Prabhat Mishra
One
The night on the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway was unlike the chaotic city roads it connected. Here, silence ruled the vast stretches, broken only by the occasional roar of engines and the rhythmic hum of tires on asphalt. The headlights of passing cars carved fleeting tunnels of brightness through the darkness, then disappeared, leaving the long, lonely highway in its natural emptiness once more. For truck drivers, these journeys were about endurance—keeping eyes open, hands steady, and minds sharp. One such driver, Ravi Yadav, was maneuvering his lorry past a half-lit toll booth when he noticed something unusual: a strange shape sprawled on the gravel shoulder, just beyond the pool of flickering yellow light. At first, he dismissed it as a stray sack of discarded goods, common along these routes. But as he slowed, curiosity overriding caution, the truth unraveled in a chilling instant. It was not a sack at all—it was a human body, grotesquely mutilated, the blood dark against the cracked concrete, pooling in silence. The vastness of the night suddenly pressed in on Ravi, and the once-familiar highway transformed into a corridor of fear.
By dawn, the gruesome discovery was no longer a trucker’s nightmare alone but the nation’s newest obsession. News vans crowded the stretch near the toll, reporters with microphones in hand rehearsing their dramatic retellings. Television anchors christened the unseen murderer with a name the public would not forget: The Expressway Serial Killer. Headlines blazed across channels and newspapers, warning citizens of a predator who hunted in the shadows of India’s proudest infrastructural marvel. For a project meant to symbolize speed, progress, and connectivity, the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway now bore a sinister stain, its sleek promise overshadowed by dread. Social media erupted with theories—some whispered of organized crime, others speculated a deranged wanderer who treated the deserted plazas as hunting grounds. Every toll booth suddenly seemed haunted, every dark shoulder a stage for the killer’s next performance. Fear tightened its grip as more questions than answers circled in the air, unanswered and unsettling.
It was into this storm of panic and speculation that Inspector Kavita Shekhawat stepped. A seasoned officer in her early forties, she was known in the force for her calm precision and refusal to be swayed by theatrics. A woman of measured words and steady gaze, Kavita had earned her stripes dealing with both urban gang wars and rural cold cases. She knew that a killer this bold, striking on a brand-new artery of national pride, would demand not only her investigative skill but also her ability to cut through the layers of political pressure and media frenzy already building around the case. As she stood near the cordoned-off toll plaza, watching the forensics team work under the harsh glare of portable lights, she felt the familiar weight settle on her shoulders—the weight of a puzzle with deadly consequences. The mutilations were not random, she realized; they bore the signature of someone who wanted to send a message. The expressway was not chosen by chance—it was deliberate, symbolic, a stage too perfect to be ignored.
Kavita’s instincts told her this was only the beginning. The killer had chosen the expressway not just because of its emptiness, but because of its visibility. A place designed for speed and progress was now a canvas for fear. The highways that promised connection now threatened isolation. She drove slowly past the stretch that night, the flashing barricades fading in her rearview mirror, her mind already mapping out leads, suspects, and patterns. She knew the days ahead would be relentless: long hours in the control rooms, interviews with toll workers and drivers, scouring CCTV footage that might or might not reveal a shadow in the right frame. But deeper than procedure, she knew she was entering into a psychological battle with someone who thrived on the thrill of control and spectacle. As the city slept and the expressway hummed quietly in the distance, Inspector Kavita Shekhawat took her first step into a case that would consume her—and a nation watching with bated breath—one body at a time.
Two
The first reports of the “Expressway Serial Killer” reached Raghav Sharma over morning tea, folded neatly into the front page of a Hindi daily. A small-town journalist based in Kota, Raghav had spent years chasing stories that never made it beyond local pages—disputes over farmland, water shortages, political rallies recycled from press notes. Yet the brutality of the expressway killings caught his eye, not because of the gore described but because of the uneasy undertone. Something about the framing—the neat packaging of fear into the label of a “serial killer”—felt too convenient. Over the years, Raghav had developed a quiet instinct for patterns behind the noise. He clipped the article, tucked it into his worn notebook, and made his way to the office, where the familiar chaos of clacking keyboards and buzzing telephones awaited. His editor, a stocky man with a taste for drama, leaned across the desk and said what Raghav expected: “I want a headline that sells. Write about the fear. The mystery. People eat this up.” But Raghav knew that if he stuck to the surface, he would be just another voice in the choir of panic. Something told him the killings were not random acts of cruelty but deliberate strikes with an invisible thread connecting them.
