It Killed His Parents

'Your friend?'

A moment later, Xie Qingcheng ended the call and came back inside. He Yu asked.

Xie Qingcheng had no intention of explaining. He figured He Yu had the short memory of someone who moved in rarefied circles — Chen Man, a chance acquaintance over one meal, would have been forgotten long ago. So he said only: 'More or less.'

'He said he just got off work and wants to come over.'

'I didn't say he could.'

Xie Qingcheng dismissed Chen Man and carried the finished noodles out from the kitchen. While he'd been busy, Young Master He had been watching from the side like a lord at leisure, showing no sign of offering to help — only asking about Chen Man.

'Why is he so eager to see you?'

'I told you, he's a friend.'

'Quite young, isn't he. How old?'

'About your age.'

'Professor Xie certainly collects friends across generations,' He Yu said. 'No generation gap to speak of?'

'...'

Xie Qingcheng found the whole line of questioning baffling. He set his chopsticks down with a sharp click, his gaze going cold. 'What are you, the galactic police? Since when is my social life any of your business?'

He Yu went quiet.

He had nothing to say. When he came back to himself he could see, plainly enough, that he'd been acting strange — why should any of this matter to him.

Xie Qingcheng pushed a bowl of noodles in front of him, a soft-yolked poached egg resting on top.

'Eat. I'm going to call your father.'

At this moment.

In an office inside one of Hu University Campus's teaching buildings, Zhang Yong was huddled in a dark corner, the heavy door shut and bolted.

Fat drops of sweat rolled down his forehead. He pressed a handkerchief to his face, but the cloth was already soaked through — you could have wrung it out.

His small, piggy eyes were fixed on the iron door, the only way in from outside. He had been staring at it for a long time. The moment Wang Jiankang's crime-scene photographs went public, he had known he was next.

After all, he had had a hand in designing those biological experiments being run at Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital, and taking the women there — women who had lost all normal awareness — had become an unspoken currency exchanged among these men when serious business was being discussed. Sex and power, traded like coins.

Some of the women at the psychiatric hospital were beautiful. Some had even been Huzhou University students lured in under the pretense of treatment. They were docile, compliant, the kind who stirred a certain hunger in men — and they were safe.

Few people thought to attend to the inner lives of women in a psychiatric ward, or to take what they said seriously. Some had been driven half-mad by the abuse, and some were prone to forgetting — in time, they could forget nearly everything that had been done to them.

If one of them became pregnant, that was no trouble either. He and the others had been partners with Liang Jicheng for years, and Liang Jicheng knew exactly how to handle it — he knew which tight-lipped researchers to bring in to make the 'evidence' disappear cleanly.

But...

But none of this was something he'd wanted in the first place!

It had been that older figure who'd drawn him in — dangling enormous profit and access in front of him, recruiting him to do his bidding, telling him they were all brothers on the same boat, that if anything went wrong, they'd weather it together.

After Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital burned to the ground, that man had even reassured them: everything had been cleaned up, the trail would stop at Liang Jicheng at most, everything else was dead men's testimony against dead men — nothing to worry about.

Then Wang Jiankang turned up slaughtered.

His own surname and one other had been plastered across a kill video, followed by the unmistakable sign of the Drop the Handkerchief game.

Zhang Yong had just stepped out of the teaching building when he spotted the Broadcast Tower. In an instant the fright gutted him completely — he bolted in a blind panic, all direction gone, and without thinking called the man.

The line connected. What reached his ear was soft, pleasant music, and beneath it the faint sound of a foreign masseuse asking, in a gentle voice, about the pressure.

Their lives were on the line.

And that man was at a spa.

'Hello — hello!' Zhang Yong's eyes were about to split open, rage and terror in equal measure. He forced his voice down but couldn't force out the fury, and couldn't begin to force out the fear.

'Hello!!!'

'Oh.' The other man laughed. 'Director Zhang. This late, and still not in bed — what's the matter?'

