Your head throbs in a steady succession. Surrounding you is a thick darkness, one that prevents you from seeing your surroundings and your body. A pained groan rises from the back of your throat as you begin to sit up, propping yourself up using one of your hands. Your other hand moves to rub at your temple, but is met with something hard and plastic. Using your hand to study the thing on your face, you make out the vague shape and smooth rubber texture of a gas mask. The mask makes it difficult to breathe, and seems to have no purpose other than inhibiting your inhalation. Lifting the back-strap of the mask from the back of your skull, you grab the mask by the filter and slip it off your head.

Once you take off the mask, you soon realize as to why you had it on.

Your first breath sends you into a violent and uncontrollable coughing fit. A near-primal sense of panic sets in, and you fall down to the ground with a dull thud; scrambling on your hands and knees in an attempt to find your mask. Toxic fumes sear your throat and lungs as you reach around hoping for purchase but finding none. As you fall onto your back and try to grab at your throat, you instead come into contact with a rubbery membrane hanging in front of your clavicles. With a raspy wheeze, you exhale what little tainted oxygen remained in your lungs; grabbing the mask by the filter and practically shoving it to your face. Until now you would’ve never thought that filtered air tasted this good.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. In and out.

The sounds of your coughing and sputtering is eventually replaced with the asthmatic sound of a gas mask inhaling and exhaling. The aching of your lungs is beginning to subside, though the intense burning in the back of your throat lingers like a case of strep-throat. Your head feels heavy on your shoulders and your chest feels like it’s being weighed down, though that might not just be the toxic air around you. Moving your hands down to your body, you feel a series of canvas pouches bulged and full, all surrounding a vertical-zipper starting at your sternum and ending at your lower torso. Sitting yourself up again with a grunt, you reach around to your backside to feel two dinner-plate sized pieces of metal attached to your back; each one has a canvas-wrapped tube leading up and over your clavicle and connecting to two individual valves molded into the bottom of your gas mask. “Must have been what held the mask up,” you think to yourself as you clear your throat.

With a few audible pops coming from your joints, you use your hand to lift yourself up and come up to an unstable stance as you let your feet flat against the floor.  Your legs feel weak and sore, like they’ve been beaten by a bunch of angry rozzers with steel batons. You go to massage them but stop when you feel something hard meet your palm at your right hip. You immediately recognize it as a holstered pistol, the shape and contour of the grip and hammer giving it away to you. You choose to leave it in its confines for now, not wanting to drop it to the floor and have a negligent discharge, or lose it to the enveloping darkness. Checking your left leg, you find a small rectangular device with a smooth front and a ridged rubberized back. You let out a raspy sigh of relief, the realization of it being a phone hits you.
 
You fumble with it in your grasp for a few moments, trying to find the small side-button to activate the screen. The brightness of the phone blinds you, and you let slip a quiet “Bloody hell!” in response to the miniature flashbang.

Once your eyes adjust to the harsh blue-light, you’re able to discern the device’s home-screen, the time telling you that it was 04:30. You immediately attempt to unlock the phone past the lock-screen, swiping up only to be met with a “Enter Passcode”. Your hopes were stamped down into nothing at this, though a silver lining reveals itself in the form of a “Torch” option. You hold it down and release it, the small beam of light illuminating the inky-black darkness and revealing hundreds of tiny yellow specks floating in the air.

As you illuminate your surroundings with your small light, you’re able to make out vague shapes and shadows. Gritting your teeth, you let out a hiss of pain as you take your first step forward. A few more steps and you’ve gone from limping to walking in an awkward and pained gait, your legs feeling like two pillars of tenderized meat. Your foot knocks into something; many brass somethings from the sound of it. You shine your light down to the floor, seeing dozens of spent shell casings rolling off into the darkness, your torch nowhere nearly bright enough to illuminate the depths they escaped to. 

You begin to cautiously step back in the other direction; dread came in the form of an ulcer in your gut, and the feeling of a panic-attack is starting to rear its ugly head. With a shaky hand, you draw the pistol from your hip; the steel-alloy frame feeling more akin to a hunk of lead in your weak grasp. You bring the thing up to head-level, your blurry vision barely able to make out the green forward sight. As you begin to spin your heel into a 180, your foot catches on something and you let out a surprised yelp.

Your already pounding head slams side-ways onto the hardwood floor, your source of light falls out of your hand and clatters to the floor just out of your reach, the built-in torch shining up into the darkness, limiting your vision to a small cone upwards. Your pistol remained in the palm of your now outstretched hand, but only just barely. You grit your teeth and let out a muffled “Shite” as you grab the back of your head, your vision pulsating.

