Chapter 432: Come Collect Your Men’s Bodies

Chapter 432: Come Collect Your Men’s Bodies

“Kill people?” Zhuang Xiaodie’s face went taut.

Something like this wasn’t actually that hard for her to take in. During her year of training, she’d heard her trainers talk about Mao Rusong.

She’d heard a good deal about the blood a “big man” like Mao Rusong had waded through on his way up, and about some of the methods he’d used once he got there.

She could accept such things more easily than most.

Still, in all the time she’d known Wu Chen, this was the first time she had heard him use the word kill.

Mr. Wu was such a calm, gentle, affectionate man.

Why would he suddenly say he was going to kill someone?

Kill whom?

She couldn’t help being frightened.

Tires spinning, the Bentley Continental tore through the intersection, its speed climbing and climbing. Well over the limit, naturally.

The black Mercedes van behind them accelerated at once.

Qi Jun’s bodyguards clearly weren’t fools.

Wu Chen was making it obvious he meant to run.

Of course they had to give chase.

Inside the Bentley, Zhuang Xiaodie gripped the handle hard, her face going a little pale. It was midday, and the roads were busy. Their speed soon passed a hundred kilometers an hour.

Speed was always relative. On an expressway, a hundred and something was normal.

In the city, it was terrifying.

Like a car in a video game, the Bentley kept overtaking everything on the road, swinging from lane to lane, cutting across solid lines to get past.

Illegal, of course.

But as long as there was no accident, it was only a matter of tickets.

Zhuang Xiaodie was no fool either. She wasn’t thinking about tickets.

She was thinking about whether they’d survive.

It was terrifying.

This was gambling with their lives.

But when she glanced at Wu Chen behind the wheel, calm and unhurried, she relaxed a little. She had known him barely more than ten days all told, yet the more time she spent around him, the more she felt that Mr. Wu could do anything.

And she knew something of his driving.

It wasn’t her first time in a car with him at the wheel. Just yesterday afternoon, on the drive from Donghai to Modu, he’d raced Tang Xinbao the whole way.

Behind the Bentley Continental.

The black Mercedes van clung relentlessly to its tail. It was actually keeping up.

Its performance was nowhere near the Bentley’s, of course.

Wu Chen was holding back.

If he’d wanted to lose them, it would have been easy.

He didn’t want to lose them.

He only wanted to make them tense.

When people grew tense, their concentration sharpened, but their field of vision narrowed. That made it harder, not easier, to notice their surroundings. They would tune out nearly everything else.

The effect was especially pronounced at high speed.

It was one reason rally drivers always had a navigator in the passenger seat.

A navigator didn’t just hold the pace notes and keep calling out changes in the road ahead. He also served as the driver’s eyes on everything around them, guarding against the unexpected. A flock of sheep suddenly appearing on an open rally route, for instance.

The Bentley Continental tore along.

The Mercedes van stuck to it.

At this point the Mercedes had chances to floor it and ram the Bentley from behind.

The men inside didn’t dare.

The area was too busy, the roads too crowded, traffic cameras everywhere.

At these speeds, a collision would set off a massive pileup, the kind that made national news.

There was no telling how many people might die.

If that happened, not only would the men in the van die; the man behind them would go to prison too.

A little over ten minutes later.

The Bentley Continental left the busy part of the city and headed south through Dongpu District.

The farther it went, the more remote it got.

Gleaming high-rises gave way to something far more ordinary, until the surroundings took on the feel of the city’s rural fringe. Many of Modu’s outlying areas were like this. Because the city had developed so early, some parts of it actually looked less modern than newer big cities.

Dongpu especially.

It was a new district. A few decades earlier it had still been Dongjiao County. Only in the early 1990s had it been slated for full-scale development and made a new district.

The more remote the area, the more outdated the infrastructure and the fewer the traffic cameras.

Along some stretches, there were even fields beside the road.

With fewer cars around, the Bentley went faster still, up to a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.

Wu Chen couldn’t go any faster.

Not because the Bentley had hit its limit, but because any faster and the Mercedes might not keep up.

The bodyguard driving the Mercedes was skilled, but nowhere near Wu Chen’s level.

Keeping up all this way, the van had scraped a fair number of cars. One side mirror had been smashed off, and the left front headlight was shattered.

