Latitude 38

by Ron Hutchison

  “I’m Rosie,” the Latino woman said.

  Diego nodded at each of them, and then stepped to the open door. “It’s okay, Adriana. Come on in.”

  Taking her husband’s hand, Adriana entered the room. She glanced at the people seated before her—she raised her hand to shade the bright light—then she and Diego went over and sat on the bench beside Rosie.

  “We’re Adriana and Diego Sanchez,” Diego said.

  One of the men said “Hi,” but Diego couldn’t tell which one had spoken.

  Diego looked at Adriana and squeezed her hand. She put on a brave face.

  “Another scorcher,” Sam noted, looking at Diego.

  “Yes, set a record.”

  The man nodded with a smile.

  There was a knock at the door and a middle-aged man poked his head into the room. He was small and bony. A graying goatee. His thinning hair was done in a classic comb-over. He clutched a briefcase to his chest.

  “Arnold Cutbirth?” the man asked in crass voice. The corners of his mouth sagged in a permanent sneer.

  “Not here yet,” Rosie said.

  The man came in and took a seat next to Sam. He removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Name’s Henry. Anyone mind if I smoke?” he asked. “I’ve tried to quit. Can’t.”

  “Go ahead and smoke,” Yong said.

  “It’s okay by me,” Rosie said.

  “I was going to anyway.” Henry lit his cigarette.

  Eerie silence.

  “It’s ripe tonight,” Rosie noted, fanning the air.

  “The wind is from the north,” Sam said.

  Rosie nodded with a tense smile. “Uh-huh.”

  “The scrubbers are down,” Yong said. “My cousin works there. He said the scrubbers need to be replaced.”

  “The scrubbers?” Henry said.

  “Yeah, the machines that clean the—”

  “I know what the fuck scrubbers are,” Henry retorted.

  What had once been called Alcatraz Island was now referred to simply as the Inferno. The 12-oven crematorium processed as many as 200 bodies a day. The tall smoke stacks and high-tech exhaust fans did little to reduce the odor of burning flesh, especially when the scrubbers were down. The furnaces blazed day and night.

  “Fried bacon,” Yong said.

  “Beef,” Rosie grimaced. “Burnt beef.”

  “Could we please talk about something else?” Adriana said.

  There was another faint knock at the door and a woman in her twenties entered cautiously. Her hair was brick-red and she was dressed in vintage denim. Her nose and both eyebrows were pierced and her neck bore a small tattoo of some kind. Yong told her that Arnold Cutbirth had not yet arrived and to take a seat. She found a place beside Diego.

  From somewhere in San Francisco Bay there was the sudden and distant whirl of a helicopter followed seconds later by the rumble of machineguns. The automatic fire continued for a few more seconds before it stopped. The twirl of helicopter blades grew faint and then fell silent.

  “Saboteurs,” Yong speculated.

  “From the other side?” Rosie asked.

  “Where else?” a man asked from one darkened corner of the room. “They come by water these days.”

  Diego hadn’t seen the man until now. The man was older, perhaps in his sixties. Seated on a wooden crate in a pool of shadows, he had a shock of white hair.

  “They put in at Bodega Bay,” the white-haired man said.

  More ghostlike silence.

  A ship’s foghorn brayed a warning somewhere in San Francisco Bay, and at that very moment a Neanderthal-like brute pushed through the door and entered the room.

  Diego stifled a gasp.

  3

  What Diego saw was a man who could easily have stepped out of the pages of National Geographic Magazine—the “Early Man” issue. The man’s heavy brow sloped, his massive jaw jutted, and his eyes were set deep inside his large skull. Where his left ear should be was only a gnarly scar. The glare from the naked bulb exaggerated the primordial features of his face, and there was a musty, damp smell about the man. He clutched a black gym bag.

  Diego tried to swallow, but all his spit had suddenly dried up. The man standing before him was the scariest son of a bitch he had ever seen.

  What in God’s name are we getting ourselves into? Diego thought.

  “Diego…?” Adriana muttered, grabbing his hand and squeezing it.

  The man dropped the gym bag on the floor—it made a loud thump and Diego flinched—and stood with his hands on his hips for a full ten seconds, his prehistoric gaze moving from one person to the next.

