by Alex Irvine
But thanks to human ingenuity—specifically, in this case, Carver’s ingenuity—their trucks could run on it. Whatever Carver’s other character flaws, and they were many, he was very good with internal combustion engines. While the mechanics repeated the laborious filtering process, over and over, he was giving the run-down FEMA truck a tune-up. At least, that’s what it looked like to Malcolm. He was an architect, not a mechanic.
“This is crazy, if you want my humble expertise,” Carver said from under the hood.
Malcolm agreed, but he wasn’t going to tell Carver that.
“Just tell me how long you need to get us moving again,” he said.
“At least an hour.” Carver stood up and showed Malcolm what appeared to be a fuel filter. “I’m still replacing the filters and flushing out the shit from our last trip.” He looked over to the other end of the garage, where Alexander sat reading a graphic novel. “Gonna take your kid up there again?”
“He’s safer with me than he is down here,” Malcolm said, although he didn’t know if it was true. The real truth was he couldn’t stand to have Alexander out of his sight, knowing how precarious the situation was with the apes. For all he knew, their leader might already have changed his mind, and turned his army around to destroy the Colony.
He didn’t think that would happen—something about the ape had struck him as trustworthy, maybe even noble in a way. But when it came to his son, Malcolm didn’t believe in taking chances.
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Seems like he’s got enough problems.”
Guys like Carver, who lived through their hands, never understood kids like Alexander, who lived through their minds. Malcolm bridled at Carver’s attitude.
“Do me a favor. Just get the damn trucks working. We have to get up there before dark.”
“We?” Carver said, looking alarmed. “Oh, no. No way.”
“I don’t like it either, but you’re the best mechanic we’ve got. Dreyfus said you were going.”
“Crap,” Carver said. But he kept working.
* * *
Alexander was a strange kid. Malcolm could hardly blame him, after all he’d been through. He was just learning how to read when the Simian Flu killed his mother, and now he was in the throes of adolescence as human civilization seemingly gasped its last breath.
Malcolm knew his treatment of Alexander was full of contradictions. He wanted humanity to survive and thrive, at least partly because that would mean Alexander would live to see a better world again… but he wanted to take Alexander up into the mountains again. That was on Malcolm and no one else. He had lost his wife to the flu. He wasn’t going to lose Alexander by not being there when his son needed him.
Alexander had started drawing a lot when he was eight or nine, as the plague wound down for lack of remaining available vectors. Then they’d had to deal with the violence and wars of the next four years. He’d seen a lot of things no kid should have had to see… but that was always true, wasn’t it? Maybe Alexander’s experience wasn’t that different from a kid in the Sudan in 2012… or Bosnia in 1993… or Leningrad in 1942. And there were a lot of damaged kids who had come out of those times and places, too.
Not that Malcolm thought Alexander was damaged. He was just… quiet. A little introverted. Preferred drawing and reading to most forms of human interaction. An arty bookworm coming of age in the ruins of one of America’s great literary cities, home to Jack London, Mark Twain… Twenty years ago, Malcolm thought, this would have been the perfect place for a kid like Alexander. Even twelve years ago.
But things were different now, and they all had to do the best they could.
Even Dreyfus, who had forced Malcolm’s hand. The last thing in the world any of them should have been doing at that moment was preparing to head up to the dam again. The apes meant business. What drove Dreyfus was the beautiful dream of electricity—and the dark side of that dream, which was the knowledge that without it, the human survivors in San Francisco were destined for a slow, ugly slide into barbarism.
That barbarism might be closer than any of them thought, Malcolm mused, thinking of the mob in the Colony. They prided themselves on keeping civilization alive, but that was starting to seem like an illusion. They were treading water… maybe. More likely, they were sinking so slowly that they would be able to pretend it wasn’t happening, until they began to drown.
“Alexander,” he said.
