The Alien Years Page 11

  In the old days Anse would have taken the San Diego Freeway north to Highway 101 and zipped right on up to the ranch. But the San Diego was a mess from Long Beach to Carson because it had never been repaved after the Troubles, and you didn’t want to go inland to take the Golden State Freeway, the other main northbound artery, because the Golden State ran straight through bandido territory and there were vigilante roadblocks everywhere, and so the only thing to do was to creep along surface streets from town to town, avoiding the more dangerous ones, and picking up a stretch of usable freeway wherever you could. You went zigzagging on and on through places like Garden Grove and Artesia and Compton and in the fullness of time you found yourself getting back to Highway 405 in Culver City, which was one of the safer parts of central Los Angeles.

  From there it was a reasonably decent straight run north to the San Fernando Valley and you could, with only a couple of minor detours, get yourself on Highway 118 somewhere near Granada Hills, and that took you clear on out to the coast, eventually, via Saticoy and Ventura. Anse didn’t like driving 118 because it brought him uncomfortably close to the burned-out area where his Uncle Mike had died on the day of the big fires. Mike had been practically like an older brother to him. But taking that route was the most efficient way to do things, now that the Entities had shut off Highway 101 between Agoura and Thousand Oaks. Simply shut it off, northbound and southbound, big concrete-block wall right across all eight lanes at each end of the requisitioned zone.

  They were building some sort of facility for themselves in there, it seemed. Using human labor. Slave labor. The way it went, Anse had heard, was that the gang boss, who was human but who had had the Touch and the Push applied to him, which left him considerably altered, came to your house with half a dozen armed men and said, “Come. Work.” And you went with them, and you worked. Or else they shot you. If you didn’t like the work and were nimble on your feet, you ran away when you got the chance and went underground. Those were the only choices, so it seemed. But once you had the Touch, once you got the Push, you had no choices left at all.

  The Touch. The Push.

  Oh, brave new world! And a merry Christmas to all.

  It had been a difficult drive for Anse, hands clenching on the wheel, eyes fixed rigidly on the trash-strewn road, hour after hour. You didn’t want to hit anything that might hurt the tires; new tires were impossible to get and your old ones could take only so much fixing. You didn’t want to damage the car in any way at any time, for the same reason. Anse’s car was an ’03 Honda Acura, in decent enough shape but beginning to get a little tired around the edges. He had been thinking of trading it in for something bigger, just when the Invasion happened. But that was before everything changed.

  There weren’t any more new cars, period. There was a big Honda factory somewhere in Ohio that had survived the wild period of lunacy that had followed the Conquest and supposedly was still turning out replacement parts that came up to specs, only they weren’t shipping anything west, apparently because they didn’t trust the west coast currency that had begun to circulate in place of federal money. The Honda facilities in California, those that hadn’t been wrecked in the Troubles, were being run on a hit-or-miss basis by the people that had been managing them the day the Entities came, who had seized them a few days after contact was lost with the parent company in Japan. But they didn’t seem to be a very competent bunch of managers, and you couldn’t count on the quality of what their factories turned out, assuming you could get the part you needed in the first place, which wasn’t often easy.

  Repair, not replacement, was the order of the day; and if you had the bad luck to total your car somehow, you had essentially totaled your life, and you might as well just sign up with one of the Entity work gangs, for whom transportation, at least, was never any problem. They gave you the Touch; they gave you the Push; and then you went wherever they said, and did whatever they wanted you to do, and that was that.

  Anse pulled the car into the gravel-topped lot just north of the big main building and staggered out, stiff, cross-eyed with fatigue. He had driven the whole way himself. Carole still was willing to drive within about a ten-mile radius from their home, but she was spooked nowadays about freeway driving, or driving in any sort of unfamiliar neighborhood, and he did all of that now. It was something that they never even discussed.

  The Colonel was waiting for them on the back porch of the ranch house. “Look, guys, there’s Grandpa,” Anse said. “Give him a big hello.” But the kids were already out of the car and running toward him. The Colonel scooped them up like puppies, first the twins in one big swoop, then Jill afterward.

