Rhodes sank onto the grass at the base of a tree across the field from what was left of Stonebridge. There wasn’t much left after last night.

  He rested his Jackhammer on the ground next to him and tilted his head against the trunk.

  He shut his eyes. When he opened them, he found himself looking across the field at dozens of bodies and the wreckage of burning houses. He did that. He killed all those people.

  All his subordinates lay down there dead and bloody where they’d fallen.

  Seeing them gave Rhodes one of the best feelings he’d experienced in a long, long time. He finally did what he should have done a long time ago. He destroyed this god-forsaken place with everyone in it.

  The barn, Ora’s house, Koenig’s eatery, Thackery’s house, Fisher’s house—he burned them all to the ground. He burned the whole rotten theater set to the ground.

  He didn’t end The Grid, though. The fields of rolling grassland, the wildflowers, the birds flocking in the spotless sky, the livestock grazing in the fields—all of that was still there.

  He was still inside this whole created world the Masks developed to trap the battalion.

  Maybe there was no battalion anymore. Maybe Rhodes was the only one left after last night’s rampage.

  He didn’t think so. They weren’t dead any more than Fisher was dead. This was all part of the Masks’ misguided attempt to make him think he betrayed his subordinates, the Legion, and himself.

  A faint hint of doubt still crept in, but he lacked the energy even to care about that. The world wouldn’t lose anything if he did kill his subordinates.

  He had already fallen so far away from being human. This one last step meant nothing—or next to nothing.

  He and his subordinates had been walking corpses since they first woke up from stasis. They had all considered ending their own lives. What difference did it make if Rhodes did it for them?

  He wasn’t thinking clearly. He knew that. Thinking this way was part of the problem. It was the problem.

  He should have been the first to defend his subordinates and their right to live.

  He did defend their right to live. Those dead bodies down there—they weren’t his subordinates.

  They were just pictures of his subordinates and not very good pictures. None of them even acted like the people they were supposed to represent.

  He shut his eyes again. He really needed to sleep.

  In the blink of an eye, the landscape vanished and a stab of sickening pain snapped him wide awake. He was in the lab locked into his conversion station with Masks all around him.

  One glance to his left and right confirmed what he already knew. His subordinates were all alive, but they weren’t well. They suffered the tortures of the damned the same way Rhodes did.

  He groaned through clenched jaws, but he actually preferred this pain to the underlying rage and resentment he felt in Stonebridge.

  He would rather suffer here in the real world than live a hazy, unreal half-life in Stonebridge.

  Fisher and the other SAMs occupied the interface in front of Rhodes’s eyes. He’d never seen any sight so welcome as Fisher’s face.

  Rhodes felt himself getting choked up when he made eye contact with Fisher. Fisher didn’t mention Rhodes killing him in The Grid, but those eyes told Rhodes that Fisher understood. He understood painfully well.

  Seeing his friend alive and unharmed almost made Rhodes break down. He wanted to explain so many things to Fisher, but Fisher already knew. Not saying the words hurt worse than saying them.

  The SAMs didn’t talk, either. They didn’t argue amongst themselves. They just stayed there in silent support as each person endured the worst torment imaginable.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Some of the Masks came over to Rhodes’s station. He didn’t give a rat’s ass if they messed with his controls or doubled his pain or even if they sent him back to Stonebridge.

  He killed them—or he tried to. He would keep on trying until he succeeded. Nothing else mattered.

  That on its own solidified in his mind that he had to get back to the Legion. He had to turn the battalion against the Masks.

  If he breathed one more day of his life, he had to spend his dying breath destroying these foul creatures. He had to be the one responsible for ending their invasion.

  Ending their invasion wasn’t good enough. He had to destroy them—their whole stinking race. He had to end all of this.

  He couldn’t do that as long as he was their prisoner. He just had to find a way out of here. Then they better keep out of his way.

  They wouldn’t be able to keep out of his way because he would hunt them down. He would hunt them to the ends of the universe until he found every last Mask alive and put an end to them.

  One of the Masks stopped next to his station. Grid lines started to spiral around its helmet and it changed its appearance.

  He expected B to try to talk some sense into him again, but it wasn’t B.

  Rhodes stared and then narrowed his eyes as the Mask took the appearance of a woman. She had a petite, slender frame with curly, sun-streaked brown hair and sparkling green eyes. It was Ora.