His son looked up. For the thousandth time Malcolm wished he would let people call him Alex. Four syllables were way too many to say every time. But when you were a kid who had lost so much before you’d reached your tenth birthday, you held tight to the things you still had. And Alexander had his name. His mother had named him. Malcolm had been thinking Justin or Henry, but fifteen years after Alexander’s birth, Malcolm thought she had been right. The name fit. Maybe not in the leader-of-men sense, but still, he was an Alexander.
Whatever that meant.
“Dad?”
Malcolm caught himself. “Yeah. We’re going to head out pretty soon. Get your stuff together.”
“Didn’t the chimp tell us to stay away?” Alexander didn’t look too scared. He seemed more curious about why his father was turning right around the same day, and doing exactly what a thousand armed and intelligent apes had just told him not to do.
Malcolm nodded.
“He did. But I think I can talk to him. He needs to see that we need certain things… and then maybe we can offer him certain things, too. I don’t think there’s any way we can avoid each other forever.”
Ellie came in from outside, where she had been checking over the supplies before Carver’s guys loaded the truck. She’d heard the last part of their conversation.
“Talk to him, huh?” she said.
“I don’t think we have a choice. If I don’t try something, Dreyfus is going to go up there with a bunch of guys with guns.” Malcolm looked in Carver’s direction as he said this, making sure Carver was otherwise engaged. He was, scrubbing the truck’s spark plugs at the other end of the garage.
“Maybe you ought to let him,” Ellie said. “If that’s the way things are going to go anyway. Why put yourself out front? You have him to consider.” She glanced at Alexander. “And I’d just as soon you stuck around, too.”
“Believe me, we’re on the same page there,” Malcolm said.
“Then let Dreyfus be the big chief.”
“Oh, I am,” Malcolm said. “But you heard that speech. Basically he pointed the crowd at me and said I was going to fix the problem. So either I fix the problem, or the Colony…”
“The Colony what?” she prompted.
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said. “That’s the problem.”
“You don’t know what the chimp will do, either,” Ellie pointed out.
“This is going to sound nuts,” Malcolm said, “but I think I trust him a little more than I do most of the people down here.”
“Based on what? You looked him in the eye and he brought your son’s comics back?”
“That’s part of it. He didn’t have to do that. He was making a good-faith gesture. There’s… he wouldn’t have done that if he really didn’t ever want to see a human again. You know?” Malcolm watched Ellie think this over. She didn’t like it, but he knew her well enough that she wasn’t completely convinced he was wrong.
“This is a lot riding on a snap judgment,” she said.
“I know,” Malcolm agreed. “I wish I had a better idea.”
26
Two hours later, the truck was back at the turnoff from the highway. It passed through Muir Woods, onto the dirt fire road that led up the valley toward the dam. Carver was driving, nursing the truck over the ruts and boulders while the engine belched and stuttered from the poor quality of the fuel.
“Sooner or later, I’m gonna have to do a complete rebuild on this pig,” he muttered. “My guess is sooner.”
“As long as it gets us home today,” Malcolm said.
“Oh, it’ll get me home. You, I don’t know about, if you’re seriously gonna go flirt with the monkeys.”
“For a policy advisor, you make a great mechanic,” Malcolm replied. Carver snorted and eased the truck down a steep cut in the road, where a flash flood had started to carve the course for a new stream. Everyone held on and waited for the sound of grinding metal—if the truck bottomed out and tore off the oil pan, say, they’d all be walking home.
But that didn’t happen, and Carver worked the truck up the slope. Behind them came the second truck, with Kemp at the wheel. The dam-repair crew was ready to go, depending only on Malcolm’s ability to reach some kind of arrangement with a tribe of fully sentient talking apes.
No biggie, Malcolm thought wryly.
As the road leveled off slightly, they arrived at the clearing where they’d parked the day before. Malcolm figured it was fifty-fifty whether or not the apes would be watching the spot. It didn’t matter, really, since his plan didn’t call for secrecy. A few hundred yards up the valley was the ridge that formed one wall of the dam. A few hundred yards down the valley was the shallow crossing where Carver had gone to fill his canteen.
