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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36713
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36713
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Let me start personal. My family has been in situations where a group of people found themselves unprepared for survival, lacking both the knowledge and the infrastructure to survive, lacking help from outside (the outside trying to kill them). I had family exiled from warm Lithuania to a penal colony in Siberia in 1940, and I had one great-grand-aunt survive in the Vilnius Ghetto. Here's what I know from their stories.

- People will rarely share food when they themselves are hungry (but that does happen, surprisingly more often than you'd expect). They do, however, share skills. Nobody likes seeing their fellow man die, and one never knows when they'd be the ones needing help.
- Morals don't go away just because society has collapsed. People don't start "fighting for their females", the way @Amadeus puts it, just because there's nobody to tell them not to. The voice in your head that tells you this is wrong doesn't go away. (The people who never had this voice in the first place don't have it nowadays either.) One can, however, be pushed to killing another over a loaf of bread. One can be hungry enough for morals not to matter anymore.
- In the absence of a governing body, people very quickly establish some sort of one. We're pack animals, we need a leader.
- In the end, one survives not because one is stronger, smarter or more skilled than the others. One survives because one has been incredibly lucky, and because others helped.

* * *

_Dr Zhivago_ presents an example of just such a collapse as you describe: following the revolution in Russia, infrastructure stops working, food doesn't arrive to the cities, there's a high level of uncertainty regarding what will happen next. In Moscow, people are starving. Any wooden public structures (fences etc.) are illegally torn down for fuel. Anyone who can flee, flees to the countryside, where at least one might grow one's own food. Precious objects (jewellery, fine clothes) lose their value - food, fuel and the kind of clothes that keep you warm are the things that matter. Money has no value at all, since there is no system to back it up.

You might think it a cop-out that the MC of _Dr Zhivago_ is a doctor: he possesses a skill that's useful for survival, he has access to alcohol which may be sold, and moreover, people are willing to pay with food for medical help. That is, by use of his skills to help others, the character might acquire necessary resources. However, there is also the downside of this setup: when a group of partisans decide they need a doctor, they go and kidnap themselves a doctor. The skill that made the MC able to survive also made him a target and endangered his survival.

* * *

So how does this information come together to provide you an answer?

- Your group need not be small. In fact, any group that's successful in survival is likely to be joined by more and more people, who also wish to survive. In a larger group, it is more likely that someone would possess a useful skill you're looking for.
- Your characters might learn at least the basics of some useful skills from someone else.
- The collapse wouldn't happen in a day, so some measure of preparation is not impossible. Even if nobody anticipates a collapse, if things deteriorate over several years, people acquire some food-procuring skills etc. - whatever is made necessary by the deteriorating conditions.
- An advanced skill (like medicine) may be used directly, may have side benefits (access to alcohol, in the case of medicine), may be traded, and may make a person a target.
- Luck and random strangers' kindness are key. Realistically, without a great deal of those two, your characters aren't going to make it. That's a tool you might want to be careful with, story-wise: a story can become boring if the characters are too lucky, you note this yourself. But don't hesitate to give luck too a place in the story when you need it.

Original score: 6