It was incredible, really, what just a few years of neglect did to a place. People took for granted often enough that when a hooligan throws a stone through a window, a week later the glass will have regenerated, like a brittle, translucent leaf on a wounded plant. Here the windows broke and stayed broken eternally, and the state of a townspeople's mind was measured by the material used to patch it up: a square of tarp cut out and duct-taped over. A sheet of plywood. The particularly forsaken places, then, the homes of lepers and pariahs, wore no semblance of repair, simply letting the bitter breeze ride through. Paint, when it was not torn away to reveal naked concrete, had lost its vibrancy, pale, sun-bleached; iron acquired inimitable shades of flaky orange. Like the heart of a lonely child, here it all just crumbled, faded, and fell.
Yet the colors of spring carried no concerns for men's poetic woes. Between the cracks of the concrete, and through the overgrown grasses, tulips bloomed. Cherry trees showered petals of blushing silk upon the ruins. Where life dwindles and withers it too blossoms anew. Where one empire dies another from the fecund ashes may rise. Such it was in the courtyard of this biergarten, with gates rusted shut and sidewalks rotting, but a resplendent garden rich with more humble forms of life, flourishing far away from hedge clippers, pesticides, and clumsy footsteps. Still, the proprietor knew people didn't come here for the scenery. They came here for warmth, and even with the chilly nip outside, even with all his customers gathered in the beer cellars instead of the lush courtyard, cowering away from the grey skies and bitter breaths on the wind, still they were too sparse.
So where the hell were they? Why did his beer go undrunk and his information unbought? Why this mere smattering of rookies at his tables, which he took such pains to protect from scratches and varnish with a rich, fine coat? As he pinched and tugged at the tendrils of his dark Teutonic beard, his eyes, profoundly blue, scanned the darkness of the cellar which his money paid to illuminate, to stock well with big endless barrels, to uphold as a reputable place of charity, safety, and if he could deign to the arrogance, a little slice of home.
He poured himself a finger of something ice-clear, but stiff and pungent all the same, the vapors stinging at those blue eyes. "Damn it," he groaned, tipping it back through his burning esophagus. Then he went back to halfheartedly watching a game of blackjack being played across the room. Maybe better weather would lure them out after all.
Meanwhile...
The ammo factory had shut down after World War Two, but that didn't stop some stalkers from dreaming big. Never mind that only one crazy bastard in the whole Zone carried a Luger (though a stylish one he was!), or that they'd stopped making Karabiners half a damn century ago; no, every second or third genius to breach the Circle figured he was the first stricken by this epiphany, when really he was just the next victim of a boring plague: the brilliant notion that he would go there and he would be rich, in bullets and in the money he would make from selling them. Never again would he fret frugally over a "last magazine" or an "almost-empty clip."
But that's what the people who'd set camp there, inside the ruinous old factory, had come to expect. At first they too were scavenging hopefuls, like all the other naïve green-gills. Then they realized they could be one step ahead of these green-gills; they could demand a toll for access to the rich stores of ammo which most certainly didn't exist, and better, they could rob the people who showed up. Although it didn't have the same reputation as Stuttgart Castle as a venomous death-trap, it was a death-trap all the same, and perhaps more so, with how well-hidden it was in the shadows of those more foreboding places. After all this was one abandoned old factory of dozens; hundreds. Not everyone got to claim a castle as his base of operations. Some people have all the luck, really.
Even so, this day was different. The highwaymen were requesting assistance for once; they were even coughing up cash for the parcel. But that didn't mean they weren't careful. The two snipers on the roof could be spotted five hundred meters away and further.
