The Shed is Not a Solution

“There’s a moment, just before everything explodes, when the absurd feels almost normal. That’s when you should run. Or lie.”

"Wait!" Luke’s voice cracked like a whip behind us, slicing clean through our fleeting illusion of escape.

We’d only taken a few steps toward the cab—an almost lighthearted retreat, if such a thing were possible in the wake of death and destruction—when his voice reeled us back in. The momentum stopped instantly. I felt it in my knees first, then in my chest. That dull thud of hope dashed.

"What now?" Gladys snapped, her tone laced with brittle impatience. She flung the manifest through the air like a rogue baton in a parade no one had come to watch. It fluttered dangerously, almost catching the breeze before she wrangled it back under her arm with dramatic flair.

I shot her a look. Not full daggers—just sharp enough to draw blood. Her cavalier attitude grated like sandpaper on a fresh wound. We’d been tiptoeing through moral quicksand all morning, and here she was treating our one lifeline like it came with a prize draw.

"What do you need, Luke?" I asked, keeping my voice even, though calm was a performance I was starting to tire of. I didn’t have the energy for another bloody twist in this story, but here we were—always one request away from worse.

"We need to move the body," he said.

Just like that.

No flourish. No softening. Just those six words, dropping from his mouth like lead into the pit of my stomach. The weight of them sent my thoughts scattering like startled birds.

"Hell no!" Gladys screeched, stumbling backwards as if the mere suggestion had claws.

"I can't move it by myself," Luke replied, and the edge of desperation in his voice made it worse. Not because it was manipulative, but because it was honest.

He wasn’t wrong. The man in the truck wasn’t going to levitate himself into a respectable position. But knowing that didn’t make it easier to hear.

"Gladys," I said, turning to her. My voice didn’t waver, though I felt like screaming. “We're already involved now. We may as well keep going.”

The truth sat there, horrible and immovable. We were in. Not knee-deep—we’d already gone under. Anything less than follow-through now would just leave us half-covered and exposed.

Luke offered a brief smile. It flickered across his face like a match in the dark—warm, useless, gone too quickly.

And still, it made my stomach turn.

Because in that moment, I didn’t want gratitude.

I wanted to rewind the morning.

To unsay “yes.”

To unroll the body.

"Are you going to take him through the Portal?" I asked, my voice tight with the sort of cautious hope that clings to improbable solutions. Maybe—just maybe—there was an easy way out. One clean flick of inter-dimensional magic to erase the mess and moral rot we were currently ankle-deep in.

But Luke’s answer came too fast. Too flat.

And just like that, the hope was gone.

"Why the hell not?" Gladys snapped, her tone sharp as shattered glass. She turned toward him, brandishing the question like a weapon, the manifest still clenched in her fist as though it might double as a warrant for common sense.

I followed her glare, my own gaze landing on Luke with something less aggressive, more searching. “Then what?” I asked, quieter—but not softer. My voice carried the weight of everything unspoken between us: the fear, the confusion, the grim logic spiralling out of control.

The Portal had always loomed in the background of all this—a get-out-of-jail-free card wrapped in swirling colours and impossible light. But Luke’s reluctance to use it now… that felt dangerous. Risky in a way I didn’t yet understand. We were standing on the lip of something huge, and instead of leaping, he wanted to tiptoe around it.

And we were still holding a body.

The reality settled in like a stone in my gut. We were involved now—deeply, inescapably. Even without having lifted a weapon or told a lie, we were no longer innocent. Our fingerprints might not be on the cause of death, but they were all over the aftermath.

Accomplices by circumstance. Accessories by hesitation.

Luke swallowed visibly, the movement hard to miss. The tight, dry gulp of someone bracing for disbelief.

"Jamie isn't ready for the news yet. We can keep the body in the shed at the back of the yard for now," he said, each word carefully placed, as if they might collapse under their own weight if he rushed.

I blinked.

A shed.

We were going to put him in a shed.

It was almost funny, in the bleakest possible way. Like hiding a bad decision in the cupboard until company left. As if death could be paused with plywood and a padlock.

