The Alien Years Read online

  The second consequence of the laser attack was that sealed canisters stored in eleven of the world’s major cities sprang open within three hours of the Denver event, releasing microorganisms of an apparently synthetic nature that induced an infectious and highly contagious disease of a previously unknown kind across much of the planet. The symptoms were inordinately high fever followed by structural degradation of the larger veins and arteries followed by systemic breakdown and death. There was no known treatment. Quarantines seemed to have little value. Of those infected, about a third, who evidently had some sort of natural immunity, threw off the fever before reaching the stage of circulatory-system breakdown and recovered completely The rest died within three or four days of onset.

  It was Doug Gannett who brought the news to the Colonel, in the early days when limited e-mail communication still was possible. “Everybody’s dying out there,” he said. “I’m getting the same story from whoever’s been able to stay on-line. It’s a huge epidemic and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it.”

  The Colonel, raging within, reacted outwardly only with a weary nod. “Well, we can try to hide from it,” he said. He called the ranch hands together and told the ones who lived on the premises that they would continue to be free to go down into Santa Barbara, as before, but that they would not be allowed to return if they did. As for the ones who lived in town, mainly in the Mexican neighborhood on the south side, he let them know that they could choose between remaining at the ranch or going back down to their homes and families, but that if they did leave the ranch there would be no coming back.

  “The same, of course, goes for all of you,” he told the various assembled Carmichaels, giving each of them a long, slow look. “You go out there, you don’t get back in. No exceptions.”

  “And how long does this rule stay in effect?” Ronnie asked.

  “As long as it needs to,” said the Colonel.

  The worldwide plague continued to rage until early July, bringing what had been left of the world’s economy to a total standstill. Then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, as though the beings who had loosed it upon the world had now concluded that it had done its job to sufficiently good effect.

  The effects had been considerable. On the lofty, isolated hillside where Rancho Carmichael was situated, there had been no impact at all, except for the loss of the ranch hands who had opted to return to their families, and who, it was presumed, had perished with them. Down below, things went quite differently. When the damage finally could be reckoned up, it turned out that close to fifty percent of the world’s population had perished. The actual death rate varied, of course, from country to country, depending on local standards of sanitation and the availability of convalescent care; but none went unscathed, and some were virtually wiped out. Across the face of the world a new kind of Great Silence had fallen, the silence of depopulation. And though some three billion human beings had somehow managed to survive, very few of them had any further inclination to attempt or even consider hostile action against the alien conquerors of Earth.

  3

  NINETEEN YEARS FROM NOW

  The Colonel, waiting out on the ranch-house porch for the members of the Resistance Committee to assemble for the monthly meeting, believed himself to be awake. But in these latter days he moved all too easily between the world of sunlight and the realm of shadows, and as he sat there slowly rocking, lost in swirling daydreams, he found it difficult to be certain which side of the line he was really on.

  It was a bright April day, clear and dry after one of the wettest rainy seasons on record. The air was warm and vibrant, and the hills were thick with a dense, lush growth of tall green grass that soon would be taking on its tawny summertime hue.

  A bad business, all that thick grass. Great fuel for the autumn fire season, once it dried out.

  The fires—the fires—

  The Colonel’s drowsy mind drifted backward across the years to show him Los Angeles burning, the day the Entities came. The scene on the television: the angry, reddened sky, the leaping tongues of flame, the gigantic, terrifying black column of smoke rising toward the stratosphere. Houses exploding like firecrackers, bim bam boom, block after block. And the plucky little firefighting planes soaring above the holocaust, trying to get down close enough to do some good with their cargoes of water and fire-retardant chemicals.

  His brother Mike aboard one of those planes—Mike—

  Up there over the fire, threading a difficult course through the treacherous upgusts of heat and wind—

  Be careful, Mike—please, Mike—

  “It’s okay, Grandpa. I’m right here.”

