Fear The Walking Dead mystery: Who is patient zero?

What we know about Fear The Walking Dead’s 1st zombie…doesn’t seem to add up.

After re-watching the first two episodes of Fear The Walking Dead, I started doing more research, and, to my surprise, it seems that original showrunner Dave Erickson said on an episode of Talking Dead that Gloria, Nick Clark’s girlfriend, on top of being the first infected we saw in Fear, was also the first infected, period. (NOTE: Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any clips of this on Youtube…)

This revelation left me both happy and…confused. On the one hand, I’ve been wanting a webisode showing what Gloria did after Nick found her for years (Tales Of The Walking Dead could make this a reality), but, on the other hand, knowing what I know now about things at the beginning of the outbreak, this…doesn’t quite make sense.

To start with, in season one of The Walking Dead, Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC said that Rick Grimes’s second day awake in the apocalypse was sixty-three days “Since the disease abruptly went global”, which sounds a lot like what we saw in the beginning of Fear. This would fit with Gloria being the first zombie, except, he also said that it had been one hundred and ninety-four days since the first reports of the virus.

To assert that Gloria was the first zombie would mean that, in the nearly four months since doctors began hearing about the virus, she was the only person to die. This does not make sense.

Using some rough numbers from the CDC in 2018, on average, approximately seven thousand and seventy-eight people died in the U.S. a day. A. DAY.

The idea that nobody died in the U.S., over a one hundred and eleven day span, is insane. While I can imagine that it’s mathematically possible, the idea that it’s at all probable is something I can not accept.

Further muddying the issue is the fact that, in the very episode Gloria turns, one day later, the staff at Temple Community Hospital knew that people dying led to turning into zombies. As we see when Nick’s elderly roommate at the hospital expires, the attending physician told the nurse “If we don’t have a rhythm on him in sixty, I want him downstairs. Too much we don’t know”.

If they were that familiar with the problem, it would suggest that other people in the hospital had been dying, presumably from natural causes or the last couple of days at least, and the staff had been seeing what happened next. This suggests that Gloria wasn’t the first zombie, maybe not even the first one in Los Angeles.

What does this mean? Well, it means that the identity of the first zombie in the Walking Dead universe is still up in the air. In-story, it means that there was likely someone else roaming around, biting people, and spreading the zombie virus even before Gloria died, though probably not too long, or else L.A. would have been up to its elbows in infected long before the series began. Though, considering what we know about how long people at the CDC knew about the virus, that still raises questions as to why the infected didn’t grow in numbers earlier, but, those are questions for another time.

And that is the end of this Walking Dead Mystery! Was there anything I missed? Do you have a clip of Dave Erickson saying Gloria is Patient Zero? Do you remember the Story Syncs, which could help clear this up (If they took place before Gloria’s death)? Let me know! And, if you liked this, and want to hear my tips on how survive if zombies suddenly appear in your town, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also find it at Amazon here, and on iTunes here!