“What’s going on here?”

Backing up for a second, after I went back to my room after my feeding, I would rustle around in my sleep. A few bad dreams here and there, but nothing worth mentioning. So I woke up and saw that I got up a bit earlier than usual. I needed to get to work by six, but it turned out I woke up at five, so to waste at least half an hour, I decided the best thing to do was to make some coffee while watching the news. 

So I went into the living room, only to find an interesting sight to behold. Ty sat on his chair, hunched over a laptop that I didn’t even know he had. There were noticeable bags under his eyes, and they twitched erratically with every finger snapping on the keys. A cup of coffee steamed in the morning sun that broke through a small crack of the curtain. 

Even when I spoke to him, Ty refused to acknowledge my presence. He only turned to look at me once I had stepped so close to him that my shadow blocked the light from his computer. 

“Oh, hey Harmony.” Ty waved before hunching over his laptop.

“How long have you been up for?”

Ty shrugged his shoulders without looking away from the screen. “I don’t remember. After I woke up from a strange dream - by the way you should’ve seen it. There was a winged creature, and a flying car.”

I slapped Ty across the face, but even though he stopped speaking, it didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. He continued to type away at the keys as if nothing were wrong. 

“Get back on track.” I said.

“Sorry.” Ty laughed so quickly I barely had time to register he even laughed at all. “Anyway, I woke up, saw it was nighttime, then a strange sensation came over me. So, I went out to the twenty-four-hour electronics store just thirty minutes away from here, bought a laptop, came back, made some coffee, drank it, the caffeine got to me, and now I just can’t stop.”

“Take a deep breath.” I ordered, while rubbing Ty’s back. He began taking deep breaths, finally letting his fingers take a break. “You doing okay?”

Ty blinked several times, staring at the blank TV. “The feeling in my fingers are numb. So maybe.” His face scrunched up and his fingers curled into his palms. “There’s the feeling, and the feeling is pain. Oooooowwww.” He squeaked out all the pain in one long moan that didn’t sound pleasant at all.

“Well, first off, let’s take this away.” I grabbed the handle of his coffee mug and slid it away from him. Suddenly, Ty whimpered and with as much will as he could muster, he endured through the pain to raise a single finger. “You want one more sip?” He nodded his head. “Fine, but this is your last one, so you better savor it.” 

I raised the mug to his lips and tilted it so his throat could drain the dirty bean water down to the depths of his kidneys. Once I deemed that he had enough, I took away the mug and moved toward the kitchen. I dumped the coffee down the drain and ignored the pleading groans of someone who gained a coffee addiction overnight. 

“Why are you up so early, though?” Ty asked. “You rarely wake up until it’s the last minute.”

“Same as you. Had a rough dream last night.”

I moved toward the couch and sat down. The remote lay in the center of the coffee table, so I reached out and grabbed it. 

“What was it about?” Ty asked.

I began flipping through the channels, trying to find the news channel. 

“It was about my family.” 

“Oh yeah. Now that I think about it, you did bring up your mother yesterday before we went to bed.”

“What about her?”

I finally found the news channel that we normally watched, and something changed from last time. The normal news anchors weren’t there. Instead, it was two weird people wearing strange make-up that turned their faces into a weird mix of black and white patterns. 

For that one person just tuning in, uh. Why should I bother explaining? The female news anchor said with little to no emotion.

The male news anchor, whose hair fell all the way to his shoulders, coughed into his hand

The normal newscasters got sick, so we’re filling in for them. The world is cruel like that.

So, anyway, here’s the sports news.

“Harmony?”

“What?” I shot up from my trance. Those two’s voices were strangely hypnotic.

“What was your family like?”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. I could go into full spoiler territory, letting him know everything about me, potentially opening him up to even more danger if my identity ever got recognized by the government. Or I could just give him the simple answer.

“They’re fine.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

I shook my head, and Ty took that as the answer. He leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling.

“Man. I wanted to know what it’s like living with siblings. It would make such an interesting dynamic in one of my stories.” 

