Tales Of The Walking Dead: A Christmas Wishlist

1) “Patient Zero”

Last week, I mentioned how I was given the impression that Robert Kirkman didn’t want to actually explain the origins of the virus, and, you know what? That’s fine. This scenario is not asking for that, what this scenario is asking for is to simply see the story of the person who became the first walker.

Who would this person be? (You could have this be Gloria, but, since doctors in Los Angeles already knew that dying made people turn just a day after she did, I’m inclined to think she wasn’t the first walker.)
Where would they be from?
How did they die?

These are the sorts of questions I would love to see answered, because I just think finding out about this person, the first person to turn, would be very fascinating.

Honestly, I think the key to this story would be building tension. We as the audience would know that, sooner or later, something bad would happen to this person, we just wouldn’t know when or how, but, I think we’d all have that feeling of nervousness as we watched this person’s last days, wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.

I’m picturing someone in a place that would be likely to get a lot of international travelers (Which would help explain the virus’s spread across the rest of the world), a place like New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris, Toronto, etc. (Though, just because of cost considerations, I imagine it would most likely wind up being Atlanta, New York, or L.A., but, I digress…). Whatever the case may be, we would wind up watching this person go through a perfectly normal day, perhaps alongside a spouse, or a sibling, or a boyfriend/girlfriend, or a coworker, well, I say “Perfectly normal”, but…we would watch as our protagonist got progressively sicker, exhibiting an increasing number of flu-like symptoms as the episode wore on.

Our main character would try to tough it out, but, whoever their companion was would insist that they go see a doctor about their condition, perhaps with our main rebuffing them, assuming they could just sleep it off.

Now, here you could have things go one of two ways: Either A) Our protagonist’s companion, after seeing their condition deteriorate, takes them to a hospital, where they die on the operating table, and are brought to the hospital’s morgue. In this scenario, the last thing we could see is our protagonist, lying on a table, a sheet covering their face, waiting for the pathologist (Who would be busy answering the phone, or stepping out of the morgue for a moment), sitting up, beginning to quietly groan, the pathologist completely unaware of what awaits them.

Or B) Our protagonist, still at their house/apartment/hotel/whatever, dies in their sleep from the virus. The next morning, we’d see a shot of the camera panning over them, starting from their feet up to their head, showing first their ghostly pale skin, perhaps with some blood on their sheets or clothes (Perhaps with them bleeding the way the flu caused people to bleed in season four of The Walking Dead, who knows?), until finally showing their face, their eyes shut. We cut to the other side of their bedroom door, with their companion knocking, asking them through the door if they’re all right, and the last thing we see is our protagonist open their eyes, now ghostly white, as we hear their bedroom door open, and their companion ask off-screen “How are you feeling?”.

Either way, we would be left knowing the sad fate of whomever was the unfortunate soul who found our transformed protagonist, and that this was how the zombie outbreak began.

I don’t need to know what caused the zombie outbreak, but, I do need to know what happened to the person who became the first walker.