The pain begins to subside, and you grasp your phone to see the screen has changed from a smooth surface to a spider-webbed mess. Using your gloved hand to swipe off some of the glass-shards covering the undamaged part of the screen, you shine it down to your feet to see what tripped you. A human-shaped bulky mass sits before you, totally unmoving. 

You can feel your heart pounding, the reverberation reaching up to your throat and making your chest thump in a rhythm. You raise your pistol and level it at the figure, moving up to your feet slowly. With a better view of the blob, it becomes apparent that it’s a person.

A very large person. Even with the baggy fit of the hazmat suit, you can make out the imposing frame that this guy had. His torso is decked out in a similar looking vest to yours, though instead of pouches and zippers, it has tangling torn wires and beige rectangular boxes with a plasticky sheen to them. All of it is covered in the same thick yellow film that had settled on the lenses of your mask.

Cautiously reaching your hand out to one of the blocks with the wiring torn from it, you grab it and dust off some of the yellow haze that had mostly stained onto it. You notice yellow lettering on the side that read, “CHARGE DEMOLITION M112, WITH TAGGANT (1-1/4 LBS COMP C4) MA-04A030-001”. A strong sense of familiarity comes from reading the lettering, though a heavy fog that’s been looming over your head since you’ve woken up keeps you from remembering. You move your torch light further up to the man’s body. The second you do though you regret it.

You drop the block to the floor with a heavy thud, the thing now a distant thought pushed to the back of your brain. What used to be a face was torn into a viscera of teeth, skull-fragments, and flesh; a thick layer of that same yellow grainy substance cakes the surface of it all. The transparent plastic from the hazmat suit’s face-shield lays across the mess, torn to shreds and stained with blood. The only thing intact that would indicate that what you’re looking at used to be a human face was a lone, hazel eye.

The corpse is fresh at the very least. You weren’t staring at a maggot-eaten mess of rotting flesh, though your stomach couldn’t care less. Bile rises up to your sore throat, and it takes all of your willpower to not mess the inside of your gas mask. You swallow the bile back down and take a few deep breaths, turning away and breaking eye-contact with the viscera. Once you collect yourself, the feeling of claustrophobia begins to set in, and the urge to leave increases ten-fold. You turn from the corpse and begin your pained gait again, this time more cautious to keep your light on the floor ahead of you.
You reach a door not long after, turning the knob slowly despite the overwhelming desire to bolt; not wanting to possibly alarm who or whatever tore that man’s face to shreds. 

The door creaks loudly as it opens, and as you exit the room, you're met by a single ceiling light barely illuminating a mid-sized room, a lone window frame being covered up by sand-bags. An old ratty couch sits in the middle of the open area facing away from you, in front of it is a worn coffee table being stood up on a stack of old books in lieu of an actual table leg. An old retro Telly sits on the floor in front of the couch and table, the screen crackling as its electronic innards are laid spilt out onto the floor in a technological viscera. The lower half of someone’s legs could barely be seen sitting next to the TV, the darkness swallowing up the rest of it.

The sound of your own breathing becomes a deafening cacophony inside of your mask, nearly drowning out the sound of the wood-planks creaking in protest below your heavy boots. As you draw closer, the torch-light you held in your grasp forced the darkness to retreat, revealing a man wearing a heavy overcoat. He lays sitting up against the wall, his hooded-head hanging down in a slump. His arms laid sprawled out on either side of his body, right hand outstretched holding something that gave off a glint from your light. Holstering your piece, you use your now free hand to lift his hanging head.

His mouth lay hanging open in a silent scream; A torn piece of construction paper covers up most of his nose and the upper portion of his face, leaving only his bloodshot eyes to be seen through two angular slits. Upon closer inspection, you see that the inside of his mouth is caked in a fine yellow grain; the same substance that seems to be coating everything around you. His upper lip has two lines of dried, bloody snot going down it, indicating to you that he’s been laying here dead for a while. A harder part of you was just thankful you hadn’t found him in a messier fashion, though it didn’t do much to ease the heavy feeling of dread deep in your guts. You draw your hand back to your side, letting his head droop back down to its resting place. 

