Primal Gambit

Chapter 32: Darwin Schemes

The nights were getting colder. Winter was beginning to pummel The Dark City. Oftentimes ash converged with snow – blinding many and bringing death to the exposed. Darwin sat in the apartment, civil protection sirens echoed through the room as he leaned into his desk and jotted down notes on various papers and notebooks. The lone lamp illuminated the area in unnatural brightness – the activist leader adjusted his glasses and sipped from the snifter of amber nectar. Scotch stung his insides on the way down, both embracing and filling him with promises of power.

Darwin wrote endlessly, connecting dots and collecting names. He was undermining an entire plan that would garner him both fame and fortune, and for that reason it became akin to a drug. He built a chemical dependency to the idea of the former and the latter; were he to go too long without scheming, it would act as withdrawal – eating away at him until he made the return to the desk as he had for years before.

The man adjusted the frames of his glasses as he tried to focus harder on the notebook before him. Meeting Valerie and letting her join the activist group was the smartest thing Darwin had ever done, for the sole reason that her counterpart served with two wicked men. One fought for his people, the other for his family. What the two shared was determination, but only through a substantial increase in monetary standing would they be able to accomplish what they sought after. This is where the activist leader came into the picture. Darwin had become the puppeteer up above, pulling old strings and new until he was certain that he would be able to sit back and watch the events unfold and the rewards fall haplessly into his lap.

He held in his palms two chipped black chess pieces from the set he received from his grandfather as a child. Little did his older relative know that the art of the game would reside and fester within the child for the years that followed; he understood that if he were to position the pieces on the board just right, the entire game would rest entirely upon his next move... In his hands, the two pawns rolled and danced.

He was a God – everyone else was below him: a minion, a stepping stone, a hurdle between him and the dominance that he craved for so long. Only this time he was going to stop at nothing to achieve what he believed to be rightfully his. The small attacks on Marcotte were but the first steps in his master plan. He was the only one with access to the blueprints – seeing the ability to tap into his own mind as a gift without equal. By the end, people would know his name. It would be littered on newspapers and websites – articles both online and off. Scores of civilians would know his name for the valiant defeat of the oppressors, not for the blood-strewn methods his pawns were forced to take for him to arrive there.

Though at this point in the game, no one knew how his pieces were laid out. The fog of war had yet to be cleared; his intentions yet to be seen. If this were going to work, he would need to utilize the vagueness of the board's edges, no man's land – watch from the sidelines with just enough interaction to position the pieces to his liking without bringing any unwarranted attention or raising suspicions.

Darwin sat back and contemplated his position – the choices available to him. He drank.