An odd move, indeed. One that reeked more of desperation than design. Still, I didn’t challenge it. Not yet. I was too busy trying to picture the layout of Luke’s back garden and whether the neighbours had line of sight to the fence line.

"And the truck?" I asked, refocusing, my voice steadying with purpose. One body was bad enough. A mobile crime scene with our DNA smeared all over it? That was another monster entirely.

We needed answers. We needed a plan.

And we were fast running out of places to hide the evidence.

"I'll clean it out and bleach it while you are gone. Then I'll drive it through the Portal," Luke said, his tone precise, as if listing instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture rather than disposing of a murder scene.

His words had a cool logic to them, delivered like a checklist he’d rehearsed in his head a dozen times already. Still, it caught me off guard—methodical, yes, but bordering on absurd. Bleaching a truck bound for another dimension felt a bit like vacuuming before demolishing your house.

"But... if you are taking it through the Portal, why bother cleaning it first?" I asked, brows lifting with genuine confusion. My tone wasn’t combative, just weary. My brain was already overloaded, trying to keep pace with decisions that veered between desperate and surreal.

Luke barely blinked. "I'd rather not raise any suspicions with Paul and Jamie," he replied, and the edge of fatigue in his voice betrayed more than he let on.

It made sense. Sort of. In that careful, Clivilian logic Luke seemed ti default to—where appearances mattered just as much as intent. Where the illusion of control helped people feel safe, even while their world bent under them.

"Fair call," I murmured, conceding the point because, frankly, I had no energy left to untangle the morality of wiping down a truck for inter-dimensional travel. Besides, he had one thing absolutely right: Jamie didn’t need to see this. No one needed to see their child’s death arriving by delivery truck.

Perhaps Luke is right not to bombard them with the body of Jamie's dead son, I thought grimly, the words so sharp in my mind they could’ve drawn blood. It was hard to tell where decency ended and strategy began now. Every choice we made was laced with compromise.

Luke climbed back into the truck, a man shifting from theory into action. There was no ceremony to it—just quiet purpose, a body moving in rhythm with necessity.

"We need a blanket," he said, without turning around.

Just that. Simple. Stark.

A blanket.

Something to cover the unseeable. Something to pretend we were doing this gently, that death deserved dignity, even now.

My mouth felt dry.

Right. A blanket.

Because hiding horror was the only kindness left on offer.

"Gladys," a deep male voice called out from the front of the driveway—calm, casual, and completely out of place.

My entire body snapped to attention.

"Shit," I muttered, the word barely making it past my dry lips. A jolt of adrenaline surged through me, cold and electric, as my brain scrambled to catch up with my racing pulse.

Who the hell is here?

The question ricocheted through my mind, loud and relentless. My muscles tensed, readying for some unknown confrontation. Was this it? Had the real killer come back to tie up loose ends? To erase witnesses?

My gaze swept the yard, tracking shadows, plotting lines of retreat—front fence, back shed, over the neighbour’s compost bin if I had to. Anywhere but here.

"Gladys, everything okay here?" the voice asked again, closer now. Too friendly to be official. Too curious to be casual.

There was a beat—long enough for my nerves to fray—then Gladys’s face popped into view around the corner of the truck, her expression morphing from alarm to open delight.

"Cody!" she exclaimed, her voice light with recognition. Relief, even.

Cody. The name rang a bell. A faint but unwelcome chime from the drama of the night before—something about flirting, or fumbling, or emotional wreckage draped in cologne.

"Who the fuck is Cody?" Luke hissed beside me, his frustration sharp enough to slice through metal. The irritation in his tone wasn’t just about the interruption—it was about the collapsing scaffolding of the fragile reality we were trying to prop up.

And now we had a bloody visitor.

Gladys, ever the performer, stepped fully into view, all sunshine and ease. "Yeah, everything is great here," she called back, her voice as smooth as glass, polished with practiced charm. Not a tremble, not a crack. You’d think she was hosting a brunch.

"Get rid of him. Now!" Luke’s command came through clenched teeth, low and urgent. A command masquerading as a whisper.

My breath caught. The margin for error had shrunk to nothing.

One wrong word, one curious glance, and this whole circus would collapse in on us like a rotted stage set.

And Cody—whoever the hell he was—had just walked into the front row.

