“Can you throw me up just two inches?” I whispered desperately, looking down again at his beet-red face.

He nodded, unable to speak.

“I’ll count it out,” said Winky, nervously watching Jason’s face. “Ready? One, two, push!”

Jason crouched down a few inches and then surged suddenly upward, throwing me towards the top of the wall and giving me just the distance I needed to hook one arm over the top of it.

I pulled my head up and then the rest of my upper body, getting my second arm over in a single jerking motion. I hung there in place for a few seconds, getting a quick look at the back yard while I caught my breath.

I was high up near the leafy part of the tree, hopefully invisible from inside the house. There were no dogs below, but I could hear a big ruckus off in another corner of the yard that was probably the one caused by Buster.

I pulled myself the rest of the way up, grunting with the effort of trying to do it quietly. Once I was lying across the top horizontally, I spun myself around so I could flip my legs over to the other side and my torso down towards Winky.

Jason already had her sitting on his shoulders and she was getting up on her feet. I grabbed her outstretched hand and pulled on it so she could get up faster. Jason put his hands under the soles of her moccasins and said, “Get out of the way, Bryn. I’m throwing her up!”

I let her go and scootched over to the side, ignoring the abrasive and pointed stucco bits digging into the flesh of my stomach.

I’d just cleared the spot above Winky’s head when she came flying up to the top of the wall. Winky and Jason looked almost like a circus act, they way they executed it so well. She must be lighter than me. She got a lot more air than I did.

She hit the wall and grabbed the edge with both arms, her elbows and forearms digging into the top of it; it had to be painful.

I reached over and put my hand around the back of her head, encouraging her to lean into it and use it as leverage to get the rest of her body up.

Jason kept pushing her feet from underneath, and with the two of us helping, Winky eventually got on the wall by throwing her leg over it and dragging herself up to lie horizontally across the top of it like I had done.

“Thanks, Jason,” I whispered, before getting myself into a sitting position. “Come on, Winky. Let’s get up in that frigging tree.”

She went up on her hands and knees, breathing heavily, and crawled across the top of the wall behind me. It was too narrow for me to feel comfortable doing that, but Winky was smaller than me, so she did it well and with excellent balance. It was impressive as hell, but I didn’t have time to comment or fully appreciate the skill it took. I was too worried we were going to be seen.

As soon as we got to one of the huge tree branches that overhung the wall, I grabbed it and stood up, using the branch to keep myself steady as I moved towards the tree’s trunk.

“You first,” I whispered once we were there, leaning back a bit to give Winky more room to climb. She stepped up on the first branch, using the others just above as ladder rungs.

“How high?” she whispered.

“High enough that they won’t see you but so that you can still spy on them,” I said. I silently urged her to hurry up, fluttering my hands, sure the dogs would be back soon.

As soon as her legs were out of my way, I started climbing too. I was three branches into my ascent when I heard one of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house opening.

I froze in place except to grab Winky’s ankle to keep her from moving. She looked down at me, her eyes as big as saucers, nodding slightly.

The next thing we heard was a big, juicy burp.

It made my lip curl in distaste, reminding me of the canners I’d had close encounters with before. They were all disgusting pigs as far as I was concerned. The next sound we heard was a loud fart and a groan of relief.

“Jesus, Dave, that was fucking disgusting. Warn me next time, asshole, so I don’t have to walk through your goddamn fart smoke.”

Another fart came, this time followed by the laughter of someone else - presumably the guy with the gas problems.

“Fuck you, Dave,” said the original voice. His expletives disappeared behind the sound of the sliding door opening and closing again.

Then we heard a knocking on the glass and the growling second voice. “Open the door, dickweed.” After a pause we heard the voice again, only this time it sounded angry. Really angry. “Open it, faggot, or I’ll smash it in and slice your throat open with the glass.”

The door slid open and closed again, leaving the backyard in silence. Just before the door closed, though, I heard some yelling and furniture being shoved around.

Winky looked down at me as if she were going to say something, but I shook my head, motioning upwards with my finger. We were too low right now. I was afraid they were going to see us. This guy Dave was definitely not someone I wanted to tangle with. I had a feeling he was the famous Loco that Celia had warned me about.

Once we were high enough up that I felt shielded from the view of anyone below, I got up close to Winky. There were still no dogs in sight, but Buster had gone quiet. Please, please, let Buster and Peter and Bodo be okay.

Winky leaned in to my ear. “That was close.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it,” I whispered back. “Can you see anything from up here?” I looked through the leaves, but much of my view was blocked by the thick foliage. I caught glimpses of the sliding glass door and an area around the pool. Part of the building next to the pool was visible too, but that was it.

“Not much,” she said. “If I can get over there, it would be better.” She gestured to an area out on a limb.

The thought of her being way out there made me too nervous. “If someone sees you up there you’ll have nowhere to hide or escape to in time. Stay by the trunk so you can hide behind it and jump over the wall if you need to.”

