The morning air in town was thick with the smell of cheap coffee and diesel exhaust. Samuel sat in the corner booth of the local diner, a heavy manila folder resting on the table next to his plate. He had spent the last two days tracking down local contractors, looking for men who valued cash more than paperwork.
A large, broad-shouldered man with a grease-stained ball cap slid into the booth opposite him. His name tag read Bill. He owned a small excavation and framing business just
outside the county line.
"You're the Daystar kid," Bill said, leaning his thick forearms on the table. "The one looking to move a lot of dirt down by the old ridge road."
"That's me," Sam said, offering a polite smile. He pushed the folder across the table. "Those are the basic survey lines. We need forty acres cleared right in the center of the property.
We want a deep gravel road cut from the main gate to the build site, and we need the foundation footings poured for a three-story house."
Bill opened the folder, his calloused thumb flipping through the sketches Marcus had drawn up. He stopped at the specifications for the concrete. His eyebrows went up. "This is a hell of a footprint for a hunting cabin. Three feet of reinforced concrete for the basement walls? Double rebar grid? You planning on parking tanks down there?"
"My older brother is particular," Sam said smoothly, leaning back. "He grew up in California. He's terrified of earthquakes and mudslides. He figures if we pour enough concrete now, the place will last three generations. We have the budget for it, so we want it done right."
Bill looked up, his eyes narrowing slightly as he tried to read the seventeen-year-old. But Sam just looked like a rich kid spending his family's money. "It's going to cost you. Concrete prices aren't cheap, and getting the mixers up that ridge road is going to take time."
"We pay in cash, week by week," Sam said, his voice dropping slightly. "Every Friday afternoon, you get a stack of green bills based on the work done. No waiting for bank
transfers. No corporate checks. But we need you to start tomorrow, and we need your best crew."
The word cash did exactly what Sam knew it would. Bill's defensive posture melted away. A regular weekly cash payout meant he could bypass his usual banking headaches and pay his men directly. "Tomorrow morning," Bill said, closing the folder. "I'll have two bulldozers, a backhoe, and six of my best guys on site by seven."
"Perfect," Sam said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope thick with hundred-dollar bills, sliding it under the folder. "That's the retainer for the first week's fuel and materials. My brothers will be on site to show you where to drop the first blade."
While Sam finished the business in town, Marcus and Elias were already at the property. They had driven a rented flatbed truck into the center of the clearing, loaded down with heavy cedar posts, spools of thick chain-link wire, and bags of dry concrete mix they had bought from three different hardware stores across the county line.
Marcus stood near the creek bank, looking at the dense wall of pine trees. His white hair caught the morning light. He unbuttoned his work shirt, tossing it onto the hood of the
truck, revealing a chest and shoulders that looked like they had been chiseled out of stone.
His skin still felt thick and rough, like heavy canvas, but the power underneath it was buzzing.
"The crew comes tomorrow," Marcus said, his voice low. "We need to clear the path for the outer fence line today so they don't waste time looking at the brush."
Elias grabbed a heavy, double-bitted axe from the back of the truck. He looked small next to Marcus, but his movements were incredibly fast and precise. He walked over to a thick pine tree, about ten inches in diameter. A normal logger would take several minutes of steady, rhythmic chopping to bring it down.
Elias spat his lollipop stick into the dirt. He swung the axe.
The blade cut through the wood with a deep, wet thwack, sinking more than halfway through the trunk in a single blow. He pulled it out effortlessly and swung again from the opposite side. The pine groaned, cracked, and crashed down into the brush, its branches snapping under the weight. Elias didn't even look winded. His heart rate stayed steady, his breathing slow and regular.
"This body is a cheat code," Elias muttered, running a hand over the smooth handle of the axe. "I barely felt the resistance. It's like chopping through old cardboard."
