In the second, and most recent, episode of Fear the Walking Dead, the main characters are preparing to flee Los Angeles to the desert, where they hope to wait out the crisis. This seems strange, because they have had very little contact with the zombies.

The heroin addict son has seen two zombies, one of which his mother and stepfather also saw. The mother, stepfather, and daughter saw a video of an incident involving a third zombie. Late in the second episode, the mother encounters a fourth zombie. The daughter's boyfriend has been bitten, but is alive. No one knows what is going on yet.

And yet, before the mother ran into the fourth zombie, she was stealing OxyContin and large amounts of canned food from the high school where she is a guidance counselor, which is the kind of thing that you don't do unless you are absolutely certain that you will never need to work again - stealing a student's prescription opiate painkillers is an incredibly serious offense.

It has been roughly three days since things started to get weird, and it was only the second day when the stepfather said "That's it, we're going to hide in the desert for an indefinite period of time". At that point, they had only seen one zombie in person, and another one on a YouTube video.

Why did this family give up and run away so quickly?