by Alex Irvine
Cornelia screamed from above them and Malcolm jerked back around in time to see Caesar fall from the platform built out from the trunk of his tree. He crashed through the brush and disappeared, the sound of his fall continuing for a terribly long time as his body tumbled down the steep slope into the ravine.
Blue Eyes stood, arms outstretched, watching. Slowly his arms dropped.
Rocket rushed past them up and up the tree. Other apes were shrieking and converging on the tree.
The gorilla, Luca, folded the wailing Cornelia into his arms as dozens of apes looked down into the ravine, searching for any sign of Caesar or whoever had fired the shot. Malcolm recognized some of them. There was one of Koba’s closest apes, the gray one, climbing up from the other side of the tree to join the search.
Blue Eyes spotted something and jumped from the tree down onto a rock outcropping below. From behind them came a fresh burst of panicked shrieks. Malcolm turned to see fire spreading through several of the ape dwellings between the raised stone platform and the village gate. It was moving fast, running along the wall and through the brush. Terrified apes fled from it into the open space.
They don’t know how to fight fire, Malcolm thought. We can help—
Then another ape charged from one of the dwellings and vaulted up onto the slab of stone, where he stood with the ape commandments behind him. In the smoke it took Malcolm a moment to recognize him, but when he did, he knew they were in trouble.
Uh-oh, he thought. One-Eye. Koba.
Pacing to the front edge of the stone slab, Koba raised his arms and roared, “Humans kill Caesar!”
“What?” Ellie said. “We didn’t—”
It’s a coup, Malcolm thought. It had to be. Carver didn’t have a rifle and nobody else in the Colony knew where the ape village was. But there was no way to tell the apes that at the moment.
Blue Eyes came through the smoke then, holding a rifle over his head. In his other hand, he held Carver’s cap. The apes parted before him as he made his way to the stone slab, sobbing without tears. Koba seized the rifle and raised it for all the apes to see. The fire still spread—it had caught on the other side of the village, leaping the dirt path on a breeze coming up from the ravine.
“You see?” Koba roared. “You see!” He pointed the rifle at the flames. “And now they take our home… with fire!”
The assembled apes erupted in primal screeches, with an undertone of basso roars from the gorillas. All eyes were on Koba, but Malcolm knew that wouldn’t last. He linked hands with Alexander and Ellie.
Maurice leaned in close to Malcolm.
“Run,” he said.
Malcolm didn’t need to be told twice.
* * *
Koba stood before his apes. His apes. He held the rifle over his head and shook it, rousing them to a greater frenzy. Now was the time to unleash them.
He looked across the stone slab, but the humans were gone. Turning, he searched the village, and saw them, keeping low, running through the fire. He screamed, the sound piercing the rest of the apes’ screeching, and pointed. A group of apes charged off after the humans, who were already through the gate.
Koba signed to Grey.
Females and children go down to the woods and stay. All others will follow me!
Grey started relaying the orders to other apes as Koba returned his focus to the assembly.
“Come!” he growled. “We fight! We fight… for Caesar!”
Over the roar of the flames came the renewed shrieking of the apes.
Fight for Caesar! Fight for Caesar!
Koba turned to Blue Eyes, who stood with his head down. Koba laid a hand on his shoulder. Blue Eyes looked up and Koba slid his hand around to the back of Blue Eyes’ head. It was the gesture of a father toward a son. Blue Eyes hesitated. Then he reached around to cup the back of Koba’s head.
Yes, thought Koba. I am your father now. I am father to all apes. He looked at the burning village. Groups of females and young moved up past Caesar’s tree to the open field beyond, where they would climb down into the woods. War parties massed together at the other end of the village, beyond the flames, waiting for their leader.
Fight for Caesar!
It was time to end the human threat.
