Against Her Heart

The fence had grown by several feet of razor wire since Santiago went looking for bolt cutters. That was six days ago, when chain link and a few strands of barbed wire had been the only barrier he needed to scale.

He looked up at the endless rolls of concertina and considered flinging the useless tool he held into the mesquite. One wrong snip and all those loops and lengths of spring steel would recoil and there he’d be, hung up and bleeding to death just in time to get shot by the U.S. military.

“You.” The voice came from somewhere close, on his side of the fence. “Hands up.”

Shit. Santiago tossed the bolt cutters into the darkness behind him. A millisecond later, the unexpected and very white light of an LED beam hit him in the face.

Close. Too close.

He lifted his empty hands into the light. “I’m American.”

“You armed?” The owner of the voice stepped closer. A halo of light cast backward from the beam revealed Army fatigues and an automatic rifle aimed at Santiago’s head.

Santiago squinted, fighting the urge to drop a hand and shield his eyes. “No.”

“I.D.”

“Right hip pocket.”

From behind the focused beam of light, a second soldier emerged. He instructed Santiago to lock both hands on top of his head. A patdown followed, which produced his passport and wallet that contained other ID and remnants of a life he could never go back to.

“American,” the second soldier confirmed, but he made no move to return Santiago’s belongings. “State your business.”

Santiago held the soldier’s gaze. He could have related to the guy in a previous world. Like a neighbor down the street, or someone he’d passed in the hallway at school. “Am I being detained?”

The soldier didn’t blink. “Are you committing a crime?”

Ah, indeed--so much alike but not at all the same.

Santiago cleared his throat. It took effort to keep his voice steady. “I think you have my wife and son.”

The soldier with the gun lowered it, finger on the trigger guard. “We don’t detain Americans.”

“My son was born here.”

“To an illegal.”

“She’s not an illegal. She’s my wife.”

“The law doesn’t care about that.” The soldier holding his passport and personal items took a moment to frown at Santiago’s dead smartphone, but he said nothing about it when he handed it back. “You’re free to go. Stay ten feet from the perimeter and don’t engage with anyone behind the barrier.”

Santiago returned everything to his pocket. “Excuse me... wait. How do I find out if they’re here?”

“File an inquiry with Immigration,” the first soldier said. “A federal judge has to sign off. It’ll take about three months. A lot of folks are looking for their people right now.”

Santiago thanked him and put the requisite distance between himself and the barricade. It sucked, that information. No surprise, but still…a three month backlog? Damn. Made him want to break something. Or somebody. So breathe in, breathe out. Let the warm night air float his rage away to the atmosphere and beyond. He couldn’t afford to lose control now.

The soldiers moved on, walking single file along the perimeter. He waited until their footsteps faded. Then he inched closer and inspected the barrier in the dim light of a quarter moon. The side facing him was corrugated metal, dull green, affixed to a ten-foot chain link fence. Atop it rested those nasty coils, feet and yards and probably miles of concertina wire capable of slicing a man to the bone. A perforation in the corrugated metal, probably a nail hole from a previous installation, offered a tiny window into the world beyond the barricade. Fires burned in a line of barrels set up in front of a massive concrete structure. To the left was a row of loading docks and to the right, a piece of broken signage that read “-MART Distr.”

An old distribution center? Interesting. A warehouse that size would have enough floor space to house a large number of people. And it was probably still stocked. The company wouldn’t have had time to move anything before the solar storm hit and wiped out the planet’s entire power grid. The coronal blast sent every plane in the air plummeting to the ground and fried the electronics of all automobiles--cars and freight trucks alike--that depended on an onboard computer to function. No more Facebook, no more email. Just like that, every hacker in the world was out of a job.

Santiago made his way along the barricade, searching for a pinprick of light that would indicate another nail hole. He found one about fifty yards east of the first. Through it, he watched a group of soldiers secure a canvas tarp across a military cargo truck they’d backed into one of the docks. Nothing fancy about that old clunker, just engine, drive train, and tires. But at least it would still crank, and run.

A small pack of dogs milled around the soldiers, tails wagging. One of the soldiers reached down and scratched the largest dog between its black, shaggy ears. Total lack of fear--the pack’s trust seemed to indicate that the men guarding his family hadn’t lost every shred of their humanity.

But what were they doing with that truck? Loading it? With what? Bile rose in his throat and his gut tightened. No. Not bodies. Please don’t let it be bodies.

Lightheaded, Santiago backed away from the fence. He started moving again, heading further east, estimating how far he’d have to go until he could gain a better vantage point from the other side of the truck.

Those dogs, though--they reminded him of street dogs outside Laredo, when he and Ava were teenagers falling in love across an international border. Her family wouldn’t let her have a cell phone, but she devised a way of sending him messages in a broken piece of her grandmother’s jewelry, tied to the collar of a four-legged community beggar that everyone on both sides of the fence called Pepe.

