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DARWIN'S GAME
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 50
Vanni Richards was Sri Lankan, but she lived in
Redwood City, California and she was almost fifteen years old. She
had been named for a province in her birth country, but she was home
in America as she had been here since she was barely a month old. Her
parents had known they were coming to America long before she was
born and had hoped all the while that she would be born in their new
home, not their old and therefore had decided to name her for their
home province and change their surname when they got their visa to
live and work in the United States. The unwieldy Rajapakse was
changed legally to Richards, which also combined her father's love of
West Indian cricketers with a desire to assimilate the new and bolder
culture of California within their own.
Vanni grew up like most girls in their
neighborhood and though he parents had stayed in contact with some of
their relatives back home, she had never been back to see where she
had been born. They became naturalized citizens and they settled in
to their new lives, with new neighbors and new jobs and became new
people. Vanni had never known hardship, her father earned good money
as an IT Project Manager for a large accounting firm in San Francisco
and made the daily commute in the family's second of two cars. Her
mother was an active member of the PTA of Vanni's High School and was
an overachieving mother who was driving her daughter, and now her
younger son to over achieve as well, treating school like an army
commission and filling their heads with duty and honor.
Naturally Vanni hated all of these things and
wanted nothing more than to be rid of school and her overbearing
mother's ambitions for her. She took great delight in showing her up
at every possible turn and made sure that her parents knew this. Her
father worked long hours and the commute of thirty miles each way
meant the was at the tail end of most arguments, and was pretty tired
and fed up by the time any fight could be settled. Vanni was a bright
girl and was having no trouble with her grades or her assignments,
when she actually did them. Her mother was at the school so often
that she started not handing in work she had actually done, just to
make it more embarrassing for her to have to deal with her teachers.
But her mother was not embarrassed, was not so
easily shown up and nowhere near dissuaded. She kept up her level of
preparedness, she hounded her daughter for homework and drove her to
and from school, letting no time for her to find ways to avoid the
work she did not want to complete. Took her to violin lessons and to
math tutoring where she would practice her own with her younger
brother in the car working on his own homework with their mother
while they waited. There was little room to breathe, to stretch and
be herself and it made her chaff all the more against the controlling
influence of the woman who wanted the best for her, yet found the
worst method of achieving it.
So it was with equal amounts of fear and glee
that Vanni skipped school this very day to follow the boy from her
class that her mother had warned her about, and no bigger cliché
than that was waiting for her as she left quietly mid morning and
they went to his house to hang out and be bad kids. She was a little
unpracticed at this and he despite his reputation and rough exterior
was painfully shy when it came to making any moves. She was keen on
Jeff and he was keen on Vanni, but mostly the morning consisted of
her smiling at him and he looking sullen and disinterested while
wondering how on earth he could make a move that would cease the
stabbing feeling in his chest.
Around midday they went to the Mall where the
kids would be found often enough during free periods and breaks if
they could get away and they blended in, wanting to be seen together
and unable to capitalise on the chance to be alone at all. They
caught up with friends, envious of their courage and tenacity at
breaking the rules for the whole of the day, seeing how far they
could push Mrs Richards, who would undoubtedly be 'pissed' at her
daughter no end.
They were walking along a quiet road, in the
neighborhood not far from where Jeff's house was an hour or two
later, the day running out before they had to break and met their
parents, take a stand and be 'missplaced' for a while or capitulate
and sneak back into school and pretend like it never happened.
Neither of them wanted the latter, Jeff had little or no relationship
with his mother at the best of times, and Vanni was not sure that
involving a police report of them being missing was the best way to
achieve her goals without ruining her future either.
“Whats that? What do you think is going on
there?” Jeff was pointing across the road, Vanni swiveled to see
for herself what he was indicating. There was a dozen or so people
gathered in the car park of a motel, a seedy looking place with a
broken sign and a flickering neon arrangement that was for some
reason lit in the middle of the afternoon sunshine.
