This teleport felt different.

The previous ones, with the exception of the gateways themselves, were pretty much instantaneous, just a weird kind of buzzing feeling with a bright green flash. This one, on the other hand, hurled him into a pit of screaming darkness. Frozen black fire spilled through him, over and under and inside, and he tried to scream, but had no mouth to scream with. And then there was a jump, like an earthquake rolled all up into half a second, and he was staggering on a flat stone ground, utterly disoriented.

Jack fell over, grunted in pain as he dropped the shotgun, but that was a relief at least. The notion that he was still armed, that he had come through the other side with his armor, his guns, (he could feel their familiar, comforting weight on his body), helped ground him back to reality. He used it, groping around as his vision came back to him, and finally gripped the black, pitted barrel of the shotgun. It scraped across the stone as he pulled it to him. Jack fought the urge to vomit. When it passed, he lurched to his feet.

Jennifer appeared in a black flash. She cried out and he caught her. She tried to jerk briefly out of his grasp, but relaxed as he talked to her, bringing her back. As he did, he looked around. They'd arrived in a small stone chamber lit by torches made of...no, they weren't torches. They were human arms. The fingers were acting as wicks, burning. There was just one way out of the chamber, a stone tunnel dead ahead.

It was clear, for now, but he could see an awful red light spilling in from its far end. As if in direct contrast to the bad shit he was finding around him, the periphery of the room was packed with tables and crates, and they had ammo in them. And guns.

"Holy fuck," Jennifer said as she noticed it too.

"Yep," Jack replied. "I wonder what all this is doing here..."

"This looks like someone's preparing to fight a war." She paused. "I don't get it. They already slaughtered almost everyone on Mars, Phobos, and Deimos, and-" McNeil appeared in another flash of black light and yelled hoarsely.

They helped get him back to his feet and stable again, and then did the same thing for Pavel once he appeared.

"Man, that sucked," McNeil muttered.

"Yeah. Jennifer, you were saying something," Jack said. "It sounded important."

She looked pale and uncomfortable. "They've already wiped almost everyone out back where we came from. And pretty much all of them have the ability to produce deadly attacks on their own. Why would they need all this, except to arm the zom-" She froze. "Oh God, the zombies. That's...oh crap," she muttered.

"What?" Pavel asked. "What is it?"

"Did you notice anything weird about our enemies? Did you notice how the Imps are absolutely nothing like the Demons, which are totally different from the Cacodemons? The Barons of Hell? The Lost Souls? It's like they don't come from the same regions, the same planets. It's more like they're...attacking and conquering wherever they find, and inducting them into their ranks. They take them over, and-"

"And we're next," Jack muttered.

"They're preparing to attack Earth..." Pavel whispered.

"How could they get there?" Jack asked, frowning, thinking furiously. "I mean, it's obvious that the only way they're going to get in is through portals. But the UAC only had portals here, unless-"

"Unless they experimented in other places," Jennifer said.

"They aren't so stupid that they'd built a gateway to Hell on Earth," Jack said. They stared at him silently. He sighed. "Okay, well...yeah, they probably are. Fuck! So how the hell are we going to deal with that then!?"

"Kill the mastermind," McNeil replied firmly. "I can feel it. That thing is here. And we have the means to take it out. We'll kill it, and then...figure out what happens next."

"Wing it," Jack muttered.

"Best survival skill you can have: the ability to adapt," Jennifer said.

"I suppose that's true." Jack looked around the room. "Okay, load up. We're going to kill the fucking shit out of this thing. Whatever it is."

The four of them descended on the tables and crates of guns and ammo. Most of it was bloody, and he knew at once that it was because all of this stuff had been handled by zombies. Of course. He filled his pockets with shells and magazines, even found a few grenades, and four more of the black power cells for his plasma rifle. But as they stocked up, Jack slowly became aware of a sound. Almost as soon as he picked up on it, he found it impossible to believe that he'd missed it until now. But then, it was so...powerful.

It was like standing in the middle of a baseball stadium with fifty thousand screaming fans while simultaneously standing atop a battleship with its engines thrumming beneath you. He didn't so much hear it as feel it.

"What is that?" Pavel whispered.

"Demons. Devils," Jack heard himself whisper. "There has to be scores of them out there."

"We're gonna need a plan," Jennifer said.

"Recon first," McNeil replied. "Then we plan."

