Marcus leaned his bike against the peeling window frame and tried the door. Unlocked. Everything was unlocked now.

The smell hit him first—mildew and old clothes and something else, something sweet and rotten from the back room. His hands trembled as he pulled the bandana over his nose. Three days since his last drink. The shakes were getting worse.

The front of the store was picked over—clothing racks tipped, wire hangers scattered like pick-up sticks. But the back room, the electronics section, might still have something. People took food, medicine, batteries. They didn’t think about the guts of things.

He picked his way through overturned shelves. A microwave, door hanging open. Too heavy, and he’d already pulled one apart last week. The magnetron was useless without proper shielding, and the transformer was bulky. He moved on.

Calculator. He snatched it up, fingers fumbling with the battery cover. Empty, but that didn’t matter. He held it up to the gray light filtering through the grimy window. The solar cell was intact—maybe one square inch of dark silicon. He’d need at least six of these wired in series to get enough voltage. Into the backpack.

Another calculator. This one cracked, but the solar panel looked good. His hands shook worse as he tried to pry it off with his multitool. The plastic snapped wrong, and he cursed, but the cell came free. Two down.

A clock radio caught his eye. He hefted it—too heavy for what it offered. Maybe a transformer, but small. Not worth the weight. Twenty miles on a bike with a loaded pack. Every ounce mattered.

Portable CD player. He flipped it open, pressed the eject button out of habit. Nothing happened. Dead. He set it aside anyway, came back to it. Pried off the battery cover. Three AA. He could use the battery holder, wire it for a trickle charge system, but—no. Too complicated. The shakes were making it hard to think clearly. Keep it simple. Solar straight to the circuit, battery bank only for the fence pulse. He left the CD player.

A drawer of assorted cables and adapters. He dug through them, found a 12V wall wart. Cracked the case on the edge of the shelf—the transformer inside was tiny. Might step up voltage, but not enough. And he’d need to… no. He dropped it. The clatter echoed in the empty store.

Another calculator. Another. Five now. Maybe enough.

Then he saw it, back in the corner behind a collapsed shelf—the curved glass screen catching the light like a dead eye. CRT monitor. Old beige plastic, probably twenty years in this place before the world went to shit. His heart kicked up, and it wasn’t just the withdrawal.

He dragged the shelf aside. The monitor was massive—had to be seventeen inches. He rocked it forward. Forty pounds easy, probably more. His arms were already tired, and he hadn’t even started the ride back.

But inside…

He found a screwdriver in the drawer—phillips head, handle cracked. Held it in both hands to keep it steady. The back panel screws fought him, corroded. One stripped before he got it loose. Sweat ran down his temples despite the cold.

The back came off with a creak of old plastic. There it was, mounted to the circuit board like some kind of mechanical insect—the flyback transformer. Black epoxy block the size of his palm, red high-voltage wire coiled around it, and beneath it, soldered to the board, filter capacitors like small batteries.

This was what he needed. This was what would make the fence work.

The flyback could step his 6V battery bank up to thousands of volts. Maybe five, six thousand—enough to make someone think twice. Enough to make them scream. And the capacitors would hold the charge, dump it fast through the fence wire in a pulse that’d light up every nerve.

His hands shook harder as he worked the screws holding the circuit board. The CRT tube loomed above him, and he was careful not to touch it. Even dead, even discharged, the vacuum tube could implode if he cracked it. Glass shrapnel. And if it wasn’t discharged, there could still be—

Don’t think about it. Just get the board out.

He looked at the rest of the monitor guts. Copper yoke coils. More transformers. A whole power supply section he could harvest. The tube itself—if he could safely break it down—had copper wire, rare earth elements in the phosphor coating. Worth something, maybe, if there was ever worth again.

But it was forty pounds of glass and plastic and metal, and he had five miles of uphill grade on Old Post Road, and his legs were already weak from not eating enough, and the backpack could only hold so much, and—

He sawed through the solder points with the edge of the screwdriver, levering the flyback transformer free. The circuit board cracked. He didn’t care. The transformer came loose in his hand, heavy and dense, wires dangling like nerves.

One capacitor. He could fit one more. The big cylindrical one, rated for 400V. He worked it free, legs shaking now too, not just his hands.

The rest he’d have to leave. All that copper. All those parts.

He looked at the gutted monitor—at everything he was abandoning—and felt something tight in his chest. Waste. It was all waste. But he couldn’t carry it, couldn’t use it, couldn’t save it.

Just the flyback. Just the capacitor. Just the calculators.

He wrapped the transformer in a t-shirt from the clothing section, packed it carefully at the bottom of his bag. The capacitor went in sideways. The calculators he’d already found went in last, cushioned with more fabric.

Thirty pounds in the pack, easy. His shoulders already ached.

On the way out, he grabbed one more thing—a relay from a box of random electrical parts by the register. The kind with a clear plastic case so you could see the contacts inside. 12V coil. He could run it off the battery bank, triggered by the solar-powered sensor circuit. When the trip wire pulled, the relay would click, connect the batteries to the flyback, and—

His hands were shaking so bad he nearly dropped it. He shoved it in his pocket.

The bike ride was going to be hell.

But tonight, if he could keep his hands steady enough to solder, he’d have the bones of a fence that might actually keep them out. Might buy him another week, another month. However long the batteries lasted.

Fifty triggers, he figured. Maybe less.

He hoped it was enough.