by Alex Irvine
If they wanted to get into San Francisco, Finney wasn’t going to stop them… and he damn sure wasn’t going to die for no reason. He kept his head down and his eyes closed as the apes went by, and all the while he tried to wrap his head around what he’d seen.
They planned this out. It couldn’t be true, but it was.
When the noise died down, he opened his eyes again and looked around. The bridge was quiet again, the fog as thick as before, blanketing the city. The apes could be anywhere.
Finney started walking. Whatever the apes were going to do, he didn’t want to be alone when they were on their way back. And now that they were gone, some of the paralyzing fear left him. Maybe they didn’t know exactly where the Colony was. Maybe all of his suppositions were wrong. Maybe the gorilla had thrown his bike off the bridge just… well, it was a gorilla. Who knew why they did anything?
He walked fast, then broke into a run, heading across the bridge approach and along the road toward downtown. Maybe he could get to the Colony before the apes did. Even if not, he sure as hell didn’t want to be alone right now.
19
Caesar led the apes through the park called the Presidio, now its own forest within the city. They emerged in an area he remembered. Will had lived near here somewhere… he looked up and down the streets, trying to locate himself. The earthquake had torn this part of the city into pieces. The streets were cracked and split, with rusting cars lying at angles in the wider holes. Houses had fallen into the earth, and fires had burned block after block down to the foundations. A few chimneys, wrapped in vines, still stood. Other parts of the area—Pacific Heights, Will had called it—were not as damaged, but even there, windows were broken and roofs caved in. Some houses were untouched except by the years of emptiness.
They kept going, toward the tall buildings of downtown. Caesar sent scouts up to rooftops, including Grey and Stone, who had been this way before. He made sure they reported back to him, rather than Koba. When they reached the humans, every ape needed to know who spoke for them. If they did not speak strongly and together, the humans would know this. And if the humans thought the apes could not control themselves, a war would come.
From the tops of buildings, the scouts had a view over the hills that lay between the troop and downtown, yet they reported seeing no humans. The fog here in the city was not as thick as it was out on the water, and they could see that some of the tall buildings had fallen. Others still stood, but were partly broken—their lower floors overgrown. If there were humans, there could not be many, Caesar thought as he digested each new piece of information. They would have brought order. There would be cars. But they did not see any cars, or hear any.
They did see a tunnel leading under the hills. Caesar led the apes to it, and then into it. He signaled for them to stay quiet, and as they moved through the darkness the only sounds were the horses’ hooves and the soft scrape and shuffle of a thousand feet, moving together. In the darkness they wove among abandoned cars, some damaged, some with barely visible bones lying across their seats. Soon they were through, standing again in the soft early morning light. Caesar paused at the mouth of the tunnel. They were deep in the city now, and much closer to where Koba had reported the human settlement to be.
He looked out at an open area surrounded by buildings. It, like everything else, was overgrown by young trees and clusters of weeds, with ivy and other vines tangled over everything. He saw the movement of small animals—squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons. The trees were thick with birds. There was no sign of living humans.
There was ample sign of the dead, however. Most of the open space was closed off behind a fence, with signs hung on its wire. Caesar read them.
FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY
QUARANTINE AREA. NO ENTRY.
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS PROHIBITED.
Bullet holes punched through the signs and pockmarked the nearby buildings, where other signs read CURFEW LIMITS STRICTLY ENFORCED. The gate was open, but inside the fence were only bones and the shredded remains of what must have been tents. Caesar counted skulls, and stopped when he realized that to count them all would take too long.
Other signs on the fence, pieces of paper in plastic covers, showed smiling pictures with words below them—MISSING PLEASE HELP—over and over, with name after name. Bits of paper, pulped by ten years of rain, still clung to the wire around them. On the buildings, more signs were plastered on the few unbroken windows and doors.
Many of the buildings had burned.
The fence line had once extended into the tunnel, Caesar saw. Now the poles were fallen down and the wire trampled mostly flat, but he knew there would be more bones back in the dark parts of the tunnel. San Francisco was full of bones now, many more bones than people.
Caesar gestured, and the apes moved out, skirting the fence. He saw messages painted on walls: MONKEYPOCALYPSE and THIS IS THE END and MOTHER EARTH FIGHTS BACK and 7 BILLION AND COUNTING. There were pictures here, as well, on long stretches of wall without windows. Even as they died, the humans made pictures. Apes dancing along the lit fuse of a bomb. Ape heads on the bodies of monsters. Burning buildings, skulls and bones, clenched fists, strings of letters that made no words Caesar knew…
One of them he did remember. ALZ113. He remembered Will saying it, but not what it meant.
He lingered over one long wall, painted from side to side with a series of images.
Koba saw it, too. He caught Caesar’s eye and Caesar was certain he knew what he was thinking. You see? This is what humans will do to us if we give them the chance.
Caesar nodded without speaking. They would not give humans that chance. But neither would they seek a war, if it could be avoided.
He motioned the apes forward. It would be best if they reached the human settlement before all the humans were awake.
20
Malcolm snapped awake at the sound of pounding on his bedroom door.