  The Colonel blinked his eyes open. Took in the scene. No fires, no smoke, no little planes tossing about. Just the wide cloudless sky, the green hills all around, and a tall fair-haired adolescent boy with the long red scar on his cheek standing beside him. Anse’s son, that one was. The nicer one. The Colonel observed that he was slouching in his chair, and pulled himself irritatedly upright.

  “Did I say something, boy?”

  “You called my name. ‘Mike,’ you said. ‘Be careful, Mike!’ But I wasn’t doing anything, just waiting for you to wake up. Were you having a dream?”

  “I might have been, yes. A daydream, anyway. What time is it?”

  “Half past one. My father sent me out to tell you that the Resistance meeting is about ready to get going.”

  From the Colonel, a grunt of assent, awareness. But he remained seated where he was.

  A moment later Anse himself appeared, coming slowly toward them across the broad flagstone patio. His limp seemed a little worse than usual today, the Colonel thought. He sometimes wondered whether it was all just a theatrical act, that limp of Anse’s, an excuse for him to do a little extra drinking. But the Colonel had not yet forgotten the white shard of bone jutting through Anse’s flesh after the horse had fallen on him three years back, down along the steep trail leading to the well. Nor the hellish sweaty hour when he and Ronnie had struggled to clean the wound and set the fracture, two amateur surgeons working without benefit of anesthesia.

  “What’s going on?” Anse asked the boy gruffly. “Didn’t I tell you to bring your grandfather inside for the meeting?”

  “Well, Grandpa was asleep, and I didn’t feel good about waking him.”

  “Not sleeping,” said the Colonel, “just dozing.”

  “Seemed mighty like sleep to me, Grandpa. You were dreaming, and you called out my name.”

  “Not his name,” the Colonel explained to Anse. “Mike’s. In fact I was thinking about the day of the fire. Remembering.”

  Anse turned to his son and said, “He means his brother. The one you were named for.”

  The boy said, “I know. The one who died in battle against the Entities.”

  “He died battling a fire that the Entities happened to start, by accident, the day they first landed,” the Colonel said. “That’s not quite the same thing.” But he knew it was hopeless. The legends were already beginning to entrench themselves; in twenty or thirty years no one would know fact from fantasy. Well, in twenty years he wouldn’t give a damn.

  “Come on,” Anse said, offering the Colonel a hand. “Let’s go inside, Dad.”

  Rising from his chair with all the swiftness he could summon, the Colonel shook the hand away. “I can manage,” he said testily, knowing exactly how testy he sounded, knowing too that he sounded that way too much of the time now. It wasn’t anything that he could help. He was seventy-four, and usually felt considerably older than that these days. He hadn’t expected that. He had always felt younger than his years. But there were no medicines any more that could turn back the clock for you when you began to get old, as there had been fifteen or twenty years ago, and doctoring was practiced now, mostly, by people without training who looked things up in whatever medical books they might have on hand and hoped for the best. So seventy-four was once again a ripe old age, beginning to approach the limit.

>   They walked slowly into the house, the stiff-jointed old man and the limping younger one. A cloudy aura of alcohol fumes surrounded Anse like a helmet.

  “Leg bothering you a lot?” the Colonel asked.

  “Comes and goes. Some days worse than others. This is one of the bad ones.”

  “And a little booze helps, does it? But there isn’t much of the old stock left, I’d imagine.”

  “Enough for a few more years,” Anse said. He and Ronnie had, the Colonel knew, descended into deserted Santa Barbara one morning after the Great Plague had at last abated—a ghost town, was Santa Barbara now, inhabited only by a few spectral squatters—and had cleaned out most of the contents of an abandoned liquor warehouse they had found there. “After that, if I live that long, I’ll rig up a still, I guess. That’s not a lost art yet.”

  “You know, I wish you’d take it easier on the drinking, Son.”

  Anse hesitated for just a beat before replying, and the Colonel knew that he was fighting off anger. Anger rose all too quickly in Anse these days, but he seemed better at controlling it than he once had been.

