Dark Application: ONE (The Dark Application Series Book 1) (9 page)

The
newspaper detailed the incident, but before the larger news stations could pick
it up, Savannah’s dad intervened. He insisted that the matter remain
confidential, arguing that the girl’s dignity had been violated enough already,
and that whoever was responsible for this was still out there unpunished.
Airing something like this on the news, he argued, would be akin to
helping the enemy achieve their goal of humiliating her.

Others
in the community argued back, saying that she had taken the pictures herself
for the purpose of getting attention, and since she wanted it, she would get
it. Everyone Savannah knew had gotten the text, even her priest at
church. Even her family doctor
; all
of her
friends and classmates. Everyone with a cell phone in a twenty-five mile
radius had seen the dirty pictures. Savannah got what was coming to her,
they said.

But
Savannah’s dad continued to stick up for her, the way he did his defendants in
court. She doesn’t deserve this, he said. She has been a troubled child
her whole life, with lots of emotional problems. True, she had acted out in
many ways over the years, but this was not like her. She was a good girl,
right Savannah? Savannah?

But it
was too late. On a Wednesday afternoon when the sun was just beginning to
warm the puddles and the birds were chirping in the fresh, sticky air,
Savannah’s mother found her body in the closet of her old room at her parent’s
house, hanging by a rope of leather belts around the neck, suspended from a
bicycle hook mounted to the ceiling.

“
I
can’t be with you anymore, Luke. This is just not working like it was
before,” said Amy.

Luke
stood from the bed and grabbed her elbows, forcing her to turn toward him.
“What do you mean? Why?” he asked.

“Because
of crap like
this
,” she said, jerking her arms out of his grip.
“And your meanness, and the way you’ve changed.”

Luke
crumpled onto his messy blankets. He lay on his side, staring at the
wall. She was right. He had changed a lot since he’d started this
internship.
Since he’d discovered the
Dark
Application
.

Amy
pulled her jeans
and
her sandals on then headed
out the door. Luke laid in a stupor as he heard her tap down the steps
and out the front door.

The
sun shone brightly in the window, a hot blast of unwanted heat in his face.
Summer had come almost full-force on Fort Christanna, Virginia, and this
was the last week of spring semester. He pulled the pillow over his head
and tried to go back to sleep.

By now
Luke had given in to the compulsions of the
Dark Application
. When
the phone vibrated, he picked it up without thinking. When the blue
letters flashed on the screen, he obeyed without a thought. Mostly it was
because of what had happened with Tiffany; he’d been told to go back, but he
didn’t listen. Because of that, she was dead.

He
tried to reason with himself by saying that he had no idea that she was being
held there for ransom, justifying how he’d used the ransom money her
parents had paid for her return to buy a truck, thousands of dollars’
worth of clothes, electronics, pizza, and beer.
I didn’t know,
he’d
tell himself again.
I didn’t know that it was ransom money and I
didn’t know the kidnappers would kill her if they didn’t get the money.

But
the guilt was a blooming poison thorn, fresh as a knife stuck in the ribs.
And then the issues with Savannah had tainted Amy’s adoration of him.
He had been so cruel in those last days, laughing at her expense, egging
on the gossip and the hate talk. And now look at the result of that.
Amy hadn’t looked at him the same since.

Tomorrow
was the chemistry final, and then after that, he was turning himself in.
He had planned it all out already. He was going to go to Kevin and
explain everything, give up his phone, and drop out
of
the
internship. If he got in trouble, so be it, just so long
as the Defense Application for Remote Kinetics was gone from his life for good
and he could just be normal. Or maybe he’d never be normal again.
Maybe they would find out that he was at the scene of Tiffany’s murder,
and that he had the ransom money. Hell, they would probably throw him in
prison without
a second thought. He was
surprised they hadn’t already, considering that his tire tracks and footprints
were all over Gold Commerce Way. It was just a matter of time, he knew,
before someone showed up with a badge and a gun in his face.

So
this one last time was going to be it. He was going to use the
Dark
Application
to get an A on his chemistry exam, and
help
a few of his buddies in class get through the final too. He had a
plan that would involve the
Dark Application
sending a text message of
the formulas, in their completed form, to each person exactly twenty minutes
before the exam started. It was up to them to either memorize it or write it
down before the exam began.

