The Daffodil Killer

One.

Verona.
The world is in dire need of help.

It's no longer lively, no longer sunny and no longer...anything, really. If the history books are anything to go by, earth used to be fun. Teenagers used to go down to ice cream parlors after long days at the beach and painful sunburns, people had enough time and energy to start petty internet issues and arguments purely for the fun of it, the world was surrounded and engulfed by pop culture; movies and songs and books and everything that had the ability to feed the mind. Habitants in this earth were happy, content. Smiles were a common sight, laughter a common noise, happiness an emotion often expressed. But now, the world couldn't be more different.

The people, places, nature, weather, and everything else around here is devastated. Depressed. Dead. There is no Italy, no France, Bahamas or Hawaii, no escape. No culture or religion or anything of the sort. People aren't allowed to have their own opinions anymore. Our lives are not ours. The world is split into eight groups, nationalism and pride stripped away from any and everyone. Now, the only thing we have to hold onto in this world is what we are born to do. Group one is tasked with presenting the legal side of things. We are responsible for the courts, juries, laws, prisons, and all things judicial. Detectives and police officers, lawyers and judges and everything in between litter this place, the group just one continues flavor of bland people that despise each other. However, the only thing this group really excels are producing laws that are blatantly ignored, rules that are constantly broken, and unfair prison sentences as well as verdicts, corrupt officers and lazy detectives.

Group two: the crops and produce.

Group three: architects and engineers.

Group four: fabrics.

Group five: coal and mining.

Group six: medicine.

Group seven: technology.

Group eight: royalty.

One might think that if culture and religion was diminished, then so should royalty, but no. Royalty is the only thing they say is keeping the world together, although there's so little people to rule over anyway. In the last decade, the population of the world has dwindled down to a million. Royalty is the only way things keep running, keep working and functioning and going on. Royalty controls anyway and everything, and it's more a dictatorship than monarchy, but no one wants to say that out loud.

But regardless, I survived through a plethora of things no child should have, so what's a little bit of clouds in the sky? It's funny, in retrospect. How the world has gone complete one-eighty in the last century. Everything in the history text books—or rather what was left of them— point to a world where people used cellular devices to contact one another, entertain themselves, and stay updated on the latest advancements. It points to a world where humans used to keep animals in houses, used to go shop for their food of choice, getting to scour aisles in stores for just what they needed. And in another life, I'd like to think I'd be more like the people in Group four, where my life's purpose is to work in fashion and art and all these bright colors and fun textures. Paints and pastels and brushes. Makeup and all that exciting, enticing work they get to do. But instead, in the youngest detective in my name group, cracking cases left and right, but not more than the ones that have gone unsolved. Admittedly, there's a little too much crime in this world for me to juggle in one hand, and still make it out in one piece. People just love going against morals here, I guess. My brother did always tell me I'd make a good detective in the future because of all the puzzles and crosswords I liked to complete when I was a little girl, but his words were always brushed off, considered an exaggeration or an expression. After all, they were just jigsaw puzzles and word hunts, nowhere near the horrors and gruesome sights I'm greeted with every day now. If he were here, he'd clap me on the back a little too hard with that stupid grin he always wore, those 'I told you so' eyes flashing with a glint of mischief in the vivid indigo eyes, and I'd scrunch my nose at him in mock-annoyance. But—

The sound of crackling fills my earpiece, launching me out of my thoughts and into reality.

"Verona," my captain's deep, rumbling voice calls in cut off fragments. "Verona?"

"Yes, sir?" My finger goes to the clear bud tucked in my ear, clicking on the minuscule, undetectable button that allows me to communicate back and forth with Captain Tokyo.

"I'm going to need you down at the precinct. Another murder." His words allow no room for buts or ifs, no objections because even if I just got off of work, and even if it is extremely, so very late into the night, a detectives work knows no bounds, no timelines and schedules.

"Yes, sir," I repeat, my legs switching on auto-pilot as they take me out of the bed I lay on but don't sleep in. Sleep for me is just weird like that.

After my two words, the line disconnects, leaving me in the depths of a deafening silence I know all too well, a silence I hate more than anything.

What did I say? The people who live on this earth just love to end lives, commit petty crimes and keep the law busy. And that's evident in the fact that I've never had a break off of work before. That's just the way it is in this horrid group. Working overtime for a salary that barely covers anything, solving cases here and there, working until I forget my name and my eyes forget how to blink, but what else can I do? Nothing? Someone like me doesn't have a family to fall back on. Not a brother or parents or aunts and uncles, so this is what I'm forced into. This is my life whether I like it or not and I'll just have to deal until I can save enough up for retirement. That's not to say I hate my job—of course I don't. If I did, I wouldn't be working with half the enthusiasm I do. I love it, from following the clues to cracking the case and handing out closure and grasping the slippery concept of justice in my hands. It's something that puts me at ease...most of the times. Other times like when I'd seen a severed head simmering in a pot with its eyes gouged out, its mouth stuffed with a crimson apple that still glints in the back of my mind, or when my eyes watched as balloons filled to the brim with that horrible, horrible red liquid that reeks of metal popped and drenched my team and I, all while a strange party song blared through the speakers. The irony.

But that deranged, demented man is dead now, but only after I got his hands in cuffs and his body in that orange jumpsuit. That was not fun. James Renk bit and thrashed and scratched at me through the entire process, but what else was expected of a serial killer that had it in him to commit such gruesome crimes and feels not a drop of remorse? If anything, I was expecting so much more when I marched up to his small, weathered and run down cabin and kicked the door open, found him kneeling over a dismembered body with his mouth and teeth soaked in blood, the grin on his face absolutely, positively haunting. But that's besides the point. Now, all I can think of is this case I'm going to have to slice as my feet carry me out of the house, barely noticing the freezing weather and white ice crunching under my boots.