“Find them,” Rios-Parkinson said, now calmly. “But we need to be ready to execute the alternate plan in case you can’t. We know where they are going regardless. We can reacquire them up there and they’ll take us to it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Director.”
“Then do it. And do it right. Because if you do not, you will be accountable.” But, of course, so would Rios-Parkinson, and this disaster could mean the end of everything he had worked for. Unless, of course, he recovered what had been stolen. And if he could capture the spies who had probably been the ones who shot their way in from Utah while doing so, he could turn this fiasco into a coup.
He hung up and considered his hair. It was perfect, projecting the image of efficiency, yet projecting an edge of nonconformity that would fit in well in the circles he navigated. It was a far cry from the white boy dreadlocks he had sported as an undergrad at UCLA twenty years ago.
And now there were flecks of gray, but that was understandable. He now had responsibilities beyond the minimal requirements of getting up and getting to class as a student. And beyond getting up and getting to class to teach as a graduate student teaching assistant, and then as an assistant professor of political science.
Yes, as the Director of the People’s Bureau of Investigation in the California region, he had many responsibilities.
And perks. He heard his latest one stirring in the bedroom. Rios-Parkinson stepped out of the spacious bathroom into the master bedroom. The south wall was a window looking out over Los Angeles from high in the hills. There was downtown on the left, Century City on the right and beyond that, the ocean. In the distance, hazy and dark, beyond the Palos Verdes Peninsula, was Catalina Island. And, in the bed, a blonde, rising to her elbows.
“You need to get ready,” he said.
“I don’t want to go,” she moaned.
“Education is important,” he replied. “In your case, reeducation to correct the red lies that still infect you. Now get out of bed.”
Rios-Parkinson was not his birth name. Born in Huntington Beach to a housewife mother and an aerospace engineer father, Martin chafed at the unfairness of his position in the social hierarchy of his Orange County public schools. He was no surfer, and no soccer or football player. He was not blonde, and not conventionally handsome. And he was not rich; his parents drove a Ford, not a BMW or even a Volvo like everyone else’s parents.
What he was was clever; his grades were always good right from the beginning, and repeating back what the teachers wanted to hear came easy to him. It occurred to him as early as middle school that it was therefore cruelly unfair that those who were clearly his mental inferiors dominated his little society, and that he was nothing.
And the anger grew inside him, the gnawing resentment that the power and respect due him was instead invested in the dull and the frivolous-living Orange County stereotypes that surrounded him. He should be the one walking the halls that everyone greeted. He should be the one they should respect, and fear. He should be the one with the power. But instead, he was nothing, just another kid who wasn’t handsome or athletic who no one noticed and no one ever thought about.
But then, he found his path. In ninth grade, his social studies teacher’s casual leftism offended the default conservatism of his classmates. He was someone who stuck his finger in the eye of everything everyone held dear. He told them their comfy Orange County lifestyle was born from the exploitation of others. He told them that they were pawns of corporations and shadowy rich power brokers who manipulated the system for their benefit. He told them that maybe America was not the greatest country on Earth.
Rios-Parkinson – back then simply “Parkinson” – was fascinated as the former hippie dropped new and powerful words he had never heard before, words that seemed to have the power to knock the other kids back on their heels. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia.
He had never thought much about minorities growing up – there were some around, but no one really seemed to care. Yet Rios-Parkinson found that when he spoke about other’s crimes against race or gender or the like, the tenor of the conversation changed. The assured and the powerful became uncertain and weak, and suddenly he was in control. They were reacting and responding to him for once. And he savored it.
He had never been particularly patriotic, or unpatriotic, but when he was a junior and saw an opportunity, he ran a Mexican flag up the school flag pole, and in the ensuring uproar a television news crew came and put a camera on him and he said, “I reject the racism that the American flag represents.“ All hell broke loose – his parents were beside themselves – and suddenly Martin Parkinson was no longer some brain on the fringes of the Huntington Beach High Class of 2009, but the school’s most famous student.
After he went on Fox News and argued with Bill O’Reilly, a cheerleader led him behind the bleachers and demonstrated to him an unexpected fringe benefit of his notoriety. “I always wanted to do that for someone famous,” she said, wiping her mouth. He was too stunned by the whole experience to respond to her, but not to learn the lesson. This was his path.
Before applying to college, he took the name Rios-Parkinson to honor the Hispanic heritage represented by his great-great-grandmother, whose stepfather had been named Rios and adopted her. He was inspired by some of the news anchors on television. A blonde would be “Susan Wilson” one day on Channel 7, then show up on Channel 5 the next day with a tan calling herself “Susana Wilson-Suarez.” He understood the game.
That he had not a drop of actual Hispanic blood was beyond the point. He only knew that checking the “Hispanic” box on his application would up his chances for acceptance exponentially.