That evening, unable to shake the unease, Raghav drove down a stretch of the expressway himself, past glimmering toll gates and endless truck convoys. He stopped at a highway dhaba, one of those smoky, chaotic refuges where drivers gathered over steel tumblers of chai and oily parathas. The air smelled of diesel, fried onions, and fatigue. It was here he found Dinu Yadav, a weather-beaten trucker with deep lines on his face and suspicion in his eyes. Raghav introduced himself cautiously, careful not to come off as another hungry reporter fishing for a headline. Over steaming cups of tea, the conversation began casually—talk of road conditions, night shifts, and the constant struggle of truckers to stay awake through desolate stretches. But soon, as the chatter of the dhaba dimmed in the background, Dinu lowered his voice and spoke of the whispers making their rounds among drivers: this was no madman. According to the hushed tales, the killer chose carefully, striking only those with influence or hidden power—businessmen traveling in SUVs, mid-level officials cutting deals on the road, or contractors ferrying ill-gotten wealth. It was not fear of randomness that kept truckers awake at night; it was the belief that the killings carried a motive the police and media would rather keep quiet.
Raghav listened intently, his pen scratching discreet notes, though his mind was racing faster than his writing hand. If the whispers were true, the story had teeth far sharper than what his editor craved. A faceless predator was frightening enough, but the suggestion that the victims were not ordinary travelers—that they represented a certain class—hinted at a vigilante edge. The image of mutilated bodies was no longer just horror; it became a statement, a performance with political undertones. Raghav pressed for more, but Dinu shrugged off further detail, clearly wary of being overheard. “We talk, that’s all,” he muttered, eyes darting to other drivers. “But mark my words—this man is not killing for pleasure. He is sending a message, one corpse at a time.” Raghav left the dhaba with a gnawing certainty: he was onto a narrative much larger than the sensational headlines. The thought of crafting a report that hinted at these patterns filled him with both excitement and dread. He knew the risk of stirring waters better left still, but the instincts that had carried him this far screamed that this was where the truth lay hidden.
Back at his cramped office, surrounded by stacks of old newspapers and coffee-stained notes, Raghav began piecing together fragments of information. He cross-checked names of the dead with local reports, searching for connections the national media had overlooked. The pattern was faint but there—each victim had more than a passing tie to power: a real estate dealer under investigation, a transport contractor linked to kickbacks, a toll supervisor rumored to have siphoned funds. It was enough to spark a theory, though not yet enough to print without drawing the ire of his editor—or worse, the authorities. Raghav stared at the blank document on his screen, fingers hovering above the keys. His editor had demanded sensationalism, but Raghav felt a different duty pulling at him, heavier, more urgent. The killings were not random splashes of blood on asphalt; they were deliberate brushstrokes on a canvas of corruption. He realized with a shiver that whoever the killer was, he—or they—was painting a story as surely as Raghav was about to. And it was only the beginning.
Three
The second killing came sooner than anyone expected, shattering whatever illusion of containment the authorities had tried to build after the first. Just past midnight, under the cold fluorescence of another toll plaza, the body of Sunil Rathore—personal aide to local politician Minister Jatav—was discovered sprawled beside his SUV. His throat was slit with surgical precision, his hands bound as though he had been judged and punished. Unlike the first murder, this was no lonely trucker’s discovery; a group of toll workers stumbled upon the body when Sunil’s vehicle blocked a lane, engine still running, hazard lights blinking against the night. The news spread like wildfire. By dawn, journalists swarmed the site, their cameras flashing as heavily armed officers tried to push them back. The public shock was sharper this time because the victim was no ordinary traveler; he was connected to the arteries of power. The whispers turned to open speculation—if the killer could strike so close to a political strongman, then no one linked to the expressway was safe.
For Inspector Kavita Shekhawat, the scene confirmed what her instincts had already been warning her. These murders were not random acts of brutality—they were targeted. As she studied the body under the floodlights, her gaze lingered on the meticulousness of the wounds, the lack of chaos. This was not rage; it was method. She asked for files on the victims, cross-checked their backgrounds, and began tracing a line that soon grew undeniable: each one had ties to the expressway project. Contractors, aides, middlemen—all entangled in the vast web of money, land, and political influence that had paved this highway. The case had suddenly shifted from hunting a madman to probing a conspiracy layered with dangerous interests. Yet Kavita knew that venturing into this line of inquiry would mean crossing paths with powerful people, the very kind who preferred questions left unasked. Still, she could not ignore the threads. As she drove back from the toll, her mind sharpened with a grim clarity—the killer was not striking at random shadows. He was slicing through the fabric of corruption that clothed the expressway itself.
