Cold Day in Hell
The dead rose and feasted on the living, but not until the spring.
Winter was a hell of a time for armageddon to come knocking in North America. If the living dead planned their invasion this way, someone among their ranks needed to be released without severance.
There were a bundle of isolated incidents in morgues and mortuaries, at accidents and funerals, but the uprising of the walking dead was quelled without much ado. Modern culture had saturated the populace against zombie apocalypse so well, that no serious outbreaks occurred. Hard to believe with a shit ton of imbeciles walking around, but one thing that everyone could seem to agree on was the best way to stop a zombie.
A few pitiful news stories ran during late December, but they were little more than last gasp attempts at ratings for the New Year. Everyone got tired of seeing the occasional blimp about a zombie’s brief reign of terror. Healthcare workers and public service individuals were retrained to follow new protocols with the dead. Every funeral was a closed casket funeral, although cremations saw a serious bump in business.
January and February were unseasonably cold and a little on the quiet side. March was just the opposite, with an early thaw rolling through much of the continent. Despite the complacency that had developed toward the viral infection which reanimated the dead, speculators and conspiracists warned against a possible conflagration of the infection with warmer temperatures.
Turns out that they were right too. The virus was retro-necrotic. The old dead clawed and crawled forth from their graves and set armageddon in motion again with a vengeance. The worst thing about it, was that folks seemed a little bit happier with this turn of events, that things had been supersized. Well, at least at the start.