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

3) Collapse

After the outbreak rapidly accelerated, and society was ambushed by this development, it quickly collapsed, something we get hints of peppered across the first season of The Walking Dead.

The first clues come before Rick even leaves the hospital, as the first thing that alerts him to something being wrong is the fact his clock is stopped at 2:17. Upon leaving his room, Rick observes the carnage in the halls, seeing bullet holes strewn along the wall adjacent to his room and discovering the corpse of a woman nearly stripped to the bone. As Rick exits the hospital, the hallways become increasingly more damaged, with ceiling tiles destroyed, lights malfunctioning, and wires dangling from the ceiling.

Once outside, Rick discovers rows and truckloads of dead bodies at the hospital’s loading dock, numbering in the hundreds, and sees massive destruction to parts of the building’s structure, and even the archway leading to the hospital’s loading dock and emergency entrance is damaged.

As he climbs the hill just outside the hospital, Rick sees more bodies, alongside another partially destroyed building, surrounding abandoned military vehicles (Much like the ones he’d later see inside Atlanta) and tents, suggesting it was some kind of safe zone being coordinated by the military, but had to be hastily abandoned; So hastily, in fact, they left behind their helicopters.

As Rick enters the city, several trains next to the inbound side of Interstate 85 are derailed and destroyed, and notably, on the outbound side, right around a pair of collided cars, is a weathered scorch mark, which also incorporates several of the vehicles clogging the highway (While there appears to be another on one of the skyscrapers). As Rick moves further into the interior of the city, he passes a burnt out bus, with two walkers inside. What caused these are never revealed in this season.

The most compelling evidence, however, may have come from Shane and Dr. Jenner, who both reveal a small taste of the horrors they saw as things teetered toward collapse.

First, in Shane’s flashback to his last visit to Rick in the hospital, we learn that at that moment, the safe zone and the hospital itself, were themselves nearing total collapse. As Shane goes to see Rick, he is passed by a team of soldiers, escorting a number of doctors and nurse out of the hospital. Behind them is yet another team of soldiers in hazmat suits, who gun down a small group of doctors, nurses, and patients, before making a point to shoot them in the head, implying that, at that point, the government was aware that dying, regardless, resulted in reanimation. After completing their grisly task, several of that team of soldiers are ambushed by walkers, leading to some of the destruction we see inside the building when Rick awakens.

More interesting still, as Shane attempts to wake Rick up and rescue him from the hospital, a battle can be heard outside, with gunfire, rockets (Apparently), and explosions, the latter of which knocks out the power, suggesting that this happened at 2:17 in the afternoon, and was the reason for the mass destruction seen at the hospital and the adjacent building when Rick woke up. Why these explosions occurred is still a mystery.

Second, we learned a great deal from Dr. Jenner, who explained that, aside from himself, the only other of his international counterparts who seemed closest to a solution to the virus were those in France, but what came of their research, we can only guess.

We also learned that, once the military cordon (Which the group passes through what’s left of upon arriving at the CDC headquarters) collapsed, morale at the center plummeted, with many of his colleagues committing suicide, while more still attempted to make a break for it and try to flee. Judging by the numerous bodies strewn around the front of the complex, this attempt happened as the cordon was collapsing…with disastrous results.