Li Miaomiao’s face was deathly pale. “Could it be Mom?”
Jiang Ye was not sure either. He moved a little closer to the trunk and asked, “Mom, is that you? If it is, answer me.”
The trunk was as silent as death.
Just as Li Miaomiao also gathered her courage and edged closer, another loud THUD came from inside. A bun-sized bulge appeared in the metal trunk lid, and Miaomiao instantly jumped back behind Jiang Ye.
Now, at least, they could be certain of one thing. Whatever was inside was either Jiang Ye’s mother after she had already turned into a headless corpse, or it was not Jiang Ye’s mother at all.
Whichever it was, they could not rashly open the trunk.
“What do we do now?” Li Miaomiao poked her head out and asked.
“Tomorrow morning, we go straight to the police station and report it,” Jiang Ye said.
From another angle, having a headless corpse in the trunk was a good thing.
Jiang Ye guessed that the headless corpses at Tianlu Mansion had very likely disappeared by now. Even if they called the police, the police might not find anything. Besides, something as unscientific as a headless corpse would only make people think two high school students were talking nonsense.
But now they had living proof in their hands.
Their words would become one hundred percent credible.
And there would be more people around during the day. As long as there were enough people, they would not have to fear those things hiding in the dark.
“But...” Li Miaomiao hesitated. “Don’t you want to know whether the person inside really is Mom?”
Jiang Ye fell silent.
Indeed.
He did.
They had to open this trunk tonight.
Headless corpses were vicious. They had to make every possible preparation. He looked around the construction site but did not find any especially suitable weapons for self-defense.
“You stay here. I’ll go home and get a baseball bat,” he said.
Li Miaomiao shook her head like a rattle drum. “No. I’m not staying here with it. I’m scared.”
“You can hide somewhere and wait for me,” Jiang Ye said.
Li Miaomiao kept shaking her head.
In truth, Jiang Ye was not comfortable leaving her here alone either. But the two of them together were too conspicuous and would easily be discovered.
Forget it.
Jiang Ye said, “We’ll go together. Quick there, quick back.”
They returned to the apartment and got a baseball bat, as well as a coil of nylon rope. When they reached the first floor, they happened to run into Jin Feize, who was taking out the trash.
He wore a white T-shirt and light gray pants. It was clearly an extremely simple, casual outfit, yet somehow even the night seemed to brighten a little because of him.
The instant Li Miaomiao saw him, her tears broke loose.
“Senior Jin.” She ran up to him with tear-filled eyes. “My dad is gone.”
Jin Feize tilted his head in puzzlement. “What?”
Li Miaomiao said incoherently, “There are monsters in my house. My dad was killed. Now my mom might be in our trunk.”
Jiang Ye stopped her. “Don’t talk nonsense.”
Jin Feize’s delicate brows drew together. He asked with concern, “It sounds like you’ve run into serious trouble. Do you need my help?”
Li Miaomiao and Jiang Ye spoke at the same time.
Li Miaomiao said, “Yes!”
Jiang Ye said, “No.”
Jin Feize smiled. “So is that yes or no?”
Jiang Ye pulled Li Miaomiao and was about to leave. “I can handle it alone.”
Li Miaomiao disagreed and said worriedly, “You barely managed to deal with my dad just now. Brother, can you really handle it?”
“I happen to be free. I’ll go take a look too,” Jin Feize said.
Jiang Ye really did not want to get involved with Jin Feize. “No need.”
Jin Feize stared at Jiang Ye, his beautiful eyes carrying a faint smile.
“Jiang Ye, it seems like you really dislike me.”
Having one more person was indeed safer.
Jiang Ye struggled for a moment, then said, “The thing inside goes beyond common sense. It’s very difficult to deal with. Think it through.”
“I’ve thought it through.” Jin Feize smiled calmly.
“Fine. Follow me.”
The three of them returned to the construction site together. The trunk was still thudding.
Jiang Ye handed the nylon rope to Jin Feize and said, “You’ll know what’s inside in a moment. Adapt as needed. I’ll knock it out, and you tie it up immediately.”
Then he instructed Li Miaomiao, “You open the trunk. Move fast. Open it and run.”
Li Miaomiao took a deep breath, reached out, opened the trunk, and immediately retreated.
With a snap, the trunk sprang open. A thick stench surged out, and the thing inside stood up.
It really was a headless corpse.
From the clothing, it was a woman. She was short and fat, with a round belly that looked as if a pot had been overturned onto her stomach.
Li Miaomiao was so scared she turned and ran, shrinking behind a pillar.
Jiang Ye let out a breath of relief.
His mother took good care of herself and had a very nice figure. This was definitely not his mother.
Jin Feize looked at the thing standing in the car, a hint of surprise in his eyes.