While the police tightened their investigation, Raghav Sharma was busy chasing the story from another angle. His editor, predictably thrilled at the political angle, demanded a piece dripping with scandal. But Raghav wanted more than surface drama. At his cluttered desk, he was joined by Meera Joshi, a spirited intern fresh from journalism school, armed with boundless energy and an uncanny knack for digital digging. Meera had been following the news obsessively, and when Raghav mentioned Sunil Rathore’s name, her eyes lit with recognition. “He wasn’t just an aide,” she said, flipping open her laptop. “He handled land acquisitions for the expressway. And guess whose name comes up in connection? Minister Jatav himself.” With quick strokes on the keyboard, she unearthed reports of shady land deals, compensation disputes, and allegations of intimidation. Sunil had been at the center of it, greasing wheels and silencing dissent. Raghav leaned closer, his pulse quickening. This was exactly the missing link he needed—a motive that tied the killings to a larger rot. If Meera was right, then the murderer was not just sending a message; he was carving his way through the machinery of exploitation.
The discovery set off a spark in Raghav’s mind, but it also filled him with unease. If the killer’s victims were handpicked from the power circle surrounding the expressway, then the story was far deadlier than what his editor bargained for. Raghav and Meera debated their next step, torn between running a piece that hinted at these connections or digging deeper before risking exposure. Meera, fearless and idealistic, argued that the truth must be told no matter the consequence. Raghav, seasoned enough to recognize the dangers, weighed caution against conviction. Meanwhile, Inspector Kavita was charting the same terrain from the other side of the divide, piecing together her own suspicions with official restraint. Unknowingly, the journalist and the cop were converging on the same realization—that the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway was not just a road but a battlefield, and the killer was dragging everyone into its shadows. For both, the second toll was not just another death; it was a warning that the story—and the hunt—had only just begun.
Four
The villages along the fringes of the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway painted a starkly different picture from the sleek promise of progress advertised on billboards. Dusty lanes cut through half-broken houses, and fields that once fed families now lay barren, hemmed in by concrete pillars of the highway. When Raghav and Meera arrived, their car kicked up clouds of red earth that clung stubbornly to their shoes. The villagers, wary of outsiders, gathered at a distance before one of them finally pointed them toward a woman sitting on the threshold of a mud house. Kamla Devi’s eyes were hollow, her voice brittle with grief. She told them about her husband, once a proud farmer, who had been forced to sell his land at a fraction of its value under pressure from middlemen. When promises of fair compensation turned out to be false paperwork and bribes siphoned away the money, despair swallowed him whole. One evening, unable to bear the humiliation of debts and displacement, he tied a rope to the neem tree in their courtyard and left her a widow. Kamla spoke without tears, her sorrow long hardened into rage. “They said the road would bring development,” she whispered, “but for us, it only brought death.”
As word spread that journalists had come, more villagers stepped forward, their stories tumbling out in angry bursts. Men spoke of officials who arrived in SUVs, demanding signatures under threat. Women described nights when hired goons circled their homes, forcing them to give up ancestral plots. Compensation cheques, when they did arrive, were often written for a fraction of the promised amount, or bounced altogether. In some cases, entire families were declared “encroachers” on their own land, their documents conveniently lost in bureaucratic files. The more Raghav listened, the more the pieces aligned with the killings. The victims so far—contractors, aides, and officials—were the very men villagers named in their stories. These weren’t nameless bodies on the highway; they were symbols of a machinery that had crushed countless lives for profit. Meera typed furiously on her laptop, cataloguing every testimony, her face taut with disbelief. “This isn’t just corruption,” she muttered, “it’s theft with blood on its hands.”
