November

As with many other strange and horrible things, the event that came to be widely called the end of the world started in New Jersey, though it wasn’t until several weeks into it that scientists were able to pinpoint the hypocenter, or ground zero. Part of the reason for this was that many of the initial reports were dismissed by authorities, first out of disbelief, then out of panic, until the ever widening scope of the events made any kind of cover up impossible.

Considering the oversaturation of the horror sub-genre in popular media, you’d think people would be better prepared for the zombie apocalypse. But in a culture as sterilized as the American, where even corpses are preserved and artfully made up to appear as people merely sleeping, few ever saw or contemplated the stages of decomposition first-hand, the way Buddhist monks trained to do in Asia. In a place full of cemeteries with polished tombstones and manicured lawns, not many people were mentally prepared to look death in the face.

The societal chaos caused by the returners, the term adopted instead of the older French “revenant,” which was seen as too archaic to use in what appeared to be a cataclysmic national emergency, was drastically disproportionate to the danger the returners actually appeared to pose. The recently buried were the first to rise, like melancholy flowers through the still soft earth. Their corneas were clouded and opaque from the aqueous humor that would fill their eyes following death. Milky white, they seemed like doll eyes that were inserted incorrectly. The returners moved haltingly, slowly, their hands stretched out like the blind feeling their way. A few seemed to react to strong lights and shadows, but on the whole they seemed unable to recognize places or people because of their ocular degeneration.

They were able to react to sounds though, as the cavernous ear was much better suited to withstand the onset of decay. As such, the returners often stopped for long periods, slowly turning their heads to each side, as if trying to build a model of their surroundings in their minds using sound. It was hard to tell how intact their senses of smell and taste were, though they did appear to be breathing. The onset of rigor mortis made their vocal chords barely operable, so generally all they could manage were soft, sad, gurgling groans. But soon it became clear that they could also scream, and that they definitely still felt pain.

It was a great misfortune for the rest of the planet that the end of the world started in America, with its widespread police violence and sensationalist news coverage. After a few days of ignoring the early reports of the dead rising from their graves, the first police involved shooting took place. Officers responded to a call about a suspicious male loitering in an abandoned mall parking lot at night. When they arrived on the scene, they saw a young man in a soiled black suit staggering as if drunk. They ordered the man to get on the ground and put his hands behind his head. When the man slowly turned towards them, hands outstretched, they did what they usually do, and opened fire. Despite the horrid screeching screams of the man caught on body-cam, the officers shot over 30 rounds before the figure stopped moving. While no weapon was found on the corpse, the initial police report stated that the officers feared for their lives. But once the AG determined that there was already a death certificate for the deceased from two weeks earlier, they were promptly cleared of all charges, signaling to law enforcement across the country an open season on the returners, reports of which were increasing exponentially.

While the news praised the police as heroes protecting the people, even though there have been no verified cases of the returners actually harming anyone, except for one instance where a returner had wandered onto a highway and, like a deer in headlights, caused a three car collision, the returners soon became the go-to ideological scapegoat, quickly replacing the illegal immigrant as the supposed cause of all of America’s problems.

Yet no matter how many returners the police shot, cases kept multiplying and spreading in what seemed like an ever-widening circle. As scientists struggled to explain the phenomenon, the president wasted no time in placing the blame on China, meanwhile his secretary of health blamed the Covid vaccines from years before. Yet nobody could find a suitable explanation for the seemingly geometrical regularity of the returner phenomenon’s expansion. As reports increased to present a clearer statistical mosaic of the spread, it looked like the ripple from a drop of water, spreading equally in all directions. This seemed to violate all biological and epidemiological explanations typically used for vector borne diseases and parasites, which jump from host to host in fairly predictable ways. Despite the myriad health datasets at their disposal, none of the people who were supposed to know could provide an acceptable explanation for what was going on, which only fueled the flames of panic engulfing the country.

The news only dumped gasoline on the fire. By airing the most grotesque, misleading footage depicting the executions of returners, they created a national and soon international panic, resulting in runs on banks and the disruption of supply lines to the megalopolis that is the tri-state area of northeast US. As other states began to halt their deliveries of food, bracing for what they believed to be fast-approaching disaster, it triggered a panicked mass exodus from the area then home to over 20 million people. Three weeks into the event, New York City was more than two thirds deserted.

After hundreds of elaborate efforts at modeling the phenomenon’s spread failed, scientists had to accept the impossibly simplistic ripple effect model of a uniformly paced circular expansion, in which the planet had less than a year before the last area would be engulfed in ground zero’s antipode somewhere near Augusta, Australia.