At UCLA he insinuated himself into the network of leftist organizations and groups, learning to navigate their intricate power structures and becoming fluent in the language of progressivism. He certainly believed the views he embraced, but he never fetishized them as some around him did. He simply believed them because to be a leftist meant he had to believe them. The language of Marxism and critical studies were merely his tools, like the hammer and saw of a carpenter, and he used them to build his career. He earned his PhD and was accepted as a political science professor; his thesis was titled “Genuflection and Reflections: Centralizing Core Paradigms of Racism and Sexist Power Structures for Progressive Empowerment.”
For years he was in the forefront of organizing to subvert and disrupt the stable, prosperous society that he had inherited. During the waning months of the Obama presidency, he helped blow up any incident where a cop was forced to shoot a criminal into a fresh cause. Facts, he found, were beside the point. Truth, he learned, was simply an abstract concept that served only to distract from the all-important narrative. Who cares if the victim was a thug, if he had pulled a gun? That was mere objective truth, the weakest and least important kind. Instead, Rios-Parkinson learned to offer a new truth – that the victim’s hands were up, that he was slaughtered by a laughing cop with KKK ties while he walked from the school where he was an honor roll student on his way to the local church to help feed the homeless. Narrative truth—that was the only truth that mattered.
And when radical racist leftists declared war on police officers and murdered them in deliberate ambushes, he smiled. It was action, striking a blow, and it was working. Between the threats to their lives and the threat to their livelihoods and even their freedom if they were caught on camera using force against some criminal, the police withdrew. Crime rose, but Rios-Parkinson and his cohort savored the instability. Unburdened by any affection or affinity to norms, traditions, or the rule of law, they would not merely survive but prosper in the coming chaos.
And when the Crisis erupted, Rios-Parkinson was ready. Certainly, the sickly Hillary Clinton had been nothing like the president he and his fellow travelers truly wanted – she gave a pittance to the progressives, just enough to keep them with her, while lavishing her largesse on her Wall Street and corporate cronies. But when about half the country simply r
efused to obey her executive orders regarding gun confiscation from law-abiding citizens, illegal alien legalization, and the destruction of their carbon energy industries, Rios-Parkinson and his allies saw their chance.
Rios-Parkinson instinctively knew what he needed to do – organize and turn out as many people as they could find into the streets demanding she act to suppress the rebellion. And so, the same man who a month before had burned the American flag, calling it the “Swastika of rape culture,” was now clutching it and holding it close, demanding that the President defend it against some enemies – not foreign (he tended to side with those), just domestic. Destroy the red traitors once and for all!
He saw another chance when the military sat on its collective hands, refusing to budge – not that it could do much budging, considering the massive desertions and the sheer number of sergeants who simply shrugged when reporting to the few remaining Clinton-loyal officers that their units’ vehicles just wouldn’t seem to run for some reason. Rios-Parkinson began to organize a People’s Militia – militias had suddenly become in vogue again – to take action in support of the President. The media, slavishly loyal to the ruling elite on the coasts, eagerly covered this “spontaneous” and “patriotic” movement.
In reality, the leftist militias that sprang up in blue cities around the country were gigantic clusterfucks composed of bored students, convicts, whiny social justice warriors, and the occasional radicalized veteran. Naturally, it was always the one guy who had served as a latrine orderly in Baghdad and was now a sophomore who got interviewed on the news while being identified as an “Army Combat Vet.” The 300-pound, tattooed, genderqueered feminist who cried and screamed about patriarchy after tripping and scrapping her bloated cankle while trying to learn to march never appeared on screen.
For most Americans, the Crisis was a terrifying time of uncertainty and fear. For Rios-Parkinson, it was liberating. He abandoned his teaching to assume command of the Patrice Lumumba Battalion based in Westwood. When his paycheck stopped coming, he sent 20 of his “troops” over to the provost’s office. The checks started arriving again.
He called himself a “colonel” – he looked at Wikipedia to learn the military ranks. Every day at noon, the ragged five hundred or so (the number varied as bored enlistees dropped out and others joined) marched down to Wilshire Boulevard and the federal building, carrying a wide selection of mismatched firearms and stopping traffic. Eventually, they “liberated” the Veterans’ Administration complex west across the 405, evicting the elderly residents and setting up their own little realm. No one challenged them, so they pushed harder.
The LAPD was well aware of the sympathy of the mayor and the governor for this movement – Governor Newsom actually appeared with them and, standing beside Rios-Parkinson, who had taken to wearing a black beret he had found in an Aardvark’s recycled clothing shop, called the mob “patriots and heroes.” Ordered to stand down, law enforcement did nothing
Not when the militia marched in the streets, with guns, in violation of the anti-open carry laws passed to harass decent citizens by the same politicians who were now applauding.
Not when the militia decided to “liberate” goods and merchandise from the local stores.
Not when the militia began threatening and then attacking their critics.
And Rios-Parkinson soon found himself taking calls from the power brokers in the city who would never have taken his call just months before.
Commanding the militia – actually, the militia theoretically ran on consensus, with frequent meetings where the participants wiggled their fingers to show approval because clapping traumatized some violence survivors – came naturally to him. But he soon found the more doctrinaire members growing tiresome. They preferred endless debate and ideological purity, while Rios-Parkinson was learning the cruel, relentless logic of action and force. Guns were bad yesterday because people he hated had them; today they were good because his people were the only ones who had them.
