Defeated by Plastic

"I'd crossed dimensions and discovered alien rivers, but a piece of blue strapping had me beaten—proof that the universe has a cruel sense of proportion."

My mind had gone quiet in a way that frightened me.

Not peaceful—there was nothing peaceful about this silence. It was the emptiness that comes after a storm has torn through and left nothing standing, the blank space where thoughts should have been churning and plans should have been forming. I was a man who made lists, who calculated outcomes, who always knew the next three steps before taking the first. Now there was only dust, and sky, and the dull awareness that I needed to move my body or I might never move again.

The box I'd abandoned at the top of the hill sat where I'd left it, a forlorn rectangle against the rust-coloured landscape. It looked pathetic from here—cardboard and plastic strapping, the sum total of Luke's preparation for founding a new civilisation. The absurdity of it would have been funny if I'd had any laughter left.

The walk back up the slope felt longer than it should have. Each step required conscious effort, as if gravity had increased while I wasn't paying attention. When I finally reached the box and grasped the blue plastic strapping, the weight of it sent a fresh wave of exhaustion through my shoulders. Metal poles rattled inside—tent poles, I assumed, though I hadn't verified the contents. Structural elements for the shelter Luke had envisioned, the first building block of his grand design.

I began dragging it toward the river, the box carving a shallow furrow through the dust behind me. The trail it left was the only mark of our presence here, the only evidence that human beings had ever set foot in this desolation. In a world without wind, without rain, without anything to disturb the eternal stillness, that furrow might last forever. The thought was not comforting.

I'd chosen a spot near the riverbank for our camp. The decision had been instinctive rather than calculated—the primal pull of water, the basic human need to be near a source of life even when that life consisted of nothing more than moving water through barren earth. The river offered no shade, no shelter, no food. Just its constant flow, its quiet murmur, its promise that not everything in this world was dead.

The distance from the portal made every trip more cumbersome, but I couldn't bring myself to care. Something in me recoiled from the idea of sleeping within sight of that shimmering barrier, that gateway that had swallowed our lives and refused to spit them back out. If I was going to be trapped here, I wanted at least the illusion of choice about where I laid my head.

When I reached the spot I'd mentally marked as our campsite, I dropped the box and turned my attention to the plastic strapping. The blue band encircled the cardboard like a tourniquet, cinched tight and sealed with a metal clip that would require tools to release properly. Tools we didn't have. Tools that were probably sitting in Luke's garage back in Berriedale, completely useless to us now.

I tried prying at the clip with my fingernails. Nothing. I tried sliding my fingers beneath the strap to gain leverage. The plastic bit into my skin, leaving red marks but refusing to budge. I tried twisting, pulling, even biting at the damn thing like some desperate animal.

"Aargh!"

The sound ripped from my throat before I could stop it—frustration made audible, the accumulated weight of everything that had happened finding release in a single, ugly syllable. I stood there panting, staring at the box as if it had personally betrayed me, my hands throbbing from the futile struggle.

It was such a small thing. A piece of plastic strapping, the kind that secured a thousand deliveries every day back in the real world. I'd opened dozens of similar boxes without a second thought, using the utility knife I kept in my desk drawer or the scissors Claire insisted on storing in completely illogical locations. Simple. Routine. And now it stood between me and the contents I needed, an insurmountable barrier in a world where barriers had taken on entirely new meanings.

The thought of asking Jamie for help flickered through my mind. He was stronger than me—I'd noticed that when we were moving the first boxes, the way he'd lifted things I had to drag. His hands were probably tougher too, more accustomed to physical labour. He could probably rip through this strapping without breaking a sweat.

But the idea of walking back to the portal, of admitting I couldn't handle something as basic as opening a box, sent a surge of resistance through my chest. Pride, I recognised. Stupid, pointless pride that served no purpose in our current circumstances. We were trapped in another dimension, possibly forever, and I was worried about looking weak in front of a man I barely knew at all.

