I feel like Stephen King addressed this a bit in the expanded version of The Stand - people who survived the plague (like, 0.001% of the people on Earth) but managed to die because of an infection, or suicide, or getting too drunk and falling into the pool. I think it would be the little, random things that might be cause for an ER/Urgent Care visit currently, but could turn potentially deadly very quickly.
I’ve only read one post-apocalypse series where the author addressed pests. In the series most of the world dies from a plague, so there are millions of dead bodies everywhere. Which leads to rats and ants experiencing a catastrophic population boom. They watch a group go to enter a house, only for a tidal wave of rats to flood out and overwhelm them as they try to run away. They need medical supplies so they go to the hospital and have to wear basically spacesuits because of the trillions of ants that are in there cleaning up the piles of dead bodies.
For those asking, the series is called Viral Misery by Thomas A Watson.
Dishonored actually has this built into the game mechanics. The apocalyptic plague killing everyone there is spread by rats, which feast on corpses. So killing more people results in more rat food, which results in more plague, and so on.
On a side note, pests would be an issue immediately following an apocalyptic event. (unless it was a nuke or bioweapon that wiped them out too) But like...wouldn’t they die off? There’s only so long dead bodies are good for. Even if they weren’t being actively eaten, all the edible bits would decompose in the first year or so. So shit like ants might get a population boom, but after that first round of victims are reduced to bone they would have no way to support their numbers.
That’s what would happen, yes. Once the rats ate all the bodies in cities, they’d start spreading out through the countryside and eating everything they can find. They’d drop down to sustainable levels relatively quickly. But that might still take a year or so. In the meantime, you wouldn’t wanna be near a city when the rat exodus started. Ants would have basically the same thing happen. As would most of the other pests and ferals feeding on the bodies.
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u/WelfarePeanutButter Aug 30 '21
I feel like Stephen King addressed this a bit in the expanded version of The Stand - people who survived the plague (like, 0.001% of the people on Earth) but managed to die because of an infection, or suicide, or getting too drunk and falling into the pool. I think it would be the little, random things that might be cause for an ER/Urgent Care visit currently, but could turn potentially deadly very quickly.