Pepe had no trouble with border police. He crisscrossed the massive barricade at will, aware of every low spot to crawl under within a mile-long stretch. He’d make the rounds with his favorite humans and sometimes take a nap with his nose in one country and tail in the other. Whenever he came to visit, Santiago would check his collar. If he found a locket tied to it, he’d open it the special way Ava had shown him, and there would always be a note written in tiny letters and folded into a lump smaller than a dime. When he was old enough to land a job, Santiago activated a secret cell phone for Ava with his first paycheck and sent the locket to a jeweler for repair. Ava wore it the day they got married, resting against her heart on a twenty-four carat chain he’d bought the same day he bought their rings.

That memory hurt. Everything that reminded him of Ava hurt. Same with Diego, their son, the spitting image of his mother and Daddy’s little vaquero. When everything they knew about the world changed overnight, they made plans to go south, into Mexico or further, where farming was still a way of life and food was plentiful. Then the natural disaster became a national state of emergency. Borders slammed shut with lethal force and freedom became exclusive to a new priority class of pedigreed American citizens. It was an equal opportunity holocaust, the rationing of rights and redistribution of them to only those who qualified--and Santiago’s family did not.

He stopped walking and flung sweat off his brow with the back of one hand. Please--just don’t let it be bodies.

This time it wasn’t a nail hole that drew his eye, but a small gap between two of the metal panels. He leaned in to watch. Soldiers bustled on the dock, pushing non-motorized pallet jacks to transfer large pieces of freight from the warehouse to the truck. Squarish boxes, not long ones, but they could contain anything. No matter how devastating the truth might be, Santiago needed to know.

A shuffling sound behind him caused every hair on the back of his neck to bristle. He turned, expecting to stare down the barrel of another automatic rifle. At first he saw only darkness, then the vague shapes of scrubby mesquite jutting from the dirt. The smallest of them moved. One step, two steps, backing Santiago toward the barricade, a strange shape the color of the night itself and moving in utter silence--

Until it whined.

Santiago’s breath of relief exploded from him in a whoosh. He put his hands on his knees and hunched forward, shaking his head.

“Dog, you scared me to death.”

The dog wagged its tail and came closer. Big and black with shaggy ears--the same dog Santiago had seen in the compound earlier taking pats on the head from soldiers. Now, just minutes later, it stood outside the fence licking Santiago’s hand. That could only mean one thing. The barricade had a weak point somewhere, low to the ground, and it had to be close by.

But no time for distractions. Santiago went back to the gap between panels and tried again to understand what he saw. Cartons of cardboard with intact shipping wrap and printed labels--all things from the previous era of automation. If there were bodies in those boxes, they’d been there a long time. No, without a doubt, the words and shapes stamped on the sides of each box told an accurate story. Logos from major household brands--toilet paper, cooking oil, energy drinks. His best guess? Someone somewhere was getting an early Christmas.

Beside him, the dog gave a hard, ear-flapping shake. Tags jingled on its collar, hinting that once, it had a home and people who cared. Santiago reached down and scratched the dog on top of its head. It leaned into the contact, groaning with pleasure.

On impulse, Santiago squatted to be eye-level with the dog and gave it a hearty rub below its ears. There in the ruff around its neck, the tags jingled again. And something brushed the back of Santiago’s knuckle. Not a dog tag. Bigger, metallic, with a rounded shape.

He jerked the collar around so abruptly that the dog pulled away. “Wait, wait.” He crawled after it, hanging on to whatever fur he could grab as gently as he could. “Let me… just…” More slowly this time, he spun the collar on the dog’s neck until he could see the tags and anything else dangling there with them.

He would have recognized it in pitch darkness, the heart-shaped locket that had once belonged to Ava’s grandmother. Light from the quarter moon glinted off its burnished gold, so familiar that it felt like home. Santiago tripped the mechanism that opened the locket’s secret compartment. Inside lay a small, folded scrap of paper. He smoothed it with trembling fingers and read the words written on it: Santiago he’s like Pepe.

They were here, Ava and Diego, somewhere in this compound isolated from the rest of the world and from him. He’d suspected it all along, but now he had proof. And bolt cutters. They lay in the mesquite a few hundred yards to the west, waiting for him to use them on a weak spot of fence.

Santiago slipped his belt off and looped it through the dog’s collar. There. They were partners now. Finding that weak spot of fencing was only a matter of time. First, he needed the right words to let Ava know his plan. And a pen. Sweet, beautiful Ava, always the clever one. He led the dog away from the perimeter with its miles of throat-slitting razor wire and composed a message to her in his head. Follow him to me. He knows where I am.

.