You are a survivor. Doomsday has occurred and you are a survivor. While you are waiting for the spouse and kids to get home maybe you should do something practical. Like go down to the supermarket and lay in a bit of an extra stock.
You may notice that the little corner store has closed. If he has believed the rumor, he wants to save his stock. And besides, your money may not be worth anything tomorrow. You thought you had seen rapid inflation before but this is like from zero to a million in sixty seconds.
At the supermarket, if you are early enough, you will find pandemonium. If not, you will find practically nothing. Maybe a large bag of dog food (take it) and some cans of floor wax (forget it). The rest of the stuff was all in those carts that you met come flying up the walk as you came running down.
There won't be any girls at the cash registers, (they have done their shopping and gone). Besides, the cash registers aren't working anyhow, with no power. It may have taken the hired manager a little longer to figure out that he should grab what he can and head home to his family, but he has probably gone now. The only cops you will see are the one's grabbing stuff themselves.
If on the way back you spot a shopping basket with something in it - think twice before helping yourself. If there is an altercation there are probably no doctors at the hospital to sew up the lacerations. Everyone else is also too busy to bother calling an ambulance, if they could, and one wouldn't be available if they did.
[...]
The public shelters have no supplies and no equipment. The average designated public shelter is supposed to shelter over three thousand people. Can you imagine the anarchy and conditions there? Without food, the first to die will be infants who are not being breast fed. Other early candidates will be persons who require special medications (especially the elderly) and anyone who happens to be injured.
Not only will deaths have negative psychological effects on the survivors, they will create severe sanitation problems. There will be enough sanitation problems anyway if the water and sewage systems are not working. Most of the designated shelter locations do not have sanitary provision for three thousand people in the first place.
One of the greatest hazards in an underground shelter is carbon dioxide poisoning. The designated public shelters, almost without exception, do not have adequate ventilation for large numbers of people over a considerable period of time. And the existing ventilation systems generally depend upon electricity being available.
There are ventilation defense and survival techniques available. However, if you were to try to implement them in a large public shelter situation you would probably be one of the first persons killed by the other survivors.
[...]
Add to these problems the fact that you might not have any light in the shelter, that anarchy may become rampant, and that there will almost certainly be no food, and perhaps, more importantly, no water and you will see why no trained survivalist would want to be caught dead in the place.