Raghav felt the stirrings of something heavier than professional obligation. As a journalist, he had always sought stories that mattered, but this was different. Here was a road hailed as India’s beacon of progress, yet it was paved over the grief of hundreds who had been silenced. The killer’s victims were not chosen at random, nor were they acts of personal vendetta—they were deliberate strikes at the very people responsible for this silent devastation. For the first time, Raghav allowed himself to entertain a thought he would normally dismiss: maybe the killer wasn’t a psychopath feeding on carnage, but a vigilante forcing justice where none existed. The mutilations, the symbolism of leaving bodies by the tolls—it was brutal, yes, but also theatrical, a way of exposing the rot for all to see. Still, the thought unsettled him. Was it possible to condemn the killings while secretly understanding their anger? His pen hesitated as he wrote, unsure whether his role was to expose the truth or to interpret its unsettling morality.
That night, as they drove back toward the city, the highway stretched before them like a black ribbon through silence, the toll plazas glowing in the distance. Meera, staring out of the window, broke the quiet: “What if the killer is doing what the system never could?” Raghav didn’t answer immediately, his thoughts heavy with Kamla Devi’s hollow gaze and the rage simmering in the voices of the villagers. He knew Meera’s question was dangerous because it lingered on the edge of legitimacy. To glorify a murderer was reckless, yet to ignore the truth behind his victims was cowardice. Somewhere in the middle of those extremes lay the story Raghav had to tell—a story that might anger the powerful and unsettle the public. As the toll lights flashed past them, he realized with a chill that the expressway was no longer just a road to him; it was a crime scene stretching for miles, built on foundations of blood and land. And in its shadows, a vigilante stalked, turning pain into punishment with every strike.
Five
The fifth murder was unlike the others, not out in the open but within the walls of a toll plaza office itself. The victim, a supervisor named Prakash Thakur, had been found slumped over his desk, his shirt soaked in crimson, his body bearing the same precise mutilations as the previous killings. But this time there was a witness of sorts: a flickering CCTV camera mounted in the corner of the office. The footage, grainy and incomplete, showed a shadowed figure entering through the back door. The camera caught only fragments—a gloved hand, the silhouette of a knife, and the victim’s startled rise before the lens blurred into static. When the feed returned, Prakash lay motionless, the figure gone. The video looped endlessly in the investigation room, a ghostly performance that offered no clear face, no clean clue. The staff at the toll booths, already jittery from whispers of the “Expressway Serial Killer,” now worked under a pall of fear. If death could breach their offices, then nowhere along the highway was safe.
Inspector Kavita Shekhawat pored over the footage, her instincts screaming that the pattern was no coincidence. Yet, within hours of the body being discovered, she was summoned by senior officers and bureaucrats tied to the expressway project. Their message was curt and loaded with pressure: label the murder as a result of “gang rivalry” and move on. They argued that the toll supervisor must have crossed paths with local criminals, that stirring the narrative of a serial killer would harm the expressway’s reputation. Kavita knew better. She had seen the same surgical brutality in every victim, the same deliberate staging near toll plazas. Dismissing it as coincidence was not incompetence—it was concealment. But she also knew the risks of disobedience; going against orders meant more than losing her case—it meant making enemies in corridors of power. Still, her conscience rebelled against silence. For the first time, she considered reaching beyond the police force for help, though she hated the thought of it. That night, her decision crystallized in a single call: to journalist Raghav Sharma.
Their meeting was quiet, tense, and uneasy, held in the corner of a tea stall far from the expressway lights. Raghav arrived wary but curious, while Kavita carried the burden of secrecy in her sharp eyes. “They want me to call it gang rivalry,” she admitted flatly, sliding a copy of the CCTV stills across the table. Raghav studied the blurred frames, his pulse quickening—not from fear but from the weight of opportunity. Here was a police officer risking her career to confirm what he had begun to suspect: the killings were deliberate, calculated strikes against men tied to the expressway. Their conversation was clipped, cautious, both of them circling each other with distrust. Kavita made it clear—she wasn’t leaking for headlines but because she believed truth mattered more than orders. Raghav, for his part, promised discretion, though his mind already raced ahead to the story this alliance could unfold. They were, in essence, uneasy allies—two people on opposite sides of the law, bound by the same need to uncover what lay beneath the killings.