Minor problems.

Strictly speaking, they had already committed hit-and-runs.

But for Qi Jun, a problem that small was no problem at all.

The Mercedes van was going flat out.

There were hardly any cars around now, and almost no people.

At this speed, all the van needed was one tap on the Bentley’s rear, and the Bentley would spin out of control.

But it simply couldn’t make contact.

Holding a three-meter gap, the two cars raced on.

Five minutes later.

At a fork ahead, a ramp led up onto an overpass. Besides a sign reading Zhangjiang No. 3 Bridge, several cylindrical traffic barrels had been set across the entrance.

The overpass was plainly closed.

Wu Chen gave the wheel a slight turn and drove straight up anyway.

The Bentley slipped through the gap between two barrels and raced up the ramp.

The Mercedes van, close behind and nowhere near as precise, simply sent the barrels flying.

It stayed glued to the Bentley’s tail.

The ramp curved as it climbed, forcing both cars to slow considerably. The gap between them stayed roughly the same.

At the top, the overpass ran dead straight ahead, eight lanes across in both directions.

One hand on the wheel and the other on the gear selector, Wu Chen kept glancing at both sides of the overpass.

He was judging the exact stretch of road.

They were soon nearing the middle.

Suddenly—

Wu Chen wrenched the wheel left, then right.

The Bentley Continental swayed violently, dangerously unstable.

They had slowed on the climb and hadn’t fully picked up speed again, but a sudden swerve at over a hundred kilometers an hour could easily roll a car.

In that instant, Wu Chen relied on skill and feel alone to switch lanes at speed without flipping.

He tapped the brake too, and their speed dropped sharply.

Once he was sure the car wouldn’t roll, he stamped down hard.

Screech!

An emergency stop.

It sounds complicated. From the bodyguard’s seat in the Mercedes, all he saw was the Bentley ahead abruptly change lanes, fishtail, and slam on its brakes.

He couldn’t react fast enough.

The Mercedes shot past.

As a seasoned driver, the bodyguard didn’t recklessly yank the wheel around, nor did he stand on the brakes.

Either would almost certainly have flipped the van.

And so…

Perhaps two seconds later, the Mercedes van abruptly plunged out of sight.

The overpass was broken.

It wasn’t closed because it was finished and awaiting inspection. It was closed because it hadn’t been joined yet. The T-beams for the middle section hadn’t even arrived, and installation was still a while off.

In other words, an entire section was missing from the middle of the overpass.

But a driver sits low, barely more than a meter off the ground. From that angle, unless you got very close, it was hard to notice the road ahead was cut off. The finished roadway on the far side only made the illusion stronger.

At extreme speed, it was harder still for a driver to notice.

And so—

The Mercedes van didn’t even have time to brake before it shot off the end of the broken bridge.

It flew several meters through the air, tipped nose-down, and dropped.

Whoosh!

Boom!

The drop was over twenty meters, about the height of a seven-story building. When the van hit the ground below, a tremendous crash thundered up from beneath the bridge.

Two seconds later.

Screeeech—

Still braking hard, the Bentley Continental reached the edge too.

It came to a stop at last, half a meter short of the drop.

Zhuang Xiaodie was nearly scared out of her wits.

She had seen the black van plunge over the edge first, then felt the Bentley wasn’t going to stop in time.

She thought they were going to die.

But the terrible thing she’d imagined never happened.

Everything was within Wu Chen’s calculations.

During the thousand-year loop, he had come to this unfinished Modu overpass more times than he could count.

He had even played “death jump” here, trying to launch a car across to the far side.

Sometimes he’d made it.

Sometimes he hadn’t.

“July 7” was only a little over twenty days before July 30.

Hardly anything here had changed.

Boom!

An explosion.

A tongue of flame leapt up from beneath the broken bridge ahead, followed by billowing black smoke.

No need to look.

The wrecked Mercedes had gone up.

Wu Chen couldn’t be bothered to get out and check.

One hand on the wheel, he shifted into reverse and turned the car around.

Then he picked up his phone, quickly tapped in an unfamiliar number with one hand, and called it.

A few seconds later, someone answered.

“Hello?”

It was Qi Jun.

“Zhangjiang No. 3 Overpass. Come collect your men’s bodies.”

That was all Wu Chen said. Then he hung up.