The Winter of Discontent - A very British Zombie Apocalypse!

The bitter cold of the "Winter of Discontent" gripped the streets of the United Kingdom in 1978–1979. The air was thick with tension as strikes swept the country, paralyzing essential services. Everywhere you looked, there were mountains of rubbish piled up, spilling into the streets like a silent warning of the collapse of order. The once-bustling city centers now reeked of decay and neglect, the towering piles of waste hiding something far worse than the filth of human living.

Hospitals, strained by the lack of staff, now only treated emergency cases, but many were too far gone to save. Overworked doctors and nurses moved like shadows through the half-empty wards, their faces drawn with exhaustion, unaware that the dead they pronounced were not staying dead.

Then came the grave diggers' strike. Delays in burials meant bodies piled up in makeshift morgues or were hastily stored in churches and cold storage facilities. But the bodies didn’t stay still for long. One by one, the dead began to rise—moved by an unknown force, slowly dragging themselves out of the morgues, their eyes vacant but hungry.

The plague of undeath spread quickly in a nation already on the brink. With public services in disarray, there was no one to stop it. Uncollected rubbish served as cover for the creeping hordes, and those still walking the streets never saw them coming. The mountains of garbage became breeding grounds for disease, but soon the disease was walking, shambling through alleyways and backstreets, reaching out for the living.

The country's heart—the places where people gathered—had crumbled into lawlessness. Hospitals, once places of healing, became 'fortresses', with barricades hastily thrown up to stop the dead from getting in. Nurses and doctors abandoned their posts to seek shelter, but it wasn’t long before the hospital wards, lined with the critically ill, became feeding grounds for the hungry dead.

The grave diggers’ strike, once a labour issue, now seemed like a grim twist of fate. Those bodies left unburied began to rise from where they lay in cold storage. Cemeteries became battlefields as families fought to protect their loved ones from the unholy resurrection that was spreading with each passing hour. Rumours spread like wildfire: "graveyards were no longer safe"; the dead wouldn’t stay dead.

In the chaos of industrial unrest, strikes, and the failing infrastructure of the country, the dead found their perfect moment to return. The government was powerless—what authority could hope to restore control in the face of a nation crumbling under its own weight, with the undead stalking through the streets alongside the rising mountains of human waste?

Those who survived began to barricade themselves inside their homes, but for how long could they last? The once-thriving UK now faced a nightmare no political solution could address—a "zombie apocalypse", born from the industrial collapse and fueled by the rotting piles of rubbish and the unburied dead, sweeping the country like the final, fatal strike in a winter that would never end.