Jack nodded tightly and set out, shotgun in hand, finger inside the trigger guard. They were so close now. The four of them, bloodied and battered and bruised, warriors of Hell, shell-shocked and stricken, stalked down the last hallway. It was their only recourse, the only place left to go. The end of the stone tunnel grew closer, larger. The bloody red light grew brighter. Jack felt a dull throb building in his brain.

He reached the end of the tunnel first.

For several seconds, he was utterly paralyzed. He was frozen, rooted, affixed to his position and for a second there, just a second, he felt control leave his mind. He almost began screaming. But years of hard training, of experience born of conflict and blood and death, clamped down like a vault door on his terror and insecurities and weaknesses. It locked them away, for the time being, and he was given control of his mind, and thus his body, back.

He was looking at a sea of enemies.

There had to be hundreds of them, perhaps over a thousand. All of them were crowded in one huge open field. In the distance, he could see stone walls, and off to the left and right, several hundred meters away, he saw large openings that led down broad but relatively short areas. All of it had an open ceiling, and the sky overhead roiled with blood-red madness. He saw everything they had come up against so far. He even saw a pair of Cyberdemons.

"How in God's name are we going to deal with this?" McNeil whispered. Jack looked over, the man had gone white, his eyes wide, consumed with total terror.

Jack swallowed, forced himself to focus, to think, to plan.

There had to be a way out of this. And there was something scrabbling around in his brain, something trying to get out, to be remembered. Something crucially important. The linchpin to this whole thing.

A way out.

Nobody spoke for several minutes, crouched there on a mantle about fifteen feet above the ground, hidden among the shadows. There were so many of them...Jack thought and thought, pushing, hunting through all his knowledge on these horrors. They'd fought overwhelming numbers before, like that time when they'd teleported directly into a room with six of those fucking Barons, and then he'd run and opened the door and found the Cacodemons and they-

He gasped. "I know how to do it," he said suddenly, resolution hardening his voice.

"How?" all three of them asked at once.

"They fight each other," he said. "You give them an excuse, and they fight each other. So we have to give them an excuse."

"How do we do that without getting slaughtered?" McNeil asked.

"It'll be risky, to be sure, but everything we do is." Jack held up one of the fragmentation grenades he'd found and grinned.

The other three looked back at him, then slowly nodded, reflecting his grim, death's-head grin. "How do we do this best?" Pavel asked.

"How many grenades do we have between us?" he asked. They counted. There were eight. "Okay, two for each of us. This is what we do: split up. Move along the walls. We're going to sync up. After say...five minutes, we throw the grenades as far away from us as we can, where they'll do the most damage, and...hope this fucking works."

"Five minutes isn't a lot of time," McNeil said.

"I know but every extra second we dick around is a bigger risk of being discovered."

McNeil pressed his lips together, frowning, and nodded. "Yeah."

"Okay, McNeil, Pavel, break left. One of you stop at the corner there, right where the walls turns left and begins to head into that open area, the other try to get around that area, to the other side of it. It's not that big. The more spread out we can do this, the better. Questions?" There were none. "Then let's do this."

"Good luck," McNeil said.

"To us all," Jack agreed.

They split up.

McNeil and Pavel jogged away to the left, moving along the five foot wide stone mantle that ran around the entire length of this strange pit. He and Jennifer broke right. They didn't speak as they ran on. They'd said all that needed to be said beforehand, so they could concentrate wholly on the task at hand. Jack knew there were a hell of a lot of what-ifs in this scenario. What if they didn't fight each other? What if they spotted them beforehand? What if this wasn't enough to kill all of them? To kill...whatever it was that was controlling this?

He tried scanning the crowd several times, hunting for some unfamiliar shape, something huge, because in his mind, whatever this thing was, it was gonna be big. But he couldn't see anything among the thronging masses of demonic horrors. It was hard to tell, though. The area extended beyond his ability to easily see. And he needed to focus on not falling. Just a mere fifteen feet below him was a riot of Imps, zombies, and Demons. Cacodemons and Lost Souls floated thither and yon overhead, and all it would take was one instant of bad timing…

They reached the corner and Jennifer stopped, crouching and pressing herself up against the wall. Jack grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it once, hard, and kept on running. He had three and a half minutes left. His heart was hammering as he ran along the mantle, desperate to maintain the timeline. There were so many things that could go wrong. This was easily the most dangerous thing he'd ever done in his entire life.

If there was a God, he honestly hoped that He'd help this time around.

