the tar leaking onto the counter next to the sink with his index finger and tried looking in the cabinet under the counter.
Aha! All the way in the back of the cabinet he found what he was looking for, which was apparently a bag of beef jerky and a three quarters full bottle of Captain Morgan.
As he sat down on the couch and fed a piece of jerky to the wall behind him, he couldn't help but feel as though it were a little too quiet around here. He pulled the coffee table closer and put his bloodstained legs on top of it, not too worried about the copy of War and Peace that he was now ruining by using it as a footrest, and decided to see what was on the TV while all broadcasts were overtaken by Hell. There was nothing on but American politics, a channel that was only a glowing pentagram and a sound like grinding metal, and reruns of Roseanne.
He was just downing the last of the Captain Morgan when he heard the sound of footsteps coming closer to him. "Hell Walker..." a deep sounding voice echoed through the room.
He looked towards the Baron of Hell with a feigned disinterest and leaned himself back on the couch, putting his legs entirely on the coffee table to make it seem like he was bored and was just going to refuse to engage the demon at all so that he could take a nap. The Baron seemed annoyed at having been ignored.
"Pay attention to me!" he shouted at him.
The Doom Slayer continued flipping through several channels of static on the TV and was silently enjoying how angry the demon got when he couldn't get Hell's worst nightmare to even acknowledge that he was there.
The Baron huffed. "I know what'll get your attention..." he grumbled as he left.
The Doom Slayer polished off the last of the beef jerky and was about to reach for his shotgun and follow the Baron when he returned on his own.
"Here," the Baron said, "this is for you."
The demon reached out with one hand and released what looked like a wad of wet hair onto the floor with a slimy thud. At first the Doom Slayer thought it was a wig and he became thoroughly confused as to why the Baron thought this would get his attention when he noticed a tiny leg jutting out from the mass.
Rage filled him instantly when he ran to the bloody mess the demon had dropped in front of him. He scooped it up and tried to catch the strings of intestines that fell from it from a hole in its stomach. It was Daisy, his pet rabbit, the only thing in his life that he actually cared about other than slaughtering demons. He still remembered the day he first found her while he still lived on Earth, a tiny ball of wet fur shivering in the rain outside. She was clearly a domesticated rabbit which meant she had to have been abandoned. She would sit on his shoulder nibbling lettuce while he drank beer, watched football, and periodically reached up to pet her. She was the first to go missing when the demons invaded.
He gently ran his hand down her side the same way he would if she were still alive. Her soft, plush fur was torn out in chunks on one side, many of her bones were broken, and there was a bite taken out of her back. Her head was missing. Where was her head?!
The Doom Slayer slammed his hand on the ground and turned his head towards the Baron of Hell. He was about to make sure every demon in Hell would suffer for what they did to Daisy.
The Baron suddenly seemed a little nervous. He had clearly expected him to get angry but had seriously underestimated the Slayer's love for his pet. "Hey, uh...maybe this is the part where I should start saying I'm sorry?"
A BFG9000 was too quick and painless of a death for him. The Doom Slayer instead charged at him and jumped on him, punching his fist through the demon's abdomen and tearing out one of his kidneys. The demon had barely a chance to react to the assault and tried to fling him off as the Slayer wrestled him to the ground. He pulled the pin off a grenade, shoved it inside the Baron's gut where his kidney used to be, and jumped back just in time to watch him explode from the inside.
The Doom Slayer looked up and saw the second Baron standing just a few feet away. "Oh shit!" the Baron shouted before trying to run.
The denizens of Hell were suddenly alerted that something was very wrong when one of their Barons ran screaming through the facility's hallways, "The Doom Slayer is coming! The Doom Slayer is coming!" When such a large and powerful demon was running for his life, that meant you should be doing so too.
Everyone began panicking and running in circles trying to find an escape route or a safe place to hide. A revenant buried himself underground and hoped that the Doom Slayer would never think to check an obvious pile of dirt in an oxygen garden for him while a pain elemental started desperately looking around for her lost souls shouting, "Where are my babies?! Has anyone seen my babies?!"
