It started with the hunger. People were eating more and certainly getting fatter but nothing they ate seemed to satiate their desire for meat. Rumors began circulating that illegal drugs were being mixed in with the food hearkening back to the days when cocaine used to be in Coca Cola. These highly publicized rumors did little to deter customers from snatching up copious amounts of burgers and fries. In fact, sales seemed to increase exponentially as people claimed to get "buzzed" off of the burgers. In a brilliant wave of marketing that was almost Harold and Kumaresque the promise that the burgers got you high brought customers in and the side effect of the food increasing people's hunger kept them coming back.
As it turned out Y18 was only effective if it was ingested in repeated doses. The average person would need to eat at least 12 units (12 burgers) within the time frame of a year before showing any symptoms. Numbness in the fingers and toes, exhaustion and a change in diet from herbivore to almost exclusively meat was to become the mark of the disease. The bloating came almost a year later as did the skin discoloration but anything sickness related was associated at the time with a previously undetected terminal illness. Individuals die of suspicious maladies everyday, it wasn't until one died and then came back to life before anyone paid attention.
An average Midwestern man named John Decker was the first. As suspected, he became the new messiah. He couldn't speak or understand and he had to be restrained with a straight jacket 24 hours a day but that didn't stop the media circus from parading him around the country for every possible interview. Piers Morgan thought for a moment that he could break through Decker's glazed over pupils and get him to answer the tough questions about the after life. Alas, all the infected individual could muster were a couple of angry screams before he jostled about and fell out of his chair. As the months passed and no one including Barbara Walters could get a peep out of the unresponsive individual he was eventually locked up in a psych ward and forgotten about presumably indefinitely. That was of course until there were two.