“I don't know, we could go and have a look I
guess?” She shrugged her shoulders and so did he. Neither of them
made a move just yet and they saw that a few more people were walking
in and joining the group, which was slowly growing in number and
volume. Most of them were carrying tablets or cellphones that they
were looking at and pointing in the general direction of the motel,
the Redwood Bella Vista Motel which had around fifty rooms and units
across two floors, and three wings of buildings radiating from a
central office.
Cars began to arrive and park in the street
outside, and the area was beginning to fill up, which intrigued Vanni
so she grabbed Jeff by the elbow and urged him to follow her across
the street. They came to the edge of the swelling group and tried to
see what it was that people were doing, Jeff bit the bullet and asked
a guy who looked to be not much older than them, though he looked
nothing like the people they would normally hang with.
“What's going on bro?” Jeff was surly, it
was a default attitude whether he meant to or not.
“I'm not your bro. I'm not a dude, or a mate,
friend or anything to you.” The teenager a few years ahead of them
at most was not interested in engaging with the surly, scruffy, army
coated boy with no manners.
Vanni smiled as sweetly as she could at him and
said “Can you please tell us what is going on? We... we live nearby
and I … we don't know what is going on yeah?”
With a snort and contemptuous look at Jeff the
teen addressed Vanni directly. “Don't you watch the news? This is
him, he's here!” He pointed at his Tablet, and on it there was a
map on a website, showing where they were and a bright red dot that
marked where the Bella Vista was.
“Ummm, no we haven't seen the news, who is …
who is he?”
“Jesus, don't you kids know anything?” The
word kids was dripping with scorn but he cycled the pages to show
Vanni the article about John Vargas, the latest Darwin Episode and
the location website.
“Oh fuck, yeah I forgot. I totally forgot
that it was today.” She tugged on Jeff's sleeve, “He's here, the
winner of Darwin's Game, we are here and he is here and we're here!”
Vanni was exhilarated and her eyes sparkled in excitement, infecting
Jeff who actually cracked a smile.
“We can't fail history, we're here making
it!” A rare joke for Jeff who was failing most of his classes and
really struggled to stay a pace with the work, unlike the girl he
wanted to spend more time with. Eventually that mismatch would drive
a wedge between them, but today they felt special and that fate had
lead them to take this day, to take this stand and to be here at this
place on the spot.
“So where is he?” Vanni asked and an older
man, a larger man in a truckers cap, carrying a laptop spun around
and showed her the screen, he had a much more detailed view of the
location, but it yielded a higher definition of nothing at all.
“There ain’t nothing but the address, but
he's got to be here somewhere I can feel it.” The man patted his
pocket and then turned back to the people congregated around him.
Vanni took out her own smartphone and brought up one of the mapping
sites to see what she could see, and as she was doing so a mob was
forming around them, they were being jostled and pushed into the cars
that were already in the car park and more were pulling up, blocking
the road and people were streaming in, some running and some shouting
ahead for information.
“This is so exciting! Oh my god! I can't
believe we're here and this is happening!” Vanni gripped Jeff's
hand, he was less and less thrilled as more and more people crowded
them in. The moment though that she took his hand, those fears fell
aside, and she kept holding on to him and he could see and hear
nothing else after that.
“People! People! Hey! Hey!” The motel owner
came out of the office and he had a shotgun, he was shaking as he
swung about to address the crowd in a wavering voice that broke often
from the strain. “I've called the police. I don't want any trouble.
You need to leave. You need to leave. I've called the police, they'll
be here any minute!”
The crowd was pressing in on them, surging
forward but bending around where the motel owner was and he spun
about nervously, knowing that trouble was now unavoidable. The man
with the laptop was blocking Vanni's view but she could see that he
had his hand half-in and half out of his pocket, and it was curled
around the grip of a pistol there. Vanni felt the heat of the day
vanish and refill her body in a colder cloak of fear.