Jack hit the first corner and took the turn, making his way across the back wall of the open area he needed to get around. A lot of thoughts raced through his mind. How many people had he killed? How many families had he destroyed? How many men and women had he failed to save? God, how many people had he killed on accident? There were a lot of crazy-ass situations and it wasn't always easy to predict where your shots were gonna go, especially when the walls were made of crap materials and bullets punched through them like a knife through butter.

He'd done some bad things in his life.

But Jack liked to think that, at his core, he was still a good person. The reason he did what he did was that he was trying to strive for a greater good. But how often was that just bullshit? How many times had he been fighting some jacked-up four-star General's war, or some political moron who wouldn't know the business end of a rifle if his fucking life depended on it? How many times had he fought over oil, energy, clean water?

God, how many times had he helped, somehow, someway, aid and abet some religious war? Or some crazy ideological war?

That didn't even count the fucking corporations like the UAC who had deals up the ass with the military all over the world. How many times had he fought to protect some lying fuck, some greedy corporate bag of shit's interests because the locals were rightly pissed off? In a way, a savagely horrible way, he almost liked the demons. Because they were unequivocally, unquestioningly evil. They were as evil as evil got.

There was no ambiguity here.

They were going to kill or enslave everyone. There was no negotiating with them, no begging, no threatening. There would be no mercy. And thus, none must be given in return. There was a clear, clean factor to fighting these things. You felt good whenever you killed one, because you knew that you were doing something unquestioningly good.

Despite all this, despite the notion that having to fight these things would probably unify the human race, he would do anything to stop them from spreading. Because the loss of life if these things got out on Earth would be staggering, unthinkable. And there was no guarantee that they could stop them if they invaded.

He looked out over the vast, shifting field of screaming, roaring, growling horrors and in them he saw the extinction of the human race, the apocalypse. They had to be stopped. Jack hit the next corner and jogged on, going and going and going, pushing through the exhaustion, the hunger, the pain. Oh, the pain.

His whole body hurt.

By the time the counter was approaching zero, he'd made it a pretty good distance. He could just barely make out the shadowy figures of his comrades, the last bastions against the hordes of Hell. Jack grabbed and primed the first grenade, then hurled it as hard and as far as he could off to his right. He was glad to see that it went quite a ways out there. He did the same thing dead ahead of him. As soon as the grenade left his hand, Jack went back against the wall and crouched, trying to disappear, to be invisible.

The grenades began to go off.

He started to hear roaring, then screaming and shrieking and groaning and everything else in between.

And then it happened.

An apocalyptic level battle began to open up in the pit below him. Jack simply stared. Even from his hidden position, he had a good view of the battlefield. Chaos screamed. Blood flew. He found his eyes drawn to the Cyberdemons, who were interested in defending themselves from the horde of monsters around them that recognized they were the biggest threat and focused on taking them down. They leveled their rocket arms and let fly.

Jack didn't know how long he crouched there, staring.

The Imps and Barons threw their balls of fire and green energy. The Demons chowed down. The Cacodemons and Lost Souls rained down death from above. He even saw a few of those weird spider-queen things and clusters of their skull-spider minions tearing it up. The zombies...pretty much just got straight up slaughtered.

Eventually, the sheer number of monsters began to dwindle. The horde was thinning out. And then...it happened.

Something noticed the humans hidden among them.

There was so much happening that Jack didn't know who was discovered first or how, but it didn't matter, because suddenly he was under attack and two dozen balls of fire and energy were converging on his position. Jack immediately switched to the plasma rifle and opened fire at the quartet of Cacodemons that were coming for him, some of the few left in the air. Across the pit, three more blooms of gunfire opened up.

He popped them pretty quick, sending their splattered remains all over the demonic things below in a gory rain, and also dispatched the small flotilla of Lost Souls that happened to be nearby, but as he slapped a fresh energy cell in, he looked down and honestly wondered if he was going to be able to do this. The next phase of the battle had begun...and he still hadn't seen anything resembling a demonic General.

But there was no time for that now.

Jack screamed as he rained down blue-white plasma fire on his enemies. Imps and Demons withered and died under the fire. Zombies staggered and collapsed. Two Barons of Hell went down. Then three. Then four. And then he reached for another energy cell and there was nothing left. Growling in frustration, he dropped the rifle, abandoning it because this was the end, and pulling out the Raptor SMG he'd snagged from the makeshift armory and cut loose. A dozen more enemies fell, two dozen, three.

