by John Jakes
“But that means they can’t get back in if—” MacDonald began.
“I know exactly what it means,” Breck cut him off. “Do it.”
The assistant disappeared in the light-flecked gloom. Within moments, a ghostly file of policemen hastily donning gas masks could be seen disappearing up the stairs. Breck listened to the last of their booted feet hammering away on the concrete steps. A moment later he let out a long breath, soothed by the grinding of the machinery that was shutting the maximum-security doors at the landing half way up.
He jerked his gaze back to the monitor covering the plaza, saw the police with their large-muzzled gas-firing rifles deploying. The lenses of their masks shone like huge, eerie eyes.
MacDonald was so tired he wished his mind would blank out. But he gestured to another flickering monitor, trying to offer what little hope he could.
“The shooting seems to have died down near the armor line, sir.”
“Because they’ve broken through!”
“Maybe they’ve been turned back.”
“No,” Breck said in an empty voice. “No. They’re coming to kill us all.”
Half a block from the point at which the boulevard opened onto the broad expanse of the Civic Center Plaza, Caesar held up his hand.
About a hundred apes had broken through where the hoses were put out of action. Now they snuffled and snorted, restlessly awaiting his sign to move forward again.
But policemen were deploying in the plaza. Lights flashed from the eyes of strange masks they wore over their faces. They carried what appeared to be rifles, but with unusually large, cylindrical devices lengthening the muzzles.
The police formed a double rank facing directly toward the boulevard. Apprehensively, Caesar called for the advance to resume. A moment later, he understood the function of those peculiar weapons.
Up came the muzzles. Fired, they gave off a loud popping sound. Twists of smoke marked the passage of the projectiles they discharged. One landed six yards ahead of Caesar’s force, and began to spread an acrid, choking cloud.
Within seconds, more of the projectiles exploded on the pavement. The entrance to the boulevard was filled with billowing gas. Caesar signaled a half-block retreat.
All around him, apes began to stagger. They seized their throats, dropped their weapons, uttered hoarse, barking coughs. Caesar’s own eyes stung. His throat burned. This could turn into a rout . . .
A huge gorilla near him doubled over, started to flee. Viciously, Caesar grabbed the gorilla’s arm to hold him, waved for attention with his other hand.
With all the power he could summon, he roared, “Watch!”
As the terrified gorilla and his comrades blinked watering eyes, Caesar inhaled deeply. He held his breath a few seconds, then exhaled and pointed around the group.
“DO!”
Once more he drew in a breath tinged with the debilitating gas. He grew dizzy—but saw that the apes were following his instructions. He spun and plunged ahead of them, straight into the center of the clouds settling at the end of the boulevard.
Behind him, he heard the apes moving.
Just a few at first. Then more. Now he was into the thick of the cloud, unable to see. His chest burned. He kept running—and burst into the open, out of the worst of it.
The astonished policemen began to break formation, retreat, grope for their side-arms as more and more apes came rushing through the clouds. Several apes staggered, fell. But most kept their cheeks swelled up, imitating their leader.
“Kill them!” Caesar screamed. “Kill them all!”
The apes closed on the confused policemen, pistols exploding, knives flashing. As Caesar drew in another breath of the tainted air, he saw a pathetic sight: an orangutan lifting a gas mask from a downed officer and clumsily attempting to fit it over his own face. Caesar’s brief smile was sad.
Some of the police kept firing gas charges, but the effect was less devastating now, because the officers had scattered to various points around the plaza. Caesar stepped over a man whose ripped-open throat gushed blood, began seizing hairy arms again, gathering a strike force of a dozen, two dozen, with shouts, barks, gestures. At the same time he fought off the bite of the fumes, inhaling only in relatively unclouded air.
When he had enough apes with pistols and knives, he left the rest to pursue the knots of men with gas rifles. His face a bloodied, grimy mask, his green uniform torn to pieces, he led the picked band toward the head of the stairs to the Command Post.
