He awoke to the sound of blaring alarms, in a dirty concrete room. The floor was strewn with brass bullet casings and knocked over bottles of poorly labeled medical supplies. It took a few minutes for him to come to, he inspected his surroundings. All around him were men and women, on the floor and in bloodied stretchers, dead from grievous wounds, burns, cuts, and bullets of all varieties. It took him a while to notice that he was in an abandoned medical room, in what appeared to be some kind of bunker.
He stood up, the metal bits of his combat armor noisily clanging together. Each time he moved it shot a twinge of pain up his recently healed scar on his side, that he was only just now noticing. Every now and then a red light would spill through the cracks of the only door in the room and dimly paint the adjacent wall with the glow of warm, red light. The alarm still blared, not in the room he was in but lower down, seemingly from that same glowing red doorway. He painfully checked the room for anything useable, all he could find was a poorly maintained rifle and an unopened bandage canister, of course he had his trusty bayonet on his hip, but a bayonet can't do him much good against machine gun fire.
He gave up looking and decided to go for it. He approached the doorway and heaved open the rotten wooden door, it led down a set of stairs in which he was unable to see where they ended due to the lack of light. He marched down the steps, each was heavy and every other step sent pain up his right side but after only 15 painful steps, he had reached the bottom of the staircase. It now occurred to him why the alarm was blaring, someone pulled the emergency alarm to initiate a lockdown, nothing in or out, but why had someone pulled the alarm in the first place? The whole bunker was flooded up to his knees, causing him to exert a large amount of effort just to walk through the waterlogged room. He saw where the red light was now, it sat on the ceiling in the hallway just outside, in between him and it was a locked reinforced door with its window pried open. All around the room were bodies, sunken in the dirty, black water, he took great care to not step on them, as he did not wish to take a tumble into the water himself.
The door to the barricaded room, which he was now realizing was one of the intensive care rooms, didn't require a key, as it was a one way door, but it took a great deal of effort to pry the thing open. Once he got the door open he moved further out of the room and down the hall, it seemed there were no survivors, as every step he seemed to see another carcass in the water. He trudged through the hall looking for a sign of where he was when he saw it, a rotting body with large pustules growing from its torso, signs of an infestation.
Each and every soldier of the army is taught how to identify an infestation and when it is too far gone, as plague-mites as their called, can completely shred a few platoons of men within a week. Now he realized why the emergency alarm had been pulled. The terror slowing crept up his back as he realized he was walking through a mite infestation site. Only the best of the best were sent to burn away mite infestations. He was terrified , he'd heard stories of mites, how they're magic hellspawn, he'd heard they plant the eggs in their victims while they're still alive, and when the young hatched they feasted on the still living host. He turned around to go back but then, he felt something.
He thought something had brushed his leg, but he couldn't see anything in the water at his feet. He picked up the pace, rushing out of the room and through the bunker, looking for a sign of where the emergency shut off was so he could leave. Finally he burst into a room labeled "COMMUNICATIONS" on a big wooden board above the door, inside was a dead man in a chair, shot in the back of the head by some unknown source. He was wearing some kind of headset, hooked up to a magic communications relay. More importantly, he had a map on the table in front of him, only problem was the dead man's head was in the way. Carefully he picked up his head grabbed the map and slowly set his head back on the table.
The map gave him hope, according to it the emergency shut off was in the electrical room right behind the communications room. He quickly and painfully shuffled through the adjacent corridor into the room labeled "ELECTRICAL" inside he found what he was looking for, a large lever on the wall that had a sign read "Emergency Shut-Off". As he flipped the lever, the engines powered to life and the flashing red lights and blaring alarms were replaced by fluorescent white light and the sound of multiple metal doors grinding open.
As he stepped out of the hallway he saw something he didn't notice before, because it was pitch black down the hallway, he hadn't given the hallway a second thought, but now that he saw down the hall there seemed to be a large nest, halfway built, on the wall. Actually now that he could see, there were multiple nests built in the corners and crevices of the bunker. He felt something brush his leg,something large, this time he was sure, although he saw nothing, he was sure that something was in this room.
It burst from the water with a chirp and a scraping of malformed wings, it buzzed at him and bashed him into the floor, it attempted to latch on, stabbing him with its proboscis but he was able to yank it off him and throw it away, but it was persistent. The plague-mite was even grosser than he'd heard it described as, it smelled of vomit and was covered in large, sticky hairs, it resembled a cross between a mosquito and a cricket. It came at him again but he was ready this time, with one clean motion he cut the bug in two, spattering him with its wretched bile-like blood and spraying its insides on the previously grey concrete wall.
He hurried for the exit, it was two rooms down but it seemed the mite wasn't alone as hundreds of younger mites seemed to spill from the doorway down the hall. He rushed away, he couldn't feel the pain in his side anymore, the adrenaline pumped through his veins as he ran, tripped, and stumbled through the flooded halls. With the light on he now noticed why the bunker was flooded, somehow one of the pipes had burst and the water supply had been flooded out onto the floor, but that didn't matter now, he sprinted as he saw the light spill through the door of the bunker. The mites were right behind him, he could hear the buzzing and beating of wings, the sounds of failed attempts to latch onto him as they rammed into furniture and his fallen comrades. He just barely managed to reach the stairs and clamber up them into the light. He reached the top and slammed the bunker door shut and barred it with a piece of metal debris he found on the ground.
