The virus was real.
It seemed slow, but the effects were devastating.
More citizens were changing. That meant that more citizens were dying. Which also lead to more citizens overreacting to unusual behavior. Got a scratchy throat that affects your speech? Holy shit, you’re infected, we have to kill you! Can’t remember where you put your car keys? Your brain is getting eaten by the virus!!! Quick! Kill you!! Needless to say, people who have never harmed anything more than a zit on their shoulder, were jumping to conclusions so quickly that they practically became trained killers overnight.
Vulture rarely had any criminal activity, even downtown. Hell, there’s not even really any organized law enforcement. So a lot of people took that role on themselves. A lot of confused people. A lot of scared people. A lot of…misinformed people.
That made everyone else even more afraid.
There wasn’t a hub where the infected were sprouting from. There wasn’t a hospital where the sick fell asleep quietly in shitty electronically adjustable beds and woke up raving madmen.
The infected were all "missing" people.
That seemed to be the prerequisite.
Unfortunately, the confusion and the paranoia also added to the amount missing people. Scared family members would flee to who knows where. Others would simply lock out their loved ones to save themselves, even if they weren’t in any danger at all .

Citizens were encouraged to pay regular visits to the Display House, where each outfit from every unidentified Infected was hung up and displayed in a sealed glass case. This seemed to be the most effective way of identification, since the clothing is the only part of the person that didn’t change, and, most of the time, the clothing was intact.
Coming to terms with missing a loved one is one thing, but to then walk into a huge auditorium full of bloodied clothes worn by dead monsters, where see your son’s favorite shirt covered in the dried plasma he left behind after his death, is a completely different game.
A game I am thankful every day that I never had to play.

The attacks hit a second lull about 6 months into the chaos. No attacks for 34 days. After 30 days there were talks of celebration. Just as quickly as they jumped to conclusions when the virus started, they jumped to conclusions when they wanted it to end.

But then, I guess to make up for the summer vacation that it took, the virus hit harder than ever. 30 cases in 42 days. Some of the infected killed handfuls of people before being destroyed. It was getting out of hand.
Oddly enough, all 30 cases were male, which sparked up the formation of the Collection Agencies. Groups of scientists deemed it necessary to detain, question, test and "collect" data from every male citizen in Vulture. They worked in waves, and seemed to be doing relatively harmless busy work in order to humor everyone with hopes that there was progress within the research.
But there wasn’t.
And every fucking day I curse the formation of the Collection Agencies, because they are the assholes who took me away from my wife and daughter…