That very night, as Raghav sat in his dimly lit office reviewing the CCTV images, his phone buzzed with a new message from an unknown number. The words chilled him more than the footage: “They took our land. Now they will pay in blood.” There was no name, no number, only the raw weight of vengeance pulsing through the text. It was both a confession and a manifesto, and it confirmed the theory he and Meera had begun piecing together from Kamla Devi’s village. The killer, or perhaps killers, were not random monsters but voices of rage made flesh. Raghav stared at the screen, torn between fear and fascination. Whoever was behind the murders was watching him now, aware of his pursuit, feeding him just enough to keep him moving forward. In the silence of the night, he realized the story had swallowed him whole—no longer was he just reporting on fear, he was entangled in it. And as the glow of the expressway lights flickered outside his window, he knew there was no turning back. The toll booths had become altars of reckoning, and someone was determined to keep spilling blood until justice—twisted and merciless—was served.
Six
The deeper Meera dug, the uglier the truth became. Days spent combing through land records, government circulars, and leaked files finally yielded a chilling paper trail: hundreds of acres had been acquired for the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway at a fraction of their worth, passed off as “voluntary sales” when in reality they were coerced transfers. Entire villages had been stripped of their fields, their compensation routed through shell accounts that fattened middlemen and contractors. The documents bore signatures of familiar names—the very men who had been turning up dead one by one. When she laid the evidence out on Raghav’s desk, the patterns crystallized: each victim so far was not random collateral, but a cog in the machinery of fraud. Contractors like Prakash, aides like Sunil Rathore, supervisors like Thakur—all had dipped their hands in the same dirty pool of land deals. Meera’s voice trembled as she spoke, not with fear but with urgency. “This isn’t just murder. It’s retribution.” Raghav stared at the files, knowing instinctively that the killer wasn’t insane. He was deliberate, almost forensic, hunting the scam’s architects in plain sight.
While the documents gave shape to motive, the whispers on the ground added a face—or at least a silhouette. One evening at the dhaba, over the clatter of plates and diesel-stained chatter, Dinu Yadav leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice. “That night,” he said, “I saw someone near the toll. Not a driver, not a worker. Just a man… walking.” The words lingered like smoke in the air. On a highway defined by motion, a lone walker was an anomaly, almost an omen. Dinu couldn’t describe him clearly—the distance was too great, the light too poor—but the strangeness of it stuck in his memory. Who walked on an expressway at night, shadowing toll booths like a hunter circling prey? Raghav’s pulse quickened at the thought; Meera scribbled in her notebook, her eyes alight with the possibility that the faceless killer had finally brushed against the edge of witness. But Dinu quickly hushed himself, glancing around nervously. “Don’t ask me more,” he muttered. “I don’t want trouble. Whoever he is, he isn’t afraid of death—or of being seen.”
Meanwhile, Inspector Kavita’s investigation was tightening into dangerous territory. Her notes, too, showed the same convergence—victims tied by land, contracts, and greed. But with every step forward, the pushback grew stronger. Senior officers summoned her into curt meetings, their tones shifting from caution to veiled threat. “Don’t dig too deep,” one warned, his voice polished with bureaucratic calm. “The expressway is bigger than a few murders. Think of your career.” Another leaned closer, lowering his voice with chilling finality: “Sometimes truth is too expensive to afford.” Kavita left those rooms with her jaw clenched, her defiance hardening. She had seen corruption before, but never so brazenly shielded by those meant to protect justice. The warnings were not advice—they were directives, boundaries being drawn. Yet the more they tried to silence her, the more convinced she became that she was brushing against the core of the scam. If the killer had chosen this stage to expose it, then he was doing with a knife what the law was forbidden to do with evidence.
For Raghav, Meera, and Kavita, their paths were weaving closer, drawn by the same tangled threads of blood and fraud. The expressway, once hailed as a lifeline of progress, now revealed itself as a monument built on theft and despair. The killer, walking in the shadows of toll plazas, was not deranged but purposeful, pruning away those who had profited from misery. Yet, even as the picture sharpened, a new dread seeped into the air. If all the victims were part of the scam, then who was next on the list? A politician? A tycoon? Or someone closer, perhaps even a witness like Dinu who spoke too much? Raghav felt the weight of the anonymous message still burning in his phone: They took our land. Now they will pay in blood. It was no longer a riddle—it was a manifesto. And as the night deepened over the endless stretch of highway, each toll booth seemed less like a checkpoint of progress and more like a waiting stage for the next body to fall.
