Story Idea

Yeah, I'm still insane, but here's a story idea pulled out from the depths of that insanity.

Title: Road to Nowhere

Premise:
In the future, the world is facing a crisis. There's too many people and not enough food to feed anyone. The air, land and sea, are polluted to the point that almost no edible plant life exists anymore. Millions are starving and it's currently only the rich that seem to be having an easy go of it, even though their future looks bleak as well as most of the working force are slowly starving to death. Synthetic foods are all the rage of course, but they're very expensive and hard to make.
Zymethaline-5 is created accidentally by a scientist trying to combine two separate vegetable genes (exactly which ones is still uncertain). It's a very odd plant, looking like a very large pale white radish. It has sort of a bitter taste but not unpleasant. The taste doesn't matter though, the main thing is that it grows incredibly fast and in almost impossible conditions. It takes a very small amount of water and produces a very large amount of seeds in return, as well as a large edible bulb.
The new plant spreads like wildfire all over the world. It's heralded as the Saviour of the human race and the companies that sell the seeds and plants get very rich. New kinds are created that offer more nutrition, better flavor, larger bulbs. They fancy kinds are mostly eaten by the rich though, the poor get the very cheap, very basic kind in grocery stores and seed marts.
It becomes the staple food of previously starving world, allowing it to function better than it has for a very long time.
Some people, however, refuse to touch the things. Just like any other miraculous new thing that comes out, there are naysayers. The naysayers claim that Zymethaline-5 (Zym to the common people) wasn't tested enough before being sent out to the world at large. They claim that something very bad is going to come, and the world is going to crumble again, worse than it was before. And you know what? They're right.

For awhile, everything is fine. Sure there's the usual wars and political drama, and celebrity scandals, but at least most nations now have enough to eat. It's not until decades after that the murders start. Of course at first, nobody attributes it to the plant. Murders happen every day. But the strangeness of the violent acts starts to gain attention. An eight year old girl kills her step-father while he sleeps with a kitchen butcher knife. An elementary school teacher guts several of her students before she's gunned down by the cops. A small town preacher blows his own congregation with a bomb. Most of the murders are very random, committed by people who would never have even though about even shoplifting. It becomes a worldwide epidemic and no one can figure why it's happening, until people start to mutate....

It turns out that Zymethaline-5 only effects certain people negatively, making them prone to acts of unspeakable violence and eventually twisting their bodies into hideous forms. Scientists, however, are at a loss to figure out why it only happens to certain people and Zym is too important a world food source for people to stop eating. While the plant is tested and retested and the captured mutants subjected to unspeakable tortures in the name of science, the mutants that have escaped capture are slowly forming an underground society....

Characters:
Haven't come up with any yet.

Sound good, crappy? Ideas to throw into the pot?