Carver killed the engine. Malcolm turned so he could see everyone.
“Nobody gets out of the trucks,” he said. “No one.” To Carver specifically he added, “If I’m not back in two hours, get everyone back to the city as fast as you can.”
“You got it. Two hours, we’re gone.”
Malcolm looked at Ellie and Alexander. Now that they had come all this way, he realized what a risk he was taking. He’d known it before, but suddenly it seemed clearer, the way bad decisions always did as soon as they were irreversible. But it was done now. He hoped it was the right thing to do.
Ellie looked scared. Alexander looked as if he was trying not to look scared. Malcolm started to say something to them, but he’d already said it all. Repeating it in front of Carver wouldn’t make it any truer. He opened the door and started to get out.
“You don’t want me to come with you?” Alexander called.
Malcolm leaned back into the truck. He felt a rush of love and pride for his son, trying to be brave when in fact he was utterly terrified.
“I need you to stay in the truck,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Alexander’s nod was the last thing he saw before he shut the door and started walking.
* * *
He worked his way down the slope toward the river and paused at the shore below the rapids, re-envisioning the events of the previous day. The damp sand near the water’s edge was trampled, with hundreds of ape footprints clearly visible. Where the wounded ape had been, Malcolm thought he could still see faint bloodstains on a rock face. He walked along the shore, pushing through tree branches that leaned out over the water.
Farther downstream, the water was quieter and deeper. This was as good a crossing as any, he thought, unless he wanted to go all the way back down to the highway bridge, and that would take too much time.
Splashing out into the shallows, Malcolm stepped from rock to rock as far as he could. Then he had no choice but to drop down into thigh-deep water and wade the rest of the way. It was freezing, and he didn’t like the feeling of being exposed out in the middle of the expanse. He pushed hard to the opposite bank and paused, looking around on the off chance he might spot one of the apes, watching. Did they usually post sentries this far from their camp? That was a tough question to answer, since he didn’t know how far the camp was.
He climbed the ridge, wet boots squeaking on the rocks, and reached the top where the apes had lined up the day before. He saw prints here and there. Some of them looked strange to him, not like feet, and then he figured out they must have been left by the knuckles of gorillas. Once he was over the ridge, the ground was fairly level. He followed what looked like a path and was surprised, a few minutes later, when he came out onto a road. He was even more surprised to see an abandoned gas station, its sign overgrown, its parking lot thick with weeds and saplings.
The plate-glass windows that had formed the front wall were long gone. The inside of the station was empty, looted years ago. Three rusting cars sat on flat tires at the side of the building. Malcolm didn’t stop to look through them. He walked up the road a ways, and turned back into the woods when he saw clear evidence that apes had passed by. Small broken branches dangled in the tree canopy, and there was a scattering of freshly fallen green leaves.
Hiking uphill through the woods again, Malcolm started to feel as if something was watching him from every direction at once. Every rustle of a breeze in the leaves brought him up short. Twice he saw animals moving in the undergrowth, and froze until they were gone. He glanced at his watch, which he’d made sure to wind that morning. Thirty-five minutes since he’d left the trucks.
Was he going in the right direction? Ahead of him there was a heavily wooded ravine. If he was an ape, he’d want to be on high ground, but not above the tree line. They were around here somewhere. At the head of the ravine, where it narrowed into the flank of the mountain, might be a good spot.
He started up the center of the ravine, looking up into the trees and trying to keep an eye out for poison oak and the brambles that grew in impenetrable shadowy thickets along the ravine’s walls. It was slow going. Finally he decided he’d be able to move faster if he climbed up out of the ravine, and worked his way up the mountain along its edge.