"Why don't we..." Gladys began, voice breezy with manufactured innocence. But her sentence trailed off, unfinished, as I lifted a hand mid-air—half warning, half command. Something had begun to take shape in my mind. A sliver of strategy glinting in the fog.

The idea was sharp, slippery, barely formed. But it was there.

"Wait," I whispered.

Luke spun towards me, his glare like flint—striking sparks in the air between us. What? he mouthed, eyes narrowing with suspicion, with don’t you dare scrawled across his face.

But I wasn’t moving on impulse. Not entirely.

The gears in my mind were grinding fast, pulling together threads from every angle: Cody’s unexpected arrival, his familiarity with Gladys, his presence here now, of all times. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe not. But if there was a window in the chaos, I had to pry it open.

"I think he may be able to help us," I said aloud, quietly but clearly, the words tasting dangerous in my mouth. I could feel the absurdity of them as I spoke—like trying to fly with cardboard wings—but the idea had already rooted itself, insistent and unsettling.

"Help us?" Luke echoed, disbelief rolling off him like a wave. “How?”

Fair question.

It did sound mad.

But there was a rhythm to this now—our collective desperation had turned the air electric, and we were all just trying to survive the next lightning strike.

I hesitated, for the briefest beat. My thoughts snagged on the same concern I hadn’t yet voiced—the danger this idea might pose to Leigh. To expose too much, too soon, to someone untested… It was a gamble. A bloody dangerous one.

But what choice did we have?

We were trapped in a narrowing funnel of options. We needed a shift. A risk.

"I think he is like you," I said at last, my voice low, the words escaping like a secret I hadn’t meant to share.

Luke gasped, the sound sharp and involuntary, like the air had betrayed him. It wasn't just shock—it was recognition, laced with dread.

The implications settled between us like dust over a grave. Heavy. Inescapable.

Either I’d just given us a weapon... or I’d handed over a match to light the whole thing on fire.

"But shh," I whispered, lifting a finger to my lips in a gesture so instinctive it barely felt like mine. My voice dropped to a conspiratorial murmur, the weight of what I’d just implied still ringing in the air like a bell we couldn’t unring. “I don’t think Gladys knows yet.”

There was something sacred about that whisper—a thread of secrecy strung tight between Luke and me, trembling with implication.

"But how does Gladys know him?" Luke asked, frowning as he tried to map out the connections.

"They’re dating," I said, the words slipping out half-formed, not quite fact, not quite fiction. A guess, yes—but one that aligned disturbingly well with the way her face had lit up earlier, the way she’d said his name like a schoolgirl writing it on a notepad.

"Dating?" Luke echoed, his tone flat with disbelief.

"This is getting bizarre," he muttered, dragging a hand across his shaved scalp, the gesture a silent attempt to erase the spiralling absurdity. As if he could rub the moment clean.

He wasn’t wrong. We’d crossed into the territory where logic gave way to strange twists of fate. Romance and dead bodies—Clivilius, it seemed, had a flair for inconvenient timing.

"Gladys," I hissed, leaning around the truck’s corner, the command sharp enough to slice through her dawdling. My voice, suddenly rigid with intent, made her flinch.

"Huh?" she blinked back at me, head cocked like a pigeon. Her confusion was real, her obliviousness infuriating.

"What’d you say?"

"Bring him here," I repeated, each word measured and unmistakable. No ambiguity. No room for interpretation. Just a direct order dressed up as a favour.

She paled almost immediately, her complexion shifting from pink to putty in the span of a heartbeat. Her body froze, that all-too-familiar deer-in-headlights pose. If she had any clue what was really at stake, she didn’t show it.

I reached out and pressed a finger lightly to her forehead, nudging her backwards like a reset button.

It wasn’t forceful.

Just firm enough to say: move.

And somehow, to my astonishment, she did.

“Cody, wait!” Gladys called out, her voice suddenly sharpened with a rare note of urgency. It wasn’t her usual airy drawl—it was something tighter, more desperate. A lifeline cast across the driveway, trailing behind it the tangled consequences of everything we’d done—and everything we were about to do.

I held my breath.

