True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

  She showed the guards her ID, and they waved her through. Two knocks on the door, and she stood across from onetime Republican presidential candidate and four-time governor Bubba Davis. After a stint in Vietnam back in the late 1960s, Davis—a big bear of a man, burly and fun loving—had come home without a job. He’d finally gotten one working on an oil rig. He loved the work, the feel of the equipment in his hands, and after a while, he felt good enough to go out on his own, with a bit of a bankroll from his dad-in-law. He lived frugally—and then struck it rich when he patented a new drilling technique that skyrocketed efficiency. Soon, Bubba Davis was one of the richest men in the state. So when his friends pushed him to run for state legislature, he hesitated—why give up the Dynasty life for backroom deals with cigar-smoking lawyers?

  He hesitated until his local state assemblyman began calling for new environmental reviews of all drilling. The way Bubba figured it, he had no choice—his livelihood, and the livelihood of his workers, was at stake. He ran. He won. And he kept on winning. Turned out that his blunt nature and blustery personality worked great. His first campaign slogan: “Don’t Let ’Em Hornswoggle You.” In his opening campaign speech, he named the three top environmental officers in the state and read off how much they’d received from lobbyists for the environmentalists—and how much those environmental groups received from global competitors like the Saudi government.

  Bubba Davis played politics like he played football: he pushed the line. The press called it “swagger.” He just called it the Texas Way.

  Now, though, the governor of Texas’s face lit with rage. The man who had once picked up fellow soldiers and thrown them over his shoulder in distant rice paddies had turned to soft fat. Since Marge died, Bubba Davis drank too much, smoked too many cigars. And when he got angry, his face turned candy-apple red.

  At the moment, his face looked closer to lobster crimson.

  “Well, go fuck yourself then,” he spluttered, slamming the phone down on his carefully crafted maple desk.

  He looked up. “Oh, hey, Ellen. Glad you’re back.” He walked over and wrapped her in a bear hug. “Ain’t nothin’ to say ’bout Brett. Except that he’s a tough, mean son of a bitch. If anybody can get his way out of that one, it’s your old man.”

  Ellen nodded curtly, then sat down on the nearby settee. She didn’t want to talk about Brett, even with Bubba. “Governor, what’s the story here? My e-mail has been overflowing. I’m getting panic messages from the rest of the team.”

  Bubba planted himself heavily on the flowered couch across from her. “I’m putting more troops on the border.”

  “You know that’s just for show.”

  “Not this time, it ain’t.”

  Ellen felt an uncomfortable cringe rise in the middle of her stomach. “What do you mean, ‘this time’?”

  Bubba scratched at the back of his neck awkwardly. “You’ve seen the people outside. They’ve got a right to expect that they’re safe in this state. That’s why they elected me. It’s why they keep electing me.”

  “And you are keeping them safe, Governor.”

  “The hell I am. Have you seen the crime statistics in El Paso? Used to be one of the safest cities in the state. Now it looks like goddamn Phoenix. I’ve got kidnappings. I’ve got killings. I’ve got local police in a tizzy, and I’ve got citizens pledging to go rogue if they don’t get satisfaction from the government.”

  A shadow of a weary smile crossed Ellen’s face. “So what else is new?”

  “I’m not going to stand for it anymore.”

  “What can we do? You saw what they did to Vivian. And the feds hamstrung us.”

  “Not anymore.”

  The cringe became a pit. “What are you planning?”

  “I’m going to give them the authority to shoot, Ellen,” Davis said softly.

  She couldn’t stop herself before the words came out: “You must be out of your mind.”

  “I’m not. I’ve only been out of my mind to think anything would change. I talked to Prescott yesterday. He’s stonewalling me. Threatened to send the feds against us, to arrest our boys, to arrest me, if I do a damn thing to stop this war. And it is a war. I knew Vivian, too, Ellen. I recruited her to the office. Knew her from when she was a little girl and took piano lessons with my wife. That funeral was the last one I’ll be a party to.”

  “No, it won’t,” Ellen said. “Not if you do this. It’ll just be one among many. Do you think Prescott is bluffing? It’s just what he wants. He wants another Waco. And even better, a Waco created by one of his chief political opponents. Who do you think will stand with you? The media? They’re in his pocket. Even your own allies will desert you. They’ll call you a secessionist, a rebel. They’ll string you up and you know it. Your allies are your allies right up until they’re not.”

  “No,” Bubba said slowly. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “Oh, really? What’s going to stop them? That little mob outside?”

  “That little mob,” the governor of Texas said, “isn’t so little. I’ve got polls right here that say that seven out of ten of ’em think we ought to militarize the border.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ll stand up to feds if Prescott gets mean. Polls don’t mean a thing when the rubber hits the road. Hell, polls were in favor of the Afghanistan War, until things got tough. And Brett found out how bad things can go when the public abandons you.”

  Bubba Davis stood up, began pacing, his boots thumping on the carpet. “What do you suggest I do, Ellen? We arrest border crossers, and the president just releases them. He just doesn’t give a damn about us down here. We’re political playthings for him, a convenient enemy so he can run his party-building scam, calling us racist rednecks.”

