Why did the family in Fear the Walking Dead give up so easily?

Question

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?

Answer 1

Personal experience. In a situation where an epidemic breaks out or where a civil war starts you dont want to be in the middle of the happening. You want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible and let the government sort that out. They are afraid. Weird stuff is happening and the government isn't saying anything.

So there is going to be looting, chaos, lawlessness until the government can come back in and assert order again.

So they try doing the best thing for them. And that is to flee until the situation is normal again.

The kid in the episode said it. Looters will hit the pharmacies, the gun stores and the food stores. Police will try to contain the situation by locking the meds down. So mom does what is sensible. She takes meds from a source that isn't going to get locked down as a priority.

Having personally been in one civil war (Balkans in the 90s)I can tell you that food goes FAST!! So they are thinking ahead. We see that the infrastructure is starting to break down so it is every soul for themselves until order is restored.

Answer 2

She wasn't actually stealing food, but helping Tobias take the food. And the fact that both of them left the food after she killed Artie indicates they are in panic mode, which makes people do strange things. I am telling you, if I didn't know about zombies and I saw someone I knew (ie. Calvin the drug dealer) rise from the dead, repeatedly, that would be enough for me to flee suburbia and head somewhere isolated to wait it out. Knowing how her son would react coming off heroin would also make me steal meds anyway I could in order to get him to a safer location before letting him come off them.