I was just watching a post-apoc film and the characters were ransacking a house looking for food. It was pathetic. From decades of dealing with thieves and burglars, and dealing with booby-trapped narco stashes, keep the following in mind when describing someone who is searching: 1) Be quiet: don't sling things around. Noise not only attracts attention, but it also impairs your ability to hear the approach of others, Especially important in a post-apoc setting. 2) Open drawers from the bottom-most first: this saves you the trouble of closing them, and also ensures that you won't miss any. 3) Don't stick your hand into any area you can't see. A length of dowel, a knife, etc, should be used to probe areas you can't see into.It is very easy to stick triple-prong fish hooks, razor blades, or exacto knife blades into those sort of spots and let a searcher slice open their fingers. 4) Use a mirror to look into hard-to-reach spaces. 5) Look for finger marks. If someone had something hidden in a drop ceiling, the place where he pushed up a panel to get to his stash will accumulate grease and dirt from his fingers. 6) Have a pattern. I search counter-clockwise from the doorway following the wall, followed by quartering the rest of the room. This keeps you from overlooking things. 7) Before you search, look at the room. If you are searching for weapons, for example, most people place them where they are most commonly at, or feel most vulnerable. A bedside drawer or under the bed, by a favorite easy chair, near entrances of the building. Just a few points that might help.
I find one small flaw. Grenades and Explosives. If hidden in a drawer, cabinet, whatever, chances are you are going to become a fine pink paste. Far more effective that poking or stabbing. Bad guys tend to get their hands on and/or make those devices. Hell with the proper permits an ordinary citizen can have own grenades. (But it is probably a lot harder that for a gun.) Point being, if someone wants to keep others from snooping and living to tell the tale, they can and will. Sensors replace tripwires, meaning that if some guy has C-4 set on a motion switch inside a drawer that 'probe' is useless. Criminals evolve, even the ones who don't seem all that sophisticated will adapt with the times. Hell we could go out as far as having a sensor based setup of Claymor Mines in a hallway. Or even an archive guarded by Bouncing Betties, because that information is stored in a private server. Just put Bouncing Betties under tiles or floorboards, and you cut anyone in half who does not know the safe path to travel. Criminals figure this stuff out, knowing that Law enforcement is not equipped to detect these things. And they want to be at least 2 moves ahead of the law. So Check. Your move.
Actually, most agencies are training in counter-booby trap techniques. And a lot of us are ex-military. Plus we have a bomb squad with robots and such. Not that we've needed them for active defense. We have found a lot of dummy grenades filled with sand and the bottom hole welded shut, and a lot of Play-Dough marked 'C-4". There is no honor amongst thieves. I have never read of a factual case where explosives were used as a defensive devises. Lots of tall tales and Hollywood nonsense, but not actual instances. We have found grenades in a few weapons stashes, but grenades are not all that impressive. I have seen dope stashes in dog pits and one snake pit, but those are easy to deal with.
@RWK Good to know. You make them sound more like violent pranksters in a way, with the dummy grenades and play-dough 'C-4'. Guess live explosives are more of an offensive weapon for them? Now I know they get creative, but in less intricate and well thought out ways.
The difference, here, is that RWK is talking about real life searches. You are talking about what you see in fictional narratives.
This might help with my other sock, and the booby-trap info is good too, I never know what I've gotten up to when I'm not paying attention
Good advice for all of us in the inevitable apocalypse. But for writers, I wonder whether the character trashing the room indiscriminately might be more realistic. In a post-apoc scenario, people will be desperate and panicking. They won’t be thinking or behaving rationally or taking the time to search carefully or thoroughly. Some will, of course, but they probably won’t be as interesting in fiction.
tbh post apoc i wouldnt be bothering searching house - want some food head to tesco/walmart .... want weaponry - gunshop/army base/police station and so on. Then having got tooled up I'd head the fuck out of the cities and find a small farm with its own water, and wind generators etc.... If the owners are still alive they'd either welcome me as reinforcements or wind up shot in the head and fed to the pigs That aside if you are looking for food in a house post apoc it will be in the kitchen cupboards where it was stored pre apoc ... it won't be hidden
What I was describing was cons used to sell fakes to criminals & radicals who think they are buying explosives.
I disagree. Survivors will be the ones who can think under pressure, behave rationally, and take the time to do it right.
Of course they will. But I was working on the assumption that people in a work of fiction won't be natural born survivors. Because what would be the entertainment in that?
Most post-apoc books I've seen focus upon those with a survivor mentality. Because non-survivors, well, don't survive. If you examine the survivors of extended critical events, you will see a pattern supporting that premise. But every writer's fiction is his own.