  “And you want to hand him that label on a silver platter?”

  Bubba walked over to the windows at the back of his office, looked out at the hot Austin noon, the heat baking the grass beneath. The protesters screaming, sweating. He couldn’t hear them, but he could see their mouths work, screaming at him to do something.

  “Got any other options?” Bubba finally said.

  Ellen went silent.

  “Then it’s settled. Draft me a statement. I’m gonna put these bastards on warning.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. They won’t do shit. I know a coward when I see one, and Prescott’s yellower than dehydrated dog piss.”

  “What if you’re wrong, Bubba?” Ellen asked. “Are you ready for war with your own government?”

  Bubba looked at her. Then his eyes seemed to focus far off. “They’ve been at war with us for a long time. I know. I went to war for them. I’ve been abandoned by my government once. I’m not going to be the one doing the abandoning this time.”

  Central Valley, California

  The knock on the door came at nearly two o’clock in the morning.

  It didn’t wake Soledad—she barely slept these days, given the small city of SWAT team and surrounding militia members that had built up in two concentric circles around her home. It was tough to get exercise on the ranch now that she risked arrest if she strayed too far from her front door. Some of the militia members—now they called themselves Soledad’s Soldiers—rode their motorcycles down the slight incline, kicking up dust in their wake, every few days and brought her groceries; one of them made sure that each time SWAT cut off her electricity, her generator got fixed.

  But she’d basically been under house arrest for weeks, and she was damn sick of it. Too much time in one place made her anxious. Even the occasional big media spread didn’t seem to lift her too much anymore—she felt like the whole game was rigged. She was either hero or villain. She was always the story. Never Emilio and Juan. It was always Chris Matthews on the nightly news calling her a traitor or Michael Savage calling her a freedom fighter. It was always one or the other.

  And it just didn’t mean a
damn thing. The state government went right back in and created an emergency dike to stop the river from flowing. Her farm went dry. The only difference between before and after the bombing was the military encampment around her house.

  It just sat there.

  Every day, the militia dwindled. Every day, a few more of the bikers peeled off, took their rifles and skedaddled. You couldn’t expect them to stay indefinitely, after all. They had lives, families. And as the media attention waned, as the standoff lasted, more and more of them had to leave.

  But SWAT remained.

  Then, over the past two or three days, SWAT began to grow. She noticed a few more Humvees show up. Then some choppers. Their incessant flyovers kept her up at night, even when she was lucky enough to fall asleep.

  But she was awake now. The knock startled her anyway. She had always figured that when the invasion came, it wouldn’t come with a warning “shave and a haircut, two bits” thump on the door, but with a small battering ram through the door.

  She opened it. A SWAT officer stood there, his gun down by his side. When she opened the screen door, he sidled in without permission, holding his right arm out, palm facing her, signaling for her to keep quiet. He shut the door stealthily behind him. Then, noticing her eyes fixed on his weapon, he placed it gently on the dining room table.

  When he took off his helmet, she noticed his bright blue eyes. They stood out more because they were red-rimmed, whether from lack of sleep or from crying, she couldn’t tell. The man stood no more than five foot ten, well built, Caucasian. A thatch of mussed brown hair stood nearly on end. He moved forward quickly and grabbed her by the arm. She could feel his powerful grip through her thick robe.

  “You need to get out of here,” he growled. “Now.”

  She pushed his hand off her arm, stood up to her full five two. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said defiantly. “I know my rights.”

  “I don’t think you’re getting this, Miss Ramirez,” he said. “They’re coming for you. Tonight.”

  She felt the wave of nausea hit her so hard she almost stumbled. The possibility of this going bad had always lurked at the back of her mind. She steeled herself for it every day. But she always figured she would have warning.

  Well, she thought to herself, you do have warning at that.

  She looked at the SWAT member, puzzled. “Why are you helping me? My cookies can’t be that good.”

  He laughed softly. “Maybe they are.” A pause. “Or maybe I’m just sick of watching people get pushed around. Whatever it is, you need to get out of here tonight.”

  She gestured helplessly at her surroundings. “I’m a rancher. I’m not a paramilitary leader, no matter what Time says. Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Won’t matter when they come for you in the morning. Do you have a back door to this place?”

  She nodded.

  “Go get a suitcase ready.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aiden. Aiden Foster.”

  She smiled ruefully. “You ready to be a traitor, Aiden?”

  He shrugged.

  She walked over to one of the cabinets, opened it, took down a jar. “Well, we might as well split a cookie on that.”

  What do you take with you when your entire world is about to burn to the ground? She’d come to the Central Valley as a girl, grown up dirt poor, watched her father make his living in the dirt. But instead of running from the dirt, as he wanted her to do, she had saved up, bought a small property, built it up from nothing. A few horses. A few cows. She had grown it, hired men, brought families to live on the ranch. This ranch was her family. By the time she realized she was too old to have a family, she’d spent decades building up her patch of land. She’d picked every rock and plank on the place. She’d overseen every fixed wire fence, guarded every beef shipment from coyotes.

  The ranch itself was her most valuable possession, her memories, her life’s work. All of it.

