By the time we reached the barricade the Boardwalk community had thrown up, the city around us had already started to change.
The open, hollow streets we'd crossed earlier—lined with abandoned cars and dark storefronts like a dead mouth full of broken teeth—narrowed into channeled approaches. Vehicles had been pushed sideways across the road and locked together nose‑to‑nose. Sheets of corrugated metal, fencing, and scavenged railings filled the gaps above them. Someone had taken the chaos of the ruined city and forced it into shapes: choke points, kill lanes, paths that could be watched and defended.
And that's exactly what they were doing.