Luke
rolled out of bed and loped downstairs. Amit and Chris were eating cereal
and watching baseball on the couch.

“Yo,
brutha,” said Chris.

Amit
nodded. Luke nodded back and fell into the seat beside him.

“One
more week!” said Amit cheerfully, his mouth full of cereal.

They
all could agree to be happy about that. Just a few more final exams and
then they’d have one last raging all-nighter before Luke turned in his phone,
and himself.

When
he looked in the mirror, he was a little shocked at his reflection. His facial
hair had grown unkempt again, and his eyes were bulging from the sockets like
there was something back there pushing them out. He had deep creases in
his forehead, and his skin was pale. He could see his collar bone, and
for a second he thought of Kevin.

Was
Kevin being tortured by that damn app too
? He thought. That
would explain a lot. He showered, shaved, and then dressed. He shaved his whole
chin this morning, rubbing a hand tenderly over the sensitive exposed skin.

Then
he sat at the vandalized kitchen table eating some cereal, running his finger
over the graffiti knife carvings, feeling his and Amy’s initials carved there.

His
phone vibrated and he immediately picked it up and looked at it.

Zn
(s) + NH4NO3 (s
)------
> N2 (g) + ZnO (s) + 2 (H2O)
(g).

Quickly
he forwarded the formula to the list of people on his contact list who were
expecting the text. He picked up his backpack and hollered bye to Amit
and Chris, whose voices echoed in response from their rooms down the hall.
Then he took a long look around his house, his eyes resting on his
beat-up old stained couch, his 90” LED television with cords snaking out all
over the floor, and the thick hand-woven carpet he’d paid hundreds of dollars
for without thinking twice. He took a stack of hundred dollar bills and
wrapped them in a pink tissue paper with “Amy” in black marker. He shoved
it in his backpack and headed out.

He
revved his engine hard and turned the volume up on his speakers. The
louder the music, the harder it was to hear
his own
thoughts. He wondered if Amy would think he was trying to buy her back.
Am I? Good question, Luke
, he thought. And who cares?
What did it matter now? She had already dumped him. It wasn’t
like he thought she would actually just come back to him. Maybe he just
hoped she’d see that he really cared about her. And how else could he
apologize for the way he’d treated Savannah? He’d already screwed up
trying to play the nice, caring guy. Those days were over.

He
whipped the massive truck into a parking spot and headed to class. The
birds singing in the trees did nothing for his mood. They were annoying,
like mosquitoes in his ears. The sun was hot and the Virginia air was
humid. He entered the dark corridor of the science wing with the long
concrete passageway. It was cool inside, and he thought about winter,
walking hand in hand with Amy to class. He remembered Travis, how she had
bounced along hand in hand with him the same way. When he pulled the
metal door open, there she sat, in the seat beside him, his beautiful
to-die-for ex-girlfriend.

He sat
beside her quietly and peered over at her conspicuously. She was calm and
collected, and he wished she would act more emotional, or at least a little
sad, after just breaking up with him. He slipped the pink tissue package
under the table and she froze when she saw it.

“Luke,”
she said, rolling her eyes.

“No,
it’s for you Amy. I’ve been saving it for you and it’s still yours, even
though you dumped me this morning,” he said.

She
looked at him with her sideway glare, but slowly accepted the package, stuffing
it into her backpack.

At
each desk sat six beakers of chemicals, three powders, and three liquids.
They were labeled only by the element symbol of the contents. There
was a Bunsen burner and several empty beakers on the side. Professor
Jones walked around, checking phones and handing out a single sheet of paper
face down on each desk.

“You
will find the desired compound result on paper, and then you will create the
formula using the things on your desk. Alright, phones off, you have
thirty minutes. You may begin.”

A kid
with black hair and a yellow striped sweater turned back and looked at Luke.
Luke gave him a barely perceptible nod. Then two other people in
the class, a girl toward the right front side of the room, and a guy in a black
tee shirt a row behind him, looked at Luke as well. Others in the room glanced
around, and Luke had the impression that the text he’d sent had gone to more
people than the ones he’d sent it to.

His
mind went to his phone for moment and he could feel the weight of the plastic
warm against his leg.