Shocked from the revelation, I turned to him. “You’re going to write more books after this one?”

Ty shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. Maybe if my fingers don’t feel like they’re broken in a hundred different places, I could get back to writing.” 

“That was your fault for even attempting that last night. How much did you even write?” 

Ty swerved his head from left to right as if counting each individual word he wrote. After some deliberation, he finally gave an answer. 

“Around twenty-thousand words, maybe? It could be more or less, but that’s my best estimate.”

“That’s insane.” I said with my mouth propped open. “That’s half the size of an entire novel.”

“Yeah, and what I wrote is probably shit because of that. I got to go back and edit, anyway. I spilled the entire protagonist’s backstory in the first chapter like an idiot because I got so deep into my mind while writing.” 

I kept my mouth shut while he complained about his past mistakes. He still didn’t figure out that I had read basically his entire backstory, then proceeded to rush to his dead lover’s grave to tell him to cheer up like some insensitive asshat. He’d get pissed off, and rightfully so. That information wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge in the first place. If he wanted it to be common knowledge, then he’d use his name in Loving Gates. Instead, he hid it while accomplishing what he wanted. 

I wouldn’t want anyone to know all the details about my past. Especially someone like Ty. There’d be too many questions. Uncomfortable questions that I don’t think I could ever answer with a serious face.

Now that sports are over, there is news about the serial killings happening lately. The female news caster sighed heavily, not from sadness, but out of sheer boredom. When can we get back to our radio show?

Later, but here’s the bad news. 

The screen changed to another crime scene. The news reporter was arguing with her cameraman about something, but the wind was blowing so hard that Harmony could just barely pick up what they said. Ty probably couldn’t even hear her speaking with those human ears of his. 

Suddenly, the reporter snapped into action as she looked at the screen. She tugged at her blowing hair, keeping the strands from blocking her eyes. 

Hello. We are in the poorman district, just at the northeast edge of Juxten. Just behind a rundown nightclub, there was another murder, highly likely to be another victim of the Juxten Terror. This makes nearly their twentieth kill, and the police, doing as they do best, are wasting everyone’s time and money.

Suddenly, a recognizable redhead comes barreling into view, her face scrunched up in anger. Shining as red as a tomato, she began berating the newscaster.

What are you people doing here? The place is still under investigation. Jessica asked.

Well well. If it isn’t the local failure. Found any evidence of the murderer yet. The news reporter mocked her. The reporter’s face looked so punchable that Harmony wished she could reach on the other side of the screen to deck her herself. 

That’s classified information.

You mean like this? The reporter looked straight at the camera and raised the microphone to her lips. The deaths are that of the previous news broadcasters.

Jessica snatched the microphone away from the reporter and covered the camera with the palm of her hand. The screen changed right away to the punk looking people who sat with very disinterested faces. The only difference being a new batch of papers on the table.

Current news, we just got hired as the new news. That rhymes. The female broadcaster sighed. Why does it have to rhyme?

I don’t think that was a rhyme. The room went silent before the male broadcaster grabbed a new sheet of paper. Anyway, here’s a corporate video that will most likely brainwash you to buy a scam.

The news changed immediately to a commercial about credit cards. I didn’t see any correlation with what the broadcaster said and the commercial, so there should be nothing wrong with me purchasing one. 

“That was interesting.” Ty said, massaging his fingers against his stomach.

“Tell me about it.” 

***

“Goddamn them.” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. Even with a trench coat on, the autumn wind cut through me like a knife. 

“I know they get on your nerves, Jessica, but they’re going to be assholes no matter what.” My investigation partner, Richie Hark, said. “Let’s just get this done.”

“Yeah.”

The amount of bodies refused to slow down despite the murders becoming more gruesome. They actually stayed constant, always appearing every three or so days from each other. Not to mention, they’re not hidden very well, leading to most of them getting spotted the first few days. Outside of a few special exceptions, the bodies were laid flat in the open, as if the murderer wanted their crimes to be witnessed. 