“I'm warning you, I'm...” the rest of the
sentence never came as a crowbar came flying down in a swung arc to
crack on his forearm and Vanni was close enough to hear the bone
shatter through his sleeve. The big man drove forward and snatched
the shotgun, handing the laptop to Vanni, adopting her for some
reason as a helper and cracking the barrel open to declare it not
even loaded.
The man with the crowbar lifted it high and
yelled an unintelligible battle cry which carried back over their
heads and back across what was possibly over a thousand people in the
street behind them, blocking access and no way for anyone to drive
any closer than a block away.
“Stick with me kids, I got your backs and you
got mine?” The big man handed the empty shotgun to Jeff who held
it by the barrel like it was too hot to hold for long and Vanni
handed back the laptop as the man drew his pistol and smiled. “Don't
worry none. We got this. This bitch is ours.”
The crowd was moving again, behind the man with
the crowbar as he went to the first unit, the one nearest and slammed
the crowbar crook first into the lock, splintering the wood around it
and then with an almighty kick the door flew inwards and he ducked
inside, rummaged about and then exited again. “Empty! Let's keep
going!” The crowd roared back their agreement and they smashed in
the door to the second unit, where a couple hurriedly getting dressed
and obviously frightened were manhandled out of the room only to be
declared “it's not him!” and then moved past, white faced and
shaking.
Sirens floated in but the police were far away
and unable to get too close, the man with the crowbar sped up and
smashed in another door quickly, determining it was not the one and
moving rapidly on. The sound of calls for calm and for people to
disperse were coming over bullhorns, but were being ignored. Five
units were cleared and still no sign of the winner was apparent.
Vanni was being kicked and shoved, not with any intended violence but
with the brutal tide of the mob in action. Jeff was hanging on to
her, he had dropped the shot gun and it got swallowed by the crowd
and they moved with the masses from door to door.
The sound of a helicopter came close, then got
louder and louder as they started to feel the shuddering waves of air
from the rotors as the chopper came down as close as possible and a
voice boomed across the carpark.
“This is the FBI. You WILL Disperse NOW! Go
home! Go Now!” The crowd started to fade a little below where the
chopper was and the police who had arrived in force up the road were
pushing their way in with riot gear and tear gas to try and break the
crowd up, filing in and clearing space for the helicopter to land.
The core of the group around the angry man with
a crowbar and the big man in a truckers cap with the laptop were
caught between the chopper and the motel units, the air from the
rotors was forcing the tear gas back away from them and into the bulk
of the mob now pushed back into the streets. The big man pushed
forward and lifted a substantial leg and kicked at the door in front
of them and knocked it open just as two of the gas masked police men
pulled him back away from the door, and the man with the crow bar ran
inside the doorway, and stopped dead in his tracks.
Vanni and Jeff had a perfect view of the room,
unobstructed as the man who had forced his way in sunk to his knees
and looked up into the dead face of John Vargas, who was hanging from
a rope attached to a hook in the ceiling of the motel unit, swinging
slightly disturbed by the sudden movements of air when the door was
kicked in.
The world went silent just then. The helicopter
had landed and the engine switched off, the rotors slowing down and
stopping the air. The police men stopped in their advance, seeing too
what now a lot of people could clearly see as there was a big and
largely empty space around the chopper in the parking lot. The news
that there was a body swinging in the room, a suicide and likely to
be the person they were all looking for was starting to spread with a
chattering hiss through them, but it was a hushed tone that kept the
noise subdued and barely above the level of a whisper.
Vanni hooked her arms together and hugged
herself as she was faced with the swinging corpse of the history she
had been so keen to be a part of and started to cry. Jeff leaned over
her, taking her in his arms protectively and saying nothing, neither
of them moving.
Agent Levy walked into the motel room and
beckoned to his agents to remove the man who had dropped his crowbar
with his rage at the impotence of being too late to the party, and he
was lead away with his head bowed.
Agent Levy looked up into face of John Vargas,
and thought to himself, 'could this have ended any other way?' He
reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out the letter of
resignation and tore it up and then put it back again.
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