He burned through eight magazines of ammo and tossed the gun away in terror. They were still coming. No time to see how the others were doing, if they were even still alive. Too much happening, too much. Jack pulled out his shotgun and set to work, pumping shell after shell into them, taking headshots as often as he could. They were finally beginning to thin out at least. No more Barons of Hell in sight, no more floaters, either. He couldn't see any of those spider-queens and there was just one Cyberdemon left, and it was far off.

Just zombies and Imps and Demons, and he ignored the Demons, because they were of no threat to him up here and were getting so pissed off and frustrated that they were tearing into their friends more often than not. Jack fired off shotgun shells and fed more in and fired even more until his arms were beginning to go numb.

And then there were no more shells.

Now all he had was his fucking pistol and the BFG. It had been tempting to use it, very tempting during the first wave, but he was very glad he hadn't given in to temptation. Especially considering there was one Cyberdemon left and he still couldn't see whatever it was they were looking for. So he hammered away with his pistol, and ended up getting down to the very last magazine before finally he was alone.

The last zombie fell and the Demons had all either killed each other or been killed off by the survivors before Jack killed them. He looked around, trembling violently, gasping for breath, soaked in sweat, and felt a tremendous relief as he spied three figures in combat armor. They were still alive. Still standing. Still in the game-

As he was looking at Pavel, confirming the man's continued existence, he watched him disappeared in a tremendous plume of angry fire.

"Pavel!" he heard himself scream and jerked his head to the right, where the missile had come from. The last Cyberdemon. It was battered, damaged, bloodied. But still standing. Without thinking, Jack shoved the pistol into its holster and snatched up the BFG. Leveling it at the big thing, he called out a warning and squeezed the trigger.

The gun began to hum and vibrate. Oh God, what if it was a dud? What if there were other things to consider in its operation? What if-

A painfully bright ball of green energy burst forth from the front of the gun and sailed through the air, crackling violently as tendrils of energy slithered away from it. The Cyberdemon turned to face him, perhaps registering the most immediate threat, and raised its rocket arm. It didn't get a chance to fire. The ball hit it and an overwhelmingly brilliant light burst. Jack cried out, staggering away, faceplate polarizing in an attempt to compensate. When his vision came back, his eyes widened in pure shock. All that was left of the Cyberdemon was a pair of smoking, smoldering legs. And bits and pieces of it were everywhere.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

"We need to move on," McNeil said over the radio, snapping him back to reality.

"I still don't see it," he said, slowly surveying the huge pit. Among the sea of hundreds of corpses and an ocean of blood, the only thing of note he could see was a large, square building in the middle of the area.

He could still hear something happening on the far side of the pit, though. It sounded like someone was firing a heavy duty gattling gun. Someone was mopping up over there...but who? What? He didn't think any of them had a damned minigun.

"Come on, let's go," Jack said. "Jennifer, need you here."

"Coming," she said.

"You hear that?" McNeil asked. "You think it's-"

"The big bad guy? Yeah, I think it just might be."

"Make sure you use that big fucking gun on it."

"Oh believe me," Jack growled, looking down at the weapon, "I will."

He saw that the bar of green light on the side had diminished. It was gone by a quarter. Okay then...so he had three shots left. Well, hopefully he wouldn't need them. This thing was goddamned powerful as hell. As soon as Jennifer caught up with him, they set off. Far in the distance, he could see McNeil, alone, trekking across the mantle. They were down to three. Jack just wanted this nightmare to be over, and he felt more confident now that he'd seen the BFG in action. Although he wasn't totally sold on the idea of success.

Only an idiot was one hundred percent confident in themselves.

They kept going and before they could make it around the building, the gunfire cut off. Whatever it was, it had killed off everything else. What was it? What could it be? As they drew even closer, he heard some kind of heavy machine hydraulics and the smashing of something metal hitting stone. Something very weighty.

What the fuck could it be?!

Jack had his answer hardly thirty seconds later. He skidded to a halt as he finally caught sight of what it was they were looking for.

It was horror incarnate.

It was big. A fucking behemoth.

It had to be the size of a small house. It was a...a spider thing. But nothing like the spider-queen he'd fought earlier. It was more like...God, it was like a giant gray brain built into a metal chassis, basically just a big platform with four huge metal legs coming out of it. There was a gattling gun, a big, fuck-off, six-barreled nightmare of shining chrome, sticking from the front of the platform. There were big silver wires coming up and around from the platform and sticking into the huge pulsating brain. Worst of all, though, was the face.

