Warm Bodies

Chapter 1: Today

Granny stands at the door with the wellies, asking Esme which pair she wants. She needs to get the child ready, to move the morning along its familiar track. Esme picks Elsa, and the ritual clicks into motion, one small choice at a time.

Then Granny spots it: a dog poo on the doorstep. She stops and studies it, wanting to understand who left it there. The gate latch is closed. Someone shut the gate behind them, which means the mess was left deliberately. Granny pushes it onto the soil with a stone, wanting the step clear, and sets off down the lane with Esme and Oscar.

Esme insists on carrying the bag of scraps. She wants to help, to be big enough for the job. It is heavy, far too heavy for her, but she will not hand it over, and Granny, rather than fight her, lets her struggle along with it. Esme asks how long the walk will take, wanting reassurance. Granny answers with a joke, the same joke they always share, and the ritual holds.

Oscar squats on the grass verge, wanting to relieve himself. Granny waits, then cleans up after him with a biodegradable bag.

Esme starts singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," wanting to entertain herself, filling the lane with noise. Granny joins in, and they sing it all the way until the farm comes into view.

Barney the German Shepherd comes sniffing at Granny, wanting attention, crowding her. She is not comfortable with it. Michael calls the dog off. He greets them as his "two favourite girls," laying the charm on thick, wanting to win Granny over. She smiles back, but only reservedly. He invites her in for tea and cake, wanting to spend time with her. She lies and says she has work. It is another disappointment for him, one more in what sounds like a long line of them.

Esme asks to pour the pig food, wanting to participate. Granny says no and takes the bag herself, keeping the task in her own hands. She scatters the scraps by hand, wanting to feed the pigs, and the animals fall on them, devouring everything ravenously.

Esme spots a parsnip that looks like a finger and points it out, wanting Granny to see it too. Granny agrees with her. She does not correct her, does not explain it away. She just lets the parsnip be a finger.

Chapter 2: A Month Earlier

A month earlier, Brenda corners Jessica and wheedles the assembly surprise out of her, determined not to be caught off guard. Jessica gives in, and Brenda walks away knowing something she now has to pretend she doesn't.

At the assembly, Brenda performs mock astonishment for the whole school, keeping up appearances in front of six classes. She commits fully to the lie, and the performance locks her into a story she can't take back.

Mr Armstrong honors her ten years of cleaning, wanting to mark her retirement properly. He turns the event into a public farewell, and Brenda accepts flowers and a card. She plans to keep them forever.

She thinks back to how Frankie rented her Albert's cottage, explaining her foothold in the village. Frankie picked her over other neighbors who wanted the place, and she still counts that as a win.

When she tells the school her retirement plans, she seems ordinarily occupied. Her answers cover up where her real income comes from, and the cover story costs her nothing.

Afterward, Brenda hangs up her tabard to finish her last cleaning shift. Her secret burner phone pulls her back with a text: "Monday. Time tbc." She obeys her handler and shifts into operational mode, inventorying supplies and wondering about the package. Every job is different, and she takes each one as it comes.

Meanwhile, Beth reports a midnight transit van outside Brenda's, wanting to expose suspicious deliveries. She documents times and plates, building a record she can hand to someone with authority.

Citing her parish council role, Beth recruits Emily to intervene rather than confront the police herself. Emily agrees to show the photos to the community officer, wanting to help Beth, and takes on the surveillance role.

Chapter 3: 29 Days Earlier

29 Days Earlier

The narrator is in her shed, working under conditions she has deliberately made punishing. The heat is oppressive, and the hazmat suit she wears traps it against her skin, forcing her to stop and rest far more often than she would like. She keeps at it anyway, because the shed is the one place her activities can stay hidden, and concealment matters more to her than comfort.

She is stripping and refinishing a console table, a piece she intends to sell. The solvent fumes are strong enough that she has to wear a gas mask, and the mask slows everything down, turning a straightforward job into a test of patience. Every stage of the work costs her something, but she keeps going.

Then the shed bell rings. Noah is at the door, calling her in for dinner. He tries the door and finds it locked, so he cannot get in. The narrator does not answer him directly. Instead she watches him on a hidden camera, tracking his movements from inside. His curiosity about the locked shed is a direct threat to the secrecy she has built around it, and she stays still until he gives up and goes away.

