Baccano! - Volume 20 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue The White Rabbits Return from the Tea Party

Several hours later In the truck

In the front seat of the large truck the Runorata Family had sent, Cazze was asleep, breathing peacefully.

After everything had ended, a police van had arrived and arrested the incapacitated military men, one after another. Most of them had been taken straight to a hospital run by the police.

Miraculously, no one had died. However, Sarges was injured so badly that it would take him anywhere from several months to several years to make a full recovery.

Cazze knew nothing about these bloody results, though. He was dreaming, with satisfaction on his face.

He was about to become a bird in a cage again and would spend a while longer wandering through a life as dull as a desert.

The idea didn’t torment the boy as much as it had before, though.

Now that he’d learned what it was like outside, his craving could easily have grown more intense, but it hadn’t. Dimly, he understood that when he grew up, he’d be able to affect that outside world.

There was an oasis known as “outside,” and its water had been sweeter than he’d anticipated. Now that he knew that, he’d have hope on his journey through that boring desert.

This boy, who was far too pure, would later be called an innocent dictator. He would become particularly feared among the gangs of the East, and rumors that he “tamed enormous monsters” in many ways would begin to circulate.

But that’s a story for another day.

In the rattletrap truck

“I swear. I never thought you’d just spill everything at the worst possible time.”

“Oh, come on! That’s why they spared us, so it’s fine! Tell me I did good!”

Once everything was over, after saying brief good-byes to Cazze and the delinquents, the three members of Vanishing Bunny made themselves scarce in their old jalopy.

As they rattled down the road that ran parallel to the tracks, Pamela and Lana were entertaining themselves with one of their usual arguments.

“If you’d told him you threw that smoke bomb because you thought it was a real bomb, they would have stuffed us into oil drums and put us on the bottom of the ocean.”

“And you’re not going to congratulate me on how clever I was to avoid telling him that?!”

“Oh, yes, wow, that was great; your brain’s as valuable as a dinosaur fossil. Too bad it wasn’t destroyed along with them.”

“Now listen, you—!”

“Quit fiiighting.”

Sonia had never picked up on how tense the situation had been, and she scolded the other two in her usual laid-back way. “It’s all riiight. If we ever end up in real danger, I’m sure Nader will come and save us.” She gave an innocent smile.

Rolling her eyes, Lana teased her about the man. “Nader again? You know, we’ve been in trouble countless times, but this prince of yours hasn’t come to save us once.”

“He’s not a prince. Nader’s a hero, all right? And he promised. I bet we got through those other times because Nader was helping us from the shadows.”

Puffing out her cheeks crossly, Sonia recalled the face of her slightly older childhood friend.

If she’d stayed at the scene for just a few more hours, Sonia and her friend would have been reunited. Unfortunately, the chain of coincidences didn’t work quite that far in her favor.

After that, when Lana had finally stopped calling her names, Pamela’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “In any case, you told them it was one hundred percent your fault and tried to save me and Sonia, didn’t you?”

“Uh, wh-what, are you still scolding me?! You are, aren’t you?!”

Lana had done something dangerous without checking with them first, and Pamela really could have screamed at her in a fit. But glancing at her wary face, Pamela just smiled wryly. “Well, uh, you know… Thanks. I did think you were an idiot, but it made me kind of happy.”

For a moment, the unexpected honesty made Lana freeze. Then her face turned bright red, and she started flailing her arms, yelling desperately.

“Wha— What are you— Did you just thank me?! C-cut that out! You make it sound like I said those things because I wanted you to thank me! I didn’t! That was just, uh…spur of the moment!”

“Quit fiiighting.”

The mood in the truck was back to normal. Out of nowhere, Pamela thought, Desert rabbits who keep searching for an oasis, hmm?

Remembering the metaphor she’d come up with earlier, Pamela looked at Lana’s and Sonia’s faces and gave a little smile.

These two may actually be my life’s biggest oasis.

She didn’t say it aloud. She just stepped on the gas.

A few minutes later, the women would discover a man with a long sniper’s gun lying in the road, and they would be dragged back into the great current.

But that’s a story for yet another day as well.

On the way to New York

Once everything was over, Melody and the others headed straight for New York City.

After they’d retrieved all the bombs, the group split up. Half of them went to meet the individual who had a sales lead, while Melody and the rest started for New York, taking the wounded woman in black with them.

The woman had introduced herself—in writing—as Chané. She seemed to have lost her voice, and she barely responded no matter what they asked her. However, when they mentioned they were going to New York, she’d written “Please take me with you,” so there she was, in the back of the truck with them.

Not only had she fallen off the train, but her shoulder was wounded, and she had two large knives. Suspicious didn’t even begin to cover it, but the delinquents accepted her without giving it much thought.

“Y’know, it feels like a lot happened, but I never did figure out exactly what was going on.” Lying down in the back of the truck, the boy with the missing teeth reflected on the events of the past half day. “Like that big ol’ bear and the army fellas and the kidnapper dolls—I don’t really get how all of that worked out.”

“Them’s the breaks. If the cops were gonna turn up, we couldn’t hang around.”

When the men in black had told them that the police were on their way, the boys had hastily retrieved the cargo, then made tracks into the forest.

They hadn’t been able to say a proper good-bye to Cazze or his kidnappers, and in the end, they didn’t even know what had happened.

“Argh, that’s gonna bug me. That’s really gonna bug me. I wish I’d gone in the kidnappers’ truck. If I had, right about now, we’d be pitching woo.”

“…The only thing on your mind is those dolls.”

“He’s planning to make a pass at my little sisters.” “Unforgivable.” “I’ll slug you!” “Hya-haah!” “Hya-haw!”

“How did we get from that to this?!”

The conversation had fallen into its familiar pattern, and Melody smiled. Stretching luxuriously, she murmured to the kid with the missing teeth, “Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Just ask them next time you see them.”

“Next time? We don’t know their address or nothin’. We don’t live anywhere in particular right now, either.”

“Even so, I get the feeling we’ll see them again. Although I couldn’t tell you why…I think they’re a lot like us. If we keep living like this, we’ll hear each other’s names eventually.”

“Is that right.” The boy looked dubious.

The Asian girl snickered and spoke clearly. “If both our group and their group are travelers wandering the same desert, we’ll meet again. You see, no matter how we struggle, there are only so many oases available to us as long as we can’t leave the desert… Hya-haah!” “Hya-haw!”

Unusually, Chaini had said something intelligible. Melody giggled, ringing one of her bells softly, and then—

—she gave a remark that was ironic specifically because it came from her.

“It really is what you’d call a matter of time, isn’t it?”

After that, they would take up residence in a certain New York mansion and get pulled into all sorts of trouble involving the immortals.

But that’s yet another story.

Their positions were completely different, but all the rabbits continued to wander.

Each of them had found a fleeting oasis in their personal desert.

Either that, or—like the delinquents—their oasis was always with them, in the form of their companions.

Whether or not they wanted to, every one of them eventually stepped into a new desert…

…unaware that those deserts were linked to one another.

They believed that, if they pressed onward, they would at least find a new oasis…

And so their journeys would continue through space and through time.