Zhang Yong was so livid he could feel his blood vessels straining. His voice came out warped: 'Stop pretending! Wang Jiankang is dead! He's dead!! You told us Chengkang had been cleaned up, told us not to worry — what the hell is this now?! Say something!'

'Mmm... yes, right there, a little harder on the shoulder.' The man exchanged a few words with the masseuse in English, then turned back to Zhang Yong at a leisurely pace. 'Brother, Chengkang was cleaned up. But the dogs kept sniffing, kept their noses to the bloodstain on the floor, sniffed their way right to our door — so what do you suggest we do about that?'

'That's not my problem! You're the one who should be finding a solution! You took the largest share of everything, you—'

The other man laughed and cut him off: 'Director Zhang, life is rarely fair — you're a grown man, how have you still not made your peace with that?'

Zhang Yong's back was drenched. He stared at the phone and understood: that man would not help him. Might even move against him.

This was the predictable result of bargaining with a tiger.

Zhang Yong looked up at the blood-red broadcast tower and felt as though he'd woken from a dream. He threw his traceable phone into the bushes and ran flat-out toward the teaching building.

Now he was crouched inside one of its offices.

Hu University Campus had buildings without number — offices and classrooms combined, if not ten thousand then a thousand.

He was hidden inside one of them, his smartwatch with its GPS function stripped from his wrist. He should be safe. If he could get through tonight, he would turn himself in.

He had thought it through: he could no longer afford to hope for the best. Surrendering might still earn him a reduced sentence — at least he wouldn't end up like Wang Jiankang, strangled naked to death...

The thought of how Wang Jiankang had died sent a fresh shudder through Zhang Yong. He swallowed hard. The image of Jiang Lanpei seemed to waver in front of his eyes — a red-clad, red-shoed female ghost come to drag him away too.

'Ptui!' He trembled and spat under his breath, trying to summon a scrap of courage. 'Ptui, ptui, ptui — what are you thinking, there are no ghosts! No such thing as ghosts!'

As if to disprove him, without warning —

A woman's soft laugh rose inside the sealed room: 'Hee hee...'

Zhang Yong shot to his feet, his face contorted in terror: 'Who — who's there?!'

Silence again.

As if that quiet laugh had been a hallucination.

Zhang Yong pressed his clammy, sweating back flat against the cold wall. He had chosen this office deliberately — only a door, no windows. The room was small; there wasn't even a cabinet large enough to hide a person. So where had that sound come from? He was soaked through, a fish pulled gasping from a tank, his heart hammering its way up his throat.

And then, as if fulfilling the ritual this kind of game always demanded.

The song began again.

'Drop it, drop it, drop the handkerchief... softly set it down, behind your little friend, and don't let anyone tell him...'

But he had no phone on him!

That flat, electronic chime — where was it coming from? Where was there a phone? He clutched at the sliver of hope, tried to soothe himself: could someone have left a phone behind in this office?

Zhang Yong could barely keep his footing. With great effort he tracked the direction of the sound.

Slowly, following the song, he moved those bulging, bullfrog eyes upward — toward the ceiling — above his head —

'AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!'

Zhang Yong let out a scream that reached every corner of the teaching building —

The air conditioning access panel!!!

The air conditioning access panel had been opened at some point. A woman in red, black hair loose, was looking down at him from the crawl space above with cold, calm eyes — and then she smiled at him, slow and quiet.

Zhang Yong already had an underlying heart condition. The color drained from his face until it was whiter than a corpse, his lips turning blue within seconds; his thick chest, with its Buddhist pendant still hanging there, heaved violently, and then —

Zhang Yong couldn't draw his next breath. He clutched his chest, staggered back two steps, and went down with a heavy thud.

The teaching building's ceiling was a standard suspended grid with a generous void above it — students had long since grown used to the sound of cats and rats moving around up there. The air conditioning units were the old-style kind with outward-hinged access panels. Zhang Yong had not thought to consider that the crawl space above offered enough room for a living person to move through.