EIGHTEEN
The stairs descended to a landing, doubled back—and Caesar leaped aside as a gun crashed from below.
The slug tore chips of masonry from the wall inches from his head. At the bottom of the stairs, he saw two policemen shoulder to shoulder, pistols aimed.
Caesar launched himself down the stairs in a leap, hearing another pistol explode. Something hissed past his head an instant before he struck the pair, knocking them down.
Caesar hit with such force that he was momentarily dazed. Face contorting, the nearest policeman untangled himself, whipped up his pistol, pointed it straight at Caesar’s forehead. Caesar made an abortive roll to the side. Too late, he thought, as the policeman’s finger whitened on the trigger . . .
A hairy hand holding a cleaver came slashing over. The blade impacted the policeman’s skull just as he fired. The bullet ricocheted off the ceiling. The policeman sprawled out with the cleaver buried in grisly bone and tissue. Blood ran down his nose and into his sightless eyesockets.
Panting, Caesar clambered to his feet. Other apes were swarming onto the second policeman, snuffling over him, stamping, tearing, their hands and feet smeared red. Caesar darted along the concrete tunnel—and uttered an exclamation of fury.
Massive doors or dull gray steel had rolled shut to seal off the Command Post entrance.
As the bloodied apes formed up behind him, Caesar couldn’t hold back a cry of frustration. He stormed up and down in front of the doors, hunting desperately for some way to open them.
All he discovered was a metal box imbedded in the wall. It was stencilled with the legend Aux.
He opened the cover, peered at a tangle of wiring inside. Meaningless.
In a rage, he seized a pistol from a gorilla, raised it in both hands and began to fire into the wiring.
Sparks hissed, green and yellow. Insulation smoldered. The gun bucked in Caesar’s hand as he shot again, again . . .
Flames erupted briefly from the wiring. An acrid stink filled the air. Caesar flung the hot, empty pistol away and beat his fist against the concrete with another growl of frustration.
The steel doors remained shut.
Caesar leaned his head against the wall. Behind him, the gruntings of the apes changed pitch as they sensed his failure.
The darkness was sudden, claustrophobic—as every light and monitor in the Command Post went out simultaneously.
MacDonald whirled toward the center of the vast room, bawling, “What’s wrong with the secondary generator? Cut it in manually, for God’s sake!”
Then he heard Governor Breck’s shriek: “Open the doors—we’re trapped!”
“No, wait!” MacDonald yelled, as humans and animals began to mingle their voices in a confused, terrified clamor. He stumbled against bodies, felt human flesh, ape hair. He fought through the tangle toward a board carrying the reverse power controls. He located it, fumbled his hands across it in the dark till he found the right lever and threw it over.
The monitors and lights came back up. Then MacDonald saw the worst: Governor Jason Breck, pushing aside the supervisor who manned the door control.
He’s panicked, MacDonald thought, already running to the governor’s side. But he knew that panic did not adequately describe Breck’s state. The man was crumbling mentally under the almost unthinkable devastation being wrought on his city, his personal domain of power . . .
And now he was terrified for his own safety.
Shouting warnings, MacD
onald was still too late by three steps. He heard the grinding of the machinery—and watched the glassy-eyed Breck charge for the stairs as the unseen doors rolled open.
Suddenly Breck stumbled, fell to his knees. He rose again—to run back toward the center of the Command Post, his face ghastly with the understanding of what his own uncontrollable fright had unleashed.
Apes. Armed apes. Caesar at their head, pouring down the stairs . . .
We are the instruments of our own destruction, MacDonald thought, listening to the howls that signaled the end.
A few supervisors attempted to surround and protect the governor. One, using a truncheon, dodged toward Caesar from the side. An attractive female chimpanzee with a long scratch on her face clawed the supervisor’s neck and pulled him off. Another young male chimp with a red-stained cleaver opened the man’s chest.
Caesar gave the female chimp an approving smile and said, “Thank you, Lisa.”