You pull your pistol from your right thigh, tightening your grip on it and hooking your finger in the trigger guard and on the trigger. The air inside your mask is starting to get thin, and you find your lungs beginning to ache and burn; the familiarity of it not lost on you. Your filters are starting to expire. You need to find an escape. Now. You look around the room frantically, using your light to look for an escape. As you whip around you see it; a door. You limp towards it, dropping your phone with a clatter and twisting the knob, hoping for purchase. The knob turns, but the door wouldn’t give - It’s blocked from the other side.

You quietly whimper to yourself, small “No”’s running out of your lips in rapid succession growing louder until you’re screaming out in anguish. You violently slam your weak body against the steel mass with all your might; the only thing you succeed in doing is causing a sharp pain in your shoulder. A few more weak thrusts and you’re left to rest your broken shoulder against it, sliding down against the steel. The futility of it all makes your eyes burn, and you break out into a sob. Fat teardrops roll down your cheeks and into your open mouth, the salty taste sticking to your tongue. Your mask amplifies the sound of your own pitiful weeping; each hiccup you inadvertently take reminding you of a toddler throwing a temper-tantrum. A few minutes of this and you’re left emotionally sapped; a dull emptiness replacing the feeling of dread you had in your stomach. You’re going to die here. You’re going to die scared, confused, and whimpering like a child. You look down to your right hand to see your pistol is still in it, palm laying outstretched. The thought of eating a bullet sounded more than appealing right now, more appealing than choking down toxic gas at least. You raise the handgun to your temple, slowly putting more and more pressure onto the trigger. You open your eyes you didn’t realize you closed and look up. Through your teary eyes you can just barely see the corpse of the man in the overcoat. The ceiling light is only barely bright enough to let you see the outline of his open maw. You remember the dead man you found in the room you woke up in; murdered in a brutal fashion, his face mangled into a bloody pulp. 

No. No you’re not going to be found like this. You’re not going to be found killed by your own hand because you were too much of a sodden coward to at least try and find your way out. You stand up, tapping into a will you thought was broken; your heart thumps faster at a pace you hadn’t thought possible before, and your ragged breathing grows raspier. You begin to move forward and your legs scream in protest as you begin to limp at a pace faster than they find acceptable, and your calves start to lock up in threat of a charlie-horse. It doesn’t matter though. You’re almost there, almost out of this hellhole. You brace yourself up against the windowsill, using your free hand and rest of your miniscule strength to pull the heavy sandbags from the window, letting out raspy grunts as you do. You can see moonlight. Almost there, almost to freedom. As the last sandbag falls to the floor with a heavy thud, you raise your pistol and turn away, squeezing the trigger twice. Two deafening bangs sound off around you, and you look back to see the glass partly shattered. You reel your free hand back and punch as hard as you can; the adrenaline numbing the faint feeling a sharp pain on your knuckles. You brace your hands against the window frame, cutting holes into your palms as you drag yourself through the window.

You fall about two feet onto long forest grass, and hear fabric ripping behind you. You tear off your mask, letting it hang in front of you by its hoses and breath in crisp forest air. As you exhale, you gag and vomit out viscous bile and yellow grains. You look back at your leg to see that the glass has torn a sizable chunk of fabric from your pant leg and severely cut up your ankle, the wound already pissing blood all over onto the grass. You groan and hiss through your teeth; you don’t have time for this, you need to get away, far far away. The adrenaline is beginning to wear off, and your left hand is covered in blood and stinging like a motherfucker. You’re just going to have to grin and bear it for now. You look around to see your pistol just a few feet away; the thing must’ve fallen from your grasp at your exodus. You stand up with a pained grunt, pistol in hand. The sound of ringing in your ears just barely blocks it out, but you hear it. Footsteps.

You whip your head to your right, and the sound of voices begin to accompany the footfalls. That’s when it rounds the corner. It’s no bigger than 5 feet tall; two giant growths tower over its head and cast a demonic silhouette. Your heart jumps into your throat, and you raise your pistol, squeezing the trigger. You hear a shrill, animalistic yipe as a mist of crimson shoots from its shoulder. The thing collapses to the ground and writhes in the tall grass, whimpering like a beaten dog. Suddenly, you feel four small but strong furry appendages wrap around your body and throat, bringing you down to the ground in a body-locked chokehold. Your pistol slips from your grasp and falls just short of your arm's reach into the uncut grass. You struggle with what little might your knackered being has left, but it’s no use. As your vision grows darker and begins to close in, a feeling of serenity takes hold of you; at this point you’re not sure if it’s the lack of oxygen or a genuine feeling of calmness. One last pitiful groan chokes out of your torched lungs before unconsciousness takes hold of you.