by John Jakes
Caesar, MacDonald, and Virgil passed undetected.
The sun rose to see them trudging across a region of sparse vegetation. The sky ahead went from black to deep blue, became bluer and bluer, then began getting pale, shading almost to white, then yellow and pink. Finally, a great ball of light showed its rim over the horizon and began climbing higher and higher to reveal itself as a blazing yellow orb. The sky around it was white with glare.
Their shadows stretched out behind them, then began shrinking as the sun climbed overhead. The morning began warming, and MacDonald shrugged out of his jacket. Later he loosened his shirt. The two apes too began to feel the heat but couldn’t do anything about it.
The ground was covered with dry scrub grass and occasional cactus. There were large boulders sticking up out of the sand. Once they saw a snake slithering out to sun itself on one of them. Another time they saw a rabbit, but by the time MacDonald got his Smith & Wesson out and loaded, it had disappeared.
They stopped to rest at a water hole and chew on some of the dried fruits and nuts they had brought with them; Caesar sniffed at the water and wrinkled his nose in distaste. They used the water in their canteens instead. They waited out the hottest part of the day and then moved on.
Evening saw them still struggling over the desert, the sun sinking behind them like a great red eye. The floor of the desert was sandy, and it was hard going; but they pushed on until it was too dark to see any more. Then and only then would Caesar let them stop for the night.
The stars were sharp, brilliant needlepoints of clarity, high and distant. The roof of the world was vast, filled with them. In the cold, dark night, surrounded by silence and stars, whipped by a cold breeze, MacDonald felt a chill in his bones. A chill and something more. He looked over at Caesar and Virgil. They were silent and stolid. He wondered if the two apes felt the same way when they looked at the incredible night sky. They were impassive.
What kind of emotions did apes have, anyway? They were more basic than humans—that was for sure. They were closer to nature. But, dammit, sometimes they seemed more rational than humans, more removed from life. And often they were impossible to decipher with their almost but not quite human expressions.
MacDonald fell asleep thinking about it. He dozed lightly. He kept waking up and falling asleep again. He tossed and turned and rolled around in his blanket. He slept fitfully on the hard cold ground, and his mind was troubled with images he couldn’t identify, things that weren’t distinct enough to be called dreams.
When he awoke, the two apes were already moving about, breaking up camp and preparing to hike on. MacDonald breakfasted lightly and unsatisfyingly on some dried fruits and joined them without comment. His head hurt from the uncomfortable, restless night.
Once more they trudged into the sunrise, Caesar in the lead, Virgil following eagerly, MacDonald beginning to show fatigue. The ground was rockier here, uneven and jagged. Several times he missed his footing and slipped. The apes were nimbler; they bounced from rock to rock.
It wasn’t until he noticed the first twisted girders that MacDonald realized that it wasn’t rocks he was stumbling over. It was shattered concrete.
He looked about him then, and with this new realization, saw that they had been walking through ruins for some time. As they moved up a low mound, he looked behind him and saw the shattered pattern of the city stretching out toward the distant horizon. He hadn’t even noticed. It faded out into the desert so gradually one had to know it was there in order to see it.
They reached the top of the hill, and Caesar stopped in sudden shock. Virgil came up beside him, also startled. A moment later MacDonald joined them. His mouth fell open in horror. The three of them stared ahead in awe and amazement.
“There it is,” said Caesar and then corrected himself. “Or was.”
Virgil was solemn. “It looks like a storm at sea,” he murmured. “But solidified.”
“It was done by a bomb from an armory one thousand times the size of yours,” said MacDonald.
“There must not have been anybody to keep its owner’s conscience,” remarked Virgil.
The three of them fell silent at that. They stood on the rise of ground and surveyed the nightmarish scene below.
As far as they could see, stretching to the distant horizon, the landscape was a jumbled ruin. It was the total desolation of one of man’s great cities, and it lay in a shambles of twisted and melted girders and concrete, shattered automobiles, fallen buildings, and ruined highways. The destruction was total. The city was massive, silent, and utterly dead. A monument to madness. A tribute to the game of war. The ultimate playground for generals. And gorillas.
