Dreadful Radio Game

Chu Zhao and Su Bai were crouching in the garden beside the teaching building, looking at each other.

“I asked you for idea about the missing silent mentors at noon, and you gave me the answer in the evening.” Chu Zhao murmured as if he knew that Su Bai had already known it at noon but didn’t tell him until late in the night, so he had to get out of his warm bed and rush here, full of complaint.

Su Bai rolled his eyes “Did you see that scalp?”

“No. I’m timid and I’m afraid of blood,” Chu Zhao answered.

“And you can be a cop?”

“You know I’m the IOU; I got in through the back door.” Chu Zhao stood up and stretched himself.

“That’s not the scalp of a silent mentor. Silent mentors[1] have been dipped in formalin for so long and have been studied by students for so many times that there’s no way their scalps would still have fresh blood. Beside, the scalp tissue was fine and tender, so it can’t have been long after death or it might have been carefully kept for a while.”

Chu Zhao looked at him as if he was looking at some psychopath: “Fuck, you took it out and observed it?”

“I was there when the scalp was found. I’m one of the witnesses. Of course I’d go have a look before the cops showed up.”

“Alas. So it’s a fresh scalp, which means?” Chu Zhao simply took out another cigarette and tried to light it up. As the wind was blowing, he tried several times to light the cigarette with the lighter but failed.

“Fresh, human skin. There was no report of injury or something, so it’s pretty close to a homicide.”

Chu Zhao, who kept failing to light up the cigarette, was so mad that he threw the cigarette and the lighter onto the ground and stamped on them.

“That is to say, I can’t go back to sleep, right?”

Su Bai looked at Chu Zhao with a look of “you tell me”. But Chu Zhao was indeed a weird cop; there was a homicide, and all he thought was that he couldn’t sleep for tonight.

“Chu Zhao, what are you doing there?” A middle-aged man was standing in front of the teaching building’s gate, shouting at Chu Zhao.

“That’s my brother-in-law. A captain of criminal police. Other people’s brothers-in-law would try everything to please the younger brothers of their wives, but mine only knows how to order me around. Fuck him!”

Chu Zhao put on his police hat: “Come with me.”

“Captain Sun, I’m investigating about the case. This is Su Bai, one of the witnesses on the site where the scalp was found.”

Captain Sun had a square face, crew-cut hair and clear pronunciation, which made him look masculine. He swept his sight across Su Bai, and asked: “Is the record ready?”

Su Bai nodded: “Yes. And I’ve told him everything I know.”

Hearing this, Captain Sun asked nothing more, and directly said to Chu Zhao: “The superiors have decided to carry out an inch-by-inch search throughout the campus, but we’re short on hands. You go to the school authority or the Student Union and ask them to find us some liable help.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chu Zhao turned around and left. So did Su Bai.

After they had walked to somewhere far away, Chu Zhao immediately put on a sad face: “Fuck! Inch-by-inch search!”

“It’s a scalp, not foot skin. Of course there has to be an inch-by-inch search. That’s their routine.”

“Su Bai, it would be so great if all murderers were like you. You just kill people if you want to, but don’t cut off human skin and flesh, don’t throw them away like trash, and don’t waste my time as a sanitary worker here.”

“…” Su Bai.

…

With the police leading them, the students in Student Union were grouped and led by different cops. All the lights in the campus were turned on and the students were holding flashlights or the lights on their cellphones while searching.

About seven or eight hundred people were searching together. The key area was a circle around the teaching building where the scalp was found.

Soon, the results were collected. It was much easier than they thought.

Flesh was found in the garden, in other classrooms, in the toilet and even behind the vending machine. In a word, within one hour after the big search began, tens of pieces of human flesh were found.

That encouraged all people to search even more carefully!

Yes, Su Bai had noticed that the students around him were working even harder. They knew what they were looking for, but so many chances to find the target were indeed an encouragement to the searchers.