* * *
The five humans ran for their lives into the night, getting off the path as soon as the terrain permitted and cutting down into the woods. Behind them, they heard the crackling in the branches—the sound of apes pursuing them. Their only hope was to get somewhere and hide. They couldn’t outrun apes, and the faster they moved, the sooner their sounds would give them away.
Just down the slope from the main path, beyond the totem gate, the ground gave way underneath them and they tangled their feet in dislodged vines. The shrieking of the apes was getting closer fast. Malcolm got Ellie loose and saw that Alexander was scooting farther down the slope, to where it leveled out in a small bowl. Ellie moved after him, and Malcolm saw where they were going.
He followed, making a beeline for a jumble of fallen trees, probably pushed together by a long-dead work crew on a job clearing the old road to the dam. He and Ellie and Alexander crawled under the pile, scraping through rotten wood and spongy masses of loam. Malcolm waited for Foster and Kemp to join them, but they were gone.
Had they split off in another direction? Had the apes caught them?
There was nothing he could do, in either case. They hunkered down as the sound of the apes grew closer, louder… overwhelming. This was more than the initial search party. This was hundreds of apes, stampeding along the ground, shaking the fallen trees as they leaped onto and over them. A storm of leaves fell from the forest canopy as hundreds more surged down the ravine. The three humans froze, not breathing, until at last the wave passed.
In the silence they could hear the fire in the ape village.
It was a long time before any of them dared to speak. Ellie was first.
“What do we do now?” she asked, very quietly.
At first Malcolm didn’t answer. He had no idea.
48
In the Colony, there was jubilation. Every man, woman, and child surged through the market, marveling at the lights. So many lights! The children too young to remember electricity were awed, and some were terrified. Their parents explained with happy tears in their eyes. And word began to spread. Malcolm had done it! This was the start of a new day.
Almost literally, since it was nearly midnight.
The lights had been on for a few hours, and the celebration was just settling as a real party. Until that moment, everyone had been too shocked to celebrate, and too afraid that something would go wrong and the lights would go out again, crushing their hopes just when they had been raised. But belief took hold quickly, and soon they were dancing and drinking and raising hell from the pure joy of being alive.
Dreyfus’s back stung from the number of times it had been slapped. His hands were scraped and aching from being shaken by what seemed like a thousand people. Finally he excused himself from the festivities, because there was something he needed back in his quarters.
* * *
It took him a while to find it, buried under a pile of maps on a shelf in the corner, but before long he was standing in front of an electrical outlet, an iPad in one hand and its power plug in the other. Moving with the care of a priest performing a mystic ritual, he plugged it in and closed his eyes when he saw the lightning bolt on its screen.
He watched it, hearing the joyful sounds outside but caring only for the tiny sliver of red that appeared on the battery icon. The tablet powered up, and Dreyfus tapped the photo icon. He swiped through photos of old Army buddies, fellow police officers, him at different social functions and fund-raisers… and there was what he had come for. Maddy and their boys, Edward and John. Standing on the viewing platform at the top of the Coit Tower, they smiled for the camera in that distant year of 2012, when the Simian Flu was just a public-health concern and nobody had imagined what the
next ten years would hold. Dreyfus blinked tears from his eyes and looked, drinking in every last detail.
Electricity wouldn’t just give them a future, he thought. It would give them back their past. He looked up and out his window, over the mass of revelers. Above them, blinking against the sky, was the light at the top of the antenna on the unfinished skyscraper. If the light was on, the antenna had power. If the antenna had power, they could make themselves known, and at last—at long last—they could hear other human voices.
If any were left.
He took another look at his family, kissed his fingers and touched them to each of the three faces in turn. Then he set the tablet on his desk and composed himself. It was time to be the leader again.
* * *
The radio room was set back in a corner of the Colony away from the market and near the edge of the workshop area. Dreyfus headed for it, enduring more backslaps and handshakes, smiling and high-fiving, and at last getting clear of the crowd. He entered the radio room, and the first thing that struck him was the sound.
Static.