  “My name is Arnold Cutbirth, and I want you to remember four things,” Cutbirth began in a gruff, loutish voice that Diego recognized from the voicemail. “Your life will depend on what I am about to tell you, so listen well.” His archaic eyes moved from one person to the next. “One, I don’t give a rat’s ass why you want to cross the border. Maybe you think abortion is okay. Maybe you think women have the right to choose. Read my lips. I don’t give a shit what you think. Keep your opinions to yourself.” He paused to allow his words to sink in, his unflagging gaze finding each of them. “Maybe you think homosexuals should have the right to marry, adopt kids.” He looked at Yong and Sam. ”I don’t give a flying fuck about your feelings on the subject. So zip it.”

  Sam had been looking at Cutbirth, but now he lowered his eyes.

  “Maybe you think your ancestors swung from trees by their tails. Maybe you think it should be taught in school. If so, put a cork in it because I couldn’t care less about your feelings pertaining to evolution or any other science, natural or otherwise.”

  Another long pause.

  “Maybe you believe the 28th Amendment to the Constitution should be repealed. Maybe you don’t think states have the right to secede. Here’s a news flash: I don’t care what you believe. Keep your reasons for crossing the border to yourselves. You catching my drift? Keep all those feelings about political persecution locked up in that special part of your brain where secrets are stored, because I’m not one fucking bit interested. It’s all about the money, not the morality.”

  Cutbirth made a snorting noise through his wide, flat nose. “Two, no weapons of any kind. None. It’s not negotiable. I find a weapon and you’re out. I’ll shed you like pounds at a Weight Watcher’s convention.” Cutbirth made another strange blowing sound through his nose. It reminded Diego of a bull snorting. “Also, no booze. No drugs.”

  “How about cigarettes?” Henry asked.

  Cutbirth nodded. “Cigarettes are okay.”

  “Pain patches?” Diego said.

  “Pain patches?” Cutbirth asked. The skepticism on his face rendered it even uglier.

  “My wife needs them,” Diego said. “She has...chronic pain.”

  Cutbirth glared at Adriana. “If you’ve got chronic pain, I’m not so sure you’re up to the task, Little Mother. You ever hear of the Buffalo Theory?”

  Adriana shook her head. “No.”

  “A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo,” Cutbirth said. “And when the herd is hunted, it’s the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. I have you pegged as our slowest member—a liability. Not only will you get yourself killed, you’ll get us all killed.”

  Adriana fell silent.

  “Your failure to disagree has just confirmed my theory,” Cutbirth noted, motioning toward the door. “It’s time for you and your significant other to make your exit.”

  Adriana uttered a soft groan.

  “Now listen,” Diego began, his heart accelerating angrily in his chest, “my wife is as fit as anyone in this room. She’s not a goddamned buffalo and she won’t slow us down.”

  “Hubby speak the truth, Little Mother?” Cutbirth’s lips were smiling, but his eyes were cold.

  “He speaks the truth,” Adriana said in a solemn voice. “I have pain, but I’m fit. I won’t slow us down. I used to run marathons�
��before I got sick.”

  “You slow us down and you’re gone,” Cutbirth said. “You and hubby.”

  “I understand,” Adriana said.

  Cutbirth continued. “Three, I’m the boss. You do as I say. Always. There’s only room for one alpha male in this tribe. In case you didn’t know, crossing the border is dangerous. People die every day trying to make it across, north to south, south to north.” A wide grin stretched across his mammoth jaw. “Yeah, that’s right. A lot of people living on the other side of the border would rather be on this side. What a concept, eh?” A dark, primeval snicker rolled off his tongue. “Anyone ever see the border?”

  Yong said, “Sam and I saw it from a mountain top while we were hiking in Utah two years ago. We had binoculars.”

  “What’d you see?”

  “A wide stripe of barren ground cutting through the forest.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Guard towers. At least, we think they were guard towers,” Yong said. “You’re not allowed within five miles of the border.”

  “No kidding, Asian Boy!” Cutbirth retorted. “Tell me something I don’t know!”

  “My name is Yong Kim, not Asian Boy.” Yong had introduced himself with the calm, assertive grace of an aristocrat.

  “Yeah, sure, Yong Kim,” Cutbirth said. “Anyone else ever see the border?” He looked at Diego.

  “Not me,” Diego said. All Diego knew about the border was what he read in the Chronicle or saw on PNN. But he knew most stories appearing these days in the Chronicle were heavily censored, and PNN was nothing more than a propaganda arm of the government. A recent story—one Diego found more believable—reported that the new republics on both sides of the 38th latitude invested about one percent of their annual GNP to maintain the border.