  “I wish a lot of things were different from what they are, but they aren’t going to be,” Anse said tightly. “We do what we can to get through the day.—Mind the door, Dad. Here you go. Here.”

  The members of the Resistance Committee—they had changed the name of it a few years back; Army of Liberation had begun to seem much too grandiose—had gathered in the dining room. They stood at once as the Colonel entered. A tribute to the valiant old chairman, yes. However pathetic the valiant old chairman had become, however superannuated. Anse did most of the work these days, Anse and Ronnie. But Anson Senior, the Colonel, was still chairman, at least in name. He chose to accept the accolade at face value, acknowledging it with a cool smile, stiff little nods to each of them.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “Please—sit, if you will—”

  He stood. He could still do that much. Square-shouldered, straight-backed as ever. Standing here before them, he felt much less the sleepy oldster nodding off on the porch, much more the keen-minded military strategist of decades past, the vigorous and incisive planner, the shrewd leader of men, the enemy of self-deception and failure of inner discipline and all the other kinds of insidious moral sloppiness.

  Looking toward Anse, the Colonel said, “Is everybody here?”

  “All but Jackman, who sends word that he couldn’t swing an exit permit from L.A. because of a sudden labor-requisition reassignment, and Quarles, whose sister seems to have started keeping company with a quisling and who therefore doesn’t think it’s a smart idea for him to come up here for the meeting today.”

  “Is the sister aware of Quarles’s Resistance activities?”

  “Not clear,” Anse said. “Maybe he needs to check that out before he feels it’s safe to begin attending again.”

  “At any rate, we have a quorum,” the Colonel said, taking the vacant seat beside Anse.

  There were ten other committee members present, all of them men. Two were his sons Anse and Ronnie, one his son-in-law Doug Gannett, one his nephew Paul: with the Carmichael ranch standing high and safe above everything, all alone on its mountainside, untouched by the horrors of the plague year and largely unaffected by the transformations that had overtaken the world’s shrunken population in the decade since, the local Resistance Committee had become virtually a Carmichael family enterprise.

  Of course there were other Resistance Committees elsewhere, in California and beyond it, and Liberation Armies, and Undergrounds, and other such things. But with communications even within what once had been the United States so chaotic and unpredictable, it was hard to keep in touch with these small, elusive groups in any consistent way, and easy to develop the illusion that you and these few men that were here with you were just about the only people on Earth who still maintained the fiction that the Entities would someday be driven from the world.

  The meeting now began. Meetings of this group followed a rigid format, as much of a ritual as a solemn high mass.

  An invocation of the Deity, first. Somehow that had crept into the order of events three or four years back, and no one seemed willing to question its presence. Jack Hastings was always the man who intoned the prayer: a former business associate of Ronnie’s from San Diego, who had had some kind of religious conversion not long after the Conquest, and was, so it certainly seemed, passionately sincere about his beliefs.

  Hastings rose now. Touched his fingertips together, solemnly inclined his head.

  “Our Father, who looketh down from heaven upon our unhappy world, we beseech You to lend Your might to our cause, and to help us sweep from this Your world the creatures who have dispossessed us of it.”

  The words were always the same, blandly acceptable to all, no particular sectarian tinge, though Ronnie had privately given the Colonel to understand that Hastings’s own religion was some kind of very strange neo-apocalyptic Christian sect, speaking in tongues, handling of serpents, things like that.

  “Amen,” said Ronnie loudly, and Sam Bacon half a second later, and then all the others, the Colonel included. The Colonel had never been much for any sort of organized religious activity, not even in Vietnam where the body-bags were brought in daily; but he was no atheist, either, far from it, and aside from all that he understood the value of formal observance in maintaining the structures of life in a time of stress.