This was it. The moment the veil lifted. The moment our mess stopped being ours alone.

Cody’s footsteps were unhurried at first, casual even—until he turned the final corner and caught sight of the truck bed.

“What the fuck!”

The words tore out of him like a gut punch. No time for politeness, no time for measured reactions. Just raw shock, cut clean.

His eyes locked on the body, then shot to Luke, disbelief twisted into the sharp angles of his face. The easy rhythm of his approach vanished. Whatever he thought this was, it definitely wasn’t this.

Luke didn’t flinch. He stood his ground as Cody’s gaze landed on him, a current snapping taut between them. The kind of eye contact that seemed to stretch time thin and brittle. For one strange second, they looked almost like two animals in a clearing—neither sure who’d pounce first.

"Who the fuck is that, Luke?" Cody demanded, gesturing sharply at the corpse. His voice was thick with accusation, with disbelief barely masking fear. His eyes darted from Luke to the body and back again, hunting for something—logic, a lie, anything that might make sense of what he was seeing.

"Wait," Luke said, faltering. “You know who I am?”

The hesitation in his voice struck me. That hint of disorientation, like the ground had shifted just slightly beneath him. I felt it too.

“Of course,” Cody replied, as if the question were absurd. His tone now carried a cool certainty that didn’t belong in a conversation about dead bodies in backyards. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I went cold.

We.

That word rang out in my head, shrill and wrong. Who exactly was we? Leigh had made no mention of Cody. Was he lying? Or—worse—were there more Guardians out there than even he knew? The thought was unsettling. The ground beneath our feet wasn’t just shifting—it was splintering.

"Waiting for me?" Luke asked, the words spoken like someone trying to read a sentence in a foreign language. Confusion gave way to something darker—realisation beginning to dawn, slow and unwelcome.

But Cody had already moved on.

His eyes flicked back to the corpse with the clinical focus of someone trying to file away chaos into manageable boxes.

“What happened to him?” he asked, climbing into the truck beside Luke like they were colleagues about to debrief a botched operation. “Throat looks like it’s been slit. Any idea who did this?”

His tone was brisk. Unbothered. Practised.

I watched him closely.

He didn’t recoil. He didn’t hesitate.

Whoever Cody was—this wasn’t the first dead body he’d seen.

And that, more than anything else, unnerved me.

I leaned in, straining to catch Luke’s voice, curiosity prickling at the edges of my unease. Whatever he was saying, it was too low—just a breath between clenched teeth. Muffled words that evaporated before they reached me. My frustration swelled. Every moment wasted felt like a thread pulling the entire situation tighter.

"We don't have time for this now, Luke," Cody said, his tone clipped and purposeful. No theatrics, just the sharp clarity of someone used to working under pressure. “I need to know who he is and what happened. We don’t have much time.”

The way he said it left no room for negotiation. It wasn’t a request—it was an operational directive, the kind people obey without thinking. And yet Luke hesitated.

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. A rare stammer in the usually steady current of his competence. Guilt? Fear? Or something else he hadn’t yet named?

I couldn’t bear the pause.

"His name is Joel," I said, my voice cutting through the charged silence. It felt like dropping a match into a dry forest. "He's Jamie’s son."

There. Out.

No sugar-coating. No soft preamble. Just the truth, exposed like a wound. My stomach twisted as the words settled in the air between us. Saying it aloud made it more real—more irreversible. Like opening a door that could never be shut again.

The shift was immediate. Cody stiffened slightly, processing the weight of that name, that relationship. Another line connecting the sprawling web we were all now caught in. I watched him closely, but his expression remained unreadable—a stone wall built for moments like this.

"Is he—" Cody gestured subtly toward Luke, his unfinished question loaded with implication. Is he one of you? The nod wasn’t just about affiliations—it was about fate. Responsibility. Cause.

"No. I don’t think so," I said quickly, a little too quickly, as if speed could substitute for certainty.

But the truth was, I didn’t know. Not for sure.

The idea of Joel as a Guardian felt incongruous, like giving a teenager the keys to a nuclear facility. And if he had been one of them—then his death carried a whole different gravity.

Or perhaps his inexperience is what got him killed?

