Chapter 55: S#9. Midnight Vegetable Train (4)
by fnovelpia
At dawn, I met with the Hyper sisters.
Both Zelda and Hilda came today.
“Summer. Is this size enough?”
Zelda pointed to the box she was carrying.
It wasn’t a box used for storing vegetables and meat. It was so large, even a tiger could fit inside.
We took it with us on the subway.
Normally, we would have headed to the last car of the train. But today, we went to the very first one.
A door sealed with chains.
I unlocked it and opened the door.
The green vegetable curtain stood like a fortress, unchanged.
I knocked cautiously.
“Vegetable Man. We’ve brought you something to eat.”
A rustling sound came from inside.
“Finally, the crazy b*tch in the back car has starved to death, huh? Did you bring the body?”
“That’s not it. Meat Girl has apologized to you. She admits her fault and is regretting it.”
“Apologies? I can’t believe it!”
He was skeptical. I expected that reaction.
Zelda Hyper spoke up.
“If you don’t want to believe, don’t. She even brought a lot of raw meat asking for forgiveness. We might as well throw it away.”
“……”
The green curtain slid open.
Apparently unable to bear the hunger, Vegetable Man poked his head out.
I seized the moment and whacked his head with an axe.
Vegetable Man passed out and collapsed.
The story about bringing Meat Girl’s raw meat was, of course, a lie.
The box was empty.
I shoved the unconscious Vegetable Man into the box.
That’s why we had prepared such a big box.
We carried the box to the last car.
I unlocked it, and tapped on the red curtain.
“Meat Girl. We’ve brought you something to eat.”
“Finally, the crazy bastard in the front car has starved to death, huh? Did you bring the body?”
“That’s not it. Vegetable Man has apologized. He was being a jerk and is truly sorry.”
“I can’t believe it!”
Meat Girl’s response was chillingly similar to Vegetable Man’s.
The red meat curtain opened.
I whacked Meat Girl’s head with the axe, knocking her out.
I pulled Vegetable Man out of the box and threw him into the back car.
The quivering meat walls.
Vegetable Man, smelling the fresh raw meat, seemed about to wake up.
I hurriedly locked the door.
The unconscious Meat Girl was shoved into the box.
“Now we can go back to the front car, let Meat Girl out, and they can both eat their fill.”
A switch.
The vegetable person to the red car.
The meat person to the green car.
Switching their positions so that they could tear at the walls and ceiling filled with vegetables and meat.
This was the so-called ‘surprise’…
The only solution to break the deadlock between the two monsters.
I carried the box with Meat Girl toward the front car.
But then, Zelda suddenly stopped in her tracks.
“……Hold on.”
“What’s wrong, Zelda?”
“I hear footsteps.”
Footsteps? I could only hear the train.
I once heard that visually impaired people have several times more acute hearing than normal people.
Soon, the train stopped at the station. I could see dark figures loitering on the platform through the window.
Zelda had heard their footsteps.
But now, another sound was heard.
Click. The sound of a gun being loaded.
“Get down!”
I moved reflexively, grabbing the Hyper sisters, and got low.
Ratatatata- gunfire rang out. The windows shattered.
Bullets whizzed over our heads. If we hadn’t ducked, we would have been riddled with holes.
The gunfire continued for a while. It was a messy shootout.
“What, what’s going on?!”
A flustered Zelda asked. Hilda was equally confused.
Men swarmed into the open door, grim-faced thugs holding pistols.
“Hey.”
A familiar face, aiming a gun at me and the Hyper sisters.
Ten thugs, like pirates, had taken over the dawn train.
Some of the guys we had met on the train a few days ago were mixed in with the group.
At their insistence, the Hyper sisters and I compliantly took our seats.
I can withstand a few bullets, but the Hyper sisters were a different story—they would die instantly if shot.
We couldn’t defy the commands issued at gunpoint.
“Stay put, tough guy,” growled a man with a cast on his hand, brandishing a revolver.
He was the same guy whose hand had broken when he hit me.
Perhaps he had brought his gang for revenge.
