Cut the Head of the Snake
Session: 2026-07-15
May 7. Littleville. Evening coming on slow.
U2 on the radio. Sergei and the Gent got into some conversation about veterinary procedures on dogs that I didn't need the details of. I found the radio a better use of my attention.
Supper time. Six, six-thirty. Static wanted us regrouped at the house before we did anything else, which was the right call — you don't walk into a town's business on an empty read of the place.
We checked on the Roadmaster first. The Gent went over her, checked the radio levels out of habit. Dustin called him old for it, then messed with the dial himself — the radio wasn't even on. Kid likes to win arguments that don't exist.
Someone asked if Rock could serve as a battery for the car. He can't. He's a little touchy about the question, which tells you something about how he thinks about himself these days.
The house had a few hours of dead time in it before Daisy got off work. Everyone found their own way through it. The Gent read from a holy book he's been carrying — said it helps him find some hope, and I didn't ask which kind. Sergei had his medical texts out, reading up on neuro-psychosis, which is either research or rehearsal, I haven't decided. Dustin had some Boba Fett paperback, telling Sergei there was a flowchart at the back of it — there wasn't, I'd bet money — and for a while the two of them were debating the psychology of a bounty hunter like it mattered. Sergei likes Star Wars. Thinks Skywalker's an idiot. I went through my own notes, the way I used to work a file before a knock on a door — read it again, see what's actually there instead of what you remember being there.
Seven-thirty, we went to get her. Dustin wanted back streets, and I didn't argue. North side of town, curving west into blocks nobody's kept up — the kind of abandoned that isn't sudden, it's accumulated. Ellis Street. Her address was on the receipt.
Single-story bungalow, better kept than anything else on the block. Somebody still cares about that yard. The Gent knocked. I moved up next to him out of habit more than need.
Porch light went off before the door did. Then her voice, and we went in. Static peeled off to the window to watch the street — a good instinct, and I was glad one of us had it, because I wasn't thinking about the street. I was thinking about what kind of town turns its porch light off before it lets you in.
She thanked us for coming. Asked why we were still here. The Gent told her the truth — we're stuck till we get a battery — and she said Jimmy would probably honor the deal. Then she asked if we'd been to the church yet.
We hadn't. Only seen it.
She told it like something she'd told herself enough times to have the shape memorized. Marcos held this town together longer than it had any right to hold together — criminals, neurine addicts, the whole slow rot — and people kept leaving anyway. He moved his sermons into the neuroscape. Built a heaven. Said it that plainly: a heaven, virtual, vivid enough that people describe it like angels talking to them directly. A kid named George Lopez built it for him — his mother works the liquor shop — skilled enough with the programming that nobody doubted it was possible.
Sergei said he understood her. Said he'd seen something like it before. I believed him.
People flocked to it. Addicts, sure, but good people too — that's the part that always gets left out of the easy version of this story.
Then a few months in, the neuroscape lit up gold on its own, and something walked out of it that nobody built. A golden angel. George swears up and down he didn't program it. After that some people stopped eating. Others walked away from the church entirely, wanting nothing more to do with any of it.
Dustin asked if not attending was even allowed. Small question, the kind that tells you the real question underneath it.
She went to make coffee and stopped in the doorway. Said the angel wasn't satisfied being a thing you watch. It wanted to take physical form in the world. She said it like a woman reporting a fact, not a fear.
Sergei laid out the read: she's not wrong to be scared, and we've got maybe two moves — leave, or play along long enough to see what's underneath it. Static offered to watch the building when it came to that. Sergei thought going near the church at all was a bad bet. Static was more worried about the people still going — that they might need pulling out, not just avoiding.
The Gent's instinct, same as always: get a battery, get gone. Dustin asked if we actually thought we could save a town from a cult. I didn't have a clever answer for that. What I had was simpler.
Cut the head of the snake.
Static built it into something workable — one or two of us in the neuroscape during the sermon, listening, the rest watching the building from outside, and once it's over and quiet, in to destroy the server. Counterpoint, and a fair one: the people who go still walk back out afterward. Not addicted. Not yet.
Dustin made it clear he wasn't a car thief by trade, but wanted to know how we'd actually get into a hood we didn't have a key for. Sergei suggested Rock as a getaway driver, which is the kind of suggestion Sergei makes when he's already decided something's going to go wrong.
She came back with the coffee. Static asked about the footsteps — the ones that shake the water in a glass and leave craters the size of a car. She's heard them. Doesn't know what they are. Doesn't know if it's the angel. Hasn't been to a sermon in about a week, she said, and added, quiet, that she doesn't think the angel is what he says it is. Sergei asked if anyone had been acting different toward her lately. Wondered aloud if somebody could've hacked into the thing. That thought cost him something — I watched it cost him something.
Dustin asked if she had any medical books lying around, for Sergei. Practical, in his way.
The Gent brought it back around. Told her plain: we need a battery to get out of here.
She gave us three names. Jimmy's truck — best left alone, she thought. Old Doug, a prepper with a Jeep Cherokee and a dirt bike, more dangerous than the description makes him sound. Lucas and Maria Torres, who had an old Cutlass Ciera in the garage and, as far as she knew, no reason to expect company.
Static said, not unkindly, that if we don't get out of Littleville, she doesn't either. She took a slow sip of her coffee and didn't answer that directly, which is its own kind of answer.
I didn't like it. Taking from people who hadn't done anything to us. But I said let's do it, because the alternative wasn't better for anybody, including her.
The Gent, Dustin, and I went to get it.
Gloom by then, properly dark. We were about a hundred feet out when the porch light came on and the door opened — the Torres couple, coming out with a couple of kids in tow, heading somewhere for the evening.
I stood there and had a bad minute. I'd already talked myself into this reluctantly, and now there were kids in the equation, and reluctant wasn't holding. Dustin talked me back down — told me there was no problem here, and meant it enough that I let myself believe it for the length of the job. I filed that away too. I'm not sure yet what to do with the fact that convincing me was that easy for him.
The family waved as they walk off together, the way people wave at neighbors. Garden out front, kids' toys in the yard, an attached garage. The Gent went to try the back door — locked — found a window instead, went in, popped the garage from the inside. Silver Cutlass Ciera, exactly as advertised.
Dustin and I stayed in the dark near the street while he worked. Door unlocked, battery out, a look around for anything else worth taking, and then he shut the hood, the door, and the window, and came back out to us like a man closing a filing cabinet.
We were still walking back when the ground moved again. Same as the house, the first night. The Gent felt it, Kaylan felt it, Sergei felt it. Whatever's out there making craters the size of cars hasn't gone anywhere.
Neither have we, yet. Working on that.