The thought settled in like a draught under a locked door—quiet, insidious, cold.

I didn’t want to believe it.

But belief had very little to do with anything anymore.

"What happened?" Cody asked again, his voice low but insistent. It wasn’t just curiosity—it was the kind of question a person asked when trying to steady themselves in the middle of a storm, when the facts are the only thing keeping the ground from falling away.

I could only shrug, a helpless lift of my shoulders that conveyed everything I didn’t have words for. The truth was, we were all fumbling through fragments of a story that refused to assemble cleanly. Like someone had shaken the box and spilled the pieces into another room.

"I'm not sure," Luke said at last. "He delivered a few tents here this morning. I took the opportunity to take them through the Portal while he was in the toilet. Then the boys accidentally ran through."

His words came out flat, rehearsed—like he’d already told himself the story three times just to make sense of it. But even spoken aloud, it sounded absurd. If it hadn’t ended in blood, it might’ve passed for comedy.

"The boys?" Cody asked, brow creased. Confusion flickered across his features like a shadow caught in passing headlights.

“Dogs,” I clarified, quickly, a small satisfaction blooming in my chest. It was the second time I’d said something before Luke did. The tiniest edge of control, reclaimed.

Not that it mattered. Not really.

Because then Cody asked the one question that actually mattered.

"And did he see?"

We all knew what he meant. Not the dogs. Not the tents. The Portal. The thing no one was supposed to see.

"Yeah," Luke said, nodding slowly. “I’m pretty sure he did. And when I returned, I found him like this.”

The implication lay there, heavy and unspoken. Like a stain that wouldn’t wash out.

It didn’t matter whether Luke had done it or not. The result was the same.

"Shit," Cody muttered, his body suddenly restless. He began pacing, each step marked by tension coiled beneath the skin, like he was trying to outwalk his own thoughts.

And then, predictably, the moment ruptured.

"Oh my God!" Gladys shrieked, arms flailing with fresh panic. "We've both seen the Portal too," she cried, pointing between the two of us like we were contestants on a game show she’d just realised had life-or-death stakes. "Does that mean we are going to die too?"

Her voice pitched high with dread, wobbling on the edge of hysteria.

"Not today, Gladys. Not today," Cody replied, and though the words were meant as reassurance, something in his tone said otherwise.

It wasn’t a promise.

It was a delay.

"I am really confused," Luke admitted, running a hand over his head again as if he could smooth out the chaos. “Who are you again? And how do you know me? Did you have a dream too?”

There it was again—that word. Dream.

His tone held no irony, no questioning of its legitimacy. Just a raw, searching curiosity. Like dreams were currency here. Clues to something larger. Something unseen but somehow known.

A dream?

The mention of it lit up a dozen questions in my mind, each one snapping into focus like photos in a darkroom. Did they all dream about each other? Was this how they were connected—visions stitched through sleep?

But now wasn’t the time. I couldn’t afford to get lost in the metaphysics of it all. Not when there was a corpse cooling metres away and a manifest fluttering like a paper-thin alibi in Gladys’s grip.

"We have a murder to cover up, after all," I muttered silently, trying to re-anchor myself in the grim reality that refused to be ignored.

“I think Gladys and I had better finish making those deliveries,” I said aloud, pivoting toward Luke. My voice was steadier than I felt. “I’ll call you later. When we’re done.”

There was something almost laughable about the sentence. As if we were simply running errands. Dropping off tents, dodging suspicion, and pretending that the blood beneath our fingernails could be scrubbed away with enough time and distance.

Luke nodded once, solemn. He didn’t argue. He knew as well as I did—we needed to move. We all had parts to play, and hesitation was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

"Be careful. Both of you," Cody said, his voice lower now. Less command, more prayer. Not dramatic. Just... weary. Like he knew just how easily things could spiral from here.

"We will," I said, my tone clipped with resolve as I reached for Gladys’s arm and steered her toward the other truck.

She didn’t resist. For once.

But Cody’s words lingered behind us like a scent in the air—subtle, but impossible to ignore.

The road ahead wasn’t just dangerous. It was unknown. Coated in secrets, shaped by choices we hadn’t even realised we’d made.

And we were already too far in to turn back.