He found this new freedom from ideology liberating. He found he loved, and understood, force. Because only from force came real power.
But some of the practical matters he did not understand. He was given a .38 revolver and, in his condo, he accidentally shot off the tip of his little toe and had to hobble in pain for a month. A number of his “soldiers” ended up accidentally killing themselves with firearms. These tragedies, of course, never made the news. Rios-Parkinson early on made it a point to deploy a team of People’s Observers to each of the local television stations every morning to ensure that coverage was “fair” and “honest.” After several producers were beaten, and the police never came, the stations capitulated. Rios-Parkinson found himself in control of the local media. Much of each broadcast was devoted to the perfidy of the red state traitors, and soon it became clear that the negotiations that would lead to the Treaty of St. Louis were going to result in the country breaking in two, to the promises of a bright future free of the knuckle-dragging racists who infested the vast wasteland between the coasts.
And Rios-Parkinson learned about people. He learned that the students and the activists he had spent years with talking about revolution and action were prepared for neither. They were soft, sometimes even sentimental. He ushered them out of the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, preferring instead the homeless kids he found on the streets and gave food and shelter, and the petty (sometimes, not so petty) criminals who joined up. Of course, they were not really criminals – the true criminals were the people who had cast them into the dungeons of the prison-industrial complex. So they had stolen, so they had robbed, so they had done – allegedly – worse things? Rios-Parkinson found they had the edge the soft, suburban social justice warriors lacked. They could give and take a punch. And they were very, very useful.
Soon, Rios-Parkinson was commanding an army of 2,000 of them within the heart of Los Angeles. And the police were powerless to stop him. In fact, once the Treaty was signed and the borders were set, most of the cops simply stopped showing up for work. They were among the first to see where this was heading, and therefore they headed east from Los Angeles to the red states to start over.
In the wake of the Split, the presidential election was cancelled due to the “emergency” and was thereafter never uncancelled. In the blue states, the liberal elite that was left in complete control suddenly found itself without any constraints whatsoever. It wrote a new Constitution, a better one (they promised), one not infected with the virus of racism and oppression inherent in the one it replaced, written as it was by a bunch of dead white males a zillion years before. There was a right to free speech, but not to racism or hate crimes or a variety of other exceptions—exceptions inserted by design to swallow the rule. The same with the freedom of the press and assembly. You could print what you wanted and protest what you wanted, assuming what you wanted was what the ruling elite wanted.
And Rios-Parkinson was now part of that ruling elite, as his militia was folded into the new police force and he was installed as the police chief. The past police chief was by then retired to Norman, Oklahoma, having decided that Los Angeles deserved whatever miseries it decided to inflict upon itself. So when the new People’s Constitution was signed– the new government had begun using the modifier “People’s” to rub the new reality in the faces of the reactionaries who remained in the blue states – Rios-Parkinson was on the VIP reviewing stand for the parade. Except no one called them VIPs – they were just fellow citizens, citizens who merely happened to have power. And despite having 218 amendments in the New Bill of Rights – which included the rights to a job, a home, to “climate justice” and “to be free of cisnormative bias,” those were the only people with any power at all.
And now Rios-Parkinson was where he had always known he belonged – wielding power. He left the police department (which was soon nationalized, along with all other law enforcement organizations) to take over the California branch of the People’s Bureau of Investigations, which also prov
ided oversight of the People’s Security Force. In doing so, he found himself among the handful of California’s most powerful men and women and non-binary persons (the current mayor of Los Angeles was named simply “Chris” and refused to accept any specific gender identity; “xe” was Chris’s preferred pronoun).
And as a member of the elite, he had claimed Amanda Ryan.
“Get up,” he said again. She did, but slowly, and it grated on him. It did not occur to him at any conscious level that she looked quite like one of the affluent Orange County blondes who had ignored him through most of his youth; that weirdness was submerged deep in his roiling psyche. But he understood that he derived a great deal of satisfaction from the fact that she belonged to him, both physically and emotionally.
And though he never gave it any specific thought, he understood that his satisfaction would increase exponentially when he had fully broken her to his will.
“Why do I have to go? I’m sick of school. All they do is talk,” she said.
“You are contaminated with red state bullshit, Amanda. And you need to be decontaminated.” He went over to the bureau where she kept her things and picked up her purse, reaching in to pull out a wallet of photographs that Amanda often flipped through.
“Put that down,” she hissed.
“You can’t seem to give up your old life, can you, Amanda?” he said, smiling a reptilian grin. “These people, these family and friends, they are all dead to you. Or, at least, they should be. You are lucky, you know. Most people who crossover end up in rehabilitation camps, like the friends you came with, and the camps are not quite as comfortable as this place.”
Amanda moved toward him and took the wallet, replaced it in her purse, and put it back on the bureau top. Then she walked over to a credenza where she kept several bottles of imported whiskey and poured herself a tumbler full.
“It is eight in the morning,” Rios-Parkinson sneered.
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