spent some serious money on it, before the economy collapsed and people began burning their precious paper money for fuel. I wonder what it would have been like to drive a car, especially one so low and long as this, as I destroy the left window with one well-placed aim. Inside the car is a small box with a limited amount of medical supplies, a flare and another flashlight. I flick the button, but there's no response. Dead battery of course, you could almost fill a dumpster with the number of dead batteries I've found. The flashlight is flimsier than my trusty metal model so I drop it on the driver's seat and stand up from my crouch with another glance down the street. No company makes it's presence known as I canvass the remainder of the lonely cars on the street. Working up and down the rows makes it more difficult to accidentally skip a good wreck, not that there's much danger of that on this street. I reach the end of the row with only half a bag of supplies and a new coat. The coat pleases me because it's a lovely dark blue colour and the moths haven't eaten holes in the woolen fabric yet. It'll keep me warm until the leaves fall, but no longer than that unless I head south. Still, a girl can always use a nice coat.
Dusk in a city means you'd better find shelter, doubly so if you're an unmarked. Even if these streets were deserted all day, there could still be camp raids to contend with when the night comes. The raids aren't for supplies or food - they're only for people like me, who aren't already claimed by a rival camp. When the encampments took hold after the deaths eased up, they became so entrenched for most of the population that they still exist as the only type of real organization left here. People are born in a camp, they die in a camp. Their children get their marking as soon as they're of age, and the cycle continues. The problem is that something went wrong with the survivor's ability to have equal ratios of children. almost twice as many boys are born, which keeps reproduction rates low and forces the gangs to have to induct new members to keep their numbers high whenever they can find them. No one knows quite why females are so rare now, but like everything else that's gone wrong with this world, it's usually blamed on TPM-2. Being a unmarked young woman alone after dark is about as safe as painting myself with a bulls eye and running screaming through the streets, so I turn north and head back to the squat I've been calling home this week. I can only mark time by the passage of the sun throughout the sky since my last salvaged watch finally quit working - that damn battery problem again. It's sitting in my travel pack in the squat though, and I'm hoping to find a store that hasn't been totally ransacked or torched on my way down south. I know it's foolish to care about material things, especially worthless ones like a dead watch, but the extra weight is negligible and I am fond of the clunky old thing. There's something so painfully ugly about all that gold and glittery glass bits mashed together, so shiny that