When John saw all those windmills burning, he’d hardly said a word. Maybe a tired “fuck me” slipped through the black balaclava that covered his face, but he was a professional—a mask—so after parking his truck in a visitor’s spot, he pushed through the throng of first-shift gapers who stared after their symbols of prosperity crumbling into molten, screeching metal. 

Stephen, the manager of the H— plant, met him at the entrance. Together, they walked a serpentine path to the main office. There, Stephen asked John to remove his mask; John declined, falling into the seat in front of Stephen’s cheap-ass desk. 

Middle management always asked for the mask to come off and for a mask, that was the stupidest way to die. A mask’s livelihood depended on the people whose pulpit was economic freedom and unfettered profit, not mercy. Trust was an essential commodity in this business, but both parties knew that bullets were cheaper.

Like all middle management cogs in a S.E.Z., Stephen gave a speech about how his corpo was more vital than their competitor, T—, more vital to the health of this Japanese automotive S.E.Z. They employed more people. Higher salaries. Less workplace accidents. Their company stores had healthier, more affordable foodstuff. And they were at the cutting edge of renewable energy technology. 

Finally, after all that hot air, Stephen gave him the rundown of the situation. Someone had overloaded the AI surveillance with QR codes printed on masks they wore, and then rigged about half of the windmills with explosives, and the fires had spread from there. It was a large-scale op. Coordinated and clean.

It would be a full shift before the plant’s generators would be up and running: a loss of fifty million dollars in production. But the windmills and AI patches would cost the corpo at least half a billion, which meant lay-offs and more prison labor rentals. 

So, nobody was very fucking happy. 

Stephen suggested that John “look into” the commies at Kent State, corpo-speak for “give me a few bodies that PR can spin.” Collegiate communists weren’t exactly known for much besides barricading campus doors and then selling their souls to the corpo they were protesting after Daddy’s money ran dry…

John nodded, all the while rubbing his fingers together. There was only one kind of talk that mattered in a S.E.Z. The sooner they settled on a price, the sooner John would be out there, applying the methods of his trade. Stephen tossed him a lowball offer; John was silent and waited. 

Middle management liked to pretend they were in control. That the power their corpo doled out was enough to overcome humanity’s problem of natural equality. The game could be rigged, but at the end of the day, a car bomb was still a car bomb.

John had learned that lesson the hard way when he’d been in middle management himself. A stooge like Stephen, he’d been ruthless–a spreadsheet killer, faithful that being a desk jockey would protect him from the uglier side of his job. There was no material benefit to harming someone in middle management, but business is more than smooth talk and greased palms. All it took was corpo denying payment to a merc for the house of cards that John had built to come tumbling down.  

Intent on taking that unsuspecting midnight joy ride in his dad’s shiny convertible, John’s son was incinerated, his soul blasted from its frame, leaving behind only a burnt flesh doll charred to the driver seat. Corpo didn’t even approve John’sleave request, and when he took it anyway, they fired his ass. Good God, how he’d thought that a 100k salary and paper-thin benefits meant corpo gave a damn about him was a mystery now.

Still, John didn’t blame corpo for it, not more than the merc who had wired that bomb to his car’s ignition. It was far easier to blame the individual and more cathartic.

The man’s name: John couldn’t remember. The only thing he could summon now was the merc’s smashed flat nose, his sweat pooling in John’s soft, downy gloves and how the merc had tried to barter with the twenty-one hundred green dollars he had on him. And what was the dull green of money against the black crisp of his son’s body? 

He’d taken the money. Life wasn’t free, but John wasn’t special. Almost every mask could trace their beginnings to a wake-up call like that.

When Stephen finally offered a respectable sum of twenty thousand dollars plus an extra thirty from his kid’s college fund, John nodded. He’d do it. He signed the paperwork and got the hell out of that corpo tomb.

Having saved over two million dollars John needed three million more to transfer his citizenship to the Free State of Maine. Pretty much every mask was gunning for a gold bar visa since Maine had dropped the price to get in.

A townie kid with a festering needle wound in the crook of his only arm and his screaming girlfriend—they gave the local dealer up pretty quick. John knocked on the dealer’s door and as soon as the door cracked, John kicked it open, grabbing him by his white-dude dreadlocks and dragging him into every room, looking for any glassy-eyed teens sunk into beanbags. When John was sure they were alone, he hauled the dealer into the living room to conduct business. 

At first, the dealer was squirmy, but a knee planted in the man’s stomach kept him from doing anything other than vomiting up his breakfast. The dealer begged, asked John what he wanted, but John just twisted the dealer’s pointer finger until he felt a few pops. He grabbed the next one and promised the dealer that if he didn’t give him a lead, he’d never hold his dick again.

