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citizens of San Angelo was the Gathering Squad’s tactics. Besides the guy who managed the city’s ammunition, Mayor Delgado and Colonel Henshaw, the Air Force base commander, were the only people outside of the squads who knew how often they got into firefights and scrapes out in the wastes. Aeric hadn’t lied when he told Veronica that they tried to negotiate with people first. That rarely went well and they often got into fights rather quickly. Aeric’s heavily-armed men and women were almost never received well and those initial meetings usually ended with the people dead. Luckily, the Gathering Squads had been better than those that they ran into so far.
    He’d discussed the moral dilemma with Tyler and the Squad’s lieutenants on multiple occasions. Were they any better than the psycho-scavengers roaming the land because they killed and stole things for the betterment of an entire city instead of themselves? Aeric wasn’t sure. He knew how precarious the situation in the city was though. There were over thirty thousand people living in San Angelo—which was less than a third of the pre-war population. Even with the centralized food kitchen and supply point, the city’s constables found people dead on a daily basis. The investigation almost always pointed to a fight over food. The simple truth of the matter was that until the temperatures warmed enough to grow crops, a population of thirty thousand wasn’t sustainable. They needed to reduce the population down to a third of that number to be able to feed everyone without daily supply runs.
    The Provisions Warehouse came into view around the corner. They’d spent a massive amount of time building concentric rings of fortifications around the warehouse so they could fall back to supplementary positions if there was a sustained attack on their supply storage site. Surveying the warehouse as he rode up, Aeric once again wished that they had working tractors. His long-term plan was to build earthworks behind each barricade so the defenders could shoot over the walls instead of using them simply as a barrier. It was a prudent plan to keep their supplies, literally their lifeline, secure. In time, when the squads weren’t so busy, he’d make sure that his plan for the defenses were completed.
    Two large military trucks called MTVs were parked out front of the Provisions Warehouse. The MTVs, or Medium Tactical Vehicles, were large trucks with a five-ton carrying capacity. Their cargo areas contained the Gathering Squad’s bicycles for the trip to Garden City. The shooters and the actual men and women of the squad would ride back there as well. Then on the way back, the trucks would be full and the squads would ride their bikes beside the full trucks.
    The MTVs were a major improvement over the contraptions that the Gathering Squads normally used during supply runs. They’d taken Aeric and Tyler’s concept of a pull-behind trailer on their bicycles and increased the capacity. Since horses were in short supply, they’d fabricated a way to haul a lot of supplies at once. Aeric’s rough design was developed by several engineering students and now they had several variations of long, flatbed trailers with lightweight metal side rails that were hitched to either four or six bicycles, similar to a team of horses.
    Their carrying capacity was the next best thing to using the limited fuel in the military trucks. Unfortunately, the bike and trailer combinations’ inability to maneuver also made them death traps for the riders if they were attacked. It was a lesson that only needed to be learned once. After that, they began sending heavily-armed single riders as well as the team and everyone in the Gathering Squads were trained in military tactics. The result was a militarized group of men and women who went out on the supply runs.
    “Hey, Aeric, glad you could make it,” Tyler called from between the trucks. “I thought for a second that you finally got yourself