The woman opened the panel and dropped down, a narrow blade catching the light in her hand.

'You... it's you...!'

Even in the grip of blind terror Zhang Yong could make out the woman's face — a bewitching face, the kind that dims the moon and shames the flowers, delicate past describing. But in this moment, to him, it looked exactly like a demon crawled up from the depths of hell.

Jiang Liping!!

It was Jiang Liping!!!

'Now that you've seen my face, you can't leave here alive.' Jiang Liping smiled and stepped toward him. 'How do you want to die? Knife? Gun? Both are quick enough...'

'You — you're working for them?! You — you're not just a loose woman, you're also — you're their person too!!'

'Yes, I'm their person.' Jiang Liping smiled, warm and unhurried. 'What did you think? Why else would I have spent all this time mixing with rotten, greasy old men like you?'

Zhang Yong backed away... kept backing away... clutching his chest, lurching on his knees, his peripheral vision locked on the iron door behind him — and then —

Bang!

From somewhere he found a burst of strength — some animal instinct for survival — and threw himself forward like a creature unhinged, slamming into the door and out into the hallway at a dead run.

Jiang Liping's eyes dimmed.

He was running?

Let him run.

Every step out there was already a trap. He'd only be choosing a different way to die.

She knew she had no need to chase a man who was already half-mad with fear — and besides, she couldn't very well chase him into the open. The police were everywhere outside, which was precisely why she'd come in through the ceiling crawl space.

'Boss, Zhang Yong just ran out of room 4406,' Jiang Liping murmured against her lips, voice close to a specialized comm piece. 'Heading toward exit 3. I'll take exit 6 — have your people meet me.'

Zhang Yong fled the teaching building in a blind scramble. His screaming and the commotion drew the Police Force's attention at once; officers and police vehicles converged on him fast.

Zhang Yong had never imagined that one day the sirens he feared even in dreams would sound like the music of salvation. Drenched in sweat, his voice nearly gone, he screamed: 'Help! Help!! I'm turning myself in! I have information! Save me — there's a killer in that building!!'

He ran breathlessly, the Buddhist pendant swinging against his chest, and even now Zhang Yong had not noticed the faint flicker of an electronic signal light in the tiny hole drilled through the pendant...

A guilty conscience drives a man to pray. But what does his prayer bring him?

Demons and monsters.

His confederates had laid the trap long ago. The moment he knelt before his gods, there were eyes at his back watching — noting every weakness, every moment of hesitation.

He was dead weight in the organization. Sooner or later he'd be cut off.

'Save me... save me...'

'Help!! Help!!'

The officers stationed in a ring around the building heard his screams and came running toward him, fully armed.

Zhang Yong's eyes blazed with desperate light. He summoned everything he had and ran toward the police with every ounce of it, like a drowning man thrashing toward shore through a storm —

He didn't want to die, he didn't want to die...

Almost there...

Just a few more steps...

He could already make out the expression of the nearest officer — tense, resolute — and he reached his hands toward them, stretching them out, reaching —

'Save me, I'll talk, I'll tell you everything, I —'

Bang!!

A sound that turned the blood cold.

The confession died in his throat.

Silence.

Zhang Yong had just crossed the intersection and was a second away from reaching the Police Force when a refrigerated delivery truck parked at the roadside suddenly let out a monstrous engine roar — and drove straight into him.

Everyone froze mid-stride and could only watch as Zhang Yong was hurled into the wall in an instant and then slammed back to the ground.

A crack — the sound of a skull splitting. Blood sprayed across the pavement. Zhang Yong was dead before he hit the ground; his obese body landed heavily, and the truck, headlights blazing, reversed and drove over the corpse a second time, crushing half of Zhang Yong's body out of shape in a matter of seconds.

'Captain Zheng!'

After a stretch of horrified silence.