"Daddy! Save us!" a cherub shouted as it grabbed ahold of a mancubus and tried to hitch a ride to safety.
"I already told you freaks, I'm not your daddy!" the mancubus complained as he tried to shake it loose, only for several of them to latch on.
There was a loud creak as the trunk of a small, dead tree growing in a pot started to break under the weight of a hell razer that had scrambled to the top and a hell knight tripped over a cacodemon that was trying to make herself look small and unassuming by laying low to the ground and landed on his face. Somewhere nearby a spectre was laughing at them all as he stood invisible and unnoticed in the shadows.
"HE'S HERE!" a lost soul shouted before exploding into the ether from a gunshot wound.
As all the demons continued to scatter, an imp started handing possessed humans guns of varying size and caliber and pushing them out into the open, hoping that their distraction could buy everyone time to escape. The Doom Slayer fired a pistol into the knee cap of the nearest one and then kicked his face in when he collapsed to the ground. He grabbed another by the head and roughly twisted it, the sickening crack foretelling its end as it collapsed to the ground. One of them got a lucky shot in, but the shot failed to puncture his armor and the Slayer uppercut him so hard that both of his eyeballs flew out of his sockets.
The mancubus used the blood of fallen comrades as the Doom Slayer kept slaughtering everyone behind him to draw a sigil on the ground. "Everyone over here!" he shouted over his shoulder as the teleporter he had just created became live.
Demons ran towards him, many of them exploding into gore as assault rifle fire pierced their vital organs. The ones that made it were swiftly teleported away.
Before he managed to join them, the mancubus slowed the stampede of the Slayer by snatching a particularly small cherub off the ground. "Eat baby!" he shouted before throwing it at him. The cherub flew through the air and hit the Doom Slayer in the face, exploding on impact and knocking him to the ground while the mancubus escaped.
He got up and chased after him but found that the demonic teleporter would not work when he stood on it. He hopped up and down in place, but it just wouldn't allow anyone but a demon through. He stared at it a moment and then had an idea. Turning his head, he saw the imp from earlier, desperately out of possessed human soldiers to throw at him, and a hell knight that was subscribing to the "If I don't move he can't see me!" train of thought. He pointed at them both in a silent threat and began to run at them.
"FUCKING RUN!" the imp shouted as they both took off together.
"WHERE?!" the hell knight shouted back at her as his longer legs carried him faster.
"I DON'T KNOW! Uh...HERE!"
She led him through a door and then quickly shut it behind them. Stopping to take a deep breath, she leaned against the wall as her heart pounded from fear.
"This is a supply closet!" the hell knight pointed out.
"Yes, but we'll be safe in here!" the imp replied. "We'll be safe as long as he..."
With a mechanical whir, the door opened. The Doom Slayer stood blocking the closet's only exit with his hand on the open/close switch. Even though his face couldn't be seen through the helmet, the tilt in his head suggested his expression was along the lines of, "Really?"
"Are you kidding me?! He knows how to open doors?!" the imp shouted.
"Of course he knows how doors work! Why would he not know how doors work?!" the hell knight pointed out.
"Look, it took me weeks to figure out that technology! How was I supposed to know he'd already mastered it?!"
The imp barely had a second to get another word out before her head exploded into a pile of warm giblets. The hell knight spun around to face him and held his arms out in front of him. "Stay back! I'm warning you! I..." He too hardly had a chance to get a few words out before he ended up chock full of bullet holes.
As the end of the chaingun began to smoke from overuse, the Doom Slayer knelt before the hell knight, grabbed a handful of raw gore, and began smearing it all over himself.
"Are you sure that he can't follow us here?" one of the many cacodemons that had survived asked.
"Of course! We're currently inside of a pocket dimension separate from Mars," the mancubus nodded. "You see that sigil we used to get in here?" He pointed towards the glowing red pentagram on the floor. "That's the only way in or out and it will only allow a demon to get through it. The Doom Slayer is but a mere mortal. There's no way he can trick it into thinking..."
