In Rainbows

“Another late night, D?”

The sun had set some hours ago, but I found myself still hunched over my desk. Truth be told, I hadn’t noticed the time, but a glance at the clock showed half past eight. I’d missed dinner, again.

“Guess so,” I replied.

“Listen, man,” Riley walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re not cracking this on no sleep. This is your third late night this week, and it’s Wednesday.” I glanced up at him from the file I’d been studying, a report set to be the latest dead end in a series of failed leads. “My advice? Go home, get some dinner on your way, and get some sleep. Spend some time with your wife.”

“I’ll wrap up soon,” I lied.

“I hope so, brother. See ya tomorrow.”

I watched him go, leaning back and rubbing my eyes as I lost sight of him. Riley was a good man, and he wasn’t wrong. I’d been burning both ends of the candle for longer than anyone knew. Four murders in as many months, every lead fizzling out. There was a fear settling over the city—everyone afraid to go out at night. Hell, even our beat cops didn’t want to patrol anymore.

The case board loomed over me. The thing had gradually expanded until now it took up nearly my entire office wall. The assortment of photos, sticky notes, and drawings mocked me each day as I poured over every new crumb of information that came across my desk. The rest of the department called me obsessed, and maybe there was some truth to that, but people didn’t pay taxes for me to sit on my ass while some psycho butchered their loved ones.

I reached down into my drawer and pulled out the case files. Each of the four victims had been mutilated, sliced open at the stomach with their insides tumbling out. The killer would use their blood to draw some kind of picture on the ground. Only one of those had actually remained intact by the time we got there, a crude portrait of the victim herself. Blood wasn’t the best paint, it turned out, or maybe our killer just wasn’t the best artist.

This collection of papers and photos had been analyzed, forgotten about, and reanalyzed by every person in our homicide unit. Everyone had found the same nothing and comfortably gone back to forgetting until the next killing popped up. At the start, I’d had the entire department at my disposal. Priority number one: finding and stopping this killer. Over the last two months, our unit had been drastically downsized to consist of just Riley and myself. Not enough money in the budget, better spent on new toys for SWAT, or a new pool for the Chief. Seemed like I was the only person left who cared about the real world, about the people on the street. Even Riley’s eye wasn’t on the ball anymore.

I stared into the case files yet again, not bothering with the words anymore; I could recite those from memory now. If there was anything left to learn from these stacks of papers, it was somewhere in the photos. Even as desensitized as my years had made me, these were hard to look at. Intestines bulging from slashed stomachs, a dozen or more stab wounds bleeding at varying degrees. I’d determined early on that our killer was no professional—the kills were far too messy. The excessive stab wounds pointed to the stomach incision happening post-mortem, presumably for access to the quantities of blood needed for their sadistic renditions.

I analyzed the photos, trying to give myself a fresh pair of eyes. Dozens of times I’d studied these files, and dozens of times I’d come up short. I’d gone through every logical bit of connective tissue between these killings: location, race, background, gender, clothing brands, and come up with nothing. I rubbed my eyes, resigning myself to defeat for the night. Maybe everyone else was onto something after all, and this was consuming me too much. I was drowning in theory and helplessness—maybe it was time to start swimming and step away for a bit. Give it some time and come back with the truly fresh eyes I needed. I reached out for a pen to finish my paperwork, but stopped short.

Each pen in my cup was a different color. That was intentional, I kept them for the doodles I made during the long-winded meetings with the chief. I cocked my head, staring at that cup of pens I saw every day.

What if I had been thinking wrong?

I had gone through every logical piece of this puzzle, but I wasn’t tracking someone who was bound by the rules of logic. I wasn’t even tracking a killer. This person left a painting at every scene, a grotesque art piece inspired by their own perception of morality. I was tracking an artist, a twisted one, but an artist all the same. I spread out the crime scene photos again, the widest shot of each to get the full scene.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. I had something.

Colors. The Red Rose, in front of a mural, inside a taxi cab, and in the park—those were the crime scenes. Each had a strong color connected: red, orange, yellow, and green. I racked my brain, trying to remember everything I had learned about color theory in school. Red, orange, yellow, green…

I shot up from my chair, running my hand through my hair. The color spectrum. I paced my room for a moment, reeling from the first real lead I’d had since the call came in four months ago. I sat back at my desk, crashing back to earth. This was a stretch, and when I thought about it for more than a moment, it seemed insane. All of it could be a coincidence. I looked back at the board on my wall, its shadow swallowing me.

I’ve never believed in coincidence.

***

The cold air nipped at me, my coat doing its best to keep it at bay. It wasn’t quite winter, but it was getting close. I had parked around the corner and down the street, trying not to draw any attention. I needed to appear helpless and alone, but only one of those things was true.