The tension between us was real, though neither of us had named it. He was Luke's partner, which made him part of the reason I was here. And I was Luke's brother, which probably made me complicit in whatever resentments Jamie harboured about the secrets Luke had kept. We were connected by circumstance and divided by everything else, two strangers bound together by forces neither of us had chosen.

Asking for help would feel like crossing a line. Admitting vulnerability. Acknowledging that I couldn't do this alone.

I sat down on the box instead, defeated by a piece of plastic, and let my head drop into my hands.

The movement was too sudden. Blood rushed away from my brain, leaving a hollow roaring in my ears and a grey haze creeping in from the edges of my vision. I gripped the box beneath me, steadying myself against a wave of dizziness that had nothing to do with the alien atmosphere and everything to do with exhaustion, dehydration, and the accumulated trauma of the past hour.

When the greyness cleared, it left behind something worse.

Mack's face swam before me, clear as a photograph. Eight years old, with those wide, curious eyes that saw everything and questioned more. He'd be turning nine in October, already talking about what kind of cake he wanted, already planning the experiments he'd conduct with his birthday presents. I'd promised him a proper chemistry set this year—the kind with real beakers and test tubes, not the plastic rubbish they sold in toy shops. Claire had objected, worried about safety, but I'd convinced her. "He's responsible," I'd said. "He can handle it."

Would I be there for his birthday? Would I ever watch him unwrap that chemistry set, see the light in his eyes when he realised what it was?

And Rose. Six years old, all energy and laughter and that particular stubbornness she'd inherited from her mother. She'd been so excited about staying with Nana and Grandad while I was away, chattering about the backyard "campsite" they'd promised to set up, the fairy garden she wanted to build, the biscuits she was going to help bake. When I'd kissed her goodbye, she'd barely noticed—too busy planning adventures with her grandmother, too certain that Daddy would be back soon.

I'd told myself the trip would be brief. A quick visit to see Luke, check on whatever had been troubling him, and back home before the kids returned from their grandparents' house. That had been the plan. That had been the promise I'd made to myself, silent and certain.

Now I sat on an alien world, trapped by forces I couldn't understand, and my children were somewhere unimaginably far away, waiting for a father who might never come home.

The thought hit me with physical force, a blow to the chest that stole my breath. I doubled over on the box, arms wrapped around my stomach as if I could hold myself together through sheer pressure. The fear I'd been keeping at bay rushed in like floodwater through a broken dam—not the fear of death, not the fear of this strange world, but the primal terror of a parent separated from his children.

Will I ever get to hold my kids in my arms again?

The question had no answer. That was the worst of it. Not knowing if the separation was temporary or permanent, if there was hope to cling to or only grief to prepare for. The uncertainty was its own kind of torture, a wound that couldn't heal because you couldn't tell if it was fatal.

I thought of their faces when they realised Daddy wasn't coming back. Mack would try to be brave—he always did, taking on the role of protector even when he was too young for such burdens. Rose would cry, would ask questions no one could answer, would eventually stop asking but never stop wondering. And Claire... Claire would have to explain, somehow, that the father of her children had vanished into thin air, gone to visit his brother and simply never returned.

Would they think I'd abandoned them? Would they spend their lives wondering why I'd left, constructing stories to fill the void where the truth should have been?

The grief welled up, hot and overwhelming, and I let it come. There was no one to see, no one to perform composure for. Just me and the dust and the weight of everything I might have lost.

When the wave finally receded, it left behind a strange kind of numbness. Not peace—nothing like peace. More like the exhaustion that follows violent illness, the body too depleted to feel anything more. I uncurled slowly, wiping my face with hands that came away gritty with dust and salt.

The box still sat beneath me, still sealed, still mocking my inability to perform the simplest of tasks. And somewhere on the other side of the hill, Jamie was probably still pressing himself against the portal, still hoping that persistence might accomplish what desperation could not.

