Liam,

I think Saul's and Victor's first trip to ground zero described uncollected dead. People seemed to have died there, but were not collected like the other five million people in LA

I find it interesting that whatever the gas haze was melted through the body bag. If it was a real body bag, they are designed to contain body rot. Even if it is not, plastic does a good job resisting biology. Was it a strong exothermic reaction (heat) that melted it?

I think we must keep an open mind. It could very well be a chemical gas, but I would not rule out a spore cloud. We could have a fungus that throws spores, infects people, manipulates the host and then converts the host into more spores. I do not like to go too in depth with this stuff. It used to be my day job... But, I will allow myself another piled higher and deeper... Lol

There is a class of microbes that produce methane. It could be possible to harness this process and combine it with the spore life cycle. For dispersal, low density is better. Dandolines put those big pompom hats on to help the wind disperse them. Spores are pretty dense, but what if the microscopic spore had a methane balloon two or three times the size of the spore? It would still be microscopic, and much easier to disperse. We can milk this a bit more and have the spores sit in the methane deep underground and is disturbed by the hydrolic fracking technology that is now being used to vastly increase the amount of natural gas we can pump out of the ground. In real life they are fracking at ground zero.

I can go further down the crazy train, the slime molds normally do there own thing, but when a few of them think the growing conditions suck, they start pumping out a chemical signal to other slime molds to team up and produce spores together. I do not think KC has gone this route, but we have hard science that a single celll microbe can send out a signal that causes them to organize into a multicellular organism. Scifi can take the same concept and push it world wide to have multiple outbreaks.