When I came back to the station after a two-day break, my bosses tried to get me to take a longer break. However, I couldn’t just let the murders keep going while I’m lounging at home with nothing to do. As long as I was alive, I would find this killer, no matter the circumstances. 

Richie and I moved to the back of the building where the body was. The person who called in to the police was a jogger, and they saw the body’s feet sticking out from around the corner. Expecting it to be someone in need of help, she ran to the man, only to find what I saw.

A man covered in bruises, cuts, and scars. His clothes showed signs of being torn off roughly, and every limb of his body was broken. Every limb. His arms twisted unnaturally, bone sticking out at some points. His legs were no better, twisting in a way as if the murderer had wanted to make a human pretzel. Even the man’s penis couldn’t avoid such a fate. During erection, a man’s penis has the possibility of snapping, and that’s exactly what had happened with this man.

However, there was something new here than all the other cases. Lying a few feet away was the body of a woman. She looked just as bruised and damaged as the man, blood spilling out of every orifice in her body. Her hand stretched out toward the corpse of the man, as if trying to either help him or call for his help. She too was completely in the nude, her limbs twisted the same way as the man’s. 

I quickly recognized the two as the original news broadcasters right away. They were both in their late forties and early fifties, which was around the age of the older victims. The damage on the man also coincided with the other victims of the killer as well. The only part of the scene throwing me off was the woman and her involvement with this murder.

Seeing as much of the body as I needed, I headed toward the police chief, who was busy talking to one of his subordinates.

“Chief, get your people to scour the area. If they even find a shred of evidence, even strands of hair on the ground, bag them up and send it for surveillance.”

The chief nodded and rounded up the officers while I walked back toward the bodies. Richie crouched over the body of the man, looking over his wounds. 

“They’ve been killed recently. The bruises are still forming and the blood is still wet.” Richie deduced. 

“What about the woman?” I asked.

“She looks pretty much in the same condition. But why would the murderer kill a woman this time?”

I shrugged my shoulders, but in reality, I had already come up with a bunch of theories. They were both news anchors, so they both could have been on a nightly stroll before getting jumped by the killer. However, that didn’t explain why they would be found in the poorman district. People like them wouldn’t even hesitate to give such a district a wide berth. Them being lured in somehow was a decent possibility, but lured in by what? 

What I was certain of, however, was that the woman was killed for witnessing the crime. At least I would think that if it weren’t for the fact she had blood stains by her crotch. It could be possible that she had witnessed the crime, and the perpetrators forced themselves upon her for the fun of it, or she could have been a target all along. Without any witnesses or useful evidence, this looked to be another bust. 

The reason why the case took so long was due to how efficiently the murders were covered up. There was little to no evidence left behind by the killers. At first I thought it was because of some shitty luck, but the crimes indicated someone on their last shred of sanity. I thought at some point, they’d leave something behind while having an episode. However, with each and every murder scene scrubbed clean of all evidence, it dictated these crimes were done by someone with wit about them. 

An officer ran up to us while we were busy looking for any evidence on the bodies. He doubled over, almost like he rushed here.

“We finally got something.”

Richie and I looked at each other, then back at the officer. Richie stood up, and we followed him, hoping that this piece of evidence could be worth it. Even a tiny piece of skin cells would be a massive lead at this point. 

When we reached what the officer had wanted to show us, it became evident why. We stood in front of a large garbage can that was completely empty except for one thing hanging over the edge. A black leather jacket I knew all too well hung by the edge of the garbage can.

“How is this evidence?” Richie asked. 

“Look closely.” I said. “Doesn’t it look like it hasn’t been here for long?” 

The leather jacket was void of all stains and tears that would indicate it being in such a remote location for a long time. Loose city animals would have torn it to shreds by then. I reached into my purse and grabbed a pair of latex free gloves. I put them on and approached the jacket.

Grabbing the jacket carefully, I picked the jacket up. Nothing was wrong with the backside, so I turned it around in my hand. 

“Bingo.”

On the left side of the shirt was a dried blood stain.