The junkyard was across the street from an ancient, run-down strip mall that had already seen better days even before the end of the world. The windows of the salvage store in the strip mall and the next-door seafood supermarket had both been busted out, and judging from the debris outside, some folks had helped themselves at some point.

I shook my head, but I didn't feel like I had the moral superiority to look down on people who'd looted. After all, I'd gotten up to a little bit of that in the drugstore with Aldina.

The junkyard had high chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. A handful of decaying monster bodies around the perimeter. It looked like most of them had been shot. To the rear of the property, there was an equally tall wooden fence with wooden slats through the holes to obscure vision. Some of the fencing on the front looked like it had similar privacy slatting.

The office for the junkyard, as well as the entry gate, were in one corner, and nearby was a mobile home that the owner or one of the workers lived in. The people living there had a garage sale in the past something like every two weeks. Even though I didn’t come this way very often, they’d actually taken ads out in the local want ads to advertise their sales.

Want ads were one way I’d acquired so much gear for less money.

I'd always assumed that the family here went to other garage sales a lot, or dove dumpsters. Or maybe somebody who lived there bought and sold from flea markets to make money on the side.

Now the house had been trashed, with signs of monster activity, but I didn't see any human bodies, just a couple more goblin bodies that were very quickly decomposing.

One small mercy of the monster invasion is that the dead monsters seem to rot extremely fast, and they didn't create quite the same strong, horrible cloud or miasma that dead humans could. Of course, all of the dead human bodies I came across, and all the ones I would see in the future, are probably more than made up for this fact.

Cheery thought.

The junkyard gates were closed, and the windows to the small office had been boarded up. I stood in the street, looking at the place, wondering what I should do. Part of me thought about creeping around to the back of the large junkyard and using my shovel to dig a hole underneath. Just taking down the fence probably wouldn't be that difficult for me at this point either, although I didn't have the proper tools to do it. Explosions would definitely be conspicuous, and only relying on my superhuman stats would take a while and probably make a lot of noise and a mess. Most importantly, I was not at war with these people.

Unlike the antique store that I had looted before, the junkyard was very obviously being occupied by people, most likely the owners, but regardless of who was inside, they were the owners at the moment.

Before I could come up with a plan of action, the decision was taken out of my hands. Someone I hadn't noticed called out, "You there! How about you get going, huh? Keep it movin’ if you don’t want any trouble!"

I turned to find where the voice had come from and saw a teenage boy with unkempt brown hair poking his head up over a wood-slatted portion of the junkyard fence. When we made eye contact at about sixty yards, he shook the barrel of his rifle menacingly and said, "I mean it! It’s loaded!”

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Keeping my expression as friendly as possible, I held my hands up in the universal gesture of peace and shouted back, "I have business with y'all."

"Business? What kind of business can you have with a junkyard when nobody's driving? Past that, what kind of business can you have with a junkyard when you're walking, too?"

I took a few cautious steps forward. "Well, that's my business until I am able to make a deal with whoever owns this place. I'll stay right here; would you mind getting them?"

The boy looked at me with narrowed eyes, obviously suspicious. I didn't blame him. All the people here have probably witnessed the strip mall across the street getting cleaned out. Then again, I amended, maybe they were the ones who'd done it. In that case, they'd probably be doubly suspicious.

The boy's head disappeared, and a younger boy's face took its place. With the similar facial features, it didn't take a genius to assume the two were brothers. The older brother had probably inherited a bit more brains, though. This boy had a nervous expression, but idly picked his nose as he stared at me. I didn't see any weapons, but his other hand was hidden from view behind the fence. I assumed that he either had a rifle at his feet or was maybe holding a pistol or had some skill-based attack. In this world, even children had received skills.

For the first time, I really thought about how young kids were already being forced to act as soldiers for survival. It was astonishing how much everything could change in only a few days. The existence of the system probably had a lot to do with it.

Finally, through the chain-link gate, I saw a trio of people approaching. “Hey stranger,” called an old man. “If you hand me that pistol on your hip over the fence, we can talk like normal folks.”

“Sounds good,” I said. I removed the magazine from my HK, cleared the chamber while locking the slide back to the rear, and added the loose round to the magazine. The entire time, I was careful to keep the pistol pointed in a safe direction and make it clear I was not doing anything threatening. Then I tossed the magazine and the pistol over the fence. Nobody made any effort to catch them and my gun was left unceremoniously on the ground.

The thought crossed my mind that even outside the junkyard, there was a lot of metal debris lying around. Tossing an [Angry Arrows] enhanced piece of junk inside to blow up the people’s office-slash-house wouldn’t even be hard for me. I didn’t like to consider it, but if they screwed me over…

The old man nodded, and the people on the other side went to the locks and chains to remove them. They began to open the gate. When they did, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. There were long, thick logs that had been driven into the ground at a forty-five-degree angle towards the gate. None of them were removed as the gate opened. Their purpose was obvious: if somebody tried to drive directly through the gate, they would hit those posts and maybe even be stopped whole, but at the very least, their vehicle would be totaled. I wondered if these people had used quick-crete or something like that to fix the logs inside the ground.

I realized that this security measure would have been super smart if their enemies were all human. But monsters didn’t drive cars.

After the gate opened outwards, the group beckoned me forward. I was greeted by a middle-aged, blonde woman who looked like she'd spent a lot of time out in the sun, a tall, overweight black man in overalls, and an older white man–the previous speaker–with a beard down to his chest. All three of them held shotguns and also wore machetes. They wordlessly gestured me forward, and I kept my hands up where they could see them. When I was about to reach spitting distance of the gate, I noticed a large number of makeshift spears leaned against a bicycle rack to one side. Most o the dead monsters outside the fence had been killed with firearms, but a few looked like they’d been stabbed. Now I knew what did the stabbing. Some of the spears were darkened by what I have come to recognize as dried goblin blood.

When I was inside the gate, the man in overalls closed and locked it. The older man kept a cautious eye on me and the outside street. Deeper inside the junkyard, I noticed a little girl in a gray dress watching me for a couple of seconds before disappearing behind a car. And at the far end of the compound, I saw another adult standing watch on top of a pile of wooden boxes, the same as the first teen I met had been.

With what little information I had to go on, I figured there were three generations of family members living in the junkyard, with at least three different families present, but they were probably all related in some way. And I also assumed that the people that had lived in the mobile home next to the junkyard were present as well. The family that had owned this junkyard were still here–I vaguely recognized the man in overalls.

I kept my hands up the entire time as I was getting the lay of the land.

The older man grunted and said, "Okay, now what business do you got?"

The man in overalls shook his head. "No way, Jim, that's not the first thing we should be asking. First, I want to know why he has so much random bullshit hanging all over him. Is he crazy?”