My quarters on Phobos weren’t exactly the penthouse suite, but they weren’t Spartan either. However, being trapped within them made them seem like a prison cell. I really, REALLY hate being imprisoned in any way, even if it’s my own doing. Unfortunately I had no choice, outside were the things that started coming though the Gate. Hacking the door lock to only work from the inside was the first thing I did. Then I stacked large pieces of furniture in front of it. I wasn’t taking any chances, boys and girls.
    I wasn’t doing this because I was scared shitless. I was scared, but I really needed time. Time to work on things I would need when I finally opened that door. I looked at myself in the mirror. Same old glasses, same old ponytail. My t-shirt was smudged with oil, as well as my jeans. I sure as hell wasn’t gonna stroll out to the laundromat downstairs.
    Checking the video feeds said that the things were still roaming around. I recognized a few of the security guards amongst the roamers, but they were moving like they had stayed up for an entire week of drinking. Kodiak would come soon. If anyone could get me the hell out of here, he could.
    Sergeant Edward James “E.J.” Ross, “Kodiak” to his buddies because of his size and his battle roar. Toughest ex-Marine that ever existed. He was used to hauling me outta some real hell-zones. That’s how we first met. I was the best hacker the Yakuza could build, with cyberware and shit straight outta the Black Clinics of Chiba. Then the cyber-soldiers that they had built for security went berserk, and the Marines were called in to mop the floor with them. Kodiak found me desperately pumping light ammo into a guy who didn’t even feel it. Bet he felt the shotgun blast that tore his head open, though.
    Yeah, ol’ Kodiak is the guy you call when even the Marines fail. He’s a mercenary now, fighting for whoever pays him, as long as it’s the Good Fight. And if the fight awaiting him here wasn’t, then I don’t know what is.
    I went back to working on my little hardware projects. I was on Phobos as the system administrator for the United Aerospace Corporation installation. It was good money for perfectly legal work (for a change). The suits were annoyed that my only name is EMC, and I don’t have any papers proving that I exist, but computer gurus don’t get any better than Yours Truly.
    Soldering wires and adjusting energy feeds, I reflected back on that fateful day when the Gate here on Phobos really acted up. The guys we had sent in before came back, and the first thing they did was mow down all the scientists. Then came those things, those alien beings. The aliens ripped the Marines to shreds while the poor soldier boys were shitting their pants. I was probably the only person on Phobos who realized that Deimos had vanished from its orbit around Mars. Hell, I was probably the only person alive.
    I had just sealed the ionized gas chamber when the telecom beeped. I stabbed the TALK button, and sighed with relief as Kodiak appeared on the screen. “Hey E, what’s shakin’? I kinda busted my ship on landing… the landing pad suddenly collapsed… better tell maintenance.”  Laid back kinda guy, Kodiak is… most of the time. I gave him the directions to my quarters and told him to hurry. Then the transmission turned to snow. Jamming, damn.
    Taking a quick look around my quarters, I strapped my unfinished project onto my back, hung the finished one on my belt, grabbed my tools, and began clearing away the furniture.

    The corridor was quiet. Too quiet. There were always the noises coming from the monsters running around. Now there were none. It was unnerving. I connected the device on my belt to a pair of large batteries strapped to my thighs, and felt safer when all the green lights lit up. I’d have a chance to test it all too soon.
    A shotgun blast made me jump three feet straight up. I heard more gunfire, prolonged gunfire. Only one motherfucker was tough enough to last this long. I ran towards the sounds.

    Kodiak had bit off a little more than he could chew. The big killing machine had gotten himself surrounded by the drunkard-walking guards. Those guys smelled like roadkill and they had glowing eyes. Either they had a little squad ritual where they all visit a cosmetic eye surgeon, or … or what? I grabbed the device on my belt and pulled the trigger.
    It worked. Oh yes, it worked. Blue energy spheres cooked those bastards nice. Energy weapons were always a hobby of mine, and I finally learned enough to create them. The idiots just sat there and let me kill them.
    “Nice gun there, E.” Kodiak was nonchalant again. “Where’d ya pick it up?”
    “I just finished building it. I call it a Plasma Rifle.”
    “That’s a boring name. Why not a Kill-o-Zap or something?”
    “Because a writer from the 1990’s copyrighted that…” I searched the dead body. Dead was right. “… Dude, this guy’s been dead for several days!”
    Kodiak squatted down next to me. “You’re right. Problem is, what was he doing shooting at me if he’s dead? Is he some kinda zombie?”
    “I feel like I’m in a horror film,” I muttered.
    “Maybe we are.”  Doesn’t ANYTHING faze this guy?!
    “Ok, how do we survive then?”
    Kodiak began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, do not split up. Two, do not investigate strange noises alone. Three, don’t walk around in your underwear. Four, aim for the heads of zombies. It’s the brain that’s been reactivated. At least, it is in the movies.” He had that grin on his face that made people nervous.

