The year is 1982, Suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Eliot, aged 35, glasses, thinning hair and an overall cowardly appearance, tries his best to tighten a bolt attached to a long barbed wire fence. The fence surrounds a large area of worn down houses, separating them from several other streets of even more worn down houses. The houses outside of the fence are shells of structure, soaked in mosses, overgrown by wildlife. Eliot struggles and tugs with a wrench until the bolt snaps into place and the fence is secure, he thinks. He steps back. His glasses shine a bit with the low evening sun, caged behind a handful of taller buildings in the semi-distance. He sighs. Restless. Tired. Sad, maybe.
Then, he hears a low gurgling and masses of footsteps from somewhere beyond the fence: A hoard. Eliot’s eyes go wide.
A few hours later the hoard of tomatomen find Eliot’s compound. They were 52 in number, so they had no trouble busting through Eliot’s poorly secured fence. They came, regurgitated their tomato-seed-infection right into the open wounds of Eliot and his family, and left, now 56 in number.
Sixteen years prior, in the year 1966, in a special bio-modification research facility in Volgograd, USSR, a team of scientists studying various specimens of the solanaceae family accidentally created a highly infectious disease that turned people into zombie/tomato hybrids. Hence the apocalypse, hence the emergence of the ‘tomatomen’.
Tomatomen are rude creatures. They are the possessed bodies of people living past death, held up by an inner network of disease. Oftentimes the innards of the body will rot away, leaving room for sacks of seedlings to form. Sometimes these pockets which spread and leach across the body, will expand past the skin, leaving open patches of rotting, budding flesh. Otherwise, they appear as green-tinted husks of decaying, ever-growing tissue.
Like the zombies of popular media, Night of the Living Dead and such, they hunt and search for any form of life that they could latch their sick onto. The sick in question: the solanumivirus, isn’t a virus at all. It’s a bacterial strand formed from a DNA combination of highly deadly diseases: rabies, smallpox and a few more, with the overall genetic structure of a tomato-like plant. Thus, it spreads primarily through vegetable resources, resists any antivirus protections and quickly finds a nice home among mass production farms. By the year 1970, 2.5 billion people were swept away by the disease, leaving humanity to crumble under its own isolation and disconnectedness.
Now you can see people like Eliot; just a teenager when the outbreak took hold, a small kid, someone who relied on other people for the survival part of life. He wanted to be an architect, but most of high school and college were swept away. For many years, he lived on a commune with most of his family and local community. They did well for themselves, isolated, cut-off, but content. Until a few months before that fateful day in 1982, when a massive hoard of 3049 tomatomen overran the simple commune. Eliot and his family survived for those couple months; sad, disturbed and forgotten – they might’ve been waiting for another hoard to come.