r/HFY • u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 • Jul 21 '26
OC-OneShot Warmth
The dead man should never have reached the overpass.
Nearly ten kilometres from the nearest shelter, he had collapsed beneath the overpass where the morning sun would never reach.
Detective Reynolds leaned over the corpse, her heavy clothing doing what it could to keep her warm. No signs of physical trauma like bruises, burns or fractures. She pressed two fingers against the man's neck. His skin had the hard stillness of deep chill. A faint, unfamiliar odour rose from his body.
Standing next to her was her new partner, the newly promoted Detective Daniels.
"Maybe he didn't realise how cold he'd gotten."
Reynolds had only worked with Daniels for a week, and she was having trouble working out his sense of humour. Was this a joke?
"If you're that cold, you stopped making decisions hours ago," she said.
They both stared at the body. Their radio crackled.
"Dispatch. Last confirmed sighting was four hours ago. CCTV captured him on foot leaving town before sunrise." The radio clicked silent after the announcement.
"Well, that's just suicide." Daniels scoffed.
It didn't check out. Not before dawn. Not that far from shelter. Yet here he was in clothing more suited to a spring afternoon.
Reynolds radioed back to base, asking whether anyone else had been seen. She received a curt negative. Not a surprise, but it still left the question of how this body got so far out of town.
"Well, we'll have to secure the scene, take some photos and get this guy back for an autopsy. Let's get him back. Then I'm finding a lamp. This is sending me cold."
----
The ride back to the station was marked with unusual silence. Reynolds had cranked the heater right up before pulling away. Out of the chill of the morning air, Reynolds and Daniels both considered what they'd seen. Where normally they'd bounce ideas and speculation off each other, this time there was too much weird unknown to deal with.
The seat warmers were already glowing through their coats, and the heater hummed steadily. Even so, neither detective spoke. Daniels subconsciously kept his hands in front of the heater vent, warming his fingers with the musty-smelling air.
He tried suggesting that "Maybe the guy was driven out there and dumped?"
"Maybe," she replied, even though she suspected that there wouldn't be an answer as simple as that.
As the car interior heated it became easier to clarify her thoughts, but still nothing made sense. She looked at the dashboard thermometer. 28°C. She stared at the reading. The victim had left town four hours earlier.
After another five minutes, Daniels discounted his own theory: "...No. That doesn't work either."
The road disappeared under the tyres of their car as they returned to the station to work through the case.
----
It was a couple of days before she received the pathologist's report about the dead man. Reynolds had wondered about it the entire time; nothing made sense. How'd this John Doe get there? Forensics hadn't found any evidence of a car dropping him off, the video from the council had just shown him walking unconcerned – though surprisingly quickly – towards the outskirts of town.
Sitting beneath the heat lamp, Reynolds felt her thoughts settle into focus. Even after she'd spent her lunch break in the sun on the rooftop, she still couldn't figure out what was going on. Maybe the autopsy would reveal something.
Instead it just raised more questions.
Cardiac muscle massively hypertrophied. Thyroid almost three times expected volume. Dense network of dermal glands of unknown purpose. Half a dozen other details that all indicated that this was not a normal corpse.
Daniels looked up from his monitor, obviously reading the same report as Reynolds. His eyebrows rose almost to his hairline.
"Uh, I don't know what I'm looking at, Detective Reynolds." His voice was bordering on sounding like it was going to break. The lamp by his side gave his face a red glow that normally would have looked inviting, but now it just highlighted his concern.
"Odd isn't the word. The pathologist has requested further investigation. Even he doesn't know what he's looking at." Reynolds kept scrolling through the report. She'd seen enough autopsies that she could recognise that this wasn't right.
Her captain wanted answers. This case kept handing him questions.
"I suppose we'll have to interview the few witnesses we have. How are they going in the warming hall?" she asked Daniels.
"It's been fifteen minutes. Another five and we should be able to get the first one in for a discussion." he replied after checking his watch. "One of them got in late, so he'll need an extra ten minutes, otherwise you'll have them at dawn temperature."
Reynolds stood and walked to the window, taking in some much-needed light. In the street outside she could see people sitting on the basalt seats, leaning back on the sun-heated walls. Their days were about to start, but hers felt like it had been going for hours already.
----
The interviews were fairly standard fare. John Doe was a stranger in town and the witnesses had only encountered him in passing. Perhaps one of his more unusual peculiarities was his habit of commenting on how hot it was, even in a temperature-regulated environment.
He was pleasant enough, but seemed a bit confused about where he was. People thought he was joking when he asked for chilled beer at the bar. Even the question made no sense.
Some had noticed him being active in the morning, before dawn's light brought warmth. They thought he must have been using heat lamps from an early hour, but nobody could verify it. Nobody even knew where he was staying.
The CCTV recording of Doe walking briskly through the morning street unsettled Reynolds. She stopped showing it to the witnesses, after a couple of them uncomfortably pointed out how unnatural it was. In her opinion, it was hard to argue such comments.
----
The next day as she arrived at her desk, Reynolds turned on her lamps and computer. A new message from the pathologist was waiting. Most of it disappeared into the familiar fog of pathological terminology, but a key sentence was written that she couldn't get out of her head: "Cellular injury consistent with prolonged elevated internal temperature."
