After a night of sleeping in the woods, Martin and Susan venture through Stoneham looking for food and water but find little. What they do find is a populace lingering in normalcy bias. Even though it is only the second day of the outage, the two of them wonder long will it be before complacency gives way to desperation.
I have a puzzling review on Amazon in which the reviewer complains that my story has civilization collapse within hours of the outage, and how he didn’t think people would behave like that. I wondered if he had been paying much attention to what he read. That doesn’t happen in my book. I agreed with him that people would, most likely, not go bonkers and everything falls into a Mad Max frenzy on the first day.
Instead, having watched how people have behaved in extended outages, or even during the Marathon Bombings (that stranded me in Boston when they closed the bus and train stations), is that people DO tend to stand around wondering what to do. Even if the crisis goes on for days, most people are prone to sit tight and wait for “normal” to return. For many, doing something about their situation will come only after a period of sitting around waiting.
Criminal types, on the other hand, are prone to seizing an opportunity. They don’t tend to sit around waiting. They DO tend to take advantage of times with the police are too busy. This isn’t the world going Mad Max. It’s how criminal types operate now. Why would it be any different during a crisis?