Seventy-Two Hours

"Work doesn't fix anything. But it fills your hands while your head sorts itself out, and sometimes that's enough."

We worked.

There's something about physical labour that clears the head. Gets you out of the endless loop of worry and what-ifs, forces you to focus on what's directly in front of you. The weight of a shovel, the resistance of packed earth, the satisfying thunk of timber being knocked into place. Simple problems with simple solutions.

Under my guidance, Paul and I set up the formwork for the next slab. I showed him how to measure out the dimensions, how to drive the stakes into the ground at the corners, how to attach the boxing boards so they'd hold their shape when the concrete went in. He was a quick learner — picked things up after being told once, didn't need his hand held through every step. By the time we'd finished the second set of forms, we'd found a rhythm, working in tandem without needing to talk through every movement.

The sun tracked across that too-blue sky, marking time in a place where I had no other way to measure it. My shirt stuck to my back with sweat. Dust coated every exposed inch of skin, turning my arms a reddish-brown that matched the landscape. My muscles burned in ways they hadn't since my first weeks on the job back home, when everything had been new and hard and my body hadn't yet adapted to the demands.

It felt good. Not happy-good — I wasn't anywhere close to happy — but useful-good. Necessary-good. The kind of feeling you get when you're doing something that matters, even if everything else has gone to shit.

Paul handed me a water bottle during one of our brief breaks, and I drank half of it in one long pull. The water was warm but clean, and I tried not to think about where it had come from or how much they had left.

"So, you've been separated from your family too?" I asked, the question surfacing before I'd fully decided to ask it.

Paul's expression shifted, something soft and sad moving behind his eyes. He looked away, out across the dunes, like he could see something in the distance that I couldn't.

"Yeah," he said, his voice dropping lower. "I have two kids. Mack is ten, and Rose is six."

Ten and six. Old enough to understand that their dad was gone. Old enough to miss him, to ask questions, to feel the shape of his absence in their daily lives. I thought about what it would be like — to be a kid, to have your father just vanish one day, to not know if he was ever coming back.

"I can only imagine how much you miss them," I said, the words feeling inadequate even as I spoke them.

Paul's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. "I miss them terribly."

The rawness in his voice hit me somewhere deep. This wasn't performance, wasn't the kind of thing blokes said because they thought they should. This was genuine, bone-deep pain — the kind that doesn't fade, that just becomes part of the background noise of your existence.

I thought about my own situation. Brianne, six months along, probably worried sick by now. Mum, who'd sent me to check on Uncle Jamie and had no idea what had happened. Dad, lost in his own world half the time but still my father, still someone I'd taken for granted would always be there.

And the baby. The kid I might never meet, growing up without knowing my face, my voice, anything about me except whatever stories Brianne chose to tell.

The thought was a fishhook in my chest, sharp and barbed, impossible to ignore.

"Have you considered bringing them here?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

The question hung between us for a long moment. Paul's gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, his profile carved against the empty sky.

"I have," he said finally.

"And?"

He turned to look at me then, and there was something fierce in his expression — determination, maybe, or desperation dressed up to look like resolve.

"I've already made up my mind that I want to bring them here. That's why I'm so determined to get this small settlement functioning as soon as possible."

I let the words settle, turning them over in my mind. Bringing kids here. To this place with no trees, no grass, no anything except dust and tents and a river that ran impossibly blue through all the brown. A place where dead men came back to life and nobody could explain why.

Was that better or worse than leaving them behind?

I didn't know. Couldn't know. The equation had too many variables I didn't understand, too many factors I couldn't account for. But I understood the impulse behind it — the need to have your people close, to protect them, to not be alone in the face of something terrifying and unknown.

"I don't want them to forget me," Paul said, his voice cracking slightly on the last word.

The admission cost him something. I could see it in the way his shoulders hunched, the way he wouldn't quite meet my eyes. This was the fear underneath all the determination, the thing that kept him awake at night, that drove him to work until his hands bled and his body gave out.

Not dying. Not being stuck here forever.

Being forgotten.

I knew that fear. Had felt it gnawing at the edges of my thoughts ever since I'd landed in this place. What if Brianne moved on? What if the baby grew up calling someone else Dad? What if everyone I loved just... kept living their lives, and I faded into a story they told sometimes, a cautionary tale about the uncle who disappeared one day and never came back?

"How long have you been trapped here?" I asked, needing to change the subject before the weight of it crushed us both.

Paul blinked, seeming to come back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. "This is our third day."

I stared at him.

"Really? Is that all?"

Three days. Seventy-two hours, give or take. That was nothing. That was a long weekend, a minor blip in the calendar, the kind of time that usually passed without you even noticing.

But looking at Paul — at the exhaustion carved into his features, the way he moved like a man twice his age, the hollow look in his eyes — it could have been three months. Three years.

Paul's expression went distant again, his gaze unfocused. The silence stretched between us, heavy with everything we weren't saying.

I watched him for a moment longer, unease settling in my gut like a stone I'd swallowed by accident. Three days, and he already looked like this. Already had that thousand-yard stare, that bone-deep weariness that spoke of horrors witnessed and processed and filed away somewhere they couldn't be examined too closely.

What would I look like after three days? After a week? After a month?

The question didn't have an answer I wanted to hear.

"Come on," I said, pushing myself to my feet. "Those forms aren't going to finish themselves."

Paul nodded, and we got back to work.

The labour was a relief — something to do with my hands, something to focus on that wasn't the slow unravelling of everything I'd thought my life would be. We measured and cut and hammered, the rhythm of it almost meditative, and slowly the morning bled away into whatever passed for afternoon in this place.

My body ached in a dozen different places, the good kind of ache that comes from honest work, from pushing yourself past comfortable into necessary.

Paul worked beside me without complaint, following my instructions, learning as he went. He wasn't useless — far from it. He just hadn't had anyone to teach him, hadn't grown up with a father who believed that every man should know how to build something with his own two hands.

I found myself liking him, despite everything. Despite Luke, despite the circumstances, despite the voice in my head that kept reminding me I shouldn't trust anyone in this place. Paul was just a bloke trying to get back to his kids, same as I was trying to get back to Brianne. We were both stuck in the same shit situation, both doing our best to find solid ground.

That had to count for something.

We were levelling the dirt for the third set of forms when Glenda's voice cut across the camp, sharp and urgent.

"Paul! Kain!"

I looked up, my hands still wrapped around the handle of the shovel. Glenda was outside the tent now, waving her arms, her whole body radiating the kind of tension that meant something had changed. Behind her, I could see Uncle Jamie struggling with something — a weight, a burden, something that looked like—

Joel. They were trying to move Joel.

As I watched, Uncle Jamie's foot caught on something and he stumbled, losing his grip. Joel's body crumpled to the ground, a tangle of limp limbs and lolling head. Glenda went down too, her knees hitting the dust with a sound I could hear from where I stood.

I dropped the shovel and ran.