What if the "zombies" in shows like TWD didn't have to be zombies?

Have you ever stopped to think about why the "walker" apocalypse from TWD had to be caused by a zombie virus ? Wouldn't it have been much more interesting to explain the apocalypse by something else ?<br><br>In the following, I assume you know what the show is about (if not, there is a wikipedia page, but, you know... spoilers), and if you have some ideas, you can post them in the comments.<br><br>Here are my thoughts: since the beginning, I have always thought that the apocalypse started by a small nuclear accident somewhere (let's assume, Italy, for some reason) that released some weird and toxic stuff that infected birds and bats and made them fly straight into humans and infect them. <br><br>The first clue that I thought justified the fact that it was a nuclear stuff would be the orangey sky. It was mainly present in season 1, but you could easily see it in the first episodes. I remember having thought about this theory when I saw the sky (season 1, episode 1, when Rick goes to the gas station). I tried to verify my theory and I was disappointed, since the creator of the show told that the orange sky is just done to make it look "darker" and is not linked to the walker infestation.<br><br>Another thing that I had thought about but never verified is that humans are not the only species touched by the virus, but it doesn't affect them. There isn't a single bird or animal to be seen in the whole show, and I have always thought that it was strange, since they were in the woods a lot and usually, in these conditions, you see a lot of animals. I had the same thought about the trees, but I will get to that in another point. Now, I don't know if I should be disappointed for not having verified that, but after verification, I found that it is not true, and there are birds and squirrels, so... Well, that was a failure, but the idea was interesting, and you can still use it in some other stories, since, well, it's not that boring.<br><br>The second clue that I used to create this theory was that I had thought that, if it's been 5 years since the apocalypse, there should not be that many trees left. The fact that everything is still kind of "green" is boring and unrealistic, and I don't understand why it is that way. I have always thought that, if a nuke should have been released in the atmosphere, the radiations would have killed most of the trees or plants, just like in chernobyl.<br><br>Now, for the link with the walkers, I have always thought that the radioactive stuff that was released and went into the atmosphere, mixed up with the rain and went into the soil, and contaminated the ground. So if someone was to die of natural death (with some radiation in his blood and organs), and his body would touch some "contaminated" ground, he would come back to life. <br><br>His body would decompose faster because of the radioactivity, so he would become a "walker" faster (it is allowed to see some "fresh" dead, that weren't contaminated, in the show). So, the only way to kill the walkers would be to "kill" the brain (which is where "radioactivity" has accumulated). And the more time would pass, the more brain would be gone because of the radioactivity, so the walkers would become more stupid and "zombie-like" with time.<br><br>The second clue for that is more subtle (if I can say) than the first one, and you have to have been paying attention to the story line. If you have paid attention to the end of season 2, you should remember the last scene, when they show all the walkers that are coming toward the survivors, and you know that there is a whole herd of them, coming from somewhere. If you have paid attention to this, you could probably guess where the walkers were coming from (in my opinion, this should have been something that was really important, since we never see them again, but whatever). <br><br>I think that the walkers were coming from Washington, because they were trying to find some kind of cure, and they knew it was there. And, I think that the reason why they went to Washington is because the "survivors" in Washington, being in charge of the nuclear facilities in the country, should have known more about the situation at the beginning of the apocalypse, since they knew exactly where the contamination was coming from and how it was going to spread. And if they had known about that, they would have been able to keep that knowledge written somewhere (they had to, since they were in charge of writing official documents about this stuff, so...).<br><br>So, all of that to say : what if the apocalypse was caused by a nuclear accident ? I think that it would have been cooler than the classical zombie apocalypse, that's all.