"Don't do that when the workers are here," Marcus cautioned, walking over to the fallen
tree. He reached down, wrapped his thick fingers around the heaviest part of the trunk, and lifted the entire log onto his shoulder with one smooth motion. A normal man would have strained his back or needed a team of three to move it. Marcus just walked toward the
brush pile, his boots sinking only slightly into the red clay, and dropped it with a dull thud. "We need to look like hard workers, not monsters. If they see us doing things like this, they'll talk in town."
"Let them talk," Elias said, though he picked up a smaller hand saw to trim the branches instead of using his bare hands. He wanted to push himself. He wanted to see exactly where his limits were.
While Marcus moved the logs, Elias found a heavy limestone boulder near the ridge. It was easily four hundred pounds. He crouched down, slipped his fingers beneath the rough
edge, and focused his mind. He didn't just use his muscles, he activated his ability, fixing his feet hard into the earth so he wouldn't slip. He lifted. The boulder came up off the
ground, his arms locking out as he brought it to his chest. His muscles burned with a good, clean heat, but there was no pain, no tearing. He dropped it, the ground shaking slightly under his boots.
"We can build this whole wall ourselves if we have to," Elias said, wiping a thin layer of dust from his hands.
"No," Marcus said, stepping up beside him. "We use the workers for the heavy digging and the basic layout. It saves our energy, and it keeps us connected to the town. We need to
know who the reliable people are before the world stops spinning. The workers have families. They have skills. Some of them might be useful later."
By the next morning, the quiet woods were filled with the loud rumble of machinery. Bill's crew arrived on time, their old trucks kicking up clouds of red dust along the newly cut gravel road. Two large yellow bulldozers began pushing through the briars, their steel
blades scraping against rock and roots as they cleared the central forty acres.
The crew was a mix of older country men and younger guys from the valley. They expected the three wealthy city brothers to sit in their air-conditioned truck or watch from a distance with clipboards. Instead, Marcus, Elias, and Sam were in the dirt before the engines even warmed up.
"You boys don't need to be doing that," Bill said, walking up to Marcus, who was busy unloading twelve-foot steel fence posts from a delivery flatbed. "My guys are paid to do the lifting."
"We like the work," Marcus said, picking up two heavy steel posts at once—one under each arm—and walking them over to the survey line.
One of the younger workers, a stocky guy named Tommy, watched Marcus walk away. He tried to pick up two similar posts himself, his face turning bright red as he strained to balance the awkward, greasy steel. He managed to carry them about ten feet before dropping one with a loud clang.
"The hell do those boys eat?" Tommy muttered, wiping his brow as Elias walked past him carrying a heavy post-hole digger over his shoulder like it was a toy. "That big one moves like he's made of iron."
Sam stayed near the staging area where the workers took their breaks. He had brought two large coolers filled with ice, bottled water, and sandwiches from the town deli. As the day grew hotter, the men naturally gravitated toward him. Sam was easy to talk to, always ready with a joke or a light compliance that made the hard work feel lighter.
"Your brothers are machines, kid," an older worker named Carl said, taking a long drag from a cold bottle of water. "I've been doing masonry for thirty years, and I've never seen a fella lay rebar as fast as that white-haired one. He doesn't even stop to take a breath."
"They've been working construction since they were teenagers," Sam lied smoothly, leaning against the cooler. "Our dad was old-school. Believed if you had money, you worked twice as hard so people didn't think you were soft. Marcus takes it too seriously sometimes."
Carl chuckled, shaking his head. "Well, it's a good trait. Most rich folks from Atlanta just come down here and complain about the bugs." He looked around the clearing, watching the bulldozers stack the fallen timber. "Hear anything about that sickness down in
Columbus? My cousin works at the hospital down there. Says they got a whole floor locked down. Some kind of heavy flu."
Sam's eyes sharpened, though his face remained perfectly relaxed. He took a sip of his own drink. "A flu? No, I hadn't heard. What's she say about it?"
"Just that people are getting real violent before they pass," Carl said, dropping his voice. "High fevers. Delirium. The state police had to escort some folks in. Probably just some new bug from the swamps, but she sounded spooked."