Apes were racing down the aisles, shooting, killing supervisors, smashing monitors with chains. Two immense gorillas bore down on MacDonald. He ran—and hairy hands seized him from behind. He was lifted high over the head of one of the bestially snorting animals.
“No!” Caesar’s voice rang sharply above the horrific din. “Put him down!”
Slowly, the trembling MacDonald was lowered to the floor. Caesar threw him a brief, pitying glance.
The human shrieks and moans were fading away almost as quickly as they had begun. Once the invading apes joined forces with the rebellious ones in the Command Post, the supervisors and few remaining guards had been slaughtered in a matter of minutes.
The dim room was filling with smoke from the shattered monitors. A few batteries of sequencing lights still winked. Most had gone out. From a speaker that dangled by three wires, a male voice was exclaiming, “This is Sector Fourteen. Half the apartments are on fire. We’re unable to contain—” A pistol shot; a scream. The speaker went silent.
Suddenly a commotion in the aisle spun MacDonald around. Two naked chimpanzees were dragging a limp form forward. Governor Jason Breck, his jacket and shirt hanging around his waist in tatters.
The chimpanzees thrust him to his knees in front of Caesar. Despite the blood and grime on his ripped green uniform, the ape stood fully as upright as any man, looking down at the governor with a gaze both regal and implacable.
Caesar executed a mock bow. “Your servant, Governor. Your creature. Your animal.”
“I saw you die!” Breck screamed, struggling against the hairy hands restraining him. Caesar’s mouth twisted into a perfect mimicry of a cynical human smile.
“The king is dead, long live the king. One thing before you die, Governor. Tell me this. How do we differ from the dogs and cats that you and your kind once loved? Why did you turn us from pets to slaves?”
Kneeling, Breck scanned the murderous simian faces clustered around Caesar. The governor had difficulty articulating his first words because of the spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. But a little of his old fury returned.
“Because—your kind were once our ancestors. Because man was—born of the apes, and there’s still an ape curled up inside every one of us. You’re the—the beast in us that we must whip into submission. You’re the savage we need to shackle in chains. You taint us,” Breck said, his lips writhing as if the word were an obscenity. “You poison our lives. When we hate you, we’re hating ourselves.”
Despite the anger in his eyes, Caesar managed to speak quietly.
“A most lucid explanation. I thank you.” He stepped a pace to the side, gestured to the snuffling apes behind him. “He is yours.”
Caesar bent down, unbuckled the belt at Breck’s waist, pulled it loose and passed it into the hand of a male orangutan, unmistakable meaning in his eyes.
The orangutan peered at the belt a moment. Then, salivating suddenly, the ape leaped forward and whipped the belt down across Breck’s shoulders. Breck shrieked.
The apes holding the governor dragged him to his feet, pushed him toward the stairs. The orangutan slipped around behind them and began to whip the governor without mercy. Breck’s back showed bloody stripes before he was manhandled out of sight up the stairs, followed by a mob of apes baying and barking approval.
“Lisa—?” Caesar turned in the gloom, shielded his eyes. The female chimpanzee trotted forward. “Find shackles. Shackles,” he repeated with quiet authority, pantomiming his meaning at the same time. Then he glanced at the black man. Again that cruel smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “We must restrain Mr. MacDonald, I think. He may not fully approve of what he is about to see.”
Eyes glowing worshipfully, the female chimpanzee darted away. When MacDonald’s ankles had been bound, Caesar stared at him a long moment, then turned and walked slowly toward the stairs.
MacDonald’s captors shoved him forward. From the foot of the stairs, he glanced up and saw Caesar’s stately figure disappear around the bend. Head raised. Shoulders high.
Kingly . . .
In chains, MacDonald ascended to the horror and the bedlam waiting above.
Smoke and the fumes of dissipating gas drifted across the Civic Center. In one of the miniature parks, apes were savagely uprooting shrubbery, overturning benches. The night sky glared orange, the high rises limned by the fires burning all across the city.