  “He looks good,” Carole said. “Stands as straight as ever, still has that sparkle in his eyes—”

  Anse shook his head. “Very tired, is how he looks to me. And old. A lot older than he looked at Eastertime. His hair is thinning, finally. His face looks gray.”

  “He’s—what, sixty-eight, seventy?”

  “Only sixty-four,” Anse said. But Carole was right: the Colonel was aging fast. His trim, erect look had always been deceptive. The true weight of his years had been thundering down upon him ever since the first day of the Troubles. That time when darkness had fallen across the world, panic had been widespread, the bonds of civil behavior had for a time been loosed as though they had never existed, had been the ultimate nightmare for the Colonel, Anse knew: the instantaneous collapse of all discipline and morality, the shedding of all civility. The world had come back a long way from the ghastly early days just after the Conquest, and so had the Colonel. But neither of them was anything like what it had been before, and probably never would be again. The changes showed on the Colonel’s face, as they did everywhere else.

  Anse went crunching across the gravel and let his father gather him into his arms. He was an inch taller than the Colonel, and thirty or forty pounds heavier, but it was the older man who was in charge of the embrace, the Colonel enfolding Anse first and Anse hugging back. That was the deal. The Colonel was in charge, always. Always.

  “You look a little weary, Dad,” Anse said. “Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s all right, yes. As right as can be, considering.” Even his voice had lost a little of the old ring. “I’ve been negotiating with the Entities, and that’s tiresome stuff.”

  Anse lifted one eyebrow. “Negotiating?”

  “Trying to. Tell you later, Anse.—By God, it’s good to see you, boy! But you look a little peaked yourself. It must have been a nasty drive.” He punched Anse in the arm, sharply, a hard shot, knuckle against meat. Anse punched back, just as sincerely. That was also something that they always did.

  They had had some difficult times, Anse and the Colonel. There was a spread of just twenty-one years in their ages, which for a time, when the Colonel was in his vigorous forties and fifties and Anse was in his twenties and thirties, made the Colonel seem more like Anse’s older brother than his father. They were just enough like each other to have done a goodly amount of butting of heads whenever they came to some area where neither was capable of backing off, and just different enough so that there was plenty of head-butting also when they reached an area of total disagreement.

  Anse’s leaving the Army so young had been one of those bad times. Anse’s spell of heavy drinking, fifteen years back, had been another. As for Anse’s occasional adventures with women other than Carole since his marriage, the Colonel surely knew nothing about those, or he would in all likelihood have killed him. But they loved each other anyway. There was no doubt about that on either side.

  Together Anse and his father pulled the suitcases out of the Honda and the Colonel, stubbornly carrying the heaviest one, showed them to their rooms. The ranch house was a huge rambling affair, wings stretching off this way and that, and Anse and Carole always were put up in the best of the guest suites, which had a big bedroom for them and an adjoining smaller one that long-legged golden-haired Jill, who was nine, could share with her four
-year-old twin brothers Mike and Charlie. There was also a nice sitting-room with a view of the sea. Anse was the firstborn son, after all. This was a family that went by the rules.

  The Colonel, taking his leave of them, clapped Anse on the shoulder. “Welcome back, boy.”

  “It’s good to be back.”

  And it was. The ranch was a big, warm, comforting place, nestling securely here on its lofty hillside between the steep mountain wall and the beautiful Pacific, far from the congestion and turmoil and outright daily deadly peril that was most of Southern California. The old stone walls, the slate floors, the sturdy unpretentious furniture, the funny frilly curtains, the innumerable high-ceilinged rooms: how could anyone ever believe, living up here in craggy solitude high above the pretty red rooftops of Santa Barbara, that invincible alien monsters stalked the world at this very moment, randomly choosing human beings to do their bidding as they gradually rearranged the landscape of the world to suit their own incomprehensible needs?

