The survivors began to form gangs.
This line actually prompted some interesting consideration on my part. "The Stand" makes it a point of how empty the U.S. would be after 99.4%+ of the population died off, but if you do the math, that's still ~1.5 million people. In the New York city area, that's ~44,000 people. You could definitely still have gangs. Whether it's likely you'd have one in some jerkwater town in Mississippi I'm not convinced.