Two men, Finney and Werner, were working with the transceiver. They sat at a table piled high with a wall of recovered equipment. They had everything from military-grade amplifiers to CB radios scavenged from old trucks. Those had taken some searching. In the age of the Internet, the CB had been almost as dead as the eight-track tape. But they had them. And they had everything else they could find that might send or receive a signal, all wired through stacks of drum-shaped signal boosters that gave them a broadcast range of hundreds of miles… in theory, anyway, and depending on the fog and atmospheric conditions…
Werner leaned into a microphone, headphones on, speaking over the thrum of current from the boosters.
“This is San Francisco, attempting contact. If anyone is receiving this message, we ask that you identify yourself and your location, over…” He noticed Dreyfus and nodded at the mountain of gear, proud of what they had done. “We’re out on over two hundred frequencies now.”
Dreyfus nodded. They all watched the speakers, looked from dial to dial on the dozens of sets piled together on the table. The static was broken by a sharp crackle and they all froze, listening harder. Had there been a hint of a voice?
The crackle lasted only a second. Then the static returned.
“Keep trying,” Dreyfus said. Hell, static was a big step forward.
49
Koba and his army thundered over the bridge, not caring who knew they were coming. They were too many for the few humans in the fort, and once the apes were in the fort, the rest of the humans would be no match for them.
Carrying torches, they rolled through the fog, down the swooping ramp from the bridge to the road that ran past the brick building. They spilled through the open gate and headed to the firing range. Koba did not care what happened to whatever humans were there. If his apes killed them, fine. If not, it would not matter once they had the guns and they marched on the human settlement. There would be plenty of time to hunt down survivors.
What he wanted right then was a gun in the hand of every ape.
He and Grey and Stone rode past steel vehicles, some with wheels and some with metal tracks. Apes did not know how to use those, so he ignored them. They pushed through the firing range and Koba dismounted, leading his group into the warehouse. He glanced at a corner of the building, where the two humans he had deceived were folded into a pair of weapon crates. He had killed three more today, and the night would bring many more.
The apes stood gawking at the three levels of the warehouse, each stacked with endless crates of guns. They grunted and growled, keeping their voices low only because Koba had commanded it. He wanted them pent-up and boiling when the attack on the human settlement started.
At a gesture from him, apes scaled the walls and started breaking open crates. They formed chains, handing rifles down in armloads. Most of them were rifles like the one slung over Koba’s back, but there were others, too. Some were shorter, with longer bullet boxes. Some were three times the size of a rifle, with hundreds of bullets in a long string. All of them went into ape hands as Stone moved among them with a pouch, dabbing war paint from it onto their faces. They looked at their weapons, eyes gleaming, rocking from foot to foot with the desire to hunt, to fight, to kill.
Koba saw Maurice and Rocket just inside the doorway. Of all the apes, only they seemed reluctant. He would keep an eye on them. They would submit. Apes together strong. He picked out Blue Eyes, watching the endless number of guns appearing from the darkened upper floors, and went to him. On the way he took a rifle from another ape. He thrust it in front of Blue Eyes, who looked down at it for a moment. Then he looked at Koba. Koba nodded.
Blue Eyes took the rifle, his face hardening.
Near them on the floor was a box full of bottles. Koba remembered the taste of the whiskey. He picked up one of the bottles and was about to drink when the inside of the warehouse lit up with muzzle flashes and the deafening sound of a heavy gun. One of the apes, careless, had accidentally fired many bullets up into the ceiling. Looking up, they could see the holes because beyond the roof, the fog was aglow with light.
Koba looked at his apes. They now saw what they held in their hands. For the space of a deep breath there was perfect silence in the warehouse.
Then it exploded with screeching and more shots as the ape army began to build itself into a new frenzy. Koba could not have stopped it if he’d wanted to… but he did not want to. Let them screech. Let them fire. Let the sound terrify any human who could hear it. He stood with Blue Eyes, letting the apes see them together, basking in the rising thunder of their hate, letting it grow to match his own.
