Dead Battery
Session: 2026-06-10
05/06/97. Sierra Nevadas highway, still. Then Stockton-adjacent. Then not moving at all.
The utility worker came back swinging and there were four of us in his lane. That's the kind of math that usually goes bad.
I went for him and couldn't close — he had a pipe wrench and knew what to do with it. The Gent got close enough to land something: two on the chin, clean. The worker gave one back, to The Gent's ribs. Nothing that dropped him. By then Sergei had the leads out. He got three clean contacts and that was the whole conversation.
I tied the second man the same way I tied the first. Hogtied and face-down and out of the road.
We picked up motion in the tree line while the worker was still twitching — someone running toward us, moving fast, covered up. Black rain jacket, black balaclava, cargo pants, boots. Hand on his hip the whole approach. Five-nine, military posture, the kind of man whose threat assessment you complete before he opens his mouth.
He'd seen four people attacking a road crew.
Hey. What are you guys doing.
Sergei answered before anyone else could. Calmly, in the voice he uses when he means every word: the workers were neurocaster-zoned, we were clearing the road, could he help. The new man nodded like it was already processed and fell in.
His name came later: Static. Former enlisted. Sniper. Years in the field after things deteriorated. There's a kind of quiet that comes from that. I know what it costs to get that quiet.
I was too easy on him at the gate. A man in a balaclava who shows up mid-incident, hand on a hip-holstered pistol — I gave him the benefit of the doubt I wouldn't give anyone else. The situation found me generous. I'll note it and adjust.
The Gent went through the workers' pockets before anyone suggested it and after everyone had already turned away. I was one of the turnaways. The detail made it to me secondhand: forty off one, ten off the other, fifty off the man Sergei had tased. He handed five dollars to Dustin when pressed.
Dustin found a baseball bat in the truck cab and dropped the wrench with the expression of a man who has been waiting for this particular upgrade.
We left the two workers tied and accounted for. Sergei had objections — he usually does when something starts to resemble abandonment. I told him they'd come around, which is true often enough to be a working position. He went along with it unhappily.
Government workers. Government neurocasters. We didn't take anything that wasn't already coming loose.
Sergei drove east. The Gent found something on the radio and the car picked up speed on its own, the way it sometimes does.
Static sat with the window and said almost nothing for an hour. He and The Gent spent a few miles working out they weren't going to get along easily. Static felt misunderstood. The Gent threw his hands up in the air. They both let it sit, which is usually the right call.
I watched him from the rearview when I could. There's a version of that quiet that comes from having seen too much and another version that comes from planning to see more of it. I hadn't decided yet which one he was.
Two hours east of the site, somewhere in the Stockton suburbs — four lanes, peeling billboard stock, the light going orange — the overhead streetlamps flickered once.
Then the tire blew.
Sergei brought it controlled, which is harder than it looks at speed. The car spun and stopped and nobody said anything for a second.
I checked the perimeter. Nothing behind us. No vehicle tailing the utility crew, no follow-up. If it was an EMP, it was either automated or far enough back to look coincidental. Static flagged the possibility first: This was automatic. He said it with the tone of a man who has been in rooms where people argue about whether that matters.
The spare went on. The car wouldn't start. Battery completely dead — not drained, not degraded. Killed.
Littleville. High neurine concentration — I knew the place by reputation, which is not the kind of reputation worth having. The kind of town the Electric State guts slowly, house by house, block by block, until only the structures are left and the people inside them are technically still there.
We pushed the Buick into a driveway off empty streets, Dustin steering while the rest of us took the rear. Static suggested we make the car look abandoned and sleep inside. Sound procedure.
The motion sensor lit the front yard as we came up the walk.
Dead neuro-addict in a chair. Body shriveled in the way they get when it takes a while. Device still running.
Another fucking loser, I said. Giving up on life.
Sergei looked at me. Don't be too hard on them.
I walked away. That was the response I had.
Sergei put the headset on. Came up on a fishing boat in the Florida Everglades — catfish, clear water, a perfect day, whatever perfect means to a man who doesn't stay put. He took it off and his face was not the face of someone who'd spent thirty seconds in paradise. He walked off toward the back of the house and didn't look back.
I know what he found in there. The place that doesn't exist for him. You recognize it when you see it and there's nothing useful to say.
The Gent opened the front door of the house.
It creaked like a question that wasn't going to answer itself.