“Dad! Dad!” Alexander was shouting from the other side. Ellie scrambled out of bed and started getting dressed. Malcolm did the same, pulling on yesterday’s pants and hurrying to the door. “Alexander, what is it?” he said as he opened it.
Alexander looked scared.
“There’s something going on,” he said.
“What do you mean, something going on?”
“Dad, if I knew more I’d tell you—come on.” Alexander looked ready to run out the door. Malcolm could hear the sounds of a crowd gathering in the market.
“All right, give me a second,” he said, irritated at being rushed right out of bed. He turned back into the bedroom to grab a shirt, and without thinking opened the door, presenting Alexander with a view of Ellie just putting on her shirt. She shot him a glare, then looked awkwardly at Alexander.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he answered, just as awkwardly.
Malcolm grabbed his own shirt on and headed past them.
“Come on, then, let’s go,” he said. It was getting louder outside.
“Smooth,” Ellie muttered to him as he passed. There was nothing Malcolm could say that wouldn’t either make the situation worse or delay them getting out the door, or both, so he didn’t say anything. As he passed through the kitchen, he heard the rising whine of the Colony’s air-raid siren.
Uh oh, he thought. Ellie’s pissed, Alexander’s embarrassed, and the whole Colony’s been put on alert. This is a hell of a way to start the day.
* * *
By the time they got out into the plaza, just inside the Colony gate, they were fighting through a crowd the likes of which Malcolm hadn’t seen since the early months of the Simian Flu, when San Francisco had seemed like one great panicked mob surging from hospitals to police stations to grocery stores… Eventually that mob had turned on itself, and the city had burned for more than a year, until there were no longer enough people to carry on the looting and violence.
Now the survivors jammed their way through the gates, some with guns, trying to
shout at each other over the sound of the air-raid siren. Malcolm looked up onto the platform built above the arched entrance, where a sentry named Leonel was cranking away at the siren while looking back and forth from the crowd to something outside. He was clearly terrified.
Where was Dreyfus? Malcolm pushed forward, trying to get to the scaffolding that led up to the platform. Then he caught sight of Dreyfus, reaching the platform and pushing through to stare out into the city.
The look on his face was one of… fear?
Malcolm got to the stairs. Dreyfus had left guards to stop the crush of people from flooding up, but the first man recognized Malcolm and let him through.
“Stay together!” he called to Ellie and Alexander as he climbed up.
It was crowded on the platform, but nothing like down below. More and more people were screaming questions up at Dreyfus, demanding to know what was going on. Good question, thought Malcolm. I’d like to know myself. He got next to Dreyfus and looked out into the street beyond.
What he saw stunned him absolutely.
“Oh my God,” he said.
Dreyfus signaled the sentry to stop cranking the siren, and it cut off abruptly. But it was far from silent—the crowd was in full voice, hundreds of people calling out questions and demands.
Malcolm looked back to the street outside, where hundreds and hundreds of apes stood in perfect silence, massed along the entire block facing the Colony gate. In the center were several dozen on horseback, with the leader right up front. Gorillas loomed, flanking the horses, with chimpanzees ranked beside and behind them. All of them were armed. A forest of spears stood upright, and those without spears held clubs and stone axes. Malcolm also saw the gleam of steel. The humans weren’t the only ones who had scavenged the ruins for weapons.
“This is a hell of a lot more than eighty,” Dreyfus said. Malcolm nodded. What he had seen on the ridgeline up in the mountains was a hunting party. This was an army.
It was an impossible sight. How had this many apes stayed completely out of sight of humans? More importantly, how had this many apes come into the city and planted themselves at the Colony’s front gate without anyone knowing? Malcolm had a bad feeling about whoever had been standing guard at the bridge.
He fought down an urge to panic. If the apes had come to kill them, they would already be fighting… or so he hoped. The truth was, he was still thinking of them as apes, when they clearly were more. Rumors had flown in the months after the outbreak of Simian Flu—conspiracy theories about top-secret military projects to create ape super soldiers, and other ridiculous fever dreams. Some of the scientists from a biotech lab where apes had broken free hinted at experiments to increase their intelligence.
But Malcolm hadn’t believed any of it. That was the stuff of pulp science fiction, not reality. He’d always figured that some enterprising microorganism had made the jump from ape to human, and biological incompatibility had done the rest. But now he had to face facts. He’d heard two of the apes speak. He’d seen them organize themselves. Now he was looking at an ape army.
And unless he was mistaken, they hadn’t come for battle. From the look of things, they wanted to parley.
“I’m going to talk to him,” Malcolm said.
“Him?” Dreyfus said. “Who’s him?”
Malcolm pointed at the chimp on horseback, front and center.
“See the one with the red on his face? That’s the one who spoke before.”
“Spoke, like said words out loud,” Dreyfus said.
“That’s what I told you before,” Malcolm said.
“I know you did, but I didn’t believe it.”
“You believe it now?”
Dreyfus, still looking out at the ape army, replied, “I don’t know what the hell to believe. You want to talk to him? You sure?”
“I have a feeling that’s why they’re here,” Malcolm said.
Behind them, one of the sentries said, “I got a feeling they’re here to kill us.”