A little hesitation was all the excuse John needed to pop it at the knuckle. 

After that, the dealer gave John what he needed in broken sobs: in the hills, there was a commune of Neo-Confederates that kept the town up to their eyeballs in drugs. Building a secessionist state wasn’t cheap, and people were more than happy to buy the hard stuff when ibuprofen was nearly three-hundred dollars a bottle.

Corpos could spin their destruction easy. They were scourging the extremist plague that had proliferated when the corpos bought and dissolved the state back in the 30s in a bid to bring back manufacturing stateside.

But more importantly, this was something that the brass at H— would authorize payment for. He hated cracking skulls, and hunting leads onlyfor a corpo to void his contract. 

Of course, almost nobody in the zone would actually believe that a bunch of backwoods secessionists possessed the technical skill to blow up all those windmills. Instead, they’d believe that a rival Corpo had done it, Probably T— since it was the only competitor in this zone.

And the citizens were usually right.

Soon, word would spread in hushed voices spoken under a Jazz so avant-garde that surveillance AI would loop into a spiral-analysis of sound structure if it listened in.

If it was another corpo, the windmills were the first spasm. They’d close the checkpoints to secure the workforce and make highway travel nearly impossible. The faster he got this done, the better. 

He parked his truck under a rusty billboard riddled with bullet holes that proclaimed, “The Future Funded Through Profit and Innovation” and hiked three miles to the ridge surrounding the commune. He unshouldered his equipment, laid down, set up, and wasted no time getting to work. His first bullet passed cleanly through a man’s head. The first few were always lucky bastards.

Chaos, and after a few minutes John’s targets hunkered down. He waited, picking off stragglers and newcomers, occasionally crawling through the thick grass to reposition himself. At the third hour, the mental strain forced his mind to merge with his trigger finger. People were just their bodies, running or shooting, but tumbling into the red pool that stretched from trailers to the rows of Japanese-made cars.

At the sixth and final hour, his hands were numb, shaking with strain, he was half-deaf, and the taste of gunpowder clung to his tongue. Three turkey vultures circled, silent, waiting.

For dinner, John had three-day-old Chinese takeout and orange G— while watching a barrel-chested man and a blonde woman make a break for the cars, carrying what looked like a bundle of cloth, possibly a baby. He shoveled another forkful of noodles into his mouth and went to his rifle only to watch them toss the bundle of cloth into the backseat of the car as they drove off. Either that baby wasn’t theirs or they were a bunch of fakers. He put a bullet in the driver, and another in the passenger. The car rolled to a stop at the edge of the ridge. A few yards short of freedom.

When he was finished eating, he made his way down the ridge to the car first to confirm that the rags were just rags before searching each shabby trailer, gun drawn, steeling himself against turning a corner to a child holding a parent’s pistol. But thankfully, he only heard their muffled cries through closed closet doors. It was better this way. Easier.

He didn’t find any explosives, no surprise there, but he did liberate plenty of drugs. Stimulants and depressants. When he came to a corrugated iron longhouse filled with bodies, he was glad to be able to bury some of the guilt.

He paused for a second too long, tracing a faint ray to a slumping corpse’s milky-blue eye. The shadow of bodies seethed in the dark just beyond John’s perception. He almost burned it down but he couldn’t bear the thought of them melting in there, and besides, only a fool robbed corpos of PR. That was a dumb way to die. 

He slammed the door. Then he rolled his mask past his chapped lips, and vomited noodles onto the dry ground. Pressing the mask into his eyes to stop them watering, he rolled the mask back over his mouth and got back to clearing the compound. 

Near dusk, John planted some kiddy-shit bombs and sent pictures to Stephen who gave each image a blue thumbs-up and wired the 50k with a message: New development. Talk soon.

It was never a good sign when middle management didn’t act like they were getting ripped off. But he’d been wired his money so the deal was done. A half-inch closer to getting a gold bar visa.

In the dark and high off his ass on liberated Benzos, John walked back to his truck where he slept through a soft, utter black. Whatever was coming could wait until morning. 

At dawn, John woke and rolled a shoulder that remembered every jolt of his rifle. He was getting old as shit. His phone lit up withan urgent message from management at T—, asking him to discuss an “opportunity.”

Corpo-speak for war and a fucking goldmine for a mask. The last war between two corpos, John had played both sides too, netting over six hundred thousand dollars.  

John pulled onto the highway as smoke billowed out of the horizon in front of him. The blackened skeletons of windmills were already far, far behind him.