Just then, a man wearing a black eye patch approached me, clearly the boss.
“Did you think you could kill our friend and get away with it?”
“I didn’t do anything. It was your guys’ fault.”
At that, the man with the cast flared up.
“Don’t talk back to the boss!”
He hit my shoulder with his other hand.
Snap-
“Ah!!”
Once again, the scream was not mine.
The man cradled his newly broken hand and collapsed, rolling around.
His colleagues looked down at him with expressions of disbelief.
The boss tapped on a large box at his feet, its lid closed so its contents were not visible.
“What’s in this box?”
“I wouldn’t open it if I were you.”
But telling someone not to do something often makes them want to do it even more—it’s been that way since Pandora.
The thugs ultimately opened the lid of the box and recoiled in horror.
“Hee, heek…! It’s the monster, boss!”
Inside the box was Meat Girl, her body grotesquely composed of chunks of meat.
In a horror movie, this would be the cliché moment when the monster leaps out and slaughters everyone, but Meat Girl was still unconscious.
This was bad.
“Shoot,” ordered the boss.
The thugs, wielding dual pistols, aimed inside the box.
Triggers were pulled in quick succession.
A barrage of bullets riddled Meat Girl’s body in an instant, turning her raw meat skin into a ragged mess, the flesh pulverized through the bullet holes.
Hilda cried.
Hearing the gunfire, Zelda also realized what had happened and weakly shook her head.
The thugs wore expressions of exhilaration, pleased to have avenged the monster that had eaten their comrade’s head.
But at that moment—
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr───────────────────────
A bizarre sound echoed, sounding like a giant belching.
It came from the last car.
“Wha, what was that sound just now…?”
“There’s another one,” I replied, causing the thugs to suddenly hold their breath.
The train shook violently.
The lights began to flicker.
Blink, blink, blink.
A wave of anxiety and fear swept over the thugs’ faces.
“…You guys, lead the way,” the boss commanded, pointing his gun.
The Hyper sisters and I led the way to the back car.
Hilda tightly gripped her sister’s arm, her shoulders trembling slightly.
But it wasn’t just from fear.
She was quickly and discreetly writing something on Zelda’s arm with her fingers.
Soon, Zelda naturally came over to me and wrote on the back of my hand.
‘Hilda will give the signal.’
A signal?
Crossing from car to car, we soon reached the back car again.
A door sealed with chains.
Blood red, it pooled from beneath the door.
A malevolent presence could be felt from beyond the door—the murderous intent of the satiated Vegetable Man.
The thugs trembled and sweated coldly.
“O…open it,” the boss commanded.
Hilda slowly took out a key.
The moment the key was inserted into the lock, the train entered a tunnel.
The flickering ceiling lights suddenly went out.
It was an unexpected blackout.
Darkness enveloped the entire train, laid out on the tracks.
In the sudden darkness, someone stumbled.
Thud!
That was Hilda’s signal.
But where and how were we to move?
It was too dark to see anything.
Then someone suddenly grabbed my hand—a soft hand, not a rough one.
It was Zelda.
She had accurately identified me by touch alone.
Hilda and I followed Zelda, running precisely in the opposite direction.
Even in the darkness that stripped away our sense of direction, Zelda did not lose her way.
She had always been in darkness.
“They’re escaping!”
As we created distance, the thugs pulled their triggers.
Flashes burst from the muzzles, carving through the darkness with flames of gunpowder.
I instinctively wrapped my arms around the Hyper sisters, using my back as a shield to take the bullets for them.
My buttock burned.
“Sh*t…!”
I had been shot in the left buttock.
The pain was sharp.
In the midst of relentless gunfire, the sound of dragging chains was heard, and then the back car door opened.
“Wait, cease fire!”
“The door’s open!”
“What? What’s inside…..”
From inside the back car, a dark mass surged out.
The train, engulfed in darkness, filled with the stench of blood emanating from the back car.
Isn’t the greatest fear the fear of the unknown?
The thugs screamed frantically and madly pulled their triggers.
But no bullets came out.
They had emptied their magazines firing at us indiscriminately.
