longer pertinent. As society thought itself progressing, these matters became nothing but archaic garbage piling up alongside the hi-tech road to the promised better life. Humans, though, are a clever lot when pushed to the brink, be it starvation, exhaustion, or sanity, and this mislaid-information quickly found a way to come back into favor. Just one long-forgotten book could revive an entire area. Once one person learned some tidbit of once-common wisdom, it had a way of making its way around with a velocity not seen since the verbal grape-vines of old.
Still, when there is nothing left to be had there is nothing left to be done about it except a reversion to the ‘might makes right’ mentality. And this just happened to be the exact point in time that the drifters found themselves trying to eke out a living. On any given day, where there used to be just a dozen or so transients at the gate, there were enough of them now that they honestly posed a threat, and what was even worse was they knew it.
As the years had passed around the Warehouse, the ranks of people standing outside the fence had swollen three-fold. Due to the sheer volume of foot traffic that came in and out through the gate, an easily removed chain drooping its way across the opening had been put up as a subtle deterrent. The rusty chain might show where the actual boundary line with the Warehouse was, but it was the knowledge of what would happen if caught trespassing that actually kept the drifters compliant; it would either be their worst day, or their worst and last day.
At least sixty of the drifters stood in Daniel’s way now, each the most desperate kind of person, each looking to gain a piece of the perceived better life on the other side of the razor wire crowned fence. Most of them were more than willing to accomplish this base goal by any means necessary. Though they all came from different backgrounds, they still shared the same uniform. Torn, soot-streaked and poorly-fitted attempts at clothing associated them all as being in the same profession of searching through piles of burnt rubble. The few women within the crowd wore shapeless tunics, sewn together using snippets of mismatched, colorful materials. Their nipples poked out at odd angles, breasts having been pressed immobile by pieces of fabric tied tightly around their neck and torso, different variations on the same halter-top theme.
Some of the Drifters would most certainly have guns tucked away, but the weapons would be old and battered, most likely single shot rifles, cut down and mended with bailing wire, or homemade zip guns made from whatever materials happened to be close at hand. Almost everybody, including the women and their near-feral children, kept plainly visible one variety or another of the dual-purpose weapons. The kind of objects that could be helpful in breaching thick walls or digging through compacted wreckage, yet still useful for offensive and defensive purposes. The most common of these tools were fashioned axes of all sizes, pry bars of all lengths, and shortened shovels with replacement handles at the ready. In this abandoned corner of southeast Michigan, outside the ring of protection offered by New Warren, one moment you could be searching the basement of a collapsed house for a possible undiscovered pocket of riches, and fending off bushwhackers the next.
Daniel’s pebble-kicking approach had aroused the hawkers to yell out their itineraries. These standardized lines were shouted without much zeal. After all, the audience was just one person. He briefly entertained the thought of waiting for the guards to return outside before trying to leave. This, he knew, would only show the drifters the fear that they seemed to feed upon, giving them all the more reason to harass him when he did go through later on.
He rolled the tops of both bags tightly, and gripped them firmly with his left hand, thus freeing the right to stay in close proximity to the pistol. Always ready for quick-action, the recently cleaned and greased matte black Taurus PT24/7 PRO C DS sat forward on his hip. It was a semi-compact, handy automatic with a double-action trigger and a two-stage, decoking safety. It held twelve .45 cal., 55 grain rounds in the main magazine and 10, now 9 after buying the pot, in the smaller spare in his pocket. It was not the best gun for a shot of any range, but considering that