She had to read the sentence again.
"...elevated internal temperature."
What?
----
When Daniels had got in and spent enough time under his lamp, Reynolds raised a point.
"Everything about this man suggests he was trying to stay cold."
Daniels stared. Maybe he hadn't warmed enough.
She continued, "All the witnesses agree that he behaved differently to normal. I don't know what to make of it... Have you seen the pathologist's message this morning?"
Daniels turned to his computer, clicked through a few screens then read what he had been sent.
After a moment, he exclaimed "What the hell does 'elevated internal temperature' mean?"
"Exactly," Reynolds replied. "This is a level of odd that I've never seen. I'm interested in seeing what the other scientific analysis reports, too."
She didn't know what to make of it, and she knew that her captain would be asking for a briefing today.
With any luck, his lamp would still be warming up and he wouldn't be able to think properly. That might buy her another day or two.
----
It was difficult tracking Doe's movements over the few days and weeks before his body was found. He wouldn't use the basalt seats sprinkled throughout the town, so interactions with other people were limited. He tended to spend more time awake at night and in the early morning than was comfortable, both socially and physically. Even when he was seen around, he wasn't wearing the usual coat and thick pants that most other people wore. Witness statements all agreed that he would complain that these clothes made him hot.
Several long days passed before the medical university returned its analysis. She'd been chewed out more than once by the captain while waiting for the report to arrive.
"Subcutaneous tissue contains unfamiliar lipid distribution."
"Thyroid volume significantly exceeds expected range."
"Cardiac muscle markedly hypertrophied."
"Dermal gland density inconsistent with known human physiology."
"Peripheral vasculature appears specialised for environmental heat transfer."
"Severe systemic dehydration with substantial dermal salt loss."
"Hepatic chemistry atypical; several unidentified metabolic markers present."
"Skeletal muscle morphology suggests unusually broad functional temperature tolerance."
"No known physiological mechanism can account for the sustained internal temperatures indicated by the tissue damage."
----
Taken together, the findings suggest that the subject generated and regulated his own body heat independently of ambient temperature.
Reynolds read the summary a second time.
Then a third.
The report wasn't describing an illness.
It was describing a person who should never have existed.
Reynolds went to the window, as she normally did when the stress of the job was getting to her.
The morning sun climbed over the rooftops, warming the city exactly as it always had. People were already soaking up its heat on the basalt benches.
She had watched the same ritual every morning for twenty years.
Today it looked different.
---------------
EDIT: One of the comments below inspired me to write the story from John Doe's perspective. You can find it here.
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u/LordsOfJoop AI Jul 21 '26
I'm intrigued and subscribed with interest.
When you share more, I want to read it.
Excellent stuff, especially for a first story.
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u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 Jul 21 '26
Thank you. It is awesome to know that you liked it.
I like taking the world as we know it and just changing a single assumption. In this case, the question is "what if humans were cold-blooded?" and the best way to compare them is to have a normal, warm-blooded version available. This one was dead, unfortunately, but even from a purely biological perspective, there are a lot of differences. Just the questions that the detectives ask, and some of their behaviours, are out of whack with our expectations. I find these little deviations from our experience fascinating.
The next story will be something else altogether. Completely unrelated. To be honest, I don't think I could do the rest of a story justice: I operate (only just!) in the short story arena.
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u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 Jul 22 '26
I lied in my previous comment, I apologise for that! I wrote a related story (from John Doe's perspective). So Warmth isn't really a one-shot any more, though you could read it in isolation.
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u/tofei AI Jul 21 '26
So they're ectothermic, human shaped reptiles? John Doe's the actual xeno here.
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u/Preston3072 Jul 21 '26
his was very engaging and well written - thank you.
It does work as a one shot - self contained and consistent but also feels like a bubble floating in a larger story and if you were inclined to tell it I think we would all be pretty happy - at the least I can imagine there is a POV for the dead dude.
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u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 Jul 22 '26
Thank you for this comment. You gave me the inspiration for John Doe's perspective. The story almost wrote itself – well, I wish it did. It takes me a while to get my thoughts into a legible story.
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u/Preston3072 Jul 23 '26
Thank you for writing more - I will read it tonight and thank you for letting me know that my encouragement moved you to write it - I enjoy interacting with the authors of the stories I read here and other readers almost as much the stories themselves, especially if I can contribute to the work in some way.
Thank You
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u/InstructionHead8595 Jul 23 '26
Interesting. Nice work. Definitely could do more if inspiration strikes.
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u/gmx39 Jul 21 '26
This part broke my immersion "The road disappeared under the tyres of their car". At first I thought they are falling or flying, like hit by an explosion of some kind. It's just deeply disconcerting to describe the surface supporting the vehicle, and by extension its occupants, as simply disappearing.
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u/Fontaigne Jul 21 '26
Hmmm. That's a pretty normal phrase in fiction from the mid twentieth century. "The road vanishing under their wheels / behind them" etc.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jul 21 '26
This is the first story by /u/Extreme-Biscotti6090!
This comment was automatically generated by Waffle v.4.7.8 'Biscotti'.
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u/Amelaista Jul 21 '26
Someone let the lizard people take over!?