    And so started our quest, to get the fuck outta Dodge. This meant finding a spaceworthy vessel and blasting off. It sounds like cowardice, but the two of us weren’t keen on killing every undead bastard on the moon. It could take all week, and we didn’t have the patience. Ok, we just didn’t like the concept of fighting something already dead. Made me sick.
    We encountered more zombies, and put holes in them. It became routine. You’re not reading this for the violence factor, anyway. Besides, the image of a guy splattering his brains on the floor loses its coolness factor when you actually experience it. Had nightmares for months.
    Some of the zombies had keycards, from when they were human. These were mostly to their quarters, but on occasion we found cards to the limited-access areas. Those we collected.

    “E?”
    I was adding some new tech stuff to my unfinished device. Kodiak looked troubled. “Yo!”
    “It occurred to me that there may be other survivors. Perhaps we should find them and get them out.”
    I snorted. “You wanna shepherd a bunch of terrified idiots through a zombie-infested installation?”
    “Maybe we’ll find someone who can handle a gun. Speaking of, I’m running low on shells. Got any?”
    I cocked an eyebrow at him. What the hell would I have shotgun shells for? He grunted and began looking in closets.
    Who the hell keeps an entire box of shotgun shells in the broom closet?!

    Sneaking though the nuclear plant seemed like a good idea at first, because it was illogical for anyone to go there in case of an attack. Therefore, we wouldn’t find any more zombies. However, there was a fair amount of radioactive waste barrels around, and quite a few barrels had spilled all over the floor. After passing by several such slime-spills, I was beginning to feel sick. After a while, I couldn’t see straight.
    So it was a surprise when I found myself getting blasted by water in the decontamination shower. My head cleared as I jumped out of the spray. Kodiak, snickering as if my predicament was funny, handed me a portable rad-scrubber to get the last bits of radiation off my skin and clothes. You don’t really need to know how I went about using it, do you?
    For once, Kodiak come up with an obvious idea that I missed: radiation suits. This meant I had to take my toys off and put them back on over the suit. I took the rad-scrubber along so I could clean off the one that wasn’t sealed yet. Radiation can do strange things to some electronics. The Plasma Rifle, however, had a force field of sorts running just above the casing that repelled radiation, stray electric currents, and lint.
    Suited up, we merrily trotted along until we came across a room that looked like a slime swimming pool. It was hard to tell, but I guessed that the gunk was three feet deep. “Now what do we do?” I muttered.
    “Well, gee, we have these keen designer rad-suits. Why don’t we just go wading?” The Bearman was giving me that grin again.
    “If these things can stand up to that, I’ll do commercials for the company saying how tough they are.”  We began wading through the slime.
    I thought the hissing was a leaky pipe or something, then my legs started getting warm. I looked down and saw steam and bubbles surrounding my legs. “Oh shit!” I screamed. “It’s eating through the fucking suit! Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!” I attempted to run, and succeeded in moving a bit faster and sinking only a foot into the slime with each step. Kodiak was moving fast, too, churning though that stuff like it was water.
    My panicked screaming brought every zombie in the place running, and the moment we got out of the slime, we had to dodge bullets while struggling to get out of our suits before the slime on them began eating through our flesh. I’m sure it was a comical scene to watch. Pulling my weapon out, I began spraying fire wildly. I managed to get most of them… by sheer luck. Kodiak was still cool as hell, but he’s trained to remain cool under fire. Such training isn’t what your typical computer guru goes for.
    Then the things appeared. I got my first good look at them. Humanoid, with horns sticking out of their shoulders and brown skin that looked like leather. Real leather, not the synthetic crap most punks wear.
    “E, what ARE those things?” Check it, Kodiak was actually mildly fazed by something!
    “Looks like a cross between a brown Swamp Thing and a porcupine.”
    At that moment they began conjuring motherfucking fireballs and started flinging them at us. So we did the only thing we could. We killed every last son of a bitch who wasn’t us.
    “So what do we call these guys? We got zombies, so what are the ugly ones?” said Kodiak.
    “Beats the hell out of me,” I answered, checking my battery charge.
    “Doesn’t sound too hard.”  I decided to let that comment pass.

    Coming out of the nuke plant, I breathed in the terraformed air. Not very interesting, but it was fresh. I saw a familiar building in the distance. “Kodiak…”
    Kodiak looked up from reloading that worn shotgun of his. “Yo!”
    “See that building over there?”
    “Yep.”
    I swallowed. “That’s the Gate building. That’s where all these things have been coming from. I’m not comfortable being this close.”
    Kodiak grinned. “As the only survivors of the assault, it is our duty to go there and shut that thing down.”
    “You just like breaking stuff and killing other stuff,” I shot at him.
    “So?”