"People scare easy these days," Sam said, guiding the conversation gently. "Probably just a bad batch of medication or something. But it's good to be out here away from the crowds anyway. That's why we bought this place. If things get weird in the cities, we've got our own little corner."
"Smart," Carl agreed. "If the grid ever goes down, this county is the place to be. Plenty of deer, plenty of wood."
While Sam gathered the rumors, Marcus and Elias worked alongside Bill near the
foundation site. They were preparing the forms for the deep basement. The plan was to create a subterranean storage area that was completely invisible from the outside—a secure vault where they could store their weapons, fuel, and long-term food rations.
Every time the workers turned their backs or moved to a different part of the site, the brothers used their interdimensional storage spaces to speed things up. Marcus would stand inside the deep trench, and with a quick movement, three heavy bags of gravel would appear at his feet from his inventory, looking like they had simply been dropped from the truck. Elias would use his storage to hide extra tools, extra spools of high-grade copper wire, and boxes of heavy structural bolts that Bill hadn't accounted for in the main order.
They were building two structures: the public one that Bill's crew could see, and the private one hidden beneath the surface.
By Thursday afternoon, the progress was staggering. The center forty acres had been cleared of major trees, the gravel road was packed hard, and the deep trench for the
foundation was fully framed with heavy timber walls, ready for the concrete trucks to roll in on Monday morning.
Bill stood at the edge of the pit, looking at his clipboard, then down at the work. He looked baffled. "I gotta admit, Marcus. I didn't think we'd be this far along for another two weeks. Your boys... you guys do the work of a whole extra crew. We haven't had a single delay."
"Good coordination," Marcus said, his voice flat but polite. "We don't like wasting daylight."
"Well, the men are happy," Bill said, tapping the pocket where his cash payment was resting. "You keep paying like this, and we'll have the main frame up before the end of the month."
"That's the goal," Marcus said.
As the crew started packing up their tools for the evening, Sam walked over to Marcus and Elias, who were cleaning off a set of heavy shovels near the truck.
"The town is starting to talk," Sam said, his voice quiet as he looked around to ensure no workers were within earshot. "Carl's cousin is a nurse in Columbus. The hospital has a
lockdown. Violent cases. High fevers. The police are already getting involved."
Elias stopped scrubbing his shovel, his dark eyes fixing on Sam. "It's starting. How long do we have?"
"We still have time," Marcus said, his voice steady. "The wild cases start small, then they get buried by the news. It takes a few weeks for the system to really fracture. We stay on schedule. Monday the concrete gets poured. Once that sets, the frame goes up."
"And what about the apartment?" Elias asked, looking at Sam. "When are you moving?"
"Tomorrow morning," Sam said, a small, sharp smile playing on his lips. "Bill's crew doesn't need me here to pass out sandwiches every day. The heavy clearing is done. I'll move into the town building, get the apartment set up, and start visiting the local stores. I'll keep a
radio on the police bands."
"Good," Marcus said. He looked around the clearing. The red dirt was torn up, the skeleton of their fortress beginning to take shape in the shadows of the Georgia pines. "We work through the weekend. Just the three of us. We need to set the underground storage doors before the concrete trucks arrive on Monday. We don't want Bill's guys seeing where the vault opens."
"I'll get the torches and the welding gear from the back," Elias said, his chest rising and falling with an easy, slow rhythm. He looked excited. The physical labor wasn't draining him, it was making him feel more alive, more locked into the new reality they were carving out of the earth.
The trucks from Bill's business drove away, their tail lights disappearing down the long gravel road, leaving the 161 acres in total silence once again. The sun dipped below the ridge, painting the sky in deep shades of purple and red.
The brothers didn't rest. They didn't go back to the small motel in town. They grabbed their tools, turned on the heavy work lights powered by their portable generator, and stepped
back down into the dirt. They had ninety days to build a sanctuary against the dead, and the clock was ticking louder with every passing hour.