The outbreak began when a mouse escaped from an animal testing facility in the middle of the countryside. As mice tend to do, it mingled with wild mice and the resulting offspring became carriers. They were harmless for long enough that the facility staff marked the missing mouse as dead with no lingering environmental impact.
It's hard to factor genetic abnormalities into any equation, let alone one single little genetic crinkle that turned an otherwise feeble attempt at a more potent mood stabiliser into something more akin to zombieism meets rabies meets narcolepsy with the infectiousness of the common cold.
If outdoor workers started getting sick and losing their emotional stability, it wasn't mentioned for a good long while. Long enough that there's no real start date to the end of society as we know it, just a lot of 'what if's' and people berating themselves for not noticing sooner. As if anybody could have seen it coming.
The first major outbreak occurred at a zoo about twenty miles from the facility. The going theory is that an infected mouse got into one of the enclosures, either attacked or was eaten by whatever was inside and from there more came and more were infected and the staff were growing more and more concerned by the gradual onset of unusual and dangerous behaviour until...
An accident happened, as they tend to do. One slip while sedating a tiger, one light brush of teeth against a forgotten papercut and the infection finally met humanity. Nothing makes an infection spread quicker than giving the carrier the inherent desire to dig into the people closest to them.
At first they were easy enough to quarantine but little slip-ups kept happening and we ran out of room. This was after we crammed the infected into sealed stadiums and left them to kill each other, hoping the infection would die with them and never considering how the rain would wash their blood into the soil and carry the infection into our own water supply.
It's hard to factor genetic abnormalities into any equation, let alone one single little genetic crinkle that turned an otherwise feeble attempt at a more potent mood stabiliser into something more akin to zombieism meets rabies meets narcolepsy with the infectiousness of the common cold.
If outdoor workers started getting sick and losing their emotional stability, it wasn't mentioned for a good long while. Long enough that there's no real start date to the end of society as we know it, just a lot of 'what if's' and people berating themselves for not noticing sooner. As if anybody could have seen it coming.
The first major outbreak occurred at a zoo about twenty miles from the facility. The going theory is that an infected mouse got into one of the enclosures, either attacked or was eaten by whatever was inside and from there more came and more were infected and the staff were growing more and more concerned by the gradual onset of unusual and dangerous behaviour until...
An accident happened, as they tend to do. One slip while sedating a tiger, one light brush of teeth against a forgotten papercut and the infection finally met humanity. Nothing makes an infection spread quicker than giving the carrier the inherent desire to dig into the people closest to them.
At first they were easy enough to quarantine but little slip-ups kept happening and we ran out of room. This was after we crammed the infected into sealed stadiums and left them to kill each other, hoping the infection would die with them and never considering how the rain would wash their blood into the soil and carry the infection into our own water supply.
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