The lights, previously out due to the power outage, came back on.
Revealed was Vegetable Man, drenched in blood.
He was munching on a chunk of flesh.
“Yum.”
Vegetable Man grabbed one of the thugs by the head and spun it around.
The neck snapped, blood spurting like a fountain.
The head flew off.
Vegetable Man charged.
His target was a chubby thug.
He extended both green hands simultaneously.
His sharp hand blades deeply pierced the thug’s pudgy chest.
Breaking the ribs and penetrating the back, lungs hung on the tips of his fingers.
The heart rolled out like a capsule popping out of a vending machine, still pulsing hotly.
The thugs retreated in unison.
“Ugh, aaaaaahhhhh!!”
They began fumbling to reload their handguns.
Vegetable Man grabbed the man with the cast.
“Aaaagh…! I’m caught! Don’t shoot…!”
“Fire!”
The boss ordered.
The thugs, having reloaded, opened fire.
The man with the cast took the bullets intended for Vegetable Man.
His body was riddled with holes.
Vegetable Man then flung the body towards the window.
Crash-
The window shattered, and the body was hurled out of the moving train.
It got crushed between the train and the wall, making a sound like a blender.
What followed was a brutal slaughter by Vegetable Man.
He tore off the thugs’ faces, folded their bodies in half into a shrimp position.
He shoved his hands into their mouths and pulled out their intestines.
Sticky blood splattered everywhere.
The graffiti inside the moving train turned red.
The splatter of dawn.
Vegetable Man, now covered in blood, had lost his original green color.
Suddenly, our eyes met.
“You… you tricked me.”
“You’ve eaten your fill, haven’t you?”
The Vegetable Man had slaughtered all the thugs.
Only the boss remained.
Trembling as he watched the carnage of his subordinates, he suddenly charged.
He grabbed Hilda Hyper.
I should have protected her.
Distracted by the gunshot wound in my buttock, it was a painful oversight.
The boss pressed the muzzle against Hilda’s temple.
He had taken her as a hostage.
“Don’t… come any closer…!”
“……”
“If you come closer, I’ll blow this woman’s head off!!!”
He was serious about pulling the trigger.
A terrified Hilda began to sob softly.
Zelda, distraught from losing her sister, couldn’t stay still.
I subtly pulled out the axe I had tucked into the back of my waistband.
I had planned to throw it to split the boss’s skull, but since Hilda was placed in front, it was difficult to aim.
Vegetable Man, drenched in blood, scoffed.
“Pfft. I don’t care about that woman’s life!”
With that, he advanced.
The boss gritted his teeth and hooked his finger on the trigger, nearly ready to shoot Hilda in the head.
Just then, Vegetable Man suddenly froze in place, as if someone had pressed pause.
“Why… why aren’t my legs obeying me…?”
Even Vegetable Man himself was taken aback by his sudden immobility.
The train gradually slowed down as it neared a station.
The boss intended to disembark, taking Hilda as a hostage.
“When the door opens, I’m getting off. Don’t you all move a step—arghhhh!”
The boss screamed out.
Behind him stood Meat Girl, her body battered from the gunfire and hunched over grotesquely.
Her red hand had plunged deep into the boss’s spine.
Pulling sharply, she extracted his spine.
Intestines burst through the collapsing muscle gaps, and the boss fell down with a thud.
It was an execution worthy of a Predator movie.
Meat Girl then turned her gaze to the Hyper sisters and me.
“You… you deceived me…!”
Meat Girl charged at us.
Her approach was ferocious, but her attack never reached the Hyper sisters.
Like being bound by invisible chains, Meat Girl abruptly stopped in her tracks, just like Vegetable Man had.
Meat Girl and Vegetable Man faced each other, both stopped.
“You…”
Neither monster could continue.
Zelda then spoke up.
“They might not recognize their children, but they recognize each other’s transformed selves.”
“What do you mean?”
“They are a couple. We are… their daughters.”
It was like a line out of a morning drama.
Bewildered, I furrowed my brow.
“Zelda, did you… get shot in the head?”