Seven
Raghav had grown accustomed to staring at fragments of stories until patterns emerged, but this time the pieces fell into place with a frightening clarity. Meera’s meticulous research into land records led them to a name that kept recurring in old village petitions and compensation disputes: Arun Singh. A farmer’s son from a settlement near Alwar, Arun had watched his family lose their ancestral land to the expressway project for a pittance. The records were blunt—acquisition approved, compensation disbursed—but the truth lay in the whispers Raghav gathered from villagers. Arun’s father, unable to withstand the humiliation of displacement, had hanged himself from the rafters of their half-demolished house. His sister, a teenager then, vanished soon after, rumored to have been trafficked by one of the local strongmen who operated under the shadow of contractors. And Arun himself? He disappeared without a trace. No police inquiry, no follow-up. It was as though the family had been swallowed whole by the highway’s progress. Yet as Raghav read between the lines, a new image surfaced: the mutilated bodies on the expressway were not random victims but the very faces complicit in destroying Arun’s world.
The idea that Arun could be the killer was more than conjecture—it was almost narrative symmetry. He had motive, rage, and above all, nothing left to lose. Raghav and Meera began to dig into what became of him after he left the village. They unearthed an employment ledger from a subcontractor: Arun Singh had been briefly hired as a laborer on the very expressway that tore his life apart. The irony was cruel—after losing his land, he was forced to build the road that replaced it. Then, suddenly, his name disappeared from the records, as if he had walked out mid-shift and never returned. To Raghav, the image was haunting: a man carrying cement and steel for a project that destroyed his family, then vanishing into silence only to return years later as a phantom with a blade. The pieces clicked too neatly, and yet they carried the unmistakable grit of truth. “He knows this highway better than anyone,” Raghav murmured, his voice low, almost reverent. “Every corner, every toll, every blind spot. He built it—and now he’s tearing it down.”
Inspector Kavita, working from her side of the investigation, found her own threads leading to the same conclusion. Cross-referencing victim lists with employee logs, she discovered Arun Singh’s brief stint on the construction crew. For her, the revelation explained what had puzzled her for weeks: the killer’s uncanny ability to strike without leaving a trace. The toll plazas had CCTV, security patrols, and sensors, yet Arun seemed to walk past them like a ghost. Of course he did—he had been part of the team that installed the very systems now failing to catch him. He knew the blind angles of every camera, the unguarded moments in toll booth rotations, the timing of patrol shifts. He was not simply a man with a vendetta; he was an architect of fear who understood the expressway as intimately as the veins on his palm. As she sat with the file spread before her, Kavita felt a rare chill: she was no longer hunting a faceless shadow, but a man with a name, a past, and a motive carved as sharp as his blade.
The realization weighed differently on Raghav and Kavita, though their conclusions aligned. For Raghav, Arun’s story was tragedy turned into fury, the kind of tale that blurred the boundary between villain and hero. His journalist’s mind itched to write it, to frame Arun not as a psychopath but as the creation of systemic injustice—a man who had lost everything to greed and corruption, and returned as retribution incarnate. For Kavita, however, the knowledge carried urgency. Arun was no longer an abstraction; he was a real, dangerous man who had already killed multiple times and would kill again. Her superiors might still want silence, but she now knew the cost of inaction would be measured in blood. Both she and Raghav, from their different worlds, stared at the same truth: Arun Singh was the vigilante haunting the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway. And as the night spread across its endless stretch, they both understood that the question was no longer who the killer was, but how far he was willing to go before someone stopped him.
Eight
The silence of the highway shattered one afternoon when chaos erupted at a busy toll lane. Witnesses later recounted how a figure emerged from nowhere, face hidden beneath a scarf, eyes blazing with fury. Arun Singh dragged a well-known contractor, Mahesh Bhadra, from his gleaming SUV in broad daylight. Commuters froze, caught between fear and disbelief, as the vigilante struck swiftly and mercilessly. The man who once lined his pockets by cheating farmers screamed for help, but no one dared intervene. Arun’s rage seemed cold and calculated, his every move rehearsed like justice long delayed. Within minutes, blood stained the asphalt. People recorded the scene on their phones, the grainy videos instantly flooding social media. By evening, hashtags raged across the internet: #TollButcher, #HighwayJustice, #BloodOnAsphalt. Panic spread not just among commuters, but among the powerful men who had once believed themselves untouchable. Arun was no longer a shadow in the night—he had become a public executioner.
