The Ford should have been dead.
Brice knew that.
The Escape had taken the Blue Wave through the windshield, dropped into a drainage cut hard enough to crack his head against the window, and made sounds no machine should make unless it was begging for a mechanic, a priest, or both.
But somehow, the engine kept coughing.
Not running.
Coughing.
There was a difference.
Running meant reliable. Coughing meant the Ford was negotiating one second at a time, and Brice was too desperate to argue with the terms.
“Come on, old girl,” he rasped, both hands tight on the wheel. “Just give me a few more miles.”
The Escape crawled along the damaged frontage road, tires crunching over gravel, broken glass, and pieces of a world that had stopped making sense. The windshield had cracked in a thin, ugly smile. The dashboard blinked and twitched like it was dreaming bad dreams. Somewhere beneath the hood, metal knocked in a rhythm Brice did not trust.
The tire iron rested beside his leg, close enough to grab if the world decided to get personal.
Behind him, the blue haze pulsed over the truck stop.
The TA Travel Center was no longer a place people stopped for gas, bad coffee, and bathroom breaks.
It was smoke.
Fire.
Screaming.
Brice forced himself not to look back too long.
Looking back was expensive.
So was panic.
He had already spent enough of both.
His phone sat dead in the cup holder. The tablet lay black on the passenger seat, Angel’s face gone from it like someone had erased the only thing keeping him tied to the old world.
He jabbed the phone’s power button again.
Nothing.
He jabbed harder.
Still nothing.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Don’t be dramatic. That’s my job.”
For half a second, the screen flashed.
Angel’s name appeared.
Not a call.
Not a message.
Just her contact picture, frozen and distorted, like the phone had coughed up a memory before dying again.
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Then the screen went black.
Brice stared at it until the road started drifting under him.
He jerked the wheel straight.
“Okay,” he said, voice rough. “Not helpful. Emotionally aggressive, actually.”
Dead didn’t mean dead anymore.
It meant unstable.
It meant one flicker, one ghost image, one cruel half-second of hope before the power bled away again.
The Ford sputtered.
The headlights flickered in broad daylight. The radio clicked on, spat one burst of static, then died again. The speedometer needle trembled even though he was barely doing twenty.
It wasn’t just the car.
It was everything.
The phone. The tablet. The radio. The dashboard. Every dead vehicle he passed. Every useless traffic light hanging black over the road.
The Blue Wave hadn’t killed electricity.
It had made electricity unreliable.
Batteries drained too fast. Screens flickered. Radios whispered static. Anything digital acted like it was drowning.
Brice glanced at the dead phone again.
No service made sense. Towers were probably down. Power grid gone. Routers dead. Whatever invisible chain normally carried Angel’s voice from Iloilo to his cracked dashboard had snapped in a thousand places.
But the sky still had satellites.
Some of them had to be alive.
They were up there drinking sunlight while everything on the ground bled power like an open wound.
“Solar,” Brice whispered.
His eyes shifted toward the rear cargo area.
“Bingo.”
He eased the Ford onto the shoulder and hit the brakes.
The Escape coughed, shuddered, and nearly died. Brice cursed, threw it into park, grabbed the tire iron, and stepped out.
The air outside smelled like smoke, hot metal, and copper. Somewhere far off, someone screamed. Somewhere closer, something answered with a roar that did not belong to any animal Brice had ever heard.
“Perfect,” he muttered. “Love the neighborhood.”
He limped to the rear hatch, popped it open, and dug through the emergency junk he had been too lazy to clean out for two years.
Old flyers.
A roll of duct tape.
Jumper cables.
A half-empty case of water.
Three pens that had probably died before the apocalypse.
And a cheap folding solar panel he had bought during one broke summer because sleeping in the Escape with a dead phone had taught him exactly how thin civilization really was.
At the time, it had felt like paranoia.
Now it felt like the smartest twenty-nine dollars he had ever spent.
Brice dragged the panel out and stared at it.