“Ah...” he said. “It really is terrifying.”
The moment he spoke, the headless corpse shot toward him like a cannonball.
Jiang Ye swung the bat at once, only then realizing he had overlooked something extremely fatal.
A headless corpse had no head.
Where was he supposed to hit it to knock it unconscious?
In that split second, he changed the point of impact, lowered himself, and struck at its legs. To his surprise, the headless corpse’s body was as hard as steel, and the baseball bat snapped in half at the middle.
Jiang Ye had not slowed it down at all.
It went straight for Jin Feize.
“Jin Feize, run!” Jiang Ye shouted.
Jin Feize did not move.
He bent down and picked up a power saw.
It was the kind of saw used on construction sites to cut steel and stone. Its blade was longer than a person’s arm.
Jin Feize started the saw. The blade spun rapidly, making a teeth-grinding clacking sound.
The headless corpse charged straight at him.
The saw in Jin Feize’s hands cut into its body. The headless corpse became stuck on the blade and trembled violently. Blood splattered all over Jin Feize’s face and body.
He turned the saw, the blade grinding through the headless corpse’s abdomen with a wet, sticky sound of flesh being churned.
Then he switched off the saw and kicked the headless corpse. It came loose from the blade.
He started the saw again and unhurriedly sawed off the headless corpse’s four limbs.
Even without its limbs, it was still twisting constantly, like a fat flesh maggot. The sight was horrifying enough to make anyone lose sleep.
Jin Feize clicked his tongue, kicked it over, and sank the saw in his hands into its back, severing its spine.
At last, it stopped moving.
Li Miaomiao stared at the blood and severed limbs scattered across the ground, dumb as a wooden chicken.
Jiang Ye also froze.
He had not expected Jin Feize to choose such a brutal way of handling it.
Jin Feize tossed away the saw, wiped the blood from his face, and said, “Problem solved. Let’s go back and sleep.”
He said it so lightly, as if what he had just dismembered was not a person, but a head of garlic.
Li Miaomiao came back to herself as if waking from a dream, leaned against the car door, and vomited nonstop.
Jiang Ye frowned. “Jin Feize, you dismembered her. If the police find this, we won’t be able to explain ourselves. No one will believe we ran into a corpse that could still move without a head.”
Jin Feize smiled apologetically. “I didn’t think that far. Then what should we do?”
Jiang Ye did not know what to do either.
He looked at the corpse pieces on the ground, then suddenly noticed the black hair on the corpse’s hands.
So far, every headless corpse Jiang Ye had seen had black hair on its body.
He found a screwdriver and prodded at the black hairs.
“That’s disgusting,” Li Miaomiao said. “Brother, stop messing with her.”
He thought for a moment about how to deal with the corpse, then stood up and found a woven plastic sack, cleaning up the severed limbs and putting them inside.
Then he turned to the wall, opened the fire hydrant cabinet, pulled out the hose, turned on the valve, and sprayed water over the bloodstains at the scene.
Before long, the bloodstains were washed clean. By the time the workers came in for their shift during the day, the water here would already have evaporated too, and every trace would disappear without a sound.
Now there was only one final problem.
How were they supposed to deal with the severed limbs in the sack?
“Why don’t you put them at my place for now?” Jin Feize suggested with a smiling face.
Jiang Ye looked at his smile and felt that he was a little strange.
This guy’s smile did not move in the slightest, like a mask.
Jin Feize noticed Jiang Ye’s scrutinizing gaze and asked with a smile, “Why do you keep looking at me?”
“...” Jiang Ye turned his face away. “I’m thinking about what to do.”
“Can looking at me help you think faster?”
“...”
“Just put it at my place,” Jin Feize said. “I have a freezer.”
Li Miaomiao was so close to breaking down that she almost cried. “We’re clearly the victims. Why do we look like murderers now?”
Jiang Ye said to Jin Feize, “Thank you, but we have somewhere to go.”
Jin Feize smiled faintly. “Where else can you go? Dragging such a huge bag of things around, who would take you in?”
Jiang Ye did not answer. He pushed Li Miaomiao into the car and threw the woven sack into the trunk.
They could not stay at the construction site anymore. They had to find another deserted place to deal with the body parts.
He got into the driver’s seat, started the car, and slowly drove out of the site.
In the rearview mirror, Jin Feize stood where he was, his white shirt stained with blood. His slender figure stood in the cold night wind like a tree of winter plum blossoms.
“Where else can we go?” Li Miaomiao said quietly. “Why don’t we just make do at Senior Jin’s place?”
Jiang Ye asked coldly, “Didn’t you think there was something wrong with him?”
Li Miaomiao had always been careless and could not sense anything strange.
“You mean the way he dismembered the corpse was scary? But he had no choice. The headless corpse wouldn’t stop moving.”
