Chapter 23: Missing (4)

Everly and Old John came to visit the patient.

It had been a week since that night when the refrigerated truck had been forced to stop. Mike’s head injury was severe, and he remained unconscious, showing no signs of waking. As for policewoman Sharon, her head wound was relatively minor, and she had mostly recovered.

Recovering from an injury was inherently boring, and Sharon had a lot she wanted to say. Old John’s visit became an outlet for her emotions. Thus, what began as a simple hospital visit gradually turned into the current “policewoman telling a story.”

“You can probably guess what happened next, Mr. John. The frequent disappearances of young women along Highway 34 threw the area into panic. With fewer prey, Peter was forced to shift his hunting grounds to Highway 466… That noon, he was dining at Old Jones’ motel when he coincidentally ran into Mike and me, who were there investigating. At the time, we were on the phone with the highway authority, requesting the past three months of truck passage records. Peter, worried that we might trace him, called out to us as we were leaving, claiming he had information, and got into our car…”

At this point, Sharon’s hand trembled slightly, and a lingering fear colored her voice.

“But you probably didn’t expect that Peter didn’t wait until later—he attacked Mike and me the moment he got in the car. We never imagined someone would do something like that in broad daylight, in a motel parking lot where anyone could walk by at any moment! Mike was immediately knocked unconscious. I fared a little better—Peter intended to spare me, to slowly torment me, so he didn’t strike a killing blow. But the impact to my head left my limbs powerless; even though I was conscious, I was completely unable to move…”

“He had subdued Mike and me, then drove the refrigerated truck next to a police car, using its body to block any outside view, and brazenly moved us into the truck’s cargo compartment. After that, Peter got into the police car, planning to drive it out into the wilderness and abandon it. The whole process went smoothly—except when leaving the motel, he ran into Lina, who had just returned from a date with her boyfriend. She saw him in the driver’s seat. Although she clearly had no idea who actually owned the police car, Peter decided that same night to eliminate this threat…”

Hearing this, Everly instinctively bit her lip.

—She saw it again!

The scene replayed in her mind, just like that night. And this time, the sequence was even more coherent, a series of grainy, yellow-tinted frames flowing together, forming a “moving picture.”

She saw a young girl with Lina’s face, lively and radiant, wearing a white chef’s uniform. She happily said goodbye to her lover, who worked as a delivery driver, and jogged toward the back kitchen. Passing by a police car, curiosity made her glance inside. She saw a brooding man wearing a hat sitting in the driver’s seat. Their eyes met briefly, but she didn’t think much of it and quickly walked away.

The scene advanced to the next frame. With a brief “flicker,” the background switched to a brightly lit bedroom. The girl with Lina’s face, now in pajamas, sat in front of the mirror, looking displeased as she removed her makeup. At that moment, her phone on the table vibrated—it was a message from her boyfriend! He said he was nearby and invited her out on a date.

Seeing the message, the girl didn’t think much. She casually threw on a jacket and climbed out of her bedroom window. However, when she arrived at the agreed-upon location, her boyfriend wasn’t there. Instead, she encountered the man from the police car earlier that day. He introduced himself as a friend of her boyfriend, explaining that her boyfriend was waiting elsewhere because he feared her father might see him. The girl, inexperienced in the ways of the world, and hearing details that matched her boyfriend’s, let her guard down and followed the man without suspicion…

As if to confirm that what Everly was seeing wasn’t just imagination, the footage reached this point at the exact moment Sharon’s story did:

“…After learning that Lina had been taken home by her father to Lemot Town, Peter kidnapped and killed Lina’s boyfriend. That same night, he drove to Lemot, sent Lina a message using her boyfriend’s phone, lured her out of the house, and abducted her…”

Everly instinctively widened her eyes.

It was the same—exactly the same! The details Sharon described matched the scenes Everly had just seen perfectly. This was no mere coincidence. The fragments she witnessed clearly had some extraordinary property!

Could it be the effect of the banshee’s milk?

The thought flashed in her mind, but she quickly dismissed it. The banshee’s power was to foresee the future—but the scenes she had just witnessed were from the past. They were completely different concepts and could not be equated.

So why was this happening…? It was strange. Yesterday, she could explain the scenes of the future as a form of precognition. But today, she felt an uncanny familiarity with the criminal’s tragic past—and, like watching a movie, she had seen a continuous sequence of events she had never witnessed before. It made no sense… Wait—watching a movie?

The word “movie” struck her like a bolt of lightning across the night sky, instantly illuminating the chaos in her mind. The sealed doors of memory crashed open. Scene after scene—some familiar, some strange—flashed before her eyes like a carousel, until finally, everything froze on a single, enormous title on a screen.

Seeing that line of text, Everly shivered all over.

