Carrier Group:Background
It is not known how it started. What is known is that it started in United States. There were as many theories about the cause as there were people telling them. Mutated version of bird of swine flu. Biological warfare by a hostile nation – and rare were the nations that someone did not name as the guilty one. A domestic bioweapon that was accidentally released. An alien virus, brought by a meteorite, escaped from Area 51, or released by the aliens as the first step in terraforming. Not a real virus at all but advanced nanotechnology.
The only thing known for sure is how it worked. Initially it looked like just another flu epidemic. Fewer and infection that lasted for a few days and then went away. Initially, it did not raise an alarm. So it had time to spread.
The true threat only became apparent later. The virus did not go away with the fever. During the fever stage it infected the nervous system and then went dormant. But upon the death of the host, at the moment when brain death occurred, it reactivated. Reactivating the central nervous system and taking control of it. Thus reanimating the dead person.
The reanimated had the barest minimum of metabolic activity and no higher brain functions. It did not take long for them to be called zombies. Their only purpose was to further spread the virus and to increase the number of reanimated. By attacking the living and the healthy. Human bite is prone to cause infections even at best of times, zombie bite proved to cause particularly virulent ones. Few people survived it, especially when the pandemic got worse and access to antibiotics and proper medical care got haphazard. And if they could, zombies attempted to savage their victims to death. Even eating parts of them, for they still had a minimal, although terribly slow metabolism and still needed energy to remain mobile, generally entering periods of immobile dormancy when fresh targets were not available. But they never completely ate their victims, leaving enough for the freshly dead to reanimate.
Their minimal metabolism made zombies sluggish in movement, except for a brief period shortly following the reanimation. However, it also made them very difficult to put down. Tissue damage, even to otherwise vital organs, only hindered them. Only their infected neural system was truly vulnerable. Especially the brain. If the brain was damaged, the virus lost control over the reanimated body.
Individually, they were outmatched by the more agile living people, and if it had been just zombie bite that created new ones, the pandemic may have been won. But that was not the case. Anyone who had gone through what then became called the zombie fever had the virus in their nervous system, and upon their deaths for any reason, they would reanimate. By the time the link between the earlier flu outbreak and the terrifying reanimations was recognized, the pandemic was worldwide. As outbreaks happened in densely populated cities, they soon started to get out of control until the hordes of zombies overwhelmed the living. And then the horror spread to the rural areas as the zombies started to wander from the fallen cities in search of fresh prey. As civilization started to collapse, panic, looting and starvation added to the catastrophe. Hostile groups of survivors could be more dangerous to each other than zombies.
It is now four years after the outbreak. Civilization has fallen. Isolated outposts and wandering groups of survivors exist, but their numbers continue to dwindle. Animals still survive. In addition to humans, apes turned out to be vulnerable to the zombie virus, but it appears not to be dangerous to other animals.