All of the cacodemons screamed and flew away like a startled flock of birds, leaving the mancubus standing there wondering what had just happened. He heard a crackle behind him, the residual sound of burning hell energy that gave the teleporter its power, indicating that someone had just used it. He looked over his shoulder to see if it was someone he knew and saw that it was one of his hell knight buddies. Except there was something not quite right about him. He looked shorter. And incredibly pale. And limp. And most of his body was made up of stringy entrails and gore like he'd been lowered into a meat grinder, and...
...the hell knight's face slid off the green helmet, leaving a sticky trail of blood down the opaque visor as it fell. The Doom Slayer cocked his head and before the mancubus knew it, he was the first to go as the Slayer began firing a plasma gun at every demon in the area.
Eyeballs flew everywhere. A deceased cacodemon fell to the ground like an inflated sack of helium. Those who tried to fight were taken out first. Those who tried to run had holes burned straight through them with a few well aimed shots from a gauss cannon. The Doom Slayer waded through the shin deep pile of mancubus guts and stood over a terrified imp.
"Don't kill me! I have a wife! And kids!" the imp pleaded. "Kill them instead!" He dispatched him with a close range headshot from a super shotgun, the same way he had dispatched the last imp.
He looked up and saw a pinky staring at him. The demon's eyes widened and he began to back up. He turned around and sprinted for his life when he heard the rev of a motor.
"Where in the here did he find a chainsaw in Hell?!" a lost soul shouted as it flew away at top speed.
About a week waged on as the Doom Slayer put a significant dent in the population of Hell's legion. He stopped not to sleep, not to eat, not even to engage Hayden as the cyborg tried to get his attention and steer him back onto whatever task he tried to interest him in, except for the brief moment where he punched the support struts in his leg out from under him when he wouldn't shut up and then kneed him in the head.
The Baron of Hell that had been part of his unstoppable rage had managed to elude him thus far. He finished barricading the only door between himself and the Slayer and quickly ran to a summoner and grabbed her, trying to hide behind her.
"You've gotta help me!" he said nervously. "He's coming for me!"
"Who?" the summoner asked him.
"The Hell Walker!"
"YOU BROUGHT HIM HERE?!" she shouted at him angrily before looking at the door in terror.
The Doom Slayer began kicking the door as hard as he could, causing the flimsy barricade to buck and bend with every kick. The summoner turned her head but the Baron of Hell was already gone, having run through another door to put more distance between them both.
"Oh great," she said to herself as she prepared for a fight. "Get ready, minions!"
The arch-vile turned his head in surprise when someone came through the door that wasn't the summoner. "What brings you down here?" he asked as he calmly sipped his blood root tea.
"The Doom Slayer is here and he's trying to kill me because my brother and I killed his pet rabbit!" he shouted.
Instantly the arch-vile spat his tea out. "What?!" he shouted. "And you left him out there with my wife?!"
"You hate your wife!" the Baron shouted as he looked for a place to hide or escape.
"Yes, but that's beside the point! You should be out there helping her try to kill the Doom Slayer!"
There was a knock at the door. Both of them turned their head to stare at it, neither of them wanting to answer it. Eventually the door opened on its own and the summoner was found standing on the other side.
"Oh sweetie, it's just you," the arch-vile said with relief.
And then he noticed the blood spurting out of her as she slowly slunk to the floor, a sharp piece of metal driven up through her back and into her brain. The Doom Slayer stood right behind her, helmet lowered in a silent threat as he stared down the arch-vile.
The arch-vile jumped up from his seat and prepared to fight while the Baron was more or less useless. The room was ablaze with fire as he fought back for his life. The Doom Slayer charged through it, not even seeming to notice any of the burns that were left behind on his arms. He swung to punch the arch-vile, missing and hitting the wall, but left a considerable dent in it.
The arch-vile dove around him and tried to claw at his side. The Slayer grabbed him by the arm and pulled him closer, grabbed his face, and smashed it repeatedly against the wall. The arch-vile struggled to get away from him and felt pain in his gut as the same thin, rusty strip of metal that killed the summoner impaled him. It was twisted inside of him, rearranging organs and tearing up insides as it moved.
