The following is a description of how a zombie apocalypse may unfold in a present-day world. This timeline will follow the outbreak from its first patient to the collapse of civilization, and how authorities attempt to contain the situation.
To anyone reading, feel free to add to or modify this page to make more sense.
Infection Information[]
Obviously, not all zombie infections are the same. When you want to write a zombie story, the first thing you may ponder on is exactly what type of infection you want.
Is the infection natural, manufactured, alien, or supernatural? Does the infection begin from a single patient, or does some kind of plot device infect multiple people in one fell swoop? Does it begin in the heart of a large city, or out in the countryside? Are they reanimated corpses or living humans gone mad? Are they slow shamblers or fast juggernauts? Does the infection take days to transform one host, or can it throw a city into chaos in a single day? Are the infected completely mindless, or do they retain a degree of sentience? Are there people who are immune to the virus, or simply become asymptomatic carriers? Does some quirk in the infection’s structure allow it to only infect certain groups of people, like prepubescent children?
For the following scenario, I will define what kind of infection will be plaguing the world. Obviously, there’s a dozen different ways to describe a zombie outbreak. This is simply the most “logical” (and more importantly, interesting) way to go about it.
- The infection begins from a single patient. The exact origin of infection will remain unknown.
- The infection begins in a major city in a first world country.
- The infection is caused by a rabies-like virus or some other kind of microbe.
- The infection is spread via direct fluid contact (bites, scratches, etc.)
- The infection time ranges from 12 and 48 hours, depending on the location of infection.
- The infection’s symptoms are as follows: flu-like symptoms (early stage), deterioration of mental state (middle state), seizures or a comatose state (late stage), and reawakening (final stage).
- The infected are living humans turned into mindless, yet resilient infecting machines.
- The infected are incapable of intelligent thought; their only motivation is to infect others.
- The infected can run as fast as an average human, neither pathetically slow or inhumanly fast.
- The infected can only be killed by a direct headshot.
- No one is immune to the virus. Everyone is susceptible.
Day One - Patient Zero[]
It’s a beautiful day in the city. People go about their daily lives, some going to work, others enjoying the day off. Our city contains about a million people, a few major hospitals, and an airport.
One of these people, a thirty-something man living with his wife in the suburbs, wakes up with a sore throat and a headache. He calls in sick for work, and treats his infection like any flu-like illness: with soup and rest. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get better. By the next day, a day which will come to be known as “Day One”, the man falls unconscious while making coffee.
His wife quickly notices and carries him to the car in order to get to the hospital. However, while driving down a fairly busy freeway, the man suddenly awakens and bites his wife on her arm, causing her to lose stop the vehicle, causing many cars to stop or crash. One of these vehicles is a police car, whose occupant steps out to investigate what happened.
The woman runs out of the car with her hand over the bite on her arm and her zombified husband, “Patient Zero” in pursuit. The woman runs to the cop, who warns Patient Zero that he will be forced to detain him should he come closer. Patient Zero, having lost all mental capacity to listen to the officer’s orders, charges anyway, and the cop is forced to taser and handcuff him. While being detained, Patient Zero manages to bite the officer’s hand, which earns him a mist of pepper spray to the face.
After a bit of interviewing the wife on what happened, the cop takes her to the hospital and Patient Zero to the police station. The cop then returns home, bandaging the bite wound with some gauze, and ignoring the slight headache.
A bit too specific? Well, when patient zero turns, they’re going to go around biting a few people before someone kills or contains them. Some of the bite victims will seek treatment at a hospital (full of sick, defenseless people and staff who wouldn’t in good conscience harm a patient no matter their condition), and others will treat their less serious wounds at home.
Week One - First Cases[]
On the day after Patient Zero’s turning, his wife turns in the hospital and bites several patients and staff before being restrained to the bed. Out in the suburbs, the cop turns and infects his family, breaks out of his home and infects some of his neighbors who came to investigate, before being gunned down by fellow officers.
As the infected patients in the hospital turn and bite others, police officers are called to the scene to investigate the attacks. Once they realize that this “cannibalistic insanity” is contagious, they isolate people in certain wards of the hospital to prevent them from attacking other patients. Samples of infected blood are sent to medical teams for testing.
Outside the hospital, the cop’s bite victims either seek treatment at other hospitals in the city or treat it at home, turn, and spread it to more neighbors. Incidents in the suburbs are taken care of by law enforcement, but certain zombies are able to escape the cops and silently spread the virus into the low-income areas of the city; people who can’t afford medical care and are glossed over by law enforcement officials.
