"Bring out your dead!"

In 1918, a virulent strain of influenza spread across the world like a brush fire. World War One helped it along: massive numbers of soldiers, packed ear to ear, shipped half-way around the world and back, served as perfect transmitters of the disease. Every country on earth was affected. Unlike most flu viruses, this one killed not only the very young and very old, but those in the prime of life. People in their twenties and thirties made up the bulk of the dead, who numbered somewhere north of 50 million. Even in the United States, which was spared the worst of it, horse-drawn ambulances trotted through major cities, calling for people to deliver the corpses of their dead family members.

Analysis of the 1918 flu strain has shown that it was a mutated version of bird flu which combined with a human variant to become a super-virus.

Right now, there's a bird flu strain going around Southeast Asia. It has killed more than 60 people so far: it's more than fifty percent lethal, just like the 1918 strain. The only difference is that the current strain can only travel from birds to person, but not from person to person. However, it is likely only a matter of time before this avian flu strain does what the 1918 strain did: combine with a human strain and make the leap from person to person. Then, international air travel will do what the troop ships of WWI did before: send the virus across the globe. At that point, the World Health Organization has estimated that such an outbreak could kill anywhere between five and ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY million people.

Now, this is scary shit, especially since I'm right in the fat part of the death bell curve of the 1918 flu. But goddamnit it if the prospect of an apocalyptic flu pandemic doesn't get me a little bit jazzed. I know that makes me a bad person. But, what makes me an even worse person is my deepest hope: that the flu strain mutates to go from person to person, then mutates to go from live people to recently deceased people, which it turns into bloodthirsty zombies.