“Congratulations,” he told it. “You have been promoted from camping garbage to life-support equipment.”
He tucked the tire iron under one arm and popped the hood.
Heat rolled out. The engine ticked and pinged, sounding offended by the concept of continuing. Brice hooked the little solar panel’s clamps to the battery terminals with hands that only shook a little.
Red to positive.
Black to negative.
At least, he hoped.
“If I blow myself up,” he muttered, “I’m blaming the sun.”
The tiny charge light on the solar controller flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then held.
Weak.
But alive.
Brice exhaled.
It was not enough to fix the Ford. He knew that. A little panel like this was not going to resurrect an SUV that had just survived the end of the world.
But it could trickle power.
Tiny mouthfuls.
Just enough to keep the battery from falling completely dead.
Just enough to keep the Escape breathing.
He taped the panel across the hood with ugly strips of duct tape, then stepped back to admire his work.
The panel sat crooked, sad, and ridiculous.
Brice nodded. “Great. I invented solar-powered panic.”
Something clicked behind him.
Brice froze.
Click.
Click.
Slow.
Sharp.
Too close.
He turned his head.
A rabbit stood near the edge of the road.
At least, it used to be a rabbit.
Now it was the size of a medium dog, with patchy fur, ears twitching in opposite directions, and a mouth full of jagged, impossible teeth. Its eyes reflected the strange blue veins pulsing through the sky.
Brice stared.
The rabbit stared back.
“Nope,” Brice said.
The rabbit twitched.
Brice raised both hands slowly, the tire iron still gripped in one fist. “Listen, I have had a very difficult day, and I am emotionally unavailable for whatever horror-movie nonsense you are about to bring into my life.”
The rabbit’s jaw opened wider than it should have.
Brice backed toward the driver’s door.
The rabbit bounded sideways with a heavy, wrong thump, then vanished into the weeds.
Brice waited three seconds before breathing again.
“Okay,” he whispered. “New rule. Bunnies are canceled.”
He climbed back into the Ford, slid the tire iron beside his leg, and turned the key.
Click.
His stomach dropped.
“No. No, no, no.”
He tried again.
The engine coughed.
The dashboard flickered.
The solar controller light pulsed weakly through the windshield.
The engine caught.
Barely.
Brice gripped the wheel and laughed once, sharp and humorless.
“Good girl.”
The Escape lurched forward, wounded but moving.
The little solar panel rattled on the hood, drinking sunlight faster than the broken world could steal it back.
For now.
Brice looked at the dead tablet on the passenger seat.
“Hang on, baby,” he said quietly.
The screen stayed black.
But somewhere above the ruined sky, satellites still turned their faces toward the sun.
And Brice was not done trying.
The frontage road curved back toward Interstate 5.
Smoke climbed over the rise ahead in dirty gray columns. Sirens wailed from somewhere far away, then cut off one by one, as if the city itself was running out of breath. The closer Brice got, the more the road filled with wreckage—abandoned cars, open doors, spilled luggage, shoes lying where people had run out of them.
The Ford kept moving.
Barely.
Every few seconds, the engine stumbled hard enough to make Brice’s teeth clench. The solar panel rattled against the hood, duct tape flapping at the edges, but the charge light kept blinking.
Weak.
Stubborn.
Alive.
“Same, buddy,” Brice muttered.
Then the screaming started again.
Not from the fields this time.
Ahead.
Human.
Brice eased off the gas.
The interstate waited beyond the curve, hidden behind smoke and dead traffic. Whatever was happening up there, it sounded bad.
Very bad.
Brice’s hands tightened around the wheel.
“No,” he whispered. “Nope. That is absolutely not my business.”
The scream came again.
Higher this time.
Closer.
Brice closed his eyes for half a second.
“Damn it.”
The Ford coughed beneath him like it agreed with the complaint.
Brice opened his eyes, dropped the shifter into drive, and aimed the wounded Escape toward the chaos.