Rumors begin to spread online that a cannibalistic cult, drug epidemic, or flu epidemic is developing in the city. No one suspects that it could be rabid humans yet.
Week Two - Losing Control[]
As the virus continues to spread in the hospital, infected patients begin collecting into hordes to break quarantines and raid other wards, massacring patients and staff alike. The police decide to barricade the hospital, while the remaining patients are evacuated from the building and into a makeshift hospital in the car park. However, some persons in the makeshift hospital managed to escape with a scratch or minor bite, and promptly cause more shooting and chaos once they turn.
Outside the hospital, the virus spreads exponentially in the slums and ghettoes of the city. People report more shootings and “riots” in homeless communities. Some of these cases manage to escape into the busy streets, but thanks to the general openness of the city, people are able to scatter from these cases and call authorities to take care of them.
Overall, the situation is starting to deteriorate. Once medical experts discover a new virus and break the news about the outbreak, people begin flocking to the stores to stock up on supplies. Other people take to the streets to protest against the police killing “innocent” civilians. Whole neighborhoods are quarantined, leaving the people inside them to coalesce into whole hordes. Hospitals all over the city are seeing outbreaks, stretching authorities thin.
Week Three - Panic Strikes[]
Finally, things begin to go downhill for the origin city. The hordes of zombies that have been building up in the hospitals for the past two weeks finally break through their barricades, overrunning police and spreading into the city. These zombies initially target densely-populated areas like stores and parks.
With the introduction of massive zombie hordes into the city, mass rioting and panicking ensues. People flock to the stores that aren’t overrun to stock on supplies or kill others for them, attracting the attention of the hordes. Authorities are stretched to their limit fighting off the hordes, leaving many to defend themselves, only to kill more people than the zombies themselves.
People flee the city in droves, causing massive gridlocks on the major roads. These gridlocks lead people to leave their cars, prompting others to leave theirs as well. These massive congestions of people also attract hordes of zombies, growing their numbers into the tens of thousands.
Other citizens seek help at police stations, only to find out just how understaffed they are. Those police teams which still function call upon the police forces of neighboring areas to assist in the disaster. Barricades are set up on major roads leading to the city, guarded by police teams assisting in evacuation and keeping infected people from passing. Unfortunately, by the time these barricades are set up, some infected people have already made it to the next city over.
Weeks Four - Infection Spreading[]
The city in which the virus originated, the “epicenter” of the outbreak, has fallen. Most of the population has either been infected, killed, or fled the area. Authorities trying to control the infected have been massacred. The last safe zones inside the city have been overrun. Many of the few survivors inside the city are trapped in their homes, unable to leave lest they be infected. The only major human activity is at the outskirts of the city, where police teams are still evacuating survivors.
By now, the incident in the epicenter has made national news. A major city has fallen to a virus that turns people into rabid killers. It’s almost certain that the government has called in military teams to the city to weed out the infected. Unfortunately, some evacuees in other cities are already reporting to the hospitals with headaches, or massacring the staff.
The government issues a statement on the ongoing outbreak, giving hopes and prayers to those at the epicenter, and ensuring that the outbreak will be under control. Nevertheless, panic appears even in cities that haven’t seen their first cases, as people stock up to prepare. Conspiracies about the virus flourish on social media sites, claiming that the virus is “divine intervention” or a “government coverup”.
Despite the military teams trying to handle infectees outside the epicenter, some manage to slip through the cracks by hiding in the forests, converting campers and hikers into mini-hordes which spill into surrounding areas. Neighboring cities, and a few in other states or countries, are starting to report attacks at airports, and some are closing off their hospitals.
Week Five - Quarantine Measures[]
As cases multiply in other cities, governments begin putting quarantines in place. All flights in and out of the origin country are grounded, as well as cruises and cargo shipments. Airports and hospitals are placed on lockdown. In areas where hospitals have recently been compromised, borders are set up both around the hospital and the entire city to prevent the infected from escaping.
Martial law is declared. People are laid off from their jobs and told to stay indoors. Curfews are put in place. Travel is restricted. Schools, cinemas, venues, all non-essential services are closed down or converted into bases of operations. Stadiums turn into mass quarantine zones to “treat” those infected.
However, even with these strict measures, the infected population continues to grow. Infected individuals who managed to travel to a rural area before turning are almost undetected, and convert the population as they move to more densely populated areas. The infected population may be as high as tens of millions during this period.
With the enactment of quarantines and travel restrictions, food shipments are also disrupted. As food runs empty and officers threaten to shoot people for trying to buy more, they start getting hungry. They start getting irritable. They start getting angry. Some angry souls discover videos of the military burning masses of infected individuals while they’re still alive, and use it to spread fear online. Fear and superstitions are spearheaded, telling people to wake up and stick it to the government, completely blind to what they’re really fighting, and why the quarantines happened in the first place.
