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 hone 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
