True Allegiance

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.”