“If that’s what they wanted, you’d already have a spear in your gut,” Malcolm said. “Look at them. You think they couldn’t get in if they wanted to?”
The sentry didn’t answer.
Dreyfus leaned in close to Malcolm.
“You think you can talk to them, go ahead,” he said. “I’ll even come with you. But they make one move, and we’re going to protect ourselves.”
Malcolm looked the chimp leader in the eye. He was met with a steady gaze.
“Don’t be in a rush to start a war,” he said to Dreyfus, quietly. “Let’s see what they have to say.”
21
The Colony gate made an ear-splitting metallic screech as they swung it open. WD-40 was hard to come by these days. Malcolm took a step through the entryway, keenly aware that what he did in the next moments could make the difference between a conversation and a bloodbath.
He walked forward with Dreyfus right behind him, and a dozen armed men with Dreyfus. The crowd massed in the doorway and on the parapets built above the arches, hundreds of people taking in the sight and telling those behind them what they saw. Malcolm heard people swearing, some angry shouts, isolated crying from children who had grown up hearing stories of the simian flu. Apes were their boogeymen, the monstrous villains of stories told to keep them from ranging too far into the city when the Colony gates were open.
The ape army was a terrifying sight, even from the relative safety of the parapet. On the ground, out in the open, it was overwhelming. The sound of maybe a thousand apes shifting their weight, softly grunting to one another, was like nothing Malcolm had ever heard before, or imagined hearing. The thick smell of them hung in the morning air.
Malcolm took ten steps out from under the arch and stopped, waiting to see what the apes would do. After surveying their lines, he kept his eyes on the leader, who made a sign to the apes on either side of him. One of them, Malcolm saw, was the other chimp who had spoken up in the mountains. The angry, scarred one missing an eye. The leader tapped his horse’s flanks and rode forward, followed by three others. One was an orangutan.
The watching crowd fell dead silent.
The leader stopped halfway between the ape lines and the small group of humans. He looked at each of them in turn, lingering on the armed men behind Malcolm and Dreyfus. There was no trace of fear on his face. The one-eyed ape at his flank gripped his spear and glared pure hate. Malcolm felt Dreyfus shift next to him. He looked over and saw Dreyfus drop a hand to the gun holstered at his belt.
Malcolm shook his head.
He looked back at the apes and saw the leader staring at him. Okay, he thought. I get it. You came this far, now it’s my turn.
He started walking toward the apes.
“Malcolm,” Dreyfus said. Malcolm ignored him, keeping his eyes on the leader. He stopped in front of the small group, just out of range of a spear thrust, or so he hoped. Then he waited.
The leader regarded him for a long moment. Then he spoke, slowly.
“Apes… do not… want war.”
Reaction swept through the human crowd, disbelieving gasps at hearing a chimpanzee speak. The chimp looked up at the crowd, observing the reaction—and, Malcolm thought, enjoying it a little. What should he say in return? Neither do we? Then why did a thousand of you show up with spears?
The chimp saved him the trouble of a response by speaking again.
“But we will fight,” he said. “If we must.”
Malcolm did not like this turn in the conversation at all. He wanted to run, to gather up Alexander and Ellie and make a break for it, south all the way to Santa Cruz, or hell, San Diego. But he stood his ground. If the apes were there for a show of strength, humans needed to return that show.
The chimp glanced back and from within his ranks, another chimp appeared. As he came out into the open, he raised one arm, showing the assembled humans Alexander’s satchel. Malcolm couldn’t believe it. The apes had mustered an army and marched down the mountains and through the c
ity, to give them back a bag Alexander had dropped? This was a more sophisticated gambit than Malcolm would have believed them capable of planning, even knowing what he knew from seeing them yesterday and this morning. They had combined a ferocious show of strength with a good-will gesture, exactly the way a head of state would do when initiating diplomacy with a rival.
Malcolm realized he wasn’t looking at just a general, or even a king. This ape was a statesman.
It boggled the mind.
He stepped forward and reached out to accept Alexander’s satchel from the chimp. Was it the same one who…? He saw the wound on its shoulder and was stunned all over again. Not only had the ape leader brought the satchel back, he had deputized the wounded ape to make the gesture. This demonstrated a grasp of symbolic nuance that Malcolm wouldn’t have believed, if he hadn’t been right there to witness it.
When the bag was in Malcolm’s hands, the young chimp turned and rejoined the ranks. Malcolm followed its progress for a moment, and then looked back at the leader. He nodded his thanks.
The chimp, holding Malcolm’s gaze, pointed at the Colony.
“Human home!” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Then he pointed in the other direction, arm lifted at an angle to indicate that he meant the distant hills and mountains beyond the bay. “Ape home,” he said.
He dropped his arm and said, more quietly but still loud enough for Dreyfus and the nearer humans to hear, “Do not come back.”
Malcolm said nothing. A moment passed and then the chimp signaled to his army. Slowly and purposefully they began to retreat, first the infantry—that was the only word that fit, even though Malcolm was astonished to find himself applying it—then those mounted on horses. He stood and watched them go. The leader did not look back.