A sharp-eyed officer shouted, his voice fractured by the shock: 'Look — the driver's seat is empty! It's driverless! The truck moved on its own!! How is that possible!!'

The detective leading the response, Zheng Jingfeng, was a veteran officer who had been close by; he had watched every detail of Zhang Yong's death with his own eyes. As it unfolded, something surfaced in his memory — a case from nineteen years ago seemed to replay itself in front of him, the violent images strobing through his mind, and Zheng Jingfeng went pale.

He shouted to everyone around him: 'Down! Everyone down!!'

Boom!!

The explosion came almost in the same breath. The empty driver's seat of the refrigerated truck burst into flame, and within seconds fire had swallowed the entire front end of the vehicle.

Zheng Jingfeng coughed through the smoke as he pushed himself up from the ground, breathing hard, eyes fixed on the half-burning wreck of steel — a driverless vehicle, a cab that self-ignited after impact, a body crushed half to ruin on the pavement. The veteran detective's face, lit by the roaring blaze, had gone very, very dark.

He felt as though he'd been thrown back to that day nineteen years ago.

What lay before him now was almost identical to what he had seen then.

The only difference was that the bodies beneath the wheels that day had been two of his colleagues. A husband and wife.

—

Xie Ping. Zhou Muying.

'Drop it, drop it, drop the handkerchief, softly set it down, behind your little friend, and don't let anyone tell him...'

The second marked target was dead.

That soft, eerie nursery rhyme drifted once again through countless screens across Hu University Campus.

The entire campus was like the stomach of some enormous creature — after a few seconds of silence it convulsed, and the cries of tens of thousands of students and faculty rose like a sonic shockwave, a rolling, muffled thunder against the ears.

Countless heads dropped. Countless eyes, white with fear, stared at phone screens.

The Drop the Handkerchief animated figure for the letter Z went still. The animated girl had caught the animated boy; he lay on the ground, a bright red handkerchief behind him, and the little digital flames began to rise from his body.

Seconds later, the kill feed changed again —

Another photograph, shot from above at full zoom.

In the frame, fire consumed the front of the refrigerated truck. Zhang Yong's body lay before the burning wreck, half of him already mashed to pulp.

'Another murder!'

'I know him — Zhang Yong!! He's the director of the university's international exchange office!'

'Z was Zhang Yong...'

The image cast itself across every screen within range, into tens of thousands of pairs of eyes — among them a pair of sharp, peach-blossom eyes, wide open now, staring at what they were seeing as though unable to believe it —

Xie Qingcheng had gone completely still.

All the warmth drained from his blood in an instant.

He had never, not for a single moment, imagined that today — this day, in the middle of this string of video murders — he would see the same thing again: a car driving itself into a person, then burning.

It was as if an invisible hand had closed around his throat and dragged him down into a dense, suffocating dark. The image of Zhang Yong's death in the video began to overlap and blur with the Nightmare he could never put behind him.

That Nightmare that had followed him for nineteen years.

That answer he had searched for and never found, and had finally, in grief, let go.

The cold had reached his hands; Xie Qingcheng's fingers lost their grip on his glass and it fell, shattering on the floor.

'Xie Qingcheng, what's wrong?' He Yu had caught the shift in the person beside him. Whatever this was, it was nothing like how Xie Qingcheng had reacted to the first photograph.

When Wang Jiankang was murdered, Xie Qingcheng had treated it like any level-headed person would. He looked, he analyzed, he followed the Police Force's instructions, he came back to the dormitory, and he kept a clear line between what needed to be done and what didn't.

But after Zhang Yong's photograph appeared, Xie Qingcheng stopped registering He Yu's presence entirely — offered not a single word of analysis. He held his phone, his face drained of color, and was still for a moment. Then he made a call and walked straight into Xie Xue's bedroom, closing the door in He Yu's face.

He Yu only caught the beginning of what he said to whoever picked up: 'Captain Zheng, it's me...'