Once he is gone, she peels off the hazmat suit. The damp fabric has left her soaked through, and she has to change before she can rejoin her family. The discomfort follows her out of the shed.

At dinner, Lucy has news. A community policeman approached her, wanting to warn the household about complaints from the neighbourhood. The narrator's fist clenches in alarm. Lucy goes on to explain that someone has complained about the deliveries and that someone has been taking photos. The narrator's face reddens with fear, though she tries to deflect with a joke about Wayfair, turning her head away so no one can read her expression.

Lucy keeps talking, mentioning the early-morning deliveries and relaying the officer's request that they be handled more considerately. The detail lands hard: it exposes the narrator's nighttime operations to scrutiny she cannot afford. She agrees to ask the drivers to be more considerate, mostly to end the conversation, but the fear stays with her. Her secrecy may already be compromised.

Lucy blushes as she describes the policeman, trying to downplay the encounter. The narrator notices the blush and what it hints at, but she has no room to dwell on it.

Esme comes in, and the talk shifts to her birthday party. The narrator stops listening. Her mind is fixed on one thing: she is now on a neighbour's radar. She excuses herself and goes back out to the shed, choosing privacy over the family dinner so she can think.

Inside the shed, she finds the freezer lid ajar, white light spilling out. She goes to close it and discovers why it will not shut: the human torso inside has expanded and pushed the lid open. She remembers a past defrosting incident and understands what is happening. She cannot solve it now. She will have to deal with the body later that night.

Elsewhere, the Village Vibes WhatsApp group is busy discussing Brenda's shopping habits, with members eager to police what she buys. Cassie pushes back, challenging Beth's motives and exposing the grudge Beth has been carrying over Albert's cottage.

Chapter 4: Twenty-Four Days Earlier

He comes home to the shed and cleans it. Not a surface wipe but a deep, deliberate scouring, working to erase every trace of blood and tissue left behind. He changes his routine as he goes, breaking his own patterns so that nothing he does leaves a signature anyone could follow back to him.

His mind drifts to his first professional dismemberment, and the memory still stings. That job was a mess, blood everywhere, evidence he had to scramble to contain. He learned from it. Now he drains the blood before he ever makes a cut, a change born directly out of that early failure.

The equipment evolves with him. A gas mask, an autopsy table, tools chosen for control rather than convenience. Each addition exists to shrink the mess and shrink the risk, to bring the work under tighter discipline than the last time.

He works head to toe, methodical, unhurried. The tools change as the body changes, and the habits change too, each one a correction to some past mistake he has no intention of repeating.

And he talks to them. While he works, he invents backstories for the dead, giving them names and histories they never had. The talk reveals something he does not soften or excuse: he kills the guilty, yes, but he kills ordinary people too. The line he draws is not the one the world would draw.

When the work is done, he moves the parts to two burial sites. Remains go under crops at one, under compost at the other, hidden in ground that people walk over without a second thought.

What cannot be buried, he burns. DNA evidence goes into the fire. Whatever is left over goes into public bins, scattered into the ordinary waste stream where no one will ever look twice.

Back at the shed, he finishes the cleaning. He plans to come back later with luminol and scrub it again, and he knows exactly what that plan admits: if the police ever search this place, the risk is real and it is not small.

He locks the shed and walks back to the house. The cleanup phase is over.

Then the day shifts, and so does he. He looks for Oscar's lead so he can walk the dog before picking up Esme, sliding back into the rhythm of family routine as if the shed never happened.

On the doormat, he finds a book. No note, no name, no explanation. An anonymous delivery, sitting there waiting for him.

He flips through it and finds passages highlighted, lines criticising processed food. The markings puzzle him. They are not random. They are pointed.

Then it lands. The book connects to a recent supermarket shop, the one for Esme's party. Someone knew about that shop. Someone is watching him.

His suspicion narrows fast. Tracy, his neighbour. He fixes on her, and the paranoia climbs.

He reaches further back and links the book to an earlier complaint about his out-of-hours deliveries. It fits together now, a pattern, and the conclusion hardens: he is being targeted.

He resolves to find whoever is doing this to him. He will cut the head off this poisonous snake. The routine is gone. What is left is the turn toward confrontation.