  “That right, Little Mother?” Cutbirth said, baring his oversized teeth in a smile. “You’ve never seen the border?”

  “No,” Adriana said. “We’ve never had any interest in seeing the border. It’s not what you’d call a tourist attraction.”

  “Well, allow me to educate you good people,” Cutbirth said, clasping his hands behind his back, his gaze scanning the eight people seated before him. “The border separating the two sovereign republics is 500 yards wide. It has been chemically treated and is completely devoid of any living thing. Not a tree, a bush, or a blade of grass. A weed couldn’t grow there. Insects crawl into that strip of ground and die a quick, toxic death.” Like a caged animal, Cutbirth began pacing from one side of the room to the other.

  Cutbirth went on. “The border is split down its middle by one continuous coil of tumbleweed razor-wire, which rises to 20 feet. The skeletal remains of animals both large and small hang from the sharp teeth of the wire like abstract figures in a horror museum. But forget about the wire because most people never make it that far.” He paused to smile. “Am I painting a picture here?”

  “A very graphic picture,” Sam said, fiddling with one end of his scarf. “Perhaps too graphic. I’m not sure—” Sam’s hand flew up to his mouth and he leaped to his feet. He rushed past Cutbirth and out the door.

  Through the open door Diego could see Sam hanging over the catwalk railing. He was spilling his guts into the Pacific Ocean.

  “Sam has a nervous stomach,” Yong apologized, looking at each of them. He started to get up, but didn’t.

  In a few moments Sam returned to the room and took his seat.

  Cutbirth said, “Feel better, Princess?”

  “Yes,” Sam said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. “Sorry.”

  Cutbirth continued. “Russian T-48 anti-personnel landmines are buried on either side of the razor-wire. Millions of these mines have been activated in the three years since the border was closed.”

  “Damn!” Henry muttered. He dropped his cigarette onto the floor and crushed it with his shoe. “I’d heard that story. I didn’t think it was true.”

  Cutbirth looked at Yong. “You’re right about the guard towers. They exist. More than 3,000 of them. They’re 60 feet tall and were constructed at half-mile intervals along both sides of the border,” Cutbirth said. “Each tower is manned by two immigration guards toting old-fashioned .50-caliber machineguns.”

  “Crossing seems impossible,” the redhead said, biting her lower lip.

  “Well, all this does present a challenge,” Cutbirth said, his words cold and unfeeling, “because the border is also rigged with thousands of weatherproof motion sensors. These sensors use a passive infrared beam to detect movement of any kind. They’re connected by a radio signal to the watchtowers. If the mines don’t get you, the guards will. And if they don’t, you’ve still got the razor-wire to contend with.”

  A prickle of fear wormed its way into Diego’s brain and he thought about dying for the first time—really thought about it. If that was their fate, his and Adriana’s, he hoped it would be fast and painless. A .50-caliber bullet to their brains would work fine. Or a Russian landmine.

  “Enough with the backstory,” Cutbirth said. “Name! Age! Occupation!” He pointed at Henry. “You first!”

  Henry cleared his throat. “Henry Bilderberg. I’m 47. I work as—”

  “What’s in the briefcase, Henry?”

  “Personal papers and such,” Henry said. “None of your concern.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Cutbirth fired back. “What’s your occupation?”

  “I’m an options trader with the San Francisco Board Options Exchange. I’ve worked there for nearly 25 years.”

  “You in good physical condition? You don’t look good to me.”

  “I water exercise three times a week at the North Shore Y,” Henry said.

  “Water exercise. You must be some sort of a real he-man.”

  Henry sat straight up, pushed his shoulders back, but said nothing.

  Cutbirth looked at Yong.

  “You know my name, Yong Kim. I’m 26 and a software engineer.”

  “You Jap or Chink?”

  “Neither,” Yong said, gnashing his teeth. “I’m Korean. Yong means ‘The Brave One.’”

  “Brave, eh? That remains to be seen. What kind of stuff have you engineered?”

  “Computer games, mostly,” Yong said.

  “And…?”

  “Are you familiar with Good and Evil, Part Three?”

  Cutbirth nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “I designed that game,” Yong said.

  Cutbirth shifted his eyes to Sam.

  “Sam Holiday,” he said with a cute little grin. “I’m 28.”

  “What are you grinning at, Sam?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Cutbirth,” Sam said with the passivity of a Buddhist monk. His eyes fell to the floor and he tugged at the scarf around his neck. “I didn’t mean to grin.”