The Precursors 1: The Darwinists chap 5

Chapter Five: The Darwinists

Someone was saying something… David couldn’t tell what. He blinked a few times and got his eyesight back to normal. He now remembered he had gone unconscious when his bus had been hijacked, by a few people…David only remembered—ahhaghh! His neck! It hurt like hell! He realized there was a huge gash on his neck, from when someone had shot a tranquilizer dart into it.
He was in a steel room, with lots of computers and technology all over. It seemed to be moving…yes it was. Definitely.
“Where are we?” David finally asked. He was afraid even to speak to these criminals, but he was so curios. The leader…what was his name…Blake, yeah, David had heard the others saying it….he spoke.
“Ah,” he said with a chuckle, “you’re awake.” He seemed young, 25, maybe, and had long brown hair and brooding black eyes.
“Yes.”
“You’re in the Rover,” Blake said, gesturing around at the room. It was dark, but flashing computer lights and shiny plasma guns lightened up the room a bit. “It’s a moving headquarters. On the outside it looks like a food delivery bus.”
Usually, David would be peeing in his pants right about now, but the tranquilizer had sent him out of his senses. “Who are you?”
“Glad you asked,” Blake said. “Blake Darwin, the leader of the Darwinists and the son of Marty Darwin, the Darwinists’ founder.” David had no idea what Blake was talking about.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a tale for another time,” a girl said. She also looked about 25, and had red hair. David believed her to be very pretty. “I’m Gina, the Darwinists’ second in command.”
“Wait, Gina,” another man said. He looked a little older, maybe 30, and had dark skin. “If the kid really is, well, y’know…he should know what’s going on.” Gina shrugged.
“Whatever, Waiyaki.”
“He’s right Gina,” said somebody who was at a computer. David peered at him. He looked younger, probably in his teens. He had jet black hair and blue eyes.
“Nahuel, we don’t even know if he is the boy yet,” said Blake.
“Well then we’ve gotta’ take our chances.”
“Fine. Okay, boy,” Blake said, turning to David. “Basically, well, never mind. Let’s start from the beginning. About eight years ago, me and my dad, who has recently passed away, discovered something. You’re not going to believe me, but…the world, humanity as we know it, is an experiment.” David threw up, but nobody seemed to care. “People were created as an experiment to learn about evolution by a race of aliens called Precursors.” Another cookie-woof. “Me, Nahuel, Gina and Waiyaki have all, from different reasons, discovered the Precursors, and their plan to delete a humanity which has become to technologically advanced. And, so, my father, Marty Darwin, founded the Darwinists, a group dedicated to protecting humanity from the threat of the Precursors.”
“Yeah right!” David said with a laugh. “You actually expect me to believe that? You’re just trying to save yourselves from me calling the cops on you kidnappers.”
Blake sighed. “Waiyaki, show him.”
“Alright, kid,” said Waiyaki. “Follow me.” David hesitated for a second, but then decided to follow him. If they were evil kidnappers, wouldn’t they have killed him already?
He followed Waiyaki through a hallway and they came to a pure white room, with a few computers here and there.
“Get ready,” Waiyaki said in a ghostly tone. He picked up a remote control and pointed it at a white wall. The wall opened up. David gasped. Inside a closed cage, an alien, that sort of looked like a wolf lay soundless.
“Is it…”
“Yeah. It’s a Precursor. A dead one that Gina killed on a mission.” So it was all true. All Blake had said. David could barely believe his eyes. It was a real live alien, like in his V-Game, Ace Hardy and the Case of the Groginbons. An alien probably from some distant gala—
“Waiyaki! No!” Nahuel came running in. “You already showed it to him, didn’t you?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“He isn’t the kid.” Waiyaki swore.
“What’s going on?” David asked nervously. Nahuel looked at him with a sigh and a dark expression on his face. Nahuel finally spoke.
“Another kid in your academy, I think his name was Quimby. Yeah, Quimby. Maybe a friend of yours?” David nodded. “Well, we narrowed it down to either you or him, and we were took the chance of showing it all to you, about the Darwinists and the Precursors, and know its that goddamn Quimby.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” David asked.
“Well, we discovered that the Precursors had placed a video chip into either your or Quimby’s head, sometime shortly after birth, to see the world from an Experimental’s view. We were so foolish. Since Quimby escaped when we attacked the bus, we took the chance of telling you, our only chance, all about…everything. And now I’ve figured out that it wasn’t you. It was a certain Jason Quimby.”
David soaked it all in. “I think I needa go to bed…” he fainted.