“What about there?” she asked, pointing to another limb, this one closer to the edge of the wall.

I thought about it for a second and then nodded. “Go for it. But if you think anyone sees you, drop over the wall and run. Don’t break an ankle and don’t wait for me. Go a few houses down and hide behind some bushes for at least fifteen minutes before coming back. If you see any canners out, signal the others.”

We’d practiced hand signals as part of our workouts, and everyone but Peter, Bodo, and I was really good at birdcalls. They already had rudimentary communication figured out using them from before. I didn’t bother to try and learn the calls, though. I can’t sing worth a dang, so they were totally out of my range of capabilities. Luckily, Rob was a big war movie buff, so he’d picked up some wartime hand signals that he taught us. We just made the rest up on our own.

Winky moved into place and settled in, just as the dogs appeared again below us.

***

The dogs searched around on the ground near the tree and looked up a few times, sniffing the air. Winky and I didn’t move a muscle. I closed my eyes for fear they’d see them moving around and start barking.

A minute or so later, they padded away, their progress easy to follow by the sounds of the long weeds swishing around.

I opened my eyes. The dogs were now lying by the murky pool - a rottweiler and a pitbull.

Oh shit, they have a pitbull. Those dogs scared the doodles out of me. I could only picture what one of them would do if it got a hold of me. I closed my eyes again and took a deep breath to clear the horrible visions that were crowding my mind. I needed to stay alert and focused, not freaking out about a potential dog attack in my future.

Winky and I stayed put for what seemed like hours, seeing and hearing nothing except the occasional movement from the dogs who often went to press their noses against the glass door of the house and presumably the door to the pool house, too. I could see them going in that direction and stopping, but I couldn’t see exactly what was there. My legs were going numb and my feet were tingling. I’d found a limb I could sit on while resting my back against the trunk, but it wasn’t comfortable enough to make it a good spot for longer than a couple hours, max.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the sliding glass door opening again. I couldn’t see who it was, so I looked up at Winky. She was staring through the leaves, concentrating very hard.

I heard some footsteps around the pool deck and then some rattling chains, followed by another door opening; and this time, it was closer. Whoever it is, must be going into the pool house. He entered where the dogs had been standing on several occasions while we watched.

“Don’t be afraid,” his voice said. “Just come out here where I can see you better.” He sounded tired. It was the same guy who had yelled at the Dave person. It was surprising to hear his voice sounding so different, almost caring. Earlier he’d sounded like a real jerk.

“I don’t want to go in! I don’t want to go in there!” came a girl’s pleading voice. She was crying and clearly in a panic.

“I’m not taking you in there, I already told you that. I’m not the frigging butcher, okay. I’m the one trying to help you.”

She sniffed, clearing her throat. “You’re with them. That’s all I need to know.” She didn’t sound as frail now - more like pissed.

“Yeah, well, just like you, I don’t have a lot of choices in my life right now.”

“We all have choices.”

Yeah. Definitely angry.

“Okay, well explain it to me,” he said in a slightly hushed but irritated voice. “Tell me how it is you think I have a choice here.”

“You don’t have to be all up in here bein’ their nazi doctor and shit. You could get out. Leave here. Let the rest of us out too, on your way.”

I heard a chair scrape on the pool deck. “Sit down so I can look at your arm, would you?”

Another chair scraped the surface. “You got nothin’ to say, do you, Mengele? You know I’m right. You’re just a chicken shit white boy, just like all the rest of them. Doin’ whatever Dave says, kissing his behind all the time.”

“Shut up, LaShay. It’s not like that. And stop calling me that name. It’s Sean.”

“Sure it is. It’s exactly like that. And I’ll call you what I want. I don’t see no sweet little Irish boy sittin’ here in front of me. I see a monster, jus’ like Hitler’s doctor Mengele.”

“Listen … what would be the point of leaving? I’ll just get caught again and brought back. Probably punished. It’s already happened once, in case you haven’t noticed. And you know how much they like to punish people here. Besides, if I go, who’s going to take care of all of you guys, huh?”

“You call this taking care of us?” She made a disgusted noise. “All you do is keep us alive so they can eat us later.”

“Whatever, LaShay. Just sit still so I can change this bandage. Your arm’s going to get infected.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, pushing her chair. “Take me back to the meat locker.”

“Please don’t call it that,” he said, sounding tired again.

“I call it like I see it. Maybe someday you’ll join us in there, Mengele. Then we’ll see what you think about changing bandages and puttin’ stumps in slings.”

The sound of the sliding door from the pool house reached my ears again and then LaShay’s voice echoed out across the pool. “Come on, then Mengele. Lock me in like a good nazi.”

“Screw you, LaShay.”

“No. Screw you, Mengele.”

The door slid shut and some chains rattled. Then another door opened - the one leading into the house.

“Hey, fairy boy!” yelled a voice I didn’t recognize. “Breakfast!”

“No thanks. I’m not hungry,” said Sean.