My fight at the moment is struggling to get stains out of sheets that are taller and wider than me by yards. Nothing takes the romance and grandeur out of life than scrubbing stains out of sheets.

One of the women worries over her husband, who she says is “playing soldier” even though he’s barely moved out of his computer programmer’s chair in twenty years. She also frets over her golden retriever, which is in the kennel with the rest of the dogs.

It turns out that most of the guard dogs are actually just pets of the people in the camp. They’re trying to train them into the mean, vicious guard dogs that chased Raffe, but in reality, they haven’t had enough time to train most of them. Besides, they’ve spent their whole lives being pampered and played with, and it’s apparently not easy to turn them into vicious killers when they’d rather lick you to death or chase squirrels.

Dolores assures me that her dog, Checkers, is of the lick-you-to-death variety, and that most of the dogs are in doggie paradise out here in the forest. I nod in more understanding than she realizes. This is the reason the guards are dog-free. It’s hard to patrol when your K9 partner keeps running off to chase after rodents and barks all night long. Thank goodness for small favors.

I casually try to turn the conversation toward what might be gnawing on the refugees on the road. All I get are wary glances and frightened expressions. One woman crosses herself. Talk about a conversation killer.

I pick up a grimy pair of pants to dunk in the dingy water, and we go back to working in silence.

Although Raffe and I are prisoners here, no one is really guarding us. That is to say, no one is assigned to guard us. Everyone knows we’re the newbies, and as such, everyone keeps an eye on us. To avoid notice to his head injury healing too fast, we managed to put two adhesive bandages at his hairline first thing this morning. We were prepared to say that head injuries bleed a lot so the injury itself was smaller than it looked last night, but no one asked.

Raffe digs a ditch by the porta-potties along with other men. He’s one of the few still wearing his shirt. There’s a dry band around his chest outlining his bandages but no one seems to notice. I note the filth on his shirt with a professional eye and hope that someone else ends up having to wash it for him.

The sun glints off something shiny on the privacy wall the men are building around the latrine. I’m pondering the perfect regularity of the rectangular boxes they’re using to build the wall when I recognize them. Desktop computers. The men are stacking desktop computers and cementing them into a privacy wall.

“Yup,” says Dolores as she sees what I’m looking at. “My husband always did call his electronic gadgets ‘bricks’ when they got phased out.”