Pier Market: Post-apocalyptic

[penthius]

Setting up a pier market is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, and seventy percent balls-to-the-wall. You find an old pier that's disintegrating, use some C-4 or dynamite or whatever you have on hand to blow the land connection (that's the really tricky part, because it's loud enough to summon zeros from miles and miles around, and because you've got to get really close to the shore to find the right structural support to blow out, something weak enough to fall, crucial, but not that's going to take out the rest of the pier). Then you wait to see if there will be zero-swarm. Zero-sum, my navigator always says with a laugh. He likes his puns. What can I say. I tolerate them where a lot of crews wouldn't, and it's gotten me an A-class nav on a C-class ship. Hell, who'm I fooling. A D-class ship, only saved from an F-class because it's actually still floating. Never mind what all we've had to do to keep it that way. I'm past the days of making landfall in a desperate, reckless raid for machined parts or dumped engines, though. That's a game for the young and the ones with no families.

Inspiration: "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor + http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonpac/8800355855/ + Under a Graveyard Sky
Story potential: High, if only because this is the kind of story I like.
Notes: Not zombies, necessarily, but some dangerous thing that doesn't like to cross water, that has set humanity-as-we-know-it afloat. Could be aliens, or something supernatural, or plaguey, or zombies, I suppose.