This is an interesting post about what it takes for human survival in the post-apocalyptic world. While being incredible fit and ruthless would obviously be helpful, it’s not all it would take to survive:
Human Survival in the Post-Apocalyptic World
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I wrote a story about a zombie preserve. Since zombies are inherently solvable, the end result is that zombies become endangered, and as such are protected under the endangered species act. So you’ll get a zombie preserve, probably someplace relatively cold to help them stay fresher longer, and with it you’ll have the rangers trying to defend the zombies from “poachers” out seeking revenge and dumb college-age kids breaking in for a cheap thrill.
This is literally the theme of the vast majority of zombie movies.
The thing is, they’re always kind of cynical about it. It isn’t that humans CAN’T work together- but it is an indictment about how humans DON’T work together.
They pretty much all go awry when one of the survivors doesn’t work with the group and they all end up dead. Often it is one of them being selfish, but sometimes they’re just too mistrusting of others, etc.
Highly recommend the book Girl With All the Gifts by M R Carey along these lines.
John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising books
While we still recommend books this one is popular scientific explanation why it’s true + gives really nice background to dehumanisation and domestication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_Friendliest
Came back and re-read this after discovering the web comic “Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint” (or just “Omniscient Reader”). The main character of this comic has just finished reading a story (masterfully disguised as not-a-guidebook) entitled “Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse” when the apocalypse described does take place.
Without spoiling too much, he uses the exact strategy described here — he’s fairly fit, but outdoes the ones that are fitter (and becomes the leader of some of them) using resourcefulness combined with the cheat-sheet he read.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies actually has a fair amount of the ‘How do we work together to cope with Zombies’ thing going on.
It was overlooked quite a bit, but there are some really interesting coping mechanisms going on, especially considering that it’s Regency era, not post-modern.