The city’s media houses pounced on the story, amplifying it into a frenzy. News anchors labeled him “The Toll Butcher,” a faceless menace waging war against corruption. Some painted him as a psychopath, a criminal threatening law and order; others, quietly but firmly, hailed him as a hero. Raghav Sharma watched the coverage with unease, sensing the dangerous polarization building in every debate. He had always feared Arun’s path of blood would drown the truth he was chasing. Still, the journalist in him knew the story had shifted—Arun wasn’t just a name whispered at dhabas or a shadow flickering in CCTV frames. He was now a myth in the making, fed by rage, grief, and injustice. Raghav decided to return to Kamla Devi, seeking not sensational quotes but human truth that could strip the mask off Arun’s legend.
When Raghav reached her modest mud-walled home, Kamla Devi greeted him with a mixture of sorrow and resignation. “Arun was like a son to me,” she confessed, her weathered face tightening with grief. She spoke of a boy who once played in her fields, who carried groceries for the elderly, who sat under banyan trees listening to stories of gods and warriors. “He was gentle, beta. Too gentle for this cruel world. But when they took his land, when his father hanged himself, something inside him died too.” She recounted how Arun’s eyes changed—quiet fury replacing laughter, silence replacing warmth. For Kamla Devi, Arun wasn’t the monster on TV; he was still that lost boy, abandoned by a system that stole his family’s dignity. Her words struck Raghav harder than any headline. He realized Arun wasn’t just waging war on corruption; he was waging war on erasure, on being forgotten like so many nameless victims of the expressway’s greed.
That night, as Raghav sat in his cluttered newsroom corner, sifting through his notes, a sealed envelope slid beneath the door. His hands trembled slightly as he tore it open. Inside lay a single sheet of paper, the handwriting sharp, angry, almost carved into the page: “Truth or blood—choose your story.” Raghav’s chest tightened. Arun had been watching him, measuring him, testing him. This wasn’t just about exposing corruption anymore—it was a direct warning, or perhaps an invitation. If Raghav chose to publish the truth, he could become Arun’s ally in a fight for justice. If he hesitated, if he gave in to editorial pressure for sensationalism, then his pen would be drenched not in ink but in blood. Outside, the hum of late-night traffic echoed like a heartbeat, reminding Raghav that the expressway was no longer merely a road. It had become a battlefield where stories and lives collided, and every choice carved a future in red.
Nine
The toll plaza was eerily silent, its booths standing like mute sentinels under the yellow glow of failing sodium lamps. Kavita had arranged her decoys with meticulous precision—two police constables disguised as contractors, another dressed as a local politician’s aide, all stationed inside a booth with nervous energy radiating off them. The rest of the team was hidden in shadows, rifles cocked, waiting for the vigilante to make his move. The expressway, usually roaring with traffic, seemed to hold its breath; only the distant hum of a truck could be heard. Raghav, ignoring Kavita’s repeated warnings, stood near the central office, his notepad in hand and his heart thudding louder than the night insects. For him, this was no longer just a story about a string of killings—it was about unraveling the truth buried beneath asphalt, concrete, and political lies. Kavita shot him a look, one that carried both frustration and reluctant respect, before turning back to her men, whispering into her radio: “Stay sharp. He’ll come tonight.”
The first sign of Arun Singh came not with footsteps but with silence—an oppressive stillness that smothered even the crickets. Then, like a shadow unmoored from the night, he appeared, emerging from the darkness on foot, just as Dinu Yadav had described. He carried no weapon at first glance, just the menace of his calm stride, his eyes scanning the toll booth with predator-like certainty. The decoys stiffened, one even fumbling nervously with his fake ID badge. In an instant, Arun lunged, dragging one of them out with a strength born of rage and desperation. Shouts rang out—“Now! Move in!”—and the air exploded with chaos. Police officers rushed forward, rifles raised, but Arun fought like a man possessed, disarming one officer, striking another down with a brutal precision that seemed rehearsed. Kavita shouted orders, her voice raw with urgency, as Raghav stood transfixed, pen forgotten, his gaze locked on the gaunt figure whose face was finally visible.
In that frenzied moment, Arun’s eyes found Raghav’s, and everything slowed. Amidst the gun barrels and shouts, Arun spoke—not in panic, but in a voice low, steady, and filled with decades of hurt. “You want your story? Here it is. They took our land, our homes, our dignity. They promised us schools, jobs, futures. Instead, they gave us hunger and graves.” His words were not just confessions but indictments, carrying the weight of thousands of silenced farmers. He told Raghav how his father, once proud of his fields, was reduced to begging when contractors cheated them with forged papers. How his sister, trapped between shame and survival, vanished into the unforgiving sprawl of the city. How the police, the very force surrounding him now, had stood guard not for justice but for the bulldozers that tore through their lives. Kavita tried to interject, ordering her men to hold position, but even she seemed struck by the raw truth pouring out of Arun’s trembling yet resolute voice.
