An investigation is reportedly still underway in identifying the early stages of the outbreak, although it’s heavily implied that it involves Patrick MacDonald succumbing to his bites sometime before he could seek professional help in the city, and spreading it to the homeless populace in the area. The actual “story” starts when members of a street gang known as the Venice Boardwalk Reds (VBR for short) rolled into the area in order to avenge the murder of one of their members, which was committed by another gang called the “Los Peros Negros” (lit. “The Black Dogs”), which used the post-industrial cesspool of the city as their hangout. After driving into the region at about 1 AM, the first thing the VBR members noticed was the lack of homeless people – the area was notorious for a large shantytown set up in a vacant parking lot, but the whole area was seemingly deserted, with the various junk the hobos had (cardboard boxes, shopping carts, etc.) strewn all over the street. Paying little attention to the road, the VBR driver didn’t see a “slow-moving pedestrian” until he ran him over and careened the gang’s El Camino into the side of a building. His gang members proceeded to berate his driving skills (or lack thereof) before realizing the pedestrian was still crawling at them, in spite of broken back. Panicking, one of the gang-bangers blindly shot at the zombified vagrant with a 9mm pistol, but only wasted ammo to the ghoul’s chest while alerting several others over a multi-block radius. By the time the Red finally head-shotted the zed, the gang would find themselves surrounded by a mob of over forty zombies, closing in from all directions.

The gang, now realizing the magnitude of their undead nemesis, quickly ran for their lives, litterally “running through” the thinnest line of the undead. After fleeing for several more blocks, they run into (ironically) the survivors of the Los Peros Negros, who had to abandon their hideout when it was overwhelmed by zombies. Quickly chucking the gang-banger rivalry for survival, the gangs hastily called a truce, and continued to flee. While the area was full of easily fortified buildings, the majority of the warehouses were locked up or (in the case of the abandoned ones) boarded up, making entry impossible. Since they knew the turf better, the Peros suggested De Soto Junior High, a small school within running distance. With the walking dead merely minutes away, the gang members made it to the school, and broke in the second story window. The good news was that, thanks to the solid concrete construction, barred and mesh-covered windows, and steel-covered, solid wood doors made the two-story building easily defensible. The bad news was that it also triggered the burgler alarm, which alerted all the zeds in the area, swelling their ranks to well over a hundred. The gang acted with remarkable foresight once inside: establishing a fallback position, checking the doors/windows for security, filling any recepticle they could with water, and taking stock of their guns and ammo. Naturally thinking the cops would be worse than the undead, the gangs used the school phone to call up their allies rather than the police. While they didn’t believe what the guys were talking about, the other gangs promised to get there anyways.

Overall, this is one of the few recorded cases of an outbreak with an “overkill” factor in the favor of the survivors:as the two gangs were well-protected, well-armed, well-led, well-organized, and extremely well-motivated, they managed to exterminate all the undead in the area, without losing any of their own. However, they (along with the promised reinforcements) were all arrested by the LAPD, who covered-up the incident as, quote, “a shoot-out between local street gangs”, and the eye-witness accounts were delusions brought on by narcotics. The undead were removed and cremated, with almost none being identified or missed, and the VBR and Pero members in the school were all convicted of first-degree murder, sentanced to life in various California state prisons, and would all end up dead within a year of incarceration (“supposedly” by rival gang members).

The story would have ended there if not for the private investigations of an CIA detective who to this day remains anonymous – after reading about the Parsons-MacDonald case, the detective was intrigued about the bizarre details, which led him/her to at least partially believe the stories. Most of the coroner reports on the corpses (skin decompostion not matching brain decompostion, scratch/claw/bite marks, human flesh in the digestive tract, etc.) matched the details of Parsons autopsy. And, finally, a wallet out of a more “well-to-do” corpse revealed said cadaver to be Patrick MacDonald (although he couldn’t be physically identified on account of a twelve-gauge solid slug blowing his face off). The detective knew better to turn the details to his/her authorities, and rather presented it to the author of the Zombie Survival Guide.