  She gazed down at him in what she probably wanted to be a kindly way, but it came off as patronizing. “That was an unfortunate end to the Stonebridge simulation, Captain,” she murmured.

  He bared his teeth at her. “Leave me alone, you rotten bitch! I hate you!”

  “You don’t hate me. You love me and our children. How could you do that to me after all the years we’ve spent together.”

  “You lying sack of shit!” Rhodes bellowed and felt himself slip a little closer to losing his mind completely. “I never spent a single night with you! I hate you! You’re a nightmare! You deserve to die—all of you! I’ll kill you again the next time I see you! I’ll kill you a thousand times if I have to!”

  He sensed his subordinates and all the SAMs listening to this conversation—if he could call it a conversation.

  He really hoped they did listen. He hoped they understood why he did what he did last night.

  “I really hoped we could work something out,” Ora went on. “You don’t have to live like this.”

  “Shove it up your ass—whatever you’re offering!” Rhodes let all his anguish and frustration pour out of him. He could finally unload it on someone who actually deserved it. “Go fuck yourselves—all of you! Do whatever the hell you want to me! Do you think I care? Do you really think there is anything you can do to me that’s worse than what you’ve already done?! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill all of you! I swear it!”

  “If you don’t cooperate, we’ll have no choice but to keep you here—in this lab. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “I’m already here, you stupid witch! What the hell difference does it make when I’m already here?”

  Some part of him recognized that the Masks’ control was already completely breaking down if it hadn’t completely broken down already.

  The Masks would have kept the battalion in Stonebridge around the clock with no interruption if the Masks could possibly have pulled that off.

  If the Masks had their way, they would have completely obliterated all the battalion’s memories that Rhodes and his people ever belonged to the Legion.

  The Masks wouldn’t be in this predicament right now if they could possibly find a way to avoid it. They wouldn’t be dealing with a bunch of people who knew where they were, why they were here, and whose determination to leave got stronger by the day.

  B already told Rhodes that this torturous outer world was too stressful for his systems to handle. That was the whole reason the Masks sent him to Stonebridge in the first place.

  Rhodes was in the lab right now because the Masks couldn’t send him back to Stonebridge—not permanently.

  From what Rhodes could tell, he and the battalion could only stay in Stonebridge for a matter of hours—twelve at the most or maybe twenty-four. Then the fa?ade broke down.

  Ora only shook her head in feigned disappointment. These Masks really needed to refine their portrayal of human behavior. She didn’t fool Rhodes for an instant.

  “If you really won’t cooperate, we can wipe your memory and your personality completely. We can erase your neural core and reboot you with no memory and no personality. Don’t make us take drastic measures.”

  “Lying bitch!” Rhodes roared. “I’ll never believe a word you say!”

  “Don’t listen to her, Captain,” Fisher interjected. “The Masks have already tried doing that more than once, but it never works. Your base personality always reasserts itself.”

  She shot Fisher a vicious glare through the interface and his face glitched once. “You be quiet, little bird,” she snarled. “No one is talking to you.”

  “You leave him alone!” Rhodes bellowed. “I swear, if you harm him…..”

  “What will you do? You can’t do anything.” She cast a sneer down at his body.

  He narrowed his eyes at her, but she was right. He couldn’t move. “I’ll make you burn for this!” he spat. “I’ll burn you down the very next time you show your face to me! Go on and send me back there! See what happens! I killed you once. I’ll kill you again, you filthy piece of shit!”

  He heard himself raving with no coherence at all, but his brain no longer functioned well enough for him to care.

  He shot and killed her in Stonebridge. The simple fact that she was alive and talking to him right now drove him into an insane rage.

  She wasn’t human. She wasn’t even alive. She was just as fake as all the others.

  “I’m afraid you have a misconception of your position here, Captain,” she breezed. “You’re in no position to kill anyone, not even yourself. I suggest you think long and hard about your future before you go throwing insults and threats like that around. You might be the one who ends up dead—not us.”

  The grid lines spread upward around her head. It turned back into a helmet and the Mask walked away.

  The machine went back to working around the lab as though none of this ever happened. That Mask across the room wasn’t Ora. Ora didn’t exist any more than B did.

  End of Chapter 34.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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