With a higher vantage point, I could see the line of traffic, stretching out down the road, avoiding the area where a portal’s expansion cut through the highway, forcing a detour onto smaller streets.

I could see the stores and the people clustered around broken windows.

Cause and effect. People couldn’t get around, which meant they couldn’t get to work easily and they couldn’t go to stores to make their purchases. Power, water, and the delivery of other resources had been interrupted in places. Stores, restaurants, and services closed or reduced their hours, because they lacked employees, customers, and resources. More people were dicking around with no or temporarily interrupted employment, frustrated at the backslide in progress and the overall hopelessness of things…

People wanted what they were owed, maybe. Or they wanted to feel like they were making some headway in things, when it felt so hard to obtain. They saw the unmanned stores and they noted the lack of proper law enforcement.

Looters. These weren’t the first I’d seen, and they weren’t the only symptom of the city’s current ails.

Will these unpowered people look back and think that they can’t recognize who they were? Or is it easier to justify and massage past events and past wrongs committed, if you don’t have powers to punctuate, exaggerate, and highlight it?

I didn’t have my costume, and I still had my jacket threaded through the triangle of upper arm, forearm, and sling strap, so it rested across my forearm.

Their getaway vehicle was on the other side of the highway, and there was less traffic going toward the city center. They’d drive off and disappear into the side roads somewhere. The ones at the front of the pack were loading up the trucks with bags of stuff, on the road just beyond the highway. The middle of the pack was already over the concrete barrier that separated the westbound traffic from the eastbound, and the stragglers were just behind them, hesitating because traffic was incoming.

I intercepted the people who were climbing into the first of the trucks. I used my aura to spook the first guy and to try to get his grip to ease up where he was holding onto the door and the side-grip at the chair back. He twisted around, hands up to defend himself, and I simply tugged him back, letting him fall to the ground. No strength needed.

I used my toe to nudge the keys from his grip to the ground, and he didn’t fight me. Then I stomped on them, forcefield up, with enough force to drive the metal into the concrete.

I pointed at him, and I ordered him, “Stay.”

He nodded.

I believed him. Marching toward the other truck, where people were rushing to load electronics into the back, I spotted orange lights at the base of the truck.