He fell to the floor and vomited out a large amount of blood. He felt a hand at the back of his neck and was spun around. The Doom Slayer was now straddling him and swung his fist at his face, causing a portion of his skull to cave in.
As he prepared for a second punch, the arch-vile shouted, "I CAN BRING YOUR RABBIT BACK!" The Doom Slayer hesitated with his fist only centimeters from the arch-vile's face. "I can bring your rabbit back!" he said again. He had his arms in front of him, trying to shield himself from the Doom Slayer's wrath, though should he start up again this would surly result in them both getting broken.
What he said clearly seemed to interest the Slayer. He lowered his fist and leaned back slightly but still kept his other hand in a death grip around the arch-vile's throat to prevent him from trying to squirm away. He looked at him impatiently, expecting a swift explanation to his claim or he would start punching away again.
"Animals have souls. Some of those people upstairs seem to claim otherwise but they do, and everything that is killed by a demon has its soul trapped in Hell, so the rabbit's soul is here, which means I can easily put it back where it belongs. I just need the rabbit's body," the arch-vile explained. Please PLEASE still have the rabbit's body with you...he silently pleaded when he realized that this could be a deal breaker for the Slayer if he didn't.
The Doom Slayer pressed his face against the arch-vile's and for a brief moment he thought he could vaguely see eyes glaring at him through the helmet, the threat clear that he better resurrect the rabbit and not try anything stupid when he let him go. The Doom Slayer gave him a shove into the soft dirt floor of Hell and stood up, placing a foot on the arch-vile to keep him in place while he searched an ammo bag.
He withdrew something that was wrapped tightly in plastic. It stank really bad and was leaking. Only the Doom Slayer would think to carry the rotting corpse of his pet with him like this, though the arch-vile had a light sigh of relief at the fact. He glared at the demon as though debating if he could trust him with his best friend's body before finally removing his foot from the arch-vile's chest and presenting the body to him.
The arch-vile took it from him. The extra movement caused a stream of foul smelling discharge from the liquefying remains to run down his arm. It didn't bother him. Decomposition was something that all demons were used to, especially one that dealt with resurrection of the dead on a regular basis. His hands began to glow and burn and the flame engulfed the body, burned away the plastic that the Doom Slayer had wrapped it in in a vain attempt to keep it from rotting inside of his spare ammo backpack. When the flames died out the rabbit was no longer rotting. Her head was no longer missing, tiny bones no longer jutting out through the skin at odd angles. She was whole and she sat up and looked around, her tiny nose twitching at all the various strange smells that she found in Hell.
The Doom Slayer took her from him with a surprising amount of gentleness for someone such as himself. The tiny rabbit looked so frail in his grasp and she was barely bigger than the size of one of his hands. Daisy turned her head towards him and recognized him by his faceless helmet instantly. She placed her feet on the bottom edge of his helmet and he in turn pressed the front of his helmet to the side of her head in a mimicry of a kiss.
And then Daisy's head snapped towards the arch-vile at the same time that the Doom Slayer's did. Oh shit...the arch-vile thought when he realized that this couldn't have been good for him.
On the positive side, the Doom Slayer thanked him for bringing his rabbit back from the dead by making sure his death was at least instant when he punched him hard enough that his head exploded. He sat on the floor of Hell and cuddled Daisy as she nibbled on the stem of one of the arch-vile's eyeballs.
They were both interrupted by the sound of whimpering. The Doom Slayer looked up and saw the Baron of Hell he had been chasing cowering behind an overturned table that barely shielded him. He tucked Daisy safely inside of his backpack and set it on the floor. She poked her head out with interest at the sound of a revving chainsaw and watched as he went to work slaughtering the cowering demon before her.
Once the demon was dead, the Slayer retrieved the bunny in a backpack and strapped her to his armor where she would safely accompany him on his quest to exterminate every demon in existence.
"You can't be serious?" Hayden asked him when he saw the furry face poking out of the bag.
The Doom Slayer just responded to his statement by kicking out his supports again.
Daisy's alive in the reboot universe, or at the very least maybe she's a spirit guide appearing to motivate Doomguy to keep slaughtering demons for her. This revelation makes me happy.