Weeks Six - Total Anarchy[]
The pot of unrest finally boils over as people take to the streets, protesting and demanding an end to the quarantines. Some of these protests are contained or put down by military forces, causing panic even greater than that which happened during the beginning stages of the epidemic.
In others, infected individuals sneak their way into the crowd, biting many protestors before people finally notice and scatter. Even with travel restrictions in place, people continue to migrate to other countries, even through illegal means, spreading the virus even farther. The infection rate skyrockets.
As whole regions become completely overrun with the infected, the military decides that it's done enough trying to protect and contain instead of actively stopping the virus, and it's time to go on the offensive.
Week Seven - Military Engagement[]
The military begins to actively combat those infected with the virus. Drones are used to lure the hordes from the cities out into the open, where they can be blown to bits with incendiaries. Other battles choose to skip the drones, carpet-bombing urban areas outright. In either cases, most zombies are blown to chunks of meat, but in a “sweet spot” of the blast that hasn’t been vaporized, particles of infected blood ride the winds, where they can land on those watching the blast like an invisible mist of death.
Elsewhere, military teams resort to shooting the infected hordes. Of course, the infected hordes are massive by this time. The mere sight of a million empty husks running towards them causes some teams to panic, and in a world where soldiers are taught to aim for the center mass, shooting a moving target the size of a basketball a hundred times over is not easy. Not to mention the possibility of splattered blood from a close-range shot getting in the eyes or mouth.
As the infection continues to pick away at the cities, we may see patterns of “internal” and “external” outbreaks. An internal outbreak, like those from the beginnings of the epidemic or in coastal cities, is when the zombie infection begins within the city, exponentially converting the population from the inside out. In an external outbreak, which may appear during the late stages of the outbreak or what happens in inland settlements, swarms of zombies from neighboring cities burn through the streets like a tidal wave of infection.
Safe zones are established wherever they can; mountain ranges, islands, walled settlements, etcetera. Government officials retreat to their bunkers, trying to calm a panicking, dwindling population from the comfort of their shelters.
Week Eight - Societal Collapse[]
The infected population is in the billions. Entire regions are populated by disorganized mega-swarms consisting of millions of infected individuals, picking off anywhere they can sense a human. Even the governments find themselves in danger, not only from dedicated zombie hordes pounding at their vaults night and day, but from the growing insanity of guilt and isolation.
By this point, many utilities and elements of global infrastructure have collapsed. Because people are either too scared, too dead, or too infected to come to work, utilities such as electricity, telecommunications, social media, the internet, and running water all start to shut down due to a lack of maintenance.
District by district, city by city, the vast webs of light once visible from space begin to dim. Those governments which remain send out “last broadcasts”, some urging citizens to stay vigilant with bold words, some just turning into a world leader’s suicide tape, and others being one last rendition of the national anthem. Others may tune their televisions to empty new stations, monotonous emergency alerts, or plain static. Eventually, they go off for good.
It’s dark. The skies are cloudy with the ashes of human remains, burnt buildings, and incendiary fallout. The cities are smoking husks, filled with god knows how many infected roaming around. Their groans, snarls, and shrieks fill the air like the cries of a billion tortured souls.
Month Three and Onwards - Rebuilding[]
So, the old world is dead. No more greasy burgers, no processed foods in the convenience of a foil bag, no internet keeping you occupied every moment, no medicine keeping you alive, no heating keeping you warm, no light keeping you sane, and virtually all of your friends, family, or any person you had a peripheral glimpse of walking down the street is either dead or worse.
But this isn’t the end. Far from it. Humanity has survived events as grim as the Black Death and World Wars, and even though the zombie apocalypse may seem far more destructive than those two events combined, it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for mankind.
In the years before the pandemic, many people have been prepping for just a disaster, and are now emerging from their forest cabins into the new world. The military is not entirely defeated, either; many teams are still active in their bases after the collapse of the government, and although some keep to themselves, others mark their bases as the founding of a new colony. People emerge from their safe zones, planning to expand them across the continent, Lucky survivors reoccupy small towns that were evacuated during the pandemic, choosing to live a life as similar to the old world as they can.
And as these new territories expand and come across the infected hordes, they take it upon themselves to gun down the infected one by one. A difficult process indeed clearing out a continent full of monsters, but not impossible. Slowly, and surely, the roughly hundreds of millions of uninfected humans left alive begin the long and arduous path to rebuilding the old world.