As he came through the teleporter, snapping out of existence in one hellish room and back into it in another hellish room, Jack thought that he would never get used to teleportation. And, to be completely honest, he didn't intend to, because he didn't intend to do this any more than necessary. Shotgun firmly in hand, he stepped off the rusted red pad of ancient metal, (briefly wondering what the hell it was that made them function like that), and quickly scoped out this latest slice of Hell he found himself coming into.

As he expected, it was ugly, though not nearly as much as it could be. He stood in a roughly octagonal room, and there were broad openings in each section of wall surrounding him. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of the same pockmarked, dirty gray stonework. It actually reminded him of a cave, despite being artificial. Or maybe it had grown this way. Who the fuck knew in a place like this? He saw a door dead ahead of him.

And then he saw movement.

Ahead to the left and to the right, in two of the shadowy niches surrounding him. He heard a growl, no, more than one growl. And they were deep. And horribly familiar. Jack looked slowly around himself.

"No..." he whispered, paralyzing terror stealing over him.

The shadowy niches were beginning to light up with a flickering hellish yellow-orange light. To his left, his right, behind him…

"No..." he groaned, trembling violently now.

Six Barons of Hell stepped forward into the light, and roared.

"No! No! No!" Jack screamed, turning and firing almost blindly at the nearest Baron of Hell. The slug shell hit it in the chest, drawing blood, ultimately being about as meaningful as a bug bite on an elephant.

There was a green flash behind him.

"Jack, what's-OH MY FUCKING GOD! WHAT THE FUCK!?" Jennifer screamed.

Jack's eyes locked onto the wooden door dead ahead of him. He had to get to it. "Move!" he screamed, jerking to the right to avoid a ball of green energy. He nearly walked right into another one. He began running towards the door, dodging and ducking and weaving, screaming the whole way, his brain operating almost purely on autopilot. It helped that he'd just taken that damned injection because if there was ever a time he needed a pickup, it was right the fuck now. He ran smack into the door and nearly fell onto his back.

He punched the open button, too terrified to even feel the pain of having run into the door. There was another flash of green light (nearly indistinguishable from the green glow of the half-dozen Baron's attacks, only discernible by its brightness) and then he heard Miller issue a terrified scream. No time to worry about that now, he had to get this damned door open and find some kind of fallback because holy shit there were so many of these fuckers!

"Here!" he screamed, ducking to get under the slow-moving door. Why, out of all the fucking doors they'd run into, was this one moving so slow?!

He began to call to the others again, but his words died on his lips as he started in stark horror at the room beyond. It was a large, open room, octagonal like the previous room, although this whole area was bathed in some strange white light. The floor had grooves cut into it, each one leading into the center. They were all filled with blood.

Easily the worst feature of this room was that there was a small fleet of something like ten Cacodemons floating in the air. All of them were slowly turning to regard him with their huge yellow eyes. All at once, they began to issue a strange hissing sound and started coming towards him. Jack turned back around and saw Jennifer and Miller still rushing towards him, and behind them Pavel snapped into existence, looked around, and screamed.

Then a green ball of hellfire scorched directly overhead. Jack heard an angry roar come from behind him. Spinning back around, he saw that the thrown projectile had smashed into the face of one of the Cacodemons.

Inspiration struck.

"Hide! Hide in the niches!" Jack screamed, grabbing Jennifer and pulling her with him off to the right, in one of the unoccupied spaces. He saw Miller and Pavel sprint off in random directions. He heard the strange sound of the Cacodemons firing off their balls of yellow-red flame from their mouths, and heard the Barons start to roar in fury. He and Jennifer got into the shadow of the small area they'd been running towards and looked back out, weapons at ready. He half expected to see a Baron coming in after them.

If that was the case, they'd be fucked.

But that wasn't the case. He did indeed see a Baron, three of them, actually, but none of them were facing his way. They were all facing towards the door he'd opened. He saw them throwing green energy as fast as they could, and from the barrage of fireballs smacking into their huge, muscular bodies, the Cacodemons were going to war. Trembling with adrenaline, Jack still felt a huge surge of relief.

For a second there, for a few, it had looked like they might really be facing their death. That had become fairly commonplace since this whole thing began, but facing down six goddamned Barons was an entirely different story. Jack found himself reflecting, as he listened to the furious roars and marrow-freezing screams of pain and rage, that they had been stupidly lucky so far. Not all of them, obviously, but considering the fact that they were, each time they stepped onto a teleport pad, basically taking a leap of faith, they had gotten very lucky. Which made him wonder: what, exactly, was waiting for them further down the line?

Was this an anomaly? Or a portent of things to come?

God, he hoped it was an anomaly.

He stood there with Jennifer, both of them with their backs to the far wall, standing stock-still, weapons aimed towards the entrance. He prayed that the others had made it to safety as well. They watched one Baron fall, then a second one. A trio of Cacodemons floated into view, pushing the others back. Two of them were popped by the green balls of flame, then the third was forced back. This war raged on for a solid ten minutes until finally, after what seemed like far too long, all was silent. The sudden silence was somehow louder than the battle.

"Now what?" Jack whispered, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. It had been a little bit since he'd so thoroughly stared down the barrel of death.

"I guess we go look," Jennifer said softly.

He nodded, but he didn't want to leave the relative safety of the niche. Right now, it felt like his entire universe. But the silence persisted, and they had to keep going. They couldn't just stand there forever. So they ventured forward, moving together, and came to stand in the entrance, staring out into the room beyond.

It was a slaughter.

"Good God," Jack whispered.

