.....On the marks: someone figured out already that they probably meant protection and that's why Ink tattoed himself with them. I now think he did it in multiple languages to be sure everyone would get it regardless of their background?
.....Now, the body dissolving in a cloud is interesting. Essentially I'm thinking this happened before.
Theory 1: The corpses were stuffed underground and rot until whatever makes the gas (bacteria, whatever) did its job. Then it stayed there for a long time, possibly some of the corpses turned into oil. A small quake lets the gas escape (the cracks) and boom zombie apocalypse.
Theory 2: the problem with theory 1 is that Ink cannot predict quakes; so I thought of an alternative: it could also be that some of the yellow gas was present in oil, again, oil produced by the corpses buried underground during the last mass extinction event, and that is introduced in the atmosphere through the combustion engine, although in diluted form. Ink could have figured that after so many years of using the combustion engine the concentration of the gas was about to reach critical mass at least in some of the more developed countries and thus he could have prepared accordingly.
I personally love theory 2, mostly because it makes
Eugenio Barsanti responsible for the whole apocalypse and thus
this old message becomes relevant to the scenario. :yay: