Free Tyrannia by Alan Deniro

her exercise book.
    “THIRD PERSON EXERCISE: MOMENT OF PLOT RESOLUTION
    “Charity McClune knew who had come to kill them: Dumbocrats, in league with homosexual imams and ecoterrorist Jews, with Mexican footsoldiers brought in from their misguided revolutions, financed by turban-wearing geothermal vice lords from India. They would stop at nothing. She had to stop them. How fitting that the seeds of their own destruction would be carried on a monorail—the transportation of choice for Communists and their broken dreams. She smirked as she assessed her handiwork. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, blue like the glacier waters of her hometown in Free Alaska. She knew the price of freedom and was willing to pay any price for it. Those other people, they were full of hate for her and her teacher, a great American—”
    He flipped forward, hands barely under control.
    “Only one right path lies before her. In the pure fire of justice her world would be cleansed. Looking up, she almost saw in a cloudface her father’s face, smiling down on her. She missed him so much and the wind pressed up a gentle breeze on her face as her chief colonel nodded.
    “‘Bring down the noise, Charity!’ he exclaimed, his jaw set.
    “As she clenched the trigger—”
    Roger closed the notebook. “Total shit,” he said, falling asleep, drifting backward to the air force bases of his prime, when he was a prime mover, an advisor, a prophet of policy. No one would ever understand, not even the apprentice. The only ones who understood were long dead, at one time laid to rest in desecrated Arlington graves: the rear admirals who requested signed copies of Fierce Power by the boxload for mandatory frigate book clubs, the Secretary of Information and Coercion who sent his daughter to shadow him for a week for a school project, and of course the president, the commander-in-chief, his commander-in-chief. Roger imagined that others in the inner circle of Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan must have felt the same thrill—not only to be living at the same time as an architect of history, but to advise great men and great decisions, by sheer accident more than anything else. He was, after all, a writer of stories, an entertainer, and he never let himself forget that. And yet . . . he was there when the world changed. He was there. He was there in the bunker, a mile underneath Minot. El Paso burning, Dallas burning, the District of Columbia cordoned, Chinese peacekeepers amassing on the Canadian border, and the choice resting on heavy shoulders.
    “Tell me what to do,” the president asked him in the bunker’s lounge, velvet upholstery muffling any sound, any Klaxons and shouts. The words and the president’s face echoed in the chambers of his sleep. “Tell me what to do, Roger.”
    “Your advisors, sir . . .” Roger said, swirling his bourbon and looking down into it.
    “I don’t trust them. Don’t trust any of them. You know that, Roger.” The president could get petulant without enough sleep, but who wouldn’t?
    “I do know that, sir. I would . . .” Roger set his bourbon down on a stack of his own paperbacks on the coffee table. A poster of Roger on the door stared back at Roger—arms crossed, wearing sunglasses, an ammo belt draped over his shoulders like a scarf, a baseball cap that had embroidered on it: DON’T TREAD ON ME, and underneath that: KILL ZONE. Roger tried to think of what that Roger would do, what Mick Solon would do.
    “You have to root out the problem at its source, sir.” The commander-in-chief stared at Roger. “Do you understand what I mean, sir?”
    The president thought about this, licking his lips. “Do you mean to bomb Mexico City? Nuclearly?”
    Roger shrugged and tried to keep his eyes on the president. When the president didn’t say anything, Roger said, “Have you seen the war games for that, sir? With the bunker busters?” Roger had no idea whether war games for that even existed, or what his real