Just as he was about to do that, he saw a path ahead… and at the same moment, a structure that definitely had not occurred naturally. It was a tripod, made of three tree trunks bound together with rough rope. At the top, in the notch created by the crossing of the trunks, was an eyrie of sticks and brush, decorated with carved totems and a single antlered skull. It had to be an ape nest.
The woods were quiet around him, except for the ever-present sound of birds in the trees and small animals in the brush.
He was getting close.
Past the nest, he climbed toward the head of the ravine, climbing a steep rocky slope with a clearly worn path ascending it. And at the far end of that slope, there was an open gate.
It, too, was made of tree trunks and festooned with various totems. Beyond it was a well-worn path, almost like a dirt street. Malcolm approached it and saw carvings on the posts. Some of them were letters, some glyphs he couldn’t interpret. In several places he saw the word APE.
My God, he thought. They can write, too?
He almost turned back then, feeling that he was getting in way over his head. He had a son to consider, and Ellie. There had to be another way to bring electricity to the Colony.
Didn’t there?
Malcolm took a deep breath. No, there did not. This was the only way. They had tried everything else.
He passed through the gate, feeling as he did that he had committed himself to some inevitable series of events, the outcome of which he couldn’t predict. More totems stood on posts near the street… and now he could hear apes in the branches that overhung the street.
They were getting closer. And there were a lot of them. He kept his hands visible and his eyes front, and he kept walking. The apes’ noises were all around him now—behind him, on both sides, and above him. He couldn’t help it. He started to scan through the branches, and he saw a chimp looking back at him from just above his eye level. Malcolm raised his arms, palms out, like he was being arrested.
The ape vanished.
At the same time, a series of alarms sounded, the cries of apes echoing in a chain upward through the trees and away into the forest ahead of him. Malcolm kept walking, half-convinced he was about to die, but fully convinced that if he ran now he wouldn’t get ten steps before a spear punched through his lungs. He kept his hands in the air, walking nice and slow, determined but non-threatening.
Apes began to emerge from the trees. Malcolm kept walking until they appeared in front of him. Then he stopped. They circled him and he started to turn, keeping as many of th
em as possible in view. He started walking again as he completed a full turn. Then he stopped dead.
Right in front of him, within arm’s reach, stood the chimp with the blind eye. It held a harpoon twice its height, both hands on the shaft, the steel point gleaming in the sun. The other apes stopped moving, waiting for their cue. Malcolm knew this was one of the leaders. Both times he had seen this ape, it had been right next to the one who first spoke, whose eyes Malcolm had first met.
And both times, seeing this one-eyed chimp, Malcolm had thought the same thing.
This one really doesn’t like people.
None of the apes were moving now. The one-eyed ape could almost have been a statue, if its good eye hadn’t moved up and down. Malcolm remembered how it had looked at the guns held by Dreyfus’s guards. He was glad he hadn’t brought a gun.
“Listen,” he said. “I—”
Before he got another word out, the one-eyed ape brought the butt of the harpoon up and around to crack into the side of his head, just over his left ear. Malcolm’s legs went out from under him. His ears rang and he couldn’t see. He had a sense of the ground hitting him, and then everything faded to a dim gray. As it did, he had one last coherent thought.
Well, there was a chance.
27
He never quite made it to unconsciousness, but for what must have been several minutes Malcolm was drifting. He had the sensation of moving, and of something wrong with one of his feet. Briefly he put those two things together and realized he was being dragged somewhere. He tried to speak but couldn’t figure out how. All around him was an overwhelming wave of screeching. Apes, he thought as his head started to clear. He blinked and his eyes started to focus. At the same time the pain from the side of his head hit him again, and he grimaced.
He was on his back, being dragged along the muddy path. Above him he saw an arch, with wooden walls extending away into the woods on either side. Along the tops of the walls, pointed timbers stuck out. Apes were everywhere, running along the walls, swinging down from the outthrust timbers, dropping from the top of the gate, running out from huts on either side of the path. Huts! They had built houses…!