There was a sneering, screaming face etched into the brain. A thing with a huge mouth stuffed full of razor teeth and enormous, glowing crimson eyes. They stared at him with hideous hatred and alien menace.

A rocket shrieked from McNeil's position and hit the side of the brain. The beast let out a roar torn straight from the lowest depths of Hell. And why not? Truly, they must be there. With an awful speed, it swung on him and the minigun opened up. Jack screamed as he saw McNeil disappear in a cloud of blood.

He hefted the BFG and fired off a shot. Another glowing green ball of energy burst into existence, cut through the air...and missed.

Jack screamed again in rage and terror as he saw the ball sear past this thing, this...Spider Mastermind, and singe its chassis and brain. It roared again and swung on him, the barrel still spinning, still firing even, chewing up bodies and stone and metal alike as it brought that impossible barrage of bullets, like a force of nature, to bear down on him and Jennifer.

He adjusted his aim and fired again.

The bullets reached them at the same time the ball of green energy hit the Mastermind. Jack cried out as he felt two of them hit home, one grazed across his left shoulder, the other cut through his right thigh, slicing through the armor.

Jennifer screamed.

He twisted around to look for her, to reach for her, right about the exact time she staggered forward and fell off the edge.

"Jennifer!"

Jack began to go after her but then he heard the gunfire start up again and a furious, unending roar of impossible hatred. Twisting around, eyes bulging, teeth gritted, Jack raised the BFG once more and sighted the big brainy bastard. He'd blown off two of its legs and blackened a big portion of its brain...but it was still alive.

Not for long.

This time, his aim was dead on, because it wasn't going anywhere.

He fired. The ball of energy blasted through the air and cut into the beast, culminating in another painfully brilliant blast. When it was over, Jack took the bare minimum of time necessary to confirm that it was dead. And it was. Nothing but a heap of singed flesh and molten slag. He couldn't even discern its basic shape from the remains. As he moved to the edge, terror ripping at his heart and filling his veins with ice, the BFG began to whine and tremble. He looked down at it, frowning, then flung it away as it got worse.

It got perhaps five feet away before detonating.

Jack screamed as the force of the blast threw him over the edge. He fell through the air for a heart-stopping half second, then slammed into the ground, landing on a few corpses. Jack nearly blacked out from the pain. As it was, his head went swimmy for a bit there and he fought viciously to hold onto his consciousness. Slowly, it went away, and he began to regain control of his body, which just felt like one big bruise now.

"Jennifer," he moaned, getting to his hands and knees, shoving the pain aside to the best of his ability, but it was almost overwhelming. He raised his helmeted head. His visor was cracked and smeared with blood. Frustrated, he got up onto his knees, undogged the helmet and threw it away. "Jennifer!" he called.

"Stop shouting, I've got a headache."

Relief, the most powerful he'd felt since this whole goddamned mess had begun, flooded through him. He jerked towards the sound of her voice and saw her getting to her feet. She lurched over to him, smiling at him.

"I thought you were dead," he whispered, gasping for breath. "I...oh man..."

"I know. I'm okay," she said. "Well, for the most part. It was a ricochet that hit me in the back. Armor managed to deflect it, but the force of the blast sent me forward and I couldn't catch myself. I fell," she explained.

"It's dead," he said, almost falling. Jennifer crouched by his side, then groaned and sat down heavily with him. "It's dead. We killed it."

She nodded slowly, looking past him. "We killed it," she agreed.

They sat there for a long time, bleeding, aching.

"We need to find a way home," he murmured.

"That'll be hard. Even if we can find a way back up there, there's no certainty the teleports will even take us back," Jennifer replied.

"They don't seem to go both ways, not all of them," he muttered. Jack raised his head again. "Let's look in there." He pointed to the building.

Jennifer sighed. "That means we have to stand up."

Jack just nodded. It took several minutes, but the two of them finally got up. They took a moment to pick through the remains as they staggered along, leaning heavily on each other, managing to find shotguns and some shells among the dead. There could be survivors. There probably would be. But they made it to the building without running into anything, found a door and opened it up. There was nothing alive inside the cavernous structure. It resembled a warehouse. And it was empty...except for another gateway surrounded by black crystals in the dead middle of the building. The two of them stood before it, staring at it for a long while.

"Well...into the wild black yonder?" he asked finally.

Jennifer nodded. "Don't see much other choice...who goes first?"

"We go together," he replied.

They stepped onto the pad and disappeared in a flash of black light.