David’s dreams were of aliens, microchips and more. But mostly of his parents. And it wasn’t till he awoke the next morning in the same bed he had awoken in before that he realized he was homesick.
“David,” Blake said as David awoke. He was tinkering with a computer drive. “We’ve made a decision about what to do with you. You are really fast, right?” David nodded. “Well, because you know so much and you have certain skills like agility…we’ve decided to recruit you to the Darwinists.” Normally, David would’ve immediately said yes. It would be awesome to join an alien-fighting team! But…he was homesick.
“No,” David finally said. “I mean, my home isn’t really much…but I miss it anyways. I have to go home.”
“David there is nothing at home for you,” Gina said sternly. “You will never go back. And our hideout, the Rabbit’s Hole, will be like a home to you.” David immediately got mad.
“Everything is at home for me!” Gina sighed.
“You don’t understand. The Precursors have already figured out you joined us and burned everyone and everything you ever knew.” David stared at Gina for a moment, soaking it in. He began to sob. They were all dead. Everything was dead!
“No,” David finally said, his tears stopping. “No.” Blake sighed and glanced at David with a pitying expression.
“I’m sorry, bro. We couldn’t stop it.”
“No! Yeah right! If those damn Precursors want to kill everybody so bad, we don’t they just burn the goddamn world?”
“David,” Gina said, staying calm, “ever since Blake blew up the Generator on one of our missions, the Precursors don’t have that much power anymore.” David cried again.
It was all gone.

Stale crackers in the cabinet, his mom yelling at him for not cleaning his room, watching roball on lazy Sundays while he should’ve been doing his math homework….
Gone.
David cried in that stupid dark room with all that stupid technology in that stupid bed for a few hours. Everything seemed so…stupid. Nothing mattered except for killing all of the Precursors. Every single goddamn one. He imagined ripping their heads off and watching their poor families cry and grief...and then kill them too. It seemed right. He had to show them what they had showed him: true grief, darkness…darkness. His mind was dark now, except for occasional images of Precursor gore.
They had to die.

Days in the Rover went by fast. David began keeping a journal about his entering into the Darwinists, but there weren’t many entries. It all went the same: eat breakfast, do some training (which was very much like Dorrington training) with Waiyaki, learn about some computer stuff with Nahuel (David was alarmingly bad at this) and eat some more. He ate a lot to keep his mind off…stuff. Off his old life.
It seemed so far away. Days watching lame roball drama while eating expired potato chips, coming to school three hours late...just living the life he used to live. It was all about shooting the target with reiptone gun and hacking into the system correctly nowadays. He became increasingly close with the other Darwinists, all who where a lot older than him, and began to think of them as parent figures. They were all he had left.
One day during training with Waiyaki, Waiyaki seemed a little off. In another pure white room, with targets and weapons and simulators all over, Waiyaki kept missing the bull’s eye during demonstrations, which he usually hit head on.
“Wai, what’s wrong?” David asked, realizing Waiyaki was hiding something from him. Waiyaki stared at David, and just said, “Nothing, bro. Just a little off today.”
Yeah right¸ David thought. Waiyaki was hiding something: and David had learned that with the Darwinists, anything could be more important than it seemed.
“Where are we, anyway?” David asked. The question had been coming up in his mind a lot recently, and the Rover had no windows. They had what seemed like a life time supply of food in the Rover, they never had to stop, but where were they? David knew they were going to some “Rabbit’s Hole”, but where was that anyway?
“In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“What?” David was surprised at such a strange thing to say. How was that possible?
“We’re in a series of tunnels at the depths of the Atlantic. Marty Darwin and the other original Darwinists built them so they could get back and forth between missions in the USA and the Rabbit’s Hole.”
“Where’s the Rabbit’s Hole?” Waiyaki sighed at the question.
“Do you really wanna know?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s in the Japanese sewer system. Beneath Tokyo, I think.” David stared at Waiyaki for a few seconds. A whole base beneath a freaking sewer system? It was getting clearer and clearer to David that maybe it was lies and maybe he was going insane. Maybe all that work at Dorrington was screwing with his brain. Or was all this adventure just making him paranoid?
David took a shot with an energy rifle Waiyaki handed him and fired at the target. He missed by a mile. He hadn’t shot that bad since Dorrington. Something was up.