    I don’t know how the hell he talked me into going to that Gate, but soon enough we were within the building. Plenty of zombies and spikey bastards to go through, though by this time Kodiak and I had come up with some solid tactics for dealing with them efficiently. They were annoying and a drain on ammo, but the alternative meant naming next of kin. Just to be safe, I stopped at a vending machine and bought some life insurance with nice benefits. I also bought a Will and Trust Toolkit and willed my half of Subdivisions Tech Shop to my partner Bandit, who handled all the sales anyway. Some idiots think that preparing for death is all mental exercise.
    We found a new type of critter, too. Imagine shaving a gorilla and giving him the head of a bull, and you’re in the ballpark of what it looked like. No fireballs, but big teeth. Due to the fact that they all had pentagram tattoos on their left ass cheek, we called them “demons.” Not very original, but we didn’t give a damn. From there, we figured that the brown guys were lesser demons, and called them “imps,” because neither of us could remember the names of any other lesser demons from Biblical stories.

    When we came into a huge star-shaped room, I was confused. I had been in that building countless times, and that room was never there. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think the building was large enough to contain such a room. Which meant that these bastards could bend space.
    I didn’t get to think about that right then because this pair of eight-foot humanoid goat things noticed us, let rip with a bloodcurdling bellow in stereo, and began flinging green fireballs at us!
    “Oh no, you did not shoot that green shit at me!” bellowed Kodiak. Yes, we do watch lots of old sci-fi movies, mostly to make fun of how Hollywood thought the next hundred years would be like. The timing of that line jolted me back into reality just in time to avoid being fried. I ducked behind a marble column (apparently we were being invaded by interior decorators) and began running through two lists. The short one was my list of options. The long one was my vocabulary of cuss words. Trust me, I know five times as many as you do.
    I heard Kodiak’s shotgun firing repeatedly, and felt a pellet whiz through my hair. I was tempted to cook him for that, but I took my aggression out on the nearest Goat Boy. It just stood there and withstood an energy barrage that would have reduced an elephant to beef jerky. The force, however, pinned him to the wall. I kept firing until I ran out of juice. There was nothing left but a grease spot.
    Kodiak had managed to get his shotgun wrestled from him, and the ugly horned one tried to eat it… stupid thing wasn’t paying attention to Kodiak getting a grip on the trigger. BOOM! Right down the gullet. I don’t care how tough your skin is, a Remington Root Canal will kill almost anything. I always wondered if Big K actually intended to do that from the start.
    We faced each other, both of us hardly able to stand. Kodiak was covered with gore. “And what are these guys?” he sighed.
    “Balrogs?”
    “What’s a Balrog?”
    “Sort of like a minor lord of Hell. Except Balrogs have wings.”
    “Let’s call them Hell Barons, then. Good fight.”
    I rolled my eyes. My philosophy clearly stated that any fight you got in was bad, because it means you screwed up somewhere. Kodiak, however, had a more pugnacious view of life.
    It was then that I noticed that the walls were gone. The room was completely open to the air, with no trace of the rest of the building. The only other structure I could see was this pentagram with a face reminiscent of a Hell Baron, only nastier. As I drew closer, the air turned cold.
    “E, I’m not sure that’s a wise idea… that thing is making me nervous…”
    That alone should’ve set me running. But I was curious, and I got closer. Kodiak caught up to me as I tossed a rock onto the design. It vanished right before my eyes. It is a testament to what I had been through that this didn’t freak me.
    Kodiak narrowed his eyes. “Don’t even tell me you’re actually considering hopping onto that!”
    I glanced back at him. “There is no other way off this moon. I want to go home, and this is the best way to do just that. You can stay here if you want, but I’d rather vanish for all time than spend one more minute on this godforsaken rock.”
    “Ok, but I’m going first. You come in after thirty seconds.”
    “Bullshit. It might only work once for humans. We go together.”
    We each took a deep breath and hopped on. The resulting experience wasn’t fun. It was like being drunk. You may ask, what’s so bad about that? To quote aforementioned 20th century author: “You ask a glass of water.”

    I came around. The sky was different, a sort of blood-red. Mountains were the same. I wondered if we had arrived in a different time, a time where Phobos had volcanic activity. Then I saw the sign.
 Deimos Gate Complex Level 3, Restricted Access.  It even had a map saying You are Here.
    Kodiak cocked an eyebrow. “We’ve just been teleported to Deimos.”
    “Impossible!” I managed to say.
    “How?”
    “Deimos doesn’t exist anymore! It vanished off the screens! Didn’t you notice?!”
    Kodiak shook his head. “I thought it was on the other side of the planet. My ship didn’t have local satellite uplink systems. You sure this was a good idea, Brainiac?”
    I started inventing new cuss words. Some of them were pretty good.
 

-To Be Continued (maybe… depends on the response I get)
apologies to iD Software for ripping off their work, but I had this urge to bring an actual PLOT to Doom!