That's the part I've been objecting to. If you meant that they were ambushed by subprime creatures, this should be cleared out. Right now, it implies that a military patrol was overwhelmed by fungaloids.
Day 0:[...] Creatures from the surviving portals, those expanded or missed by the bombs, begin venturing forth and slaughtering those they find.
That's what occurred on Day 0.
The fungaloid thing occurs on Day 2 - by then, according to the timeline, the New England area has already been declared a non-priority and most troops and equipment have begun moving elsewhere. So things are basically over even before the first fungaloids appear. It's perfectly possible a military patrol not expecting them could have been overwhelmed by fungaloids. Sure, they aren't tough individually, but they can form huge swarms and are constantly pushing guaranteed death into the air - I'd guess the military patrol retreated to a defense structure, were surrounded, and eventually succumbed when the fungus started sprouting from their own body. Having an enemy emit a substance that WILL kill you if it touches any exposed skin makes for a pretty hard enemy to fight.
Forgetting for the moment that the in-game stuff is kind of borked here, since it only works mechanically through inhalation, but the description given when it happens is that it burrows into your skin. This is part of why we are doing the rewrite, hah, some of the things fungaloids are supposed to be doing, code-wise, don't actually work right or are not implemented well, and they only spawn in limited areas and can't overtake towns like they are supposed to. And the lore given is much closer to a description of where we are actually likely to end up rather than exactly as things appear in the game right now. And the fungaloids are going to be getting significantly tougher in some ways.
But still, I'm not sure if you've ever encountered an actual fungaloid swarm in-game, but they spawn significantly faster than you can kill them in many situations.
It still isn't why the military as a whole itself was overrun - this was a single patrol overwhelmed AFTER almost everyone else had been killed or pulled out of New England.
Day 0 is when most people were killed - and it wouldn't be until Day 1 that the military was likely to have noticed that the regions they "cleared" of zombies on Day 0 were now chock full of them again, since the damage caused by bullets simply doesn't stick. The point of the lore was that every single day had new challenges, sometimes several over the course of a day -
Day 0 was nethercreatures, followed by zombies, followed death rain.
Day 1 is huge numbers of zombies including all the ones previously killed, followed by the botch-up with the security bots, and the management of the evacuation camps. Corpse piles turn into Jabberwocks in the middle of the camps. Note that despite all this the military still controls many areas at this point and probably has them fairly secure - for how terrible the stuff is, they probably mostly have a handle on it within their own areas at this point, barring the occasional surprise wiping out a squad operating outside of the military controlled areas. But there are a limited number of military personnel, and they can't be everywhere, and information is still hard to come by about what exactly is happening where.
Day 2, the military is pulled out. Pretty much everything outside military controlled areas in New England is a lost cause, and it's decided they can be put to better use defending places in the rest of the US where things aren't so bad. (We're adding maps that will a lot more examples of abandoned military controlled areas). In addition to the pullout, this is the day when Giant Insects, Graboids, Fungaloids and Triffids all begin to make their presence known. Flying enemies, enemies that strike from underground, enemies that make more of themselves while spewing death clouds into the air, and enemies that can blend in perfectly among the shadows of the forest make for a pretty hostile environment. Is it really so hard to believe that a few military patrols would fall to each of these?