The paving stones of the plaza displayed a litter of bodies, human and animal. Near the entrance to the gaunt black building which housed Breck’s operations suite and penthouse, struggling police and firemen were being dragged into the open from avenues and boulevards. The humans were shackled—and the shambling apes beat the few protestors and stragglers with truncheons. MacDonald looked away, sickened.
He searched for Caesar, saw him silhouetted against the glow of one of the few light stanchions still burning. From the top of the stanchion, Governor Jason Breck had been tied by his wrists. Apes had gathered where the tips of the governor’s shoes rotated slowly, a foot or two from the pavement. The belt was passed from hand to simian hand, as each ape of sufficient stature took a turn lashing the red ruin of the governor’s back.
Watching from a distance, Caesar abruptly signaled an orangutan to his side. He communicated with a combination of words, gutturals, and gestures.
“The Pet Memorial—it is to be destroyed. Destroyed!”
The orangutan bobbed his head and trotted off. Crack went the leather against Breck’s back.
MacDonald stumbled toward the powerful chimpanzee, who was watching the whipping with fists firmly planted on his hips, nodding a little at each stroke. So far as MacDonald could tell, every human being within sight was dead, wounded, or being hustled into captivity in the holding area in front of the government offices.
“Caesar—”
The chimpanzee turned, his magnificent eyes picking up orange glare from the sky. The night was full of the sound of destruction and animal gibbering.
“This—this isn’t how it was to be.”
Coldly, Caesar answered, “In your view or mine?”
“Violence prolongs hate. Hate prolongs violence. By what right do you spill all this blood?”
Crack went the lash. Rotating by his wrists, Governor Breck shrieked again.
“By the slave’s right to punish his persecutors,” Caesar answered.
“Then I ask you to show humanity! I ask you as a descendant of men who were savages, then slaves themselves—”
“Humanity?” Caesar shrugged. “I was not born human.”
“Yes, I know. The child of the evolved apes—”
“—whose descendants shall rule the earth,” Caesar finished.
MacDonald grimaced. “For better—or for worse?”
“Do you honestly think that it could be worse than what I found when I first came into a city of men?”
Crack. Breck’s shriek diminished to a moan. The apes around him gibbered in ecstasy. From the far side of the plaza came the steady pulp-crunch of truncheons, and crie
s of human misery.
“How—” MacDonald swallowed. “How can you possibly think this riot can win freedom for all your kind? Why, by tomorrow, the central government—”
“I promise you,” Caesar cut in, “by tomorrow it will be entirely too late. If a small, mindless insect like an emperor moth can communicate with another over a distance of eighty miles, can’t you see that—”
“An emperor ape might do slightly better?”
“Slightly?” Caesar registered contempt. “What we have done tonight—a classic example of—if you will pardon me—” again that cruel smile “guerilla warfare—every ape on earth will be imitating tomorrow.”
MacDonald shook his head. “Knives against guns? Kerosene cans against flame-throwers? Artillery? Jet aircraft? Missile submarines?”
This time, Caesar’s shrug was eloquent. “We will not win everywhere. Perhaps not even in a majority of cities. But fire brings smoke, Mr. MacDonald. And in that smoke, from this night onward, my people will crouch. And conspire. And plot and plan against the inevitable day of man’s downfall. Because, you see, as Governor Breck stated—we have valuable allies. The savage ape that lives inside each man. There will come a time when our struggle will be aided by your own kind. Turning your own weapons desperately, self-destructively against your fellow human beings.”
His voice grew louder with the force of his passion. “We both know that day is inevitable, Mr. MacDonald. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under the radioactive rubble. When the seas have become dead seas, and every land a wasteland. That is the future—which my parents saw. In that future, I will lead my people out of their captivity. And we shall build our own cities, where there will be no place for humans—except to serve our own ends. We shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty—look, Mr. MacDonald!”
Triumphant, Caesar turned to gesture at the ruined city.
“The beginning of that day is upon you even now.”