Chu Zhao and Su Bai, however, were lazy on the job all the time. Chu Zhao was definitely something; after he was forced into being a cop, his psychological inversion had gone to extreme, which could be told from the fact that he would rather join the murder club. He had a certain hatred deep down in his heart toward his job and his police uniform.

Aroma had once said that all of the four people in this club were psychopath. That made sense.

“It’s human flesh that they’re looking for! It’s part of a dead body! Why do they look like they’re playing a treasure hunting game?” Chu Zhao said, leaning against a tree.

“That’s humanity.” Su Bai looked around, and then looked at Chu Zhao: “Stay put.”

“What?” Chu Zhao froze. Then, following Su Bai’s sight, he started to look up. Among the branches in the upper part of this tree he was leaning against, there was a bird nest; but in the bird nest there was obvious something dark.

“Help me up. I’ll go check it.” After saying this, Su Bai started to run towards Chu Zhao.

Chu Zhao straddled, lowered his body and overlapped his one hand with the other. When Su Bai stepped onto his hands, he gave Su Bai a hard push. Su Bai immediately jumped up, grabbed a branch with one hand and picked up something with the other hand from the bird nest. It was furry, cold and wet.

In a word, such a touch felt bad. Su Bai felt darkness rising in his mind. Luckily, he was sort of well-experienced in this field.

Jumping off the tree, Su Bai threw what in his hand directly to Chu Zhao. Chu Zhao held it with both arms, looked at it and put on a look as if he had slept with a dog.

“Is this possible?”

“You’re lucky enough to be a cop. See, you can find the head when having a break.”

In Chu Zhao’s hands was a bloody human head. There was blood near its eyes, ears, nose and mouth and it looked horrible.

But Chu Zhao wasn’t scared to death when Su Bai just threw it to him; he just made jokes calmly. It could be said that Chu Zhao was not so frivolous and useless as he pretended to be with his words and actions.

Otherwise he would not participate that club for those dirty jobs. Whether he admitted it or not, in his bones, there ran the blood of a cop. He just refused to face himself honestly.

Chu Zhao took out his cellphone and called Captain Sun.

“Hey, bro.”

“It’s working hours, don’t call me bro. You should…”

Chu Zhao heard what he was going to say, immediate hung up and rolled up his eyes: “See? Is every cop like this?”

Su Bai took over the head, observed it with the flashlight of his cellphone.

“It’s a female, in her early 20s. Should be a student in our school if I’m correct.”

For now, that was all he could get. After all, Su Bai was not a medical examiner and he wasn’t in the mood for a detailed examination.

Soon, Captain Sun, who was Chu Zhao’s brother-in-law, called back.

“Yep.” Chu Zhao picked up.

“Are you mad at me? You…”

“Clap…”

Chu Zhao hung up again.

Then he crouched besides Su Bai and examined the head with him.

These two people looked so young and they were sort of a second generation of celebrities. But different from those rich second generation who were only into car races and girls, what they liked and tried was far beyond normal interest, even kind of horrible.

“How many pieces of flesh were found in total when they reported?” Su Bai suddenly asked.

Chu Zhao paused for a second and counted carefully: “Almost 70 or 80 pieces. Maybe one hundred pieces by now.”

“It’s a copycat.” Su Bai pursed his lips and continued, “You know what case he’s copying?”

Chu Zhao looked at Su Bai with a look of “Do I look like an idiot to you?” and said, “No matter how unqualified I am as a cop, I know that case, okay? You’re talking about THE mutilation, right?”

Su Bai nodded, “It’s a special anniversary of that mutilation case this year, right? Our un-sub[2] is making new cases to honor it.”

______________________

FOOTNOTES:

[1]: Silent Mentors: Silent Mentors refer to the body donors. These people have donated their remains to medical schools so that the students there can study anatomical knowledge through them. Therefore they are respectfully named “Silent Mentors”.

[2]:Un-sub means ‘Unknown Subject’ and refers to the criminal