“No, Summer. I’m fine. Those monsters are our parents,” Zelda clarified.
Meat Girl and Vegetable Man, emerging from the red and green cars, faced each other.
A face made of meat and another of vegetables—both wore expressions of immense shock.
“…Dementia complicated things. The condition was so severe that even we, their daughters, couldn’t recognize them.”
They had concocted a medicine to save their dying parents.
However, the medicine induced fatal side effects.
Their bodies had transformed into monsters composed of meat and vegetables.
As the Smith couple had shown, the price of encroaching upon forbidden territory was severe.
“Those monsters, no, your parents… were the elderly couple living next door”
“That’s right.”
The elderly couple afflicted with dementia were indeed Meat Girl and Vegetable Man.
The Hyper sisters had moved into their parents’ home.
Zelda held Hilda’s hand.
Standing before Meat Girl and Vegetable Man—mom and dad—she said, “Mom, Dad. In three days, you’ll forget all this, as you always have.”
“……”
“Please wait in the car until we find a solution.”
However, the couple shook their heads.
“……No.”
Though they hadn’t recognized their daughters, now they seemed to have understood everything.
“This is as far as we go.”
“But…”
“We’ve lived enough. It’s okay.”
The meat and vegetable beings embraced each other.
“It’s time to make peace.”
Their mouths met.
Crunch.
They bit off each other’s tongues.
They tore at arms and legs and chewed them up.
Through their mouths, they ground each other’s bodies of meat and vegetables.
Their movements were not greedy but rather tender.
Hilda watched in numb shock as their parents were ground up, while Zelda listened numbly.
Eventually, only two mouths and a greatly swollen stomach remained on the floor, entwined to form a heart shape with their elongated esophaguses.
“That is…”
Flowers bloomed from the stomach, their petals a mix of red and green.
These flowers gently colored the car.
The graffiti-filled inner walls of the train were now covered with meat flowers.
Flowers also sprouted from the chopped-up remains of the thugs.
The wave of flowers reached from the last car to the first.
The train had turned into a blossoming garden.
It reached its final stop.
Stepping outside, the rising sun dispelled the darkness.
Dawn had arrived.
“I’m so glad you came!”
Nancy Strode greeted Zelda and Hilda with a big smile.
It was Nancy’s birthday today.
Thanks to Nancy’s good reputation, many people had gathered to celebrate.
It was a great party with good people and good food.
Even the raccoons and other wildlife like Bob Bojangles, attracted by the smell of food, received kindness as they lurked around the yard.
I walked around the party a bit awkwardly.
The gunshot wound in my buttock was healing quickly.
The muscles were so firm that the bullets hadn’t penetrated deeply.
The Hyper sisters had offered to make a medicine that would help with the gunshot wound, but I firmly declined.
When the time came, I picked up a box.
It was not a box filled with vegetables. It was a gift box.
I approached Nancy and handed it to her.
“Happy Birthday, Nancy.”
Nancy, trembling with excitement, hastily tore open the wrapping paper.
The gift I had prepared was a book.
A first edition of “The Golden Bough,” which Nancy had previously expressed a desire to read.
It was the best gift I could come up with, not knowing much about what women might want.
Fortunately, Nancy seemed to like it.
“Thank you, Summer! This is really the book I wanted to read!”
“I also prepared a bookmark.”
“Really?”
It was a bookmark made of flowers, beautifully blending red and green.
Nancy blushed shyly as she admired the bookmark.
“…It smells nice. Hehe.”
Though it wasn’t supposed to have a scent.
But there would surely be no regrets.
I headed to a secluded corner.
There was something I needed to finish in secret.
“Alright, narrator. Tell me the secret now.”
The narrator had said, ‘If the serial killer succeeds in reconciliation, he will step closer to the secrets of this world.’
It was time to receive my reward.
The narrator seemed ready to speak.
-The killer has succeeded in reconciliation.
The secret he will now learn is…
The narration abruptly stopped.
As if someone had unplugged the microphone during a speech.
“Narrator? Hello?”
I called out, but there was no response.
A sinister premonition crept over me.
…What’s happening?
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