She finally understood why she had been experiencing so many strange sensations. It wasn’t because her precognitive abilities had evolved; rather, she had truly seen these scenes and heard this exact story before—in her previous life, through some video-sharing website.

It was a low-budget American thriller.

The film was called Highway Horror. Its protagonist was also named Lina, a motel kitchen assistant. By chance, she witnessed a serial killer handling a police car after committing his crimes and was spotted by him. The killer lured her into a refrigerated truck under the pretense of being her boyfriend—up to this point, the movie’s plot matched reality perfectly.

However, as the story continued, the film diverged from reality:

In reality, Old John had quickly noticed that something was wrong with the truck. He intervened decisively, tricking and subduing the killer, and rescued the people inside the cargo compartment. In the movie, Lina wasn’t so lucky—she was locked inside a truck at below-zero temperatures for several hours. To avoid freezing to death, she tried every method she could think of to survive. Eventually, using clothes scavenged from the dead and a makeshift “ice house” built from cardboard, she barely managed to stay conscious. When the killer entered the truck intending to torture her, the girl mustered all her remaining strength, injured his eyes, and seized the chance to escape.

What followed was a tense, adrenaline-filled chase through the wilderness. Too much time had passed, and Everly could only vaguely remember the details. She recalled that the movie’s ending wasn’t entirely happy: the protagonist, Lina, after a fierce struggle and battered from head to toe, finally stumbled toward a house with its lights on.

Just as she was about to be saved, a pair of bloodied hands suddenly reached out from the darkness behind the girl, clamping over her mouth and nose. With a violent pull, the girl—her face filled with despair—was dragged back into the pitch-black wilderness.

The final scene of the movie showed Lina’s father, Pete, looking haggard as he held a stack of missing-person posters, distributing them around the motel…

…

In Everly’s previous life, novels and TV shows about “transmigrating” to another world had been hugely popular.

“The protagonist has an accident, wakes up in the world of a book or show, uses their precognitive advantage to make a name for themselves, and along the way falls in love with the story’s characters—ultimately achieving success in both love and career.”

Although such stories were clichéd, they were addictive. Even Everly herself had indulged in similar daydreams of crossing over.

But the kind of “transmigration” she had hoped for did not include being dropped into a half-forgotten American thriller.

Although the latter half of Highway Horror diverged from reality, the beginning and middle of the story—the setup, development, and twists, including the film’s backstory about the killer—matched the just-concluded “Highway Serial Kidnapping and Murder Case” perfectly. Even the appearances of the movie’s characters were identical to the Lina, Pete, and others she knew! In this situation, the only plausible explanation was that she had somehow transmigrated into the movie itself.

As for the differences between the film and reality, Everly figured it was a kind of “butterfly effect” caused by her transmigration. Because of her disappearance, Old John had left the gas station to go to Pukati. His absence and return indirectly altered the movements of the story’s characters, ultimately causing the criminal to be subdued earlier than in the movie, preventing him from running rampant until the very end.

This deduction made perfect sense.

At the same time, it conveyed an important realization to Everly: the movie’s plot wasn’t fixed. It could be influenced by external forces, eventually leading to an ending completely different from the original.

Of course, for now, the criminal had been caught, the survivors in the truck rescued, and the victims’ bodies returned to their families for proper burial. From this outcome, Highway Horror could be considered to have wrapped filming early, and whether the original plot could be altered no longer really mattered.

But would things really be that simple…?

Everly felt a creeping unease.

She thought back on the countless strange events since her birth—witnessing a mysterious hooded figure murder and steal a baby in the hospital as a newborn; living in an apartment that, due to a dark god’s sacrifice, reeked of death and consumed countless lives; moving to the seaside and being abducted by a mythological banshee for feeding; being caught up in a plane bombing by a cult on the way to the airport… Against all these experiences, the terrifying serial kidnapping and murder case seemed almost minor.

This world was dangerous. And from Everly’s observations, the vast majority of these threats had nothing to do with Highway Horror.

Even if the plot of Highway Horror played out fully, it would only mean the film’s kidnapping and murder story had concluded. The other evils and dangers unfolding—or about to unfold—across the rest of the world would continue along their predetermined paths.

This led Everly to think of a subgenre of “transmigration” stories: the “comprehensive transmigration,” or “multi- transmigration” for short. This involves protagonists crossing into multiple movies, TV shows, novels, or 2D-animation—either consecutively moving between worlds (commonly called “quick-transmigration”) or entering a multidimensional fused world that incorporates elements from several works.

Everly suspected she had entered the latter. Although she couldn’t prove it yet—her memories from her previous life were mostly lost—so far, aside from Highway Horror, she hadn’t encountered any other familiar “storylines.”

But no matter. In a world riddled with hidden dangers, maintaining a cautious and practical approach to life could never be wrong.

With that thought, Everly let out a long, deliberate sigh.