  Jill put herself in charge of getting the boys scrubbed up for dinner. She loved playing mommy, and that lifted a big burden from Carole. As Anse unpacked, Carole turned to him and said, “Do you mind if I shower first? I feel so creaky and edgy, after that long drive. And filthy, too.”

  Anse felt none too fresh himself, and he had done all the work that day. But he told her to go ahead. The dark signs of strain were evident in her. Her lips were clamped tight, her arms were close against her body, her left hand was balled into a fist.

  Carole was still a couple of years short of forty, but she didn’t have much stamina these days. She needed to be coddled, and Anse coddled her. Carrying the twins had taken a lot out of her; and then, two years later, the Conquest, the Troubles—those uncertain terrifying weeks of living without gas or electricity, without television or telephone, boiling all your water and trying to keep clean with sponge baths and cooking your scrappy meals over a Sterno-powered stove and taking turns sitting up all night with the shotgun, in case one of the looting parties that were roaming Orange County just then had decided that it was about time for them to investigate your nice tidy suburban neighborhood—those few weeks had wrecked her altogether. Carole had never been designed for frontier life. Even now she was still only partly recovered from that terrible time.

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she undressed. One of his little covert pleasures: after eleven years he still loved the mere sight of her body, still youthful, almost girlish—the smooth supple legs, the small high breasts, the cascade of shining golden hair and that tight, springy little triangle, golden also, at the base of her belly. The familiar body, no surprises there but still exciting, still beloved, and yet so often betrayed. What had impelled him to step out on her again and again with those other, lesser women was something that Anse had never been able to understand. Nor had he ever really stopped feeling the pull from time to time.

  A defect in the family genes, he supposed. A breakdown of the iron Carmichael virtue. The blood running thin at last, after all those generations of rugged God-fearing super-patriotic righteous-living American folks.

  Not that Anse thought for a moment that his father was any kind of saint, neither he nor any of that long line of upright Carmichaels preceding him into the misty past. But he could not imagine the Colonel ever cheating on his wife, or even wanting to. Or flanging up some plausible excuse to get himself out of a dangerous or unpleasant assignment. Or putting a joint to his lips and taking a deep drag to while away some dreary night in Saigon. Or in any other way deviating from the proper path as he understood it. Anse couldn’t really even see the old man tiptoeing into the bedroom of that cute young Peggy of his to grab himself a little late-life fun.

  Well, maybe the part about smoking a joint, yes. Considering that it had been the 1970s then, and Vietnam. But not any of the rest of it. The Colonel was a man of discipline, first and foremost. He must have been that way right from the cradle. Whereas Anse’s own life had been a constant struggle between the things he wanted to do and the things he knew he ought to do, and though by and large he did not consider himself to be a disgrace to the family’s staunch traditions, he knew that he had fallen from the true and righteous path many times more than he should, and most likely would again. In all probability his father knew it too, though not the full extent of his sins, oh, no, not nearly.

  For Anse the mitigating factor in all this self-flagellation was that he was hardly the only member of the family who was something less than perfect. In the Colonel’s generation there had been Mike, Anse’s brooding, irascible uncle, dutifully putting in his time in the military for a little while, and just as dutifully doing the volunteer-firefighter thing that ultimately had killed him, but otherwise living such a strange reclusive irregular life, and eventually marrying that weird loopy jewelry-making Los Angeles woman whom the Colonel had loathed so much. And Anse’s own siblings had the taint too: Rosalie, for instance, whose adolescence, Anse knew, had been one long secret circus of frantic promiscuity that would have sent the old man into apoplexy if he had the slightest inkling of it, though she had long since cleaned up her act. Or brother Ronnie—

  Oh, God, yes, brother Ronnie—

  “We’re all invited to the ranch for the holidays,” Anse had said to brother Ronnie two weeks before, in the deepest Southland where all three of the Colonel’s children had their homes. “Rosalie and Doug, and Paul and Helena, and Carole and me and the kids,” Anse said. “And you.”