  After the prayer came the Progress Report, usually given by Dan Cantelli or Andy Jackman, and more appropriately termed the No Progress Report. This was an account of such success, or lack of it, that had been attained since the last meeting, especially in the way of penetrating Entity security codes and developing information that might be of value in some eventual attempt at launching an attack against the conquerors.

  In Jackman’s absence, Cantelli delivered the Progress Report today. He was a short, round, indestructible-looking man of about fifty, who had been an olive grower at the upper end of the Santa Ynez Valley before the Conquest, and still was. His entire family, parents and wife and five or six children, had perished in the Great Plague; but he had married again, a Mexican girl from Lompoc, and had four more children now.

  This month’s Progress was, as usual, mainly No Progress. “There was, as you know, a project under way in Seattle last month aimed at finding some means of accessing high-security internal Entity messages and diverting them to Resistance computer centers. I’m sorry to say that that project has ended in complete failure, thanks to the activities of a couple of treacherous borgmanns who wrote counterintrusion software for the Entities. I understand that the Seattle hackers were detected and, I’m afraid, eradicated.”

  “Borgmanns!” muttered Ronnie bitterly. “What we need is a program that will detect and eradicate them!”

  There were nods of approval all around the room.

  The Colonel, puzzled by the strange word, leaned over to Anse and whispered, “Borgmanns? What the devil are borgmanns?”

  “Quislings,” Anse said. “The worst kind of quislings, too, because they don’t just work for the Entities, they actively aid and abet them.”

  “Doing computer stuff, you mean?”

  Anse nodded. “They’re computer experts who show the Entities better ways of spying on us, and teach them how to keep our hackers out of Entity computers. Ronnie tells me that the name came from someone in Europe who was the first to break through into the Entity computer net and offer them his services. He’s the one who showed them how we can link our personal computers to their big ones so that they could order us around more efficiently.”

  The Colonel shook his head sadly.

  Borgmanns. Traitors. There had always been those, in every era of history. Some flaw in human nature, impossible to extirpate. He filed the word away in his memory.

  A new vocabulary was springing up, he realized. Just as Vietnam had produced words like “fragging” and “hooch” and “gook” and “Victor Charlie” that no
one remembered now but old men like him, so, too, did the Conquest seem to be producing its set of special words. Entity. Borgmann. Quisling. Although that last one, he reflected, was actually a retread from Second World War days, recently dusted off and put back into service.

  Cantelli finished his report. Ronnie now stood up and delivered his, which had to do with the Colonel’s own pet enterprise, the establishment of underground educational facilities whose purpose was to instill a passion for the ultimate rebirth of human civilization in the younger generation. It was what the Colonel called “inner resistance,” a sort of holding action, aimed at the maintenance of the old patriotic traditions, a belief in the ultimate providence of God, a determined resolve to transmit to future Americans some sense of the old-line American values, so that when we finally did get the Entities off our backs we would still have some recollection of what we had been before they came.

  The Colonel was only too thoroughly aware of the irony of placing Ronnie in charge of any project that was centered around such concepts as the ultimate providence of God and the maintenance of grand old patriotic American traditions. But the Colonel didn’t have the energy to handle the work himself any more, nor did Anse seem capable of taking it on, and Ronnie had volunteered for the assignment with a hearty if somewhat suspicious show of enthusiasm. He spoke now with eloquence and zeal of what was being done by way of sending out instructional material to groups newly organized in Sacramento, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and San Diego. He made it sound, the Colonel thought, as though he believed there really was some point in it.

  And there was. There was. Even in this strange new world of borgmanns and quislings, where people seemed to be falling all over themselves in their eagerness to collaborate with the Entities. You had to keep on working toward what you knew to be right, even so, the Colonel thought. Just as in that other era of hooches and fraggings and gooks and all the other fleeting terminology of that misbegotten war, there still had been sound fundamental reasons for taking action to contain the spread of imperialist Communism throughout the world, however cockeyed in actuality our involvement in Vietnam might have been.