  After a few moments, she stuffed some clothes in a bag, grabbed a picture of the ranch as it was originally—an empty patch of land, her smiling from ear to ear, a young woman, her father standing next to her, a bemused smile on his face, his hand gripping her shoulder. Then she zipped it shut, threw on some jeans and heavy boots, and made her way back out to the living room.

  That’s all she could carry on her back.

  Aiden waited, his gun ready, hand up to his lips.

  “Foster?” The whisper wafted through one of the windows. “You in there, man?”

  He didn’t answer. Then he signaled for her to get on the ground.

  A split second later, a smoke grenade came crashing through the window.

  Foster rolled quickly to his right, picked it up, and threw it back out the window. “What the fuck?!” cried one of the attackers. “Foster, that you in there?”

  “Fuck it,” Foster muttered.

  He leapt to his feet, began firing wildly through the shattered glass, too high to hit anyone. He heard at least two men curse and scatter. In the distance, he could see the lights of the choppers flash on. He dropped to the ground as a loudspeaker began blaring: “COME OUT, WITH YOUR HANDS UP! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!”

  Then in the distance, a man yelling. One of Soledad’s biker boys, she thought. “Go to hell, you fascist assholes!”

  Gunfire. More gunfire in the distance. A few bikes, gunning their engines.

  An explosion.

  “Ma’am,” said Aiden Foster, “I’d recommend we get out of here.”

  Soledad nodded, began to army crawl across the floor, dragging her bag behind her, as sniper bullets zinged through the windows, thunking into the sturdy oak walls. When they reached the bathroom, Soledad kicked the door shut behind Foster, began pulling everything out from underneath the sink. When she reached the bottom, she began pounding on it with her boot. Foster joined in.

  The sound of the choppers whirring into life, angry wasps out for blood, washed into the house. Spotlights shined brightly in the crack beneath the bathroom door. Then the heavy-caliber 7.62mm rounds began crashing through the roof, bathing the bathroom in speckled light. As Soledad kicked out the last board and crawled beneath the home—as Foster followed, both of them belly-down in the dirt, covering their heads—the ceramic tiles Soledad had so carefully picked to match the décor shattered above them.

  “Do you have a plan?” she yelled at Foster above the ear-splitting whine of the bullets.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “But I’ll bet they do.”

  In the distance, the cavalry was coming. Soledad’s Soldiers. At least a dozen bearded, gun-toting men on their steel horses, riding directly toward the SWAT lines. She could see it in the distance, Pickett’s hog charge.

  SWAT formed up, turned to face them, guns at the ready.

  Which is when the chopper began to groan. It sputtered, crackled—and then dropped to the ground, right at the SWAT lines. It spiraled down, out of control, scattering the SWAT members as they tried to avoid the rotor blades. The air screamed with the dying whine of the chopper. Then it dropped and exploded into flame.

  Soledad watched in horror as men, good men—men she had met, who were just trying to do their jobs—leapt out of the carnage, their entire bodies balls of flame. They screamed, rolled around on the ground, cried out for their mothers. Their comrades ran to them, tried to beat out the flames with the nearest available cloth, tried to kick dirt on them to put them out.

  She looked at Foster, horror-stricken. His eyes were filled with tears.

  “What the hell happened?” she whispered.

  He looked away. “They didn’t have to take this on,” he said. “They could have said no. I did. Sometimes, you gotta make a choice.”

  He grabbed her by the arm and pointed toward the edge of the house, where four motorcycles skidded to a hard stop. Soledad pushed herself forwa
rd, trying desperately to block out the screaming. The gunfire continued near the helicopter site as a few of the bikers fired on those trying to help their wounded friends. “You’ve got to stop them,” she told Foster. “Make it stop.”

  “I can’t,” Foster said. “It’s too late for that. You know that.”

  Foster bodily picked her up and put her on a motorcycle behind one of the militiamen. She clung to his leather jacket as he twisted the throttle and peeled out, spinning his wheels before they caught hard ground, the bike leaping forward. Foster followed on his own motorcycle.

  “Don’t look back,” Soledad whispered to herself. “Don’t look back.”

  But she did, just long enough to see, in the distance, some of the flaming men go out, leaving nothing but smoking chars of flesh.

  Detroit, Michigan

  Levon felt the air around him crackle with energy. It was something he had felt before, just before a fight—the switch that went off in the brain that notched the senses higher, made them more sensitive. The adrenaline flowing through the veins. The feeling that you’d burst from the inside out if the fight didn’t commence, and right quick.

  This felt like those fights multiplied exponentially.

  That’s because Levon knew that he wasn’t alone this time. It wasn’t him taking on some gang rival or him debating some white Republican Club sucker at the U. This was going to be flames and blood and struggle and power. This was going to be death and mayhem and hope and glory. This was going to be fucking big.

  All Levon needed was the cue.

  He’d discussed the cue ahead of time with the reverend. It would come on television, during a press conference Big Jim planned to hold with the mayor in the aftermath of the Kendrick Malone killing. The killing of another young, innocent black man at the hands of the racist white establishment. The police targeting a kid—an unarmed kid, for God’s sake!—just because he happened to be black and happened to be out at night at the wrong time.