The Walking Dead: The outbreak through the lens of season 1

2) Cascade

Along with learning how long it had been since the disease was first cataloged, we also learned from Dr. Jenner that, within the second day since Rick woke up, it had been sixty-three days “Since the disease abruptly went global”, as he puts it. This, presumably, is referring to when the outbreak, as we would later see in Fear The Walking Dead, began.

While nothing and no one explicitly says what happened, by looking at the various clues seen throughout the first season of The Walking Dead, we can at least get some idea of how the Atlanta area collapsed.

The first clue comes from Rick’s former colleague, Deputy Leon Bassett (Most notable for Rick having to remind him to see if he had a round in the chamber of his pistol and that the safety was off before preparing the roadblock for the car thieves) in the first episode.

Something that you may overlook when Rick finds Leon’s walker roaming around the station is the fact that Leon is still in uniform, and that his radio is dangling from his belt. This suggests that Leon was killed during the line of duty, perhaps even while attempting to call over his radio.

Similarly, practically from the moment Rick woke up, until the moment the group had to flee the CDC headquarters, we see abandoned military vehicles around the Atlanta area, nearly all of them in pristine condition. Not only that, but, within at least one of those vehicles (As well as several gun nests at various points in the city, including the CDC building), we see soldiers dead at their positions. In the case of that vehicle, it was a tank (The same one Rick hides in at the end of the very first episode), with not one, but two dead soldiers, one on the tank, the other, in the tank. The one on the tank lay across the vehicle’s main weapon, almost as if he were trying to get inside, but died in the attempt; The one inside the tank, had a noticeable bite on his left cheek, meaning he was bitten, and had no other refuge but to seal himself within the vehicle, and died there.

What all of this suggests is that, at some point, the disease very suddenly hit a tipping point, so suddenly, in fact, that law enforcement and military personnel attempting to maintain control of the situation were caught completely off guard by it, and were washed over by an increasing number of walkers.

After this point, things began to quickly unravel.