Jiang Ye turned the steering wheel and drove into another alley. “His technique for dismembering a human body was very clean. Bones are hard. Dismemberment isn’t that easy. The whole process of him dismembering the headless corpse took less than ten minutes. He was too skilled. He must have killed people before.”
Li Miaomiao froze, then stammered, “Brother, aren’t you being too suspicious? He’s just a high school student like us!”
Jiang Ye shook his head. “He said his home has a freezer. Every apartment in our building is old, rundown, and cramped. The biggest units are less than fifty square meters. Why would someone buy a freezer for such a small place? Don’t you think that’s strange?”
Li Miaomiao refused to believe Jin Feize had ever killed anyone.
His hands were so clean and slender, and his smile was so warm. How could he possibly kill people?
“But he’s your deskmate. Don’t you know what kind of person he is?”
“We’re not close.” Jiang Ye turned off the engine. “I’m going to buy a bottle of water and some bread.”
Li Miaomiao felt depressed and got out of the car to follow Jiang Ye.
She still felt Jiang Ye was overthinking it. If they were talking about strange, her brother was pretty strange too. After seeing a person dismembered with his own eyes, was the most normal reaction not supposed to be nausea and vomiting, like hers?
Her brother could actually still calmly clean up the scene.
In her opinion, the two of them were equally weird.
In truth, the more important reason she wanted to go to Senior Jin’s place was that there was no cover outside. She was afraid they would run into unclean things again. Walking along the pitch-black street, she kept feeling as if a ghost was about to pop out from somewhere.
Goose bumps rose on her arms. As she walked, she kept looking around suspiciously and did not notice that her brother had stopped at the mouth of the alley. She crashed headfirst into his back.
“Wha—”
Before she could finish asking, Jiang Ye covered her mouth.
Jiang Ye pressed close to the wall and frowned at the opposite side of the street.
A group of people in dark clothes was gathered in front of the convenience store. Without exception, every single one of them wore a scarf.
Wearing scarves in the middle of summer.
And a strange, indescribable smell spread through the street.
It was the smell of the headless corpses.
Jiang Ye immediately pulled Li Miaomiao back the way they had come and entered another street.
The instant he poked his head out, he saw several scarf-wearing figures appear at the street corner.
Jiang Ye drew back, and his heart sank to the bottom.
Headless corpses were everywhere.
They were surrounded on all sides.
They had nowhere left to go.
The moment Li Miaomiao saw those eerie things, she started trembling with fear again. She was even more afraid that her father was among those headless corpses. The moment she thought of that, she could not help crying.
Now was not the time to be sad.
She wiped her face and tried hard to stay calm, just like her brother.
“What do we do?”
Jiang Ye sighed. “No choice.”
A high school student who might be a murderer was still easier to handle than a headless ghost, right?
He went back to the trunk to retrieve the woven sack.
Ten minutes later, they appeared at Jin Feize’s door.
Li Miaomiao knocked on Jin Feize’s door. Strangely, even after a long time, Jin Feize did not answer.
They almost thought Jin Feize had not come home yet.
But it was so late. Where else could he have gone?
The longer time passed, the more anxious Li Miaomiao became.
Those things had followed them nearby. They would inevitably come to the apartment building to check.
She kept looking back at the dark, hollow stairwell, terrified that a monster without a head might appear.
Li Miaomiao was as anxious as a grasshopper over a flame. “I keep feeling like they’re about to come.”
The moment she finished speaking, footsteps sounded from downstairs.
THUD, THUD, THUD.
Jiang Ye: “...”
This girl had a crow’s mouth.
The footsteps were urgent and chaotic, like drumbeats urging them toward death. Li Miaomiao’s face went white at once.
Jiang Ye listened as the footsteps came closer and closer.
Second floor...
Third floor...
Fourth floor...
Just then, with a click, the door opened.
Jin Feize smiled faintly. “Sorry, I was just washing—”
Before he could finish speaking, Jiang Ye pressed a hand against his chest and pushed him straight into the entryway. Li Miaomiao quickly followed and shut the door behind them, locking it as well.
“What’s wrong?” Jin Feize asked.
Jiang Ye covered his mouth.
The three of them crowded into the entryway. Jin Feize and Jiang Ye stood face-to-face, only inches apart.
The voice-activated light went out.
In the darkness, Jin Feize blinked.
Footsteps echoed in the stairwell, drawing closer and closer. The three of them were motionless, as if afraid of disturbing a fierce beast, silently listening as the footsteps approached.
Go upstairs.
Go upstairs.
Li Miaomiao repeated the words silently in her heart. As long as he went upstairs, it would mean he was just an ordinary resident, not a headless corpse.
But heaven did not grant wishes.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.