Rocket and Maurice had no guns. Koba did not say anything, but he noticed. Yes, even with one eye, he noticed.
50
In the radio room, Werner was still broadcasting. He was tireless. Since the power had come back on, he’d been glued to the chair, repeating the same message, over and over.
“This is San Francisco, attempting to establish contact. If you are receiving this signal, please respond. Repeat, this is San Francisco—”
The door banged open and a rush of celebratory noise flooded in. Werner broke off, and Dreyfus looked up from pacing back and forth to see one of his officers, Dan DeRosario, gasping for breath in the doorway. Dreyfus had seen a lot of fear in the last ten years, but DeRosario was as scared as any human being he’d ever seen.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Apes,” DeRosario said.
Dreyfus didn’t need to hear any more.
* * *
He shoved his way through the celebrating throng, making a cranking gesture over his head as he tried to get the notice of the sentries on the parapet over the gate. On the way, DeRosario gave him a quick rundown.
“We got word from the fort. The apes went through and looted it. They’ve got every gun in the place and they’re on their way here. All of them. Hundreds.”
“Who else knows?” Dreyfus asked. “We need to get these people inside.”
“I already put the word out to the militia,” DeRosario said. “They’re keeping it quiet for now.”
One of the sentries finally noticed and started the siren. It cut through the celebration and the crowd looked toward the gate as Dreyfus got to the bottom of the stairs. He took them three at a time as the gate opened and the Colony militia spilled out to take up firing positions behind the Jersey barriers positioned between the gate and the street. Concrete walls about three feet high, placed end-to-end as used to be the practice when they were used along the highways.
“Keep them off the walls!” he shouted to the deploying militia. Then he looked up to the parapet, shouting louder. “Keep them off the walls!”
Back to DeRosario, he said, “How long?”
“We just got the call,” DeRosario said. “Some of them are on horseback, but most of them are on foot. Not too long. A few minutes.”
The crowd
’s energy began to transmute from ecstasy to aggressive uncertainty. Against the siren’s howl, Dreyfus heard people on the ground shouting questions. He would have to make some kind of a statement, settle people down… in a minute. First he had to make sure their defenses were in place. If they couldn’t count on reinforcements from Fort Point, that was bad. But he believed in the people of the Colony. They would hold out because they had do.
He wondered what had become of Malcolm and the rest of that group. If there was an ape army coming after the Colony, Dreyfus had to assume he wouldn’t be seeing any of them again. It was a hard loss to absorb… but at least they’d gotten the power going first. The apes hadn’t sabotaged it, either.
Dreyfus wondered if they were planning to take it over. But not on his watch, no sir. If the apes wanted peace, they could have it. But if they wanted war, they could have that, too.
Below him, recruits were adding material between the Jersey barriers, creating rough battlements. On the parapet over the gate, more recruits were finishing a wall of sandbags, adding a few feet in height and a lot more protection against either bullets or spears. They worked hard and they worked fast, but he could see they were also terrified. He couldn’t blame them. Apes were monsters from their nightmares at this point. It was like being attacked by boogeymen.
At the edge of the parapet a young recruit, maybe eighteen or twenty, was shaking so badly he couldn’t lock the belt into a grenade launcher. Dreyfus went to him, steadied his hands, and guided the belt into position.
“It’s going to be okay, son,” he said. “Believe it.”
He stood back up and found his megaphone on the table next to the manual crank that drove the air-raid siren. He picked it up and signaled to the recruit who was running the siren. It quickly wound down.
“Listen to me!” he called out over the siren’s dying moan. “Everything we’ve been through has prepared us for this night. Everything! We are survivors.” He paced along the parapet, making eye contact with as many of his people as he could. “They may have gotten their hands on some of our guns—but that does not make them men. They are animals! We will push them back. Drive them down. Bury them!”