There was blood and guts and corpses everywhere. Scorch marks had been imprinted on most of the walls, and even the ceiling. Out of all the monsters, there was only a single survivor: a badly damaged Baron of Hell stood in center of it all, swaying. It turned to regard them and sneered. Half of its face had been burned away. Almost without thinking, Jack raised the shotgun and pounded out a round even as the Minotaur-looking bastard began to wind up for its own attack. The shell went right into its mouth.

He watched the back of its cranium burst in a spray of pulpy gore.

The Baron of Hell crashed to the stonework floor.

"Nice shot."

They both looked over. To their left, they saw Pavel emerging from his own niche. "Goddamn, that was crazy," he muttered.

Jack nodded. "Miller?!" he called. "Where are you?"

"Here," she said, and they saw her coming out of another niche across the room. She surveyed the damage, the death, the destruction. "God, I can't believe we all survived that."

"Yep," Jack replied, then hesitated as he took a moment to look over it all. He saw a bit of pale skin. Human skin. "What the...who's that?" he asked, his stomach going cold. Whoever it was, they were at the back of the room. The four of them converged on the body. It was a man, lying on his stomach. Jack carefully flipped the naked body over. There was a huge hole and burn mark in the middle of his chest.

"Jackson," Pavel said quietly. "Well, at least we know what happened to him."

"He must've teleported in here, instead of the Warrens, and one of the Barons got him straight out the gate," Jennifer murmured.

Jack stared at the man's anguished face for a few seconds longer, then slowly stood. "McNeil and Lynch are still missing," he said. "Come on, we have to keep going."

The others followed after him.

After confirming that there were no other exits and nothing worthwhile in the initial room they'd started in, the quartet of hell-stricken Marines moved into the next room where the Cacodemon armada had once resided. Now that he wasn't going crazy, Jack got a better look at the room. Same crappy pockmarked stonework as before, and those grooves cut into the floor, four of them in total, each leading diagonally away from a pool of blood in the center. They drew the blood out and disappeared beneath the walls.

There were three exits.

The one dead ahead was the one they wanted. Unfortunately, it was locked. Between two thick bars of steel running up and down, one trimmed in blue, the other in red, he could see the teleporter. He saw a slot on either side, built into the wall, meant to take skull-keys. He sighed. "Looks like we've got our work cut out for us," he muttered.

"Yep. Let's get to it," Jennifer replied.

They broke left first.

The left door led to a long hallway of corroded red brick. As they made their way down it, Jack thought it strange that there were no more hostiles around. Well, he'd take what he could get. After all that crazy ass crap, he felt that they deserved a damned break. He studied his other two new teammates as they made their way down the corridor. He'd gotten to know Pavel a little bit already. "Miller," he asked, "what kind of action did you see back on Earth?"

"I was in Iceland, mostly," she replied. "When those eco-terrorist...cultists, I dunno, whatever they were, when they tried to take over the damned country. Did a stint in Malta, too. Before, well...you know," she said.

"Yeah, before the bomb," Pavel muttered.

"I was just leaving when it happened," Miller murmured.

"Really?" Jennifer asked. "How close?"

"Close," she replied. "Transport almost went down. Did anyone ever find out who did it?"

"I'd heard that it was an accident, actually," Pavel said.

"An accident?" Miller asked.

He nodded gravely. "Yes. I had some friends in intelligence. Nothing was ever proven, but I was told, under the table, that they were screwing around with some kind of high-yield explosive. God knows why."

"Good lord," Jack whispered. "That's a pretty awful situation..." He shook his head. "What, um...why are you up here? I mean, if you're okay to talk about it."

"I am," she replied. "I was kind of rattled after Malta. My older brother's higher up the food chain so he ended up getting me papers to get transferred here. I...thought a year in space would help clear my head, calm me down." She snorted. "God, was I wrong."

"To be completely fair, almost no one could have predicted this," Jack replied.

She sighed and nodded. They came to the end of the corridor, turned, and moved down another one. There were a handful of zombies wandering here, but none of them were armed, nor were they dangerous. The squad put them down with quick headshots all around. They found the blue skull-key resting on a pedestal at the end of this corridor, pocketed it, and retraced their route back to the original room. Finding no more demons had showed up in the meantime, they made their way through the other doorway and down another hallway.

"So, here's a thought," Jennifer said suddenly. "Every time we transition between our universe and this fucking place, we lose everything, right?"

"Correct," Jack replied.

"So how in the fuck did the UAC manage to get all these fucking people and supplies and outposts through!?"

"I...don't know," Jack murmured. "That is a really good question."

"I've been thinking about that," Miller said. "Ever since I saw that little outpost. I obviously don't know one way or the other, but I'm guessing that something changed when the invasion hit. They did something to the gateways, or maybe it's just a natural phenomenon, or maybe it was an accident, an unintended side effect. But something must be different."

"That makes sense," Jack said. "Good thing we don't have to recover anything from this place. All we've gotta do is kill."

"And kill we shall," Jennifer muttered darkly.

As they put down a handful of Imps and found the second skull-key, Jack still couldn't shake the feeling that they were getting off easy. Something bad was headed their way. Or, really, they were headed towards something bad. What had masterminded all of this? What was behind the invasion? What was controlling them all?

Well, they'd find out soon enough.

And hopefully they could find that top-secret weapon somewhere ahead.

They fell back to the main room and slotted both of the skull-keys. Each of the steel pillars rose into the ceiling as they did, revealing the teleport pad.

Resisting the urge to cross himself, Jack stepped aboard.