If I was right, the next color in sequence was blue, and there was only one place that met all the criteria. People called it the ‘blue strip,’ a stretch of road on the north side of town whose lights had a defect causing them to shine blue. It became so iconic that the city decided to leave it. It was isolated, one of the only places around the city to have no immediate buildings or viewpoints—the perfect place for a murder.

The plan was to give the killer exactly what he wanted: a single isolated target right under that blue incandescence. I set myself on the hook, stepping out under the first blue streetlight. The wind seemed to pick up with each step I took. I pulled my coat tighter, both to block the cold and to give myself some comfort. The deeper I went, the less confident I was. There was no guarantee that the killer would be here tonight. I was running purely on instinct. Today was the first of the month, and since this area was so unpopulated, I was betting they'd camp out here until the perfect target came along. That’s assuming my ludicrous color theory was even correct, which I had no real evidence to support. This was all just a hunch, or worse—a delusion.

A strong gust of wind hit me head-on, causing me to duck my face into my collar. When I looked up, I wasn’t alone anymore. There was a new figure standing beneath the lights, some thirty feet ahead of me. My breath caught, and instinctively my hand fell to the gun holstered at my side. They said nothing, so I decided to lead.

“I’m Detective Diego Black,” I forced out, my left hand blocking the wind from my face. “I want you to come with me and answer some questions involving four murders over the last several months.”

No response came, although I swore I could hear a soft muttering on the wind. They started walking towards me.

“Don’t move!” I yelled out, moving my hand in front of me. They didn’t stop, the muttering becoming more apparent the closer they got. They broke into a run, and I saw the glint of a blade underneath the blue light. In one motion, I drew my gun and leveled it at their chest, giving them one heartbeat to stop.

Ba-dump.

I fired two shots straight into their chest. They flew backwards as the bullets connected, the spray of blood appearing black under the light. I stood still for a moment, trying to calm myself and to make sure they weren’t getting up. Slowly, I approached, my gun still aimed at the assailant.

“Why didn’t you stop?” I mumbled to myself.

As I got closer, some details became clearer. This person was malnourished, badly bruised skin clinging to their bones. The patterns on the bruises looked odd, but it was hard to make out much under the blue lights. They looked up at me as I stood over them, their expression an odd mix of pity and gratitude.

Their mouth opened, and with the strength of a devil, they spoke.

“I serve the colors,” they sputtered. It was the last thing they did, as their eyes glossed over and their muscles went slack. All that remained on the street was a corpse.

I stood there dumbfounded, my one and only suspect dead at my feet. It seemed that my hunch was correct, but without a suspect to confess, I had no way to prove anything. Shaking myself from my stupor, I fell back on my training. Step one was to radio in, so I turned and started back down the road towards the car. Leaving the body felt wrong, but there was no alternative except inaction, and that simply wasn’t an option. It was numbing for it all to end this way, all the sacrifices I had made to get here bleeding out into the pavement behind me.

The light flickered to my right. I paused, hand resting on the firearm at my side once again as the acrid smell of gunpowder hung in the air. I turned, hesitating in my uncertainty, but the light was normal again. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, the blue glow that enveloped me suddenly eerie. The tension in my gut refused to let up, an alarm blaring in my subconscious. I turned around, drawing my weapon once more and preparing myself for whatever threat still lingered.

I couldn’t have prepared enough.

Leaking from the mouth of the corpse was some kind of vapor, an essence I can only describe as color incarnate. It seeped into the air, the lights around me beginning to change hue. First, a rapid shift between light and dark blues, but then transitioning into a cycling of the entire color spectrum. It sped up, reaching a speed that my eyes could no longer follow. I tried to shield my vision, but the light seeped through my hand, blindingly bright and impossibly dark all at once. I fell to my knees, my senses ablaze.

You have killed our host.

The voice was all around me, punching through me like I was made of sand. It rattled my bones as it spoke.

You serve us now.

My mind began to be ripped apart, thoughts and memories being torn down like notes from a wall. This terrible something pushed through my orifices, forcing its way into my body. I dared to open my eyes, and I realized that the lights around me hadn’t changed. This being was moving around the air, around space itself—this impossible color was its form. My mind opened, concepts I couldn’t begin to understand forced their way into my consciousness. I was torn apart, remade, and torn apart again in a moment. I raised my gun in front of me, somehow managing to keep a hold of a weapon that felt insignificant now.

A rumbling shook my mind, something deeper than my physical body shaking in response to this creature’s horrible laughter. It mocked me, mocked us, as we began to become one.

With the last bit of me that remained, I put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger.

First, there was a horrible sound, a screech that ripped apart what I can only imagine to be what remained of my soul. Then there was a blinding light, a color unlike any I had ever seen before. A color my mind would never be able to comprehend, something I was never supposed to see. It was beautiful.

Then, there was nothing—just two corpses.