The bleakness that had settled over me seemed to match the landscape perfectly. Rust and brown and that impossibly blue sky, all of it empty, all of it offering nothing except the bare fact of its existence. Even the river, which had seemed like such a gift minutes ago, now struck me as just another feature of a world that didn't care whether we lived or died.

I couldn't open the box. I couldn't save my children. I couldn't find a way home. The list of things beyond my control stretched toward infinity, each item adding weight to the crushing sense of helplessness.

But I could move boxes.

It was a small thing, a pathetic thing, but it was something. A task with a beginning and an end, a problem I could actually solve. The boxes needed to be near the river. I could make that happen. It wouldn't bring me closer to Mack and Rose, wouldn't undo the disaster that had brought us here, but it would give my hands something to do and my mind something to focus on besides the abyss.

I pushed myself up from the sealed box and began trudging back toward the pile near the portal, my legs heavy but moving. Functional. That was all I could aim for right now. Keep functioning until something changed, until Luke returned, until some opportunity for escape presented itself.

Jamie came into view as I crested the final rise, his figure silhouetted against the translucent shimmer of the portal. He wasn't attempting the crossing—he was just standing there, staring at the barrier as if the intensity of his gaze might somehow pierce through to the world beyond.

"Figured out how it works yet?"

The question came out harsher than I'd intended, an edge of frustration that had nothing to do with Jamie and everything to do with my own impotence. I regretted the tone immediately but couldn't summon the energy to soften it with an apology.

His reaction was immediate and explosive. He spun away from the portal and drove his foot into the dust, sending a spray of rust-coloured particles into the still air.

"This thing is fucking useless!"

The despair in his voice was a mirror of my own. Whatever animosity might exist between us, whatever complications our connection to Luke had created, in this moment we were two men drowning in the same ocean. His fury at the portal was my fury at the plastic strapping, our respective helplessness feeding into a shared frustration that transcended the awkwardness of our situation.

I'd never been good with conflict. Even mild disagreements set my nerves on edge, my body tensing in anticipation of raised voices and wounded feelings. Years of navigating Claire's moods had honed that sensitivity into something close to hyper-vigilance—the constant calculation of how words might land, how actions might be interpreted. It was exhausting, but it was also useful. I could read the temperature of a room, sense when to push and when to retreat.

Right now, Jamie needed to retreat. The portal was only feeding his desperation, each failed attempt deepening the wound. He needed a distraction, something to occupy his hands and his mind while the raw edge of panic wore itself down to something more manageable.

I needed help with the boxes.

The convergence of those two needs felt almost like fate, though I was too drained to appreciate the irony.

"Why don't you give that a rest for a bit and help me move these boxes?" I kept my voice neutral, careful not to let it sound like pity or command. Just a suggestion. Just an option. "It might help you to keep your mind and hands busy with something else."

The silence that followed stretched tight as a wire. I watched Jamie's back, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides. My own body had gone rigid, every muscle bracing for rejection or, worse, for the anger to redirect itself at me.

The seconds crawled past like insects across sand.

"Sure."

A single word, flat and without enthusiasm, but it was agreement. It was cooperation. It was, in its small way, an acknowledgment that we were in this together, however reluctantly.

Relief washed through me with surprising force. Not just relief at having help with the physical labour, though that was part of it. Something deeper—the knowledge that I wasn't entirely alone in this wasteland, that there was at least one other person who might help shoulder the burden of survival.

I walked toward the pile of boxes, Jamie falling into step beside me. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound hollow, no words of comfort that could address the magnitude of what we faced. But there was work to be done, boxes to be moved, a camp to be established.

It wasn't hope. It wasn't even optimism. But it was movement, and in the stillness of this dead world, movement felt like its own kind of defiance.

I bent down and grasped the strapping of the nearest box—a different one, smaller, with straps that might actually yield to force. Jamie grabbed another, and together we began the slow trudge toward the river.

Behind us, the portal shimmered on, unchanged and unchanging, keeping its secrets with the patience of stone.