Description from original post
(created 2013-08-13 16:10):
Story Behind This Skin:
In the near future, the US government accidentally unleashes a disease that seeps into the ground and pollutes the air and eventually infects everyone. The disease kills the infected person and they stay dead for up to 10 years at most. The majority of people stay dead for about 3-4 years, but there are some that come back even quicker than that. The disease quickened the decomposition of the bodies, and since there was no one willing to bury the bodies, the dead were just dragged to cemeteries and left there, further speeding up the bodies' decomposition. Unsanitary, yes, but when the entire population of New York city drops dead (including any and all undertakers), there isn't much one can do about the dead bodies.
When the disease hit, people started dropping like flies. There were few who managed to narrowly escape getting the disease, but absolutely no one on record is immune to it. The few who stayed secluded enough to not contract the disease were the clever ones and the rich who could afford hiding places where the disease just couldn't reach them. No one knew what the disease was doing to the population until the first dead person came back to life.
It was 3 years after the outbreak. The government had disappeared and presumably all authoritarian figures were dead. The country was a mess. Those that were still living hardly had any food, and very rarely did they venture out of their bunkers to get things to sustain themselves. Eventually they had started turning to each other for nourishment, and there was hardly a sane person left who hadn't eaten one of their own.
In the middle of the night, just outside of Nashville, Tennessee, a young girl crawled out from under a pile of dead bodies. She gasped for air and tried to focus her eyes, but she couldn't get her right eye to focus correctly. She could only see faint outlines of things through her right eye, and the rest was pitch black. She tried to stand, but something was wrong with her legs. She could just barely walk, and even then she had to walk oddly in order to get anywhere. She made it just inside the city when she collapsed and fell to the ground.
Morning arrived, and a few gatherers from a group of survivors were making their way around the city, searching for any sort of food that wasn't human. They noticed a dead body that lying on the ground near them and decided they should drag it out to the rest of the dead bodies. However, when they ventured closer, they realized this dead person didn't look like the rest. She had patches of grey, decaying skin just barely hanging onto her body, but there were also patches of pink, healthy-looking skin here and there. All the other dead people just looked grey and ashen, but this girl... She still looked half-alive.
Suddenly, the girl gasped and opened her eyes. She stared up at the two gatherers and shrieked. The gatherers screamed and ran away from her as fast as possible. The girl wasn't dead.
She was neither dead nor alive. She was somewhere in the middle, somewhere that was incredibly wrong. The dead began living again soon after that, some more decayed-looking than others. It was frightening. Each dead person that came back to life had one part of them that had fully died. For some, it was one of their legs or arms, for others, it was their one of their eyes.
People soon began to realize that the disease didn't actually kill the person it infected. It merely stalled their vital organs from working and then started them back up again. No one could understand why the government would want any sort of disease like this to be made, but people stopped questioning it eventually.
Years passed, and eventually people who were fully alive and not half-dead like the majority of the population began venturing out of their hiding places. It took a bit of adjusting, what with a bunch of half-dead people walking around, but everyone eventually got used to it. The disease had finally been diluted enough to not affect anyone anymore, but it still affected the dead. People started coming out of the ground in cemeteries, and soon the world was overridden with the walking dead people. They outlived the ones who hadn't been infected, and then they began to see that they could never die. They were trapped in a state between dying and living, a state where you wish you were dead but could still hand on to life long enough to wish that you could just die. It was a twisted and painful way of living, but they were stuck with it for eternity.
Why This Is A Form Of Twisted Reality
The dead should stay dead. When the dead start coming back to life, that is when you know everything that you have ever known is useless and that a whole new way of life is about to come into play.