Jared was sitting on the back chair and unmindful of the driver who kept looking at him through the front mirror. Perhaps, his knitted eyebrows betrayed the confusion and frustration he was feeling.
He scooped the android phone from one of his bags. As soon as the password was entered, he scrolled through the applications and pressed the one with an icon that looked like an onion. His fingers were apparently shaking, and he was trying to avoid eye contact with Carl as much as he could, but he would give a smile with disappeared lips whenever he would catch his curious look.
The application was an Internet browser he modified to search deeper through the web. The regular search engines could only scratch the surface of the Internet, his could pull up information that most people would find abhorrent or fearsome- child pornography, drugs and assassination jobs. These things made his stomach rumble, but he needed the deep web to finish a project he thought was going to elevate people's esteem of him.
As if his fingers had their own mind, they quickly typed Tesla Academy. His heart beat excitedly while waiting for the results to load.
The main site was built in Leafwort in 1912, now it had four sites all over the globe. There was an article that said Tesla was privately investigated because it surely caught attention on how it was filtering its students, but the investigators came up with the conclusion that it was suspiciously clean. The investigations were repeated more times, but ended up being dismissed as paranoia.
Jared's eyebrows rose when he saw another result with keywords, Secret Society and Assassination. Without thinking, his thumb pressed on the article.
As soon as the page popped up, there were texts, but they became cryptic, like binary codes which turned into hieroglyphic texts, then faded, leaving a clear white page. "What?" He gasped. Anxiously, he refreshed the page, restarted the browser and did the smart troubleshooting steps he knew, but the information he almost had never came back. He sighed.
"Any problem?" Carl's old voice crackled. "We're almost at your dormitory."
Jared could not tell Carl that he was driving like a senior citizen, which he was. But probably, he was slowed down by watching his face changed expression from curious to angry in a short span of time. Would he tell Carl that he was deeply worried the school must be some sort of a secret society? Or a cult, perhaps? No, Carl, despite his seemingly innocent face and fragile exterior, was still a part of Tesla. If he did not know anything, it must remain that way… for his safety.
"No, Carl. I'm worried about a few things, you know first day, but I'm fine," he lied.
Carl continued looking at him with a raised eyebrow but he slammed back on his chair, the car halted, when they saw what could be the most horrific scene in their life: a body of a young girl who must be around Jared's age, spread across the side of a hill like an eagle. Her limbs were squashed, her blood and mashed flesh stuck her on the rocks vertically. She was naked, and there was a tear across her chest to her stomach that revealed her inside was emptied out. There was no heart, no lungs and no intestines.
Jared's teeth grinded, he felt the beating of his heart throughout his whole body. "Carl, hurry up! Hurry up! Don't stop the engine!"
"Y-yes! Yes!" Carl answered nervously.
The car shoved through the asphalt like an F1 race car, they both waited eagerly to see the dormitory building of the Jade Hummingbirds. But Jared, out of curiosity and fear, looked back to the crime scene. He wanted to know if someone, the killer, was following them, but his eyes caught a different terror. The girl, who was dead, moved her head, as if to look back at him, and her flinty eyes rolled up the pupils so they were all white and scary.
Was he hallucinating? No, he read from Forensics that a dead body could still move postmortem due to the chemical changes in the muscles and the blood being finally affected by gravity. This is a phenomenon called rigor mortis. Nothing much to be worried about. What they needed to fear was that, whoever killed the girl must still be somewhere, hiding, waiting.
"We're here," Carl broke.
A mansion-like building surprised Jared. In his estimate, it was about 5-storey tall and his room was on the third floor. But it did not excite him, his heart was still beating rapidly on what they saw. He looked at Carl, the old man was rubbing his chest and gasping.
"It will be ok, Carl," he encouraged. He was telling the same thing to himself. He turned his phone face-up thinking he must call the police or anyone, to say that there was a crime. It was murder. But as if to tell him the scare of the day was not yet over, the page that was blank earlier was now dark, and there were human eyes peering through the screen of his phone.
Jared yelled and threw the phone unto the car floor, but it was carpeted so his phone landed with no damage. The screen went back to a white blank page.
"What is it again, kid?" Carl asked in a loud voice. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"
Jared decided he needed to calm down. His vision must be getting distorted due to panic.
The gate of the dormitory opened. A boy waited curiously for someone to go down from the car but after a beat, his face showed as if he sensed their fear. His eyes squinted and his nostrils twitched, stepping forward to the car while still holding the gate. Whoever that boy was, he looked like an animal in human form picking up something with his senses. If it was their fear, the scent of blood that must have stuck on the car, Jared did not know, and he simply did not have the energy to analyze.
"This is the part where you need to step down, kid," Carl reminded, his face was still a mask of fear.
Jared felt the muscles on his neck tightened but still managed to nod before opening the door. "Take care, Carl."
"I will call the police."
As Jared walked toward the gate, doing his best to hold his head up as there was someone waiting for him to enter, he could not help but think of something other people probably would not.
Who is that girl? Is the school involved with her murder?