While most of the city’s more influential citizens lived sealed away inside the western housing section of the Warehouse, Daniel Moore owned a house outside the protected Warehouse boundaries and paid the taxes on it diligently. He had helped to build this world, earning free access to it in doing so. Being that Daniel could leave at any time, he always wanted to. There were perpetually too many milling bodies about, too many eyes looking for an angle. Far too much stress to endure for any length of time. A deep-rooted mistrust of people ensured that his trips to the Warehouse were always short and without much interaction with others.
Deciding to give the guards a few more minutes to return he follow a dirt path to the right, skirting around the outside of the building. He walked slowly past a tattoo kiosk, the artist pumping away at a foot-powered gun as he worked on a rotund whore. Daniel pulled a spare pistol magazine from his left pocket, then stripped one of the cartridges before stuffing it back down. As always, he made sure that the magazine faced the right way, just in case he needed the extra rounds.
Waiting his turn in the four-deep line outside the bar, Daniel turned the loose round over for two grams of potent looking marijuana. Through a hole in the plexiglass window Daniel mumbled, “Thanks.” to the acne-scarred girl on the other side. The triple-beam scale sitting between them showed that the weed had weighed a little over and he appreciated the small gesture.
As Daniel headed back around to the front, he gave a wide berth to four members of the ‘Trays’ gang. Each of them wore bright yellow jerkins that had been dyed using the inner bark of the eastern black oak tree. He knew all about this gang, everyone did. They had been the first bunch of hooligans to arrive on the scene with numbers big enough that the Council could not just employ the military to put them down like all the others.
The concentration of the Trays power lay inside a dome-shaped building to the west, which was once filled to the ceiling with road salt. Once they gained controlled over this and an apartment block directly adjacent to it, the Trays became a force to be reckoned with. One of the towering apartment buildings became their hardened fortress. From there, dug in like ticks, they refined the salt down to better grades.
Once the Council realized there was no shaking the gang off their backs, they were quick to make an accord with them. Their vast supply of salt could be traded in the bazaar and to prevent the brewing war only the one competing monopoly would be allowed. The salt game was controlled with an iron fist; these were definitely not the kind of people you trifled with.
Making his way back around the beaten dirt path, Daniel tried to not look quite as scared as he felt. The guards had still not reappeared outside, and he knew he would have to deal with the crowd alone.
With their carts full of salvage, the drifters found themselves in limbo when they arrived in New Warren. If they could not get one of the scarce clean-up job through the city, who supplied all of the workers to the camp, they were destined to remain outside of the fence gate until they could steal or sell enough wares to pay for a spot inside the bazaar. However, most of the people living outside of the Warehouse were themselves scavengers, so as a general rule residents did not support the competition. Daniel was no different and he would usually try to completely ignore the drifters, unless something extremely rare had been found. Having looked briefly inside the carts that lined the trampled path on his way in and finding nothing of interest, the quicker he could get from the fence gate down to the blacktop parking lot the better.
As it stood now, the old world was fast becoming useless and dead. A good number of things could be replicated, sometimes even quite handsomely, by using bits and baubles of formerly useful items. Nevertheless, remnants of the old world’s former glory no longer came easy to those searching them out. Hidden scraps had to be dug from the ruination piece by piece.
Knowledge that had once passed down to each following generation, just as a matter of simple survival, became abandoned when it was deemed no