The standoff stretched, tense and fragile, like glass about to shatter. Kavita, torn between duty and understanding, hesitated. Arun’s chest heaved, his face streaked with sweat and fury, yet his grip on the officer he held captive loosened slightly as he turned fully toward Raghav. “Write this, journalist. Write that their roads are built on blood. Write that every toll they collect is a toll on our souls.” For the first time, Raghav saw not a killer but a man molded by injustice into something monstrous and tragic. Police units edged closer, fingers tight on triggers, but the air was charged with something heavier than violence—it was truth, raw and undeniable, laid bare on the asphalt. Raghav, gripping his notepad with trembling hands, realized this night was not just a trap for Arun, but for the very system that had birthed him. And in that realization, he knew his story would no longer be about murders alone, but about a nation’s unspoken wounds, etched forever into the black stretch of expressway under their feet.
Ten
The night at the toll plaza was thick with silence, broken only by the low hum of distant trucks. Kavita stood with her finger grazing the trigger, eyes locked on Arun Singh, the man the media had branded “The Toll Butcher.” But in that moment, he didn’t look like a monster. His face was etched with years of grief, his eyes hollowed by loss, yet burning with a fire of justice that refused to die. “You know I’m not the villain here,” he said, voice steady even with guns aimed at him. “You’ve seen the files, Inspector. You know what they did to us.” Kavita’s mind spiraled. Orders from her seniors were clear—eliminate the threat before he created more chaos. But the weight of his words pressed on her chest, a reminder that duty to the truth wasn’t always aligned with duty to the badge. Around her, the toll plaza lights flickered, as if echoing the uncertainty that churned in her veins.
Raghav, meanwhile, sat in the back of his car with his laptop glowing against his face, fingers trembling as he pieced together the story he had been chasing for months. Documents, testimonies, and Arun’s confessions—each fragment painted a grotesque picture of corruption at the highest levels. Land snatched for pennies, farmers driven to ruin, suicides ignored, villages silenced by fear. And now, a vigilante’s blood-soaked crusade had forced open the wound no one wanted to see. His editor kept calling, demanding a draft before the legal hounds of politicians smothered it. Every second counted, but the gravity of the truth weighed on him—if he hit publish, it could destroy careers, even topple powerful men. But it could also cost lives, including his own and Meera’s. Still, Raghav knew he had crossed the point of no return. His only weapon was the story, and it had to be unleashed before the night ended.
Back at the toll, Kavita’s earpiece crackled with a commanding voice: “Shoot him, Shekhawat. End it now.” The words stabbed her resolve. Her finger tightened, but Arun took a step forward, his hands raised, his voice trembling yet forceful. “You wear that uniform for justice, not obedience. If you kill me, the truth dies here. And they—your seniors, your ministers—they win again.” Kavita felt sweat streak down her temple as memories of villagers, Kamla Devi’s hollow eyes, and Meera’s documents flashed before her. Could she really silence the one man who dared to fight back, however brutally? Arun’s chest rose and fell, his defiance radiating like a shield. “I don’t fear death, Inspector. But I fear silence. If you kill me, bury me—but promise you won’t bury the truth.” The plaza air tightened, every officer waiting for her bullet, every second amplifying the war inside her.
In the final moments, fate split in two directions. Raghav hit publish, sending the story into the world before the system could muzzle it, his hands trembling as notifications began pouring in—shares, outrage, fire igniting across social media. The truth was finally out. And at the toll, Kavita lowered her gun, shocking her team into silence. Arun’s eyes flickered with a fragile gratitude, even as officers surged forward to subdue him. Sirens wailed in the distance, the night bracing for fallout. The chapter closed not with a gunshot, but with two choices made against the tide—Raghav choosing truth over fear, and Kavita choosing conscience over command. Yet neither knew if they had secured justice or invited their own destruction. The Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, gleaming and ruthless, stretched endlessly into the dark horizon, carrying the weight of blood, betrayal, and a story that could no longer be erased.
-End-
