Ben Shapiro - True Allegiance

“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 forward, 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.

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.