  Ronnie was the southernmost sibling of all, in La Jolla, just outside San Diego. Anse had driven all the way down there to deliver Ronnie’s invitation in person. Once upon a time La Jolla had been about an hour’s trip from Costa Mesa on the San Diego Freeway, but it wasn’t an easy trip any more, nor a safe one. His brother lived a lively bachelor life in a nice oceanfront condominium there, pink walls, thick carpets, sauna and spa, big picture windows, a million-dollar place purchased with the profits from some shady pre-Conquest venture Anse had never wanted to know anything about. The less Anse knew about his younger brother’s daily existence, the better: that had long been his policy.

  Some houses on the landward side of Ronnie’s street were heaps of blackened rubble, destroyed in the Troubles and never rebuilt, but Ronnie’s own place looked fine. That was the way Ronnie’s luck worked.

  “Me?” Ronald Carmichael had cried, throwing up his hands in that smarmy mock-astonished way of his. The color deepened on his already ruddy face. He was a big-boned fair-haired man who looked as if he might easily run to fat before long, though in fact his body was muscular and solid. “You’ve got to be joking. I haven’t exchanged a word with him in five years!”

  “You’re invited, though. He’s your father and he says come for Christmas, and this year he put a little extra spin on it. I don’t know why, but he made it sound urgent. You can’t say no.”

  “Sure I can. He made it perfectly clear to me way back then that he didn’t want anything whatever to do with me, and I’ve made my peace with that. We’ve been getting along very nicely without each other and I don’t see any reason to change that now.”

  “Well, I do. This year, apparently, something special is up. He said you were on the guest list this year, and this year, pal, you’re going to be there. I’m simply not going to let you throw your own father’s Christmas invitation back in his face.”

  But there hadn’t been any invitation, had there? Not directly from the Colonel to Ron, no. The old man had asked Anse to do the dirty work for him, and Ronnie took quick, easy advantage of that fact: “Look, Anse, let him speak to me himself, if he wants me there so badly.”

  “That’s asking a lot of him, Ronnie. He can’t unbend that far, not yet, not after all that’s happened between you. But he wants you to come, that I know. It’s his way of making peace. I think you ought to come. I want you to come.”

  “What the hell does he want me there for? Why do you? Obviously he still despises me. You know that he thinks I’m no
thing more than a con man.”

  “Well? Aren’t you?”

  “Very funny, Anse.”

  “This year he’ll stay off your case. I promise you that.”

  “I bet he will. Look, Anse, you know goddamned well that if I show up, there’ll just be another fight. It’ll spoil Christmas for everyone.”

  “Ronnie—”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Anse said sharply, looking straight into his brother’s tricky, hooded, intensely blue Carmichael eyes and doing his patented imitation of the Colonel’s crispest I-take-no-prisoners tone of voice. “I’m notifying him of your acceptance. You be there, that’s all.”

  “Hey, now, Anse—”

  “Done and done, kiddo, and that’s that. One way or another, get your ass up to Santa Barbara by the afternoon of December 23.”

  It sounded good as he said it, plenty of the old military zing in his tone. And Ron had shrugged and smiled in that charming, ingratiating way of his, and nodded and told him that he would give it real careful thought. Which was, of course, Ronnie’s usual way of saying no. Anse had no more expectation that Ron was going to make an appearance at the ranch than he did that the Entities were going to pack up and go back home tomorrow as a Christmas present to the beleaguered peoples of Earth. He knew what his brother was like. An alien in their midst, was Ronnie. Nothing Carmichael about him except those goddamn blue eyes.

  Well, the Colonel wanted him at the ranch for Christmas, God only knew why, and so Anse had obediently delivered the invitation. But privately he hoped Ronnie would stay home. Or get himself snatched up by a roving band of Entities, as occasionally happened to people, and spend the holiday aboard one of their ships, telling them sweet stories of the babe in the manger. There was no need for Ronnie to be there spoiling the holiday for the rest of them, was there, really? The black sheep, long strayed from the fold. The rotten apple. The bad seed.