Luke
looked at Professor Jones, who sat at the front of the room with his feet
crossed, reading a book. When Luke looked over at Amy, he saw that she
was looking at him, an unimpressed expression on her face.

Hey
sugar, you let Asshole cheat off you too
, he thought. But he didn’t
speak during the exam. Not when he was so close to being done.

The
class scribbled notes on their papers in silence, and then a few people around
the room began to turn their Bunsen burners on. Luke fired his up and put
a measurement of water into an empty beaker and set it on the flame.

He
began to measure the powders into an empty beaker, mixing around the dust,
letting it mesh together. Then he put a few droppers full of one of the
liquids into the warm water, which was slowly getting hotter. He looked
around and could see that many other students were doing almost the exact same
thing.

Except for Amy.
Amy had a different formula she was
working with. He looked over at her paper indiscreetly, puzzled,
wondering how she’d gotten so far off. He studied her work, looking out
the corner of his eye and back to Professor Jones, quickly working through her
formula in his head. Then he did it again. It dawned on him that
Amy’s work was correct. Amy had it right, and everyone else had it wrong.

The
blood drained from his face and his legs went cold. The beaker he was
holding in his hand began to tremble, and it dawned on him what was happening.
He looked around and saw that most of the other students had the powder
held over the boiling water, ready to dump it in.

Suddenly,
Luke stood up and grabbed Amy by the collar of her shirt. Professor Jones
looked up in confusion, but before Luke could say a word, it was too late.

He
tried to drag Amy toward the door, but she held fast to a chair, and screamed
at him to let her go. When the blast of hot fire bit into his back, he
knew it was too late. She didn’t understand what was happening.

There
was an ear-piercing blast when the oxygen inside the room combusted and the
windows blew out of the frames. For a split second, the pain was so
intense that Luke totally forgot where he was. He dropped his backpack and
phone and began to rip the flaming clothing off his body, throwing them aside
as well. He ran out the door, pumping his arms hard, and then dropped
onto the ground, rolling in the grass, the searing pain making him scream.

There
were other screams too. He could hear someone yelling, “Call 911!”
He suddenly had a flash back to his viral party, the party that he hadn’t
even planned, but that had made him almost famous. Then he blacked out
and didn’t wake again until the screaming cries had ceased.

*****

Sabrina
Dobson followed the tour guide and listened intently as she described the
campus cafeteria, the library, and the special bicycle trails that went for
miles though the wooded hills and orchards around the Community College.
She couldn’t wait to start school here, and she had already purchased her
textbooks for the fall semester.

She
carried the plastic bookstore bag around with the rest of the group, some who
lazily dragged behind. None
seemed
quite as
enthusiastic as her.

She
chatted incessantly about her older brother Kevin who was a graduate student
getting his PhD at some research facility nearby, and how her dad had a PhD in
computer sciences, and so on and so forth until she could clearly tell that no
one else was interested.

When
the explosion happened, the small group was only 100 feet away, on the other
side of the building. The tour guide, a sophomore girl, screamed and put
her hands up. The other high school graduates in the group put their
hands up too and ran for the parking lot.

Sabrina
was shocked and froze where she stood. She could feel the burst of hot air, the
back blast almost knocking her off her feet. She was terrified, but her
feet wouldn’t move so she stood there, her ears ringing, waiting for the next
skull-splitting boom.

Suddenly,
her attention was drawn to a man running toward the trees with his clothes on
fire. She watched in horror, her hands to her face, as he stripped and
began to roll in the grass. Without thinking, she ran in his direction,
screaming something incomprehensible.

She
saw the black smoke billowing out of the blazing building and saw that several
people lay inside, burned to death.

“Call
911!” she screamed, and then realized that no one else was around. She
was the only living person in sight.

There
was a glint of light reflected from something on the ground and she looked down
to see a smart phone lying in the grass. She picked it up and called 911.

“Help!
There’s been an explosion on campus and some
people are hurt really bad!” She screeched.

After
she gasped and grunted on the phone with the 911 operator, she heard sirens in
the distance, and then dropped the phone in her pocket. She ran to the
parking lot, immediately jumped onto a bus, and went straight home.

###

Please
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HERE
for the next book in the Dark Application Series,
Dark
Application: TWO

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Application: ONE, please
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