The horrifying part of the scene was that it was also beautiful. There was a savage kind of color splashed across the land—reds and yellows and browns, streaked with blacks and whites in stark patterns. The texture of the desolation was brutally attractive, almost lovely in its roughness. It was too horrible to be real. And yet it was.
MacDonald’s voice was shaky. “London, Rome, Athens, Rio, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking…”
Virgil’s voice was firmer. “And Hell…”
But Caesar was firmest. “That’s where we’re going.” He moved resolutely forward. The other two exchanged a glance and followed him down the hill and into the worst of the ruins.
They clambered over surfaces that had been liquid for one brief but endless moment and then had become solid again. The city had not been blown apart—it had been melted, like a candle left out in the sun, but a sun a million times hotter and a million times closer.
Glass, masonry, steel—all had been dissolved by the incredible temperature at the center of the bomb. Everything seemed to have a smooth surface; everything seemed fused together. The buildings and structures had crumpled and flowed into one another; the city was a single piece of undifferentiated slag, a mountain of glass with cars, buses, and other objects too melted to identify, sticking out of it, a glacier of savagery and hatred.
MacDonald was thoroughly shaken by the horror around him. His eyes were moist, but his face was expressionless with horror. Even the two apes were ashen at the sight of so much destruction.
The man’s mind churned with thoughts; half-remembered phrases came unbidden to him, descriptions out of Dante, Kafka, and Sade. Hell was too pale a term to describe what they were passing through.
“My God,” he, murmured. “My God. How could they have let this happen?” But there was no answer, not from the apes. Not from anyone else.
Caesar pointed toward a structure that seemed to be an underground entrance. “There,” he said. “Is that it?”
MacDonald peered, abruptly surprised out of his reverie. He nodded.
Virgil sniffed and took out the Geiger counter. He switched it on; it clattered, but not too loudly. He pursed his lips and frowned as he studied the meter on the device. “We are at best brave and at worst mad to be here. This background radiation alone will give us at least three hundred roentgens an hour.”
“Meaning?” Caesar looked at him.
“That if we’re not out of here within two hours, we shall become… inmates.”
“Hmf,” said Caesar. “Then we had better hurry.” He moved toward the entrance impatiently, MacDonald and Virgil hurrying to keep up.
MacDonald climbed down past the rubble first, hoping to identify the tunnel. He sniffed the air as he moved. It smelled stale and musty; the tunnel was old and unused.
He didn’t recognize it at first, though. He stopped at an intersection and stood there frowning in puzzlement. He lit a torch and waved it back and forth, searching for some familiar or identifying mark, until finally Caesar and Virgil climbed impatiently down themselves. Caesar was brusque. “You’ve got your bearings?”
“I think so, yes. This is… was… Eleventh Avenue. Ape Management was one block east of here; the Archives Section two blocks west, at the comer of Breck Street and Ackerman. We want department 4SJ.”
“Get us ther
e—quickly,” ordered Caesar. “Let’s go.”
MacDonald nodded and led them down one of the corridors toward a lower level.
“I was here so often,” whispered MacDonald, half to himself. “When the city was alive.”
“And existing on our labor,” snorted Caesar.
MacDonald looked at him sharply. “They paid, Caesar. They all paid.”
They groped their way along the dimly lit passage. It was damp and full of debris. The two apes wrinkled their noses in distaste, but they padded on through the rubble. The Geiger counter clicked in counterpoint.
“Dead,” muttered MacDonald. “Dead… dead… all of them dead.”
* * *
But he was wrong. Very wrong.
The city was very much alive. Perhaps not on the scale it had been nine years before, but still alive enough to be dangerous.
Down, down, farther down, buried in the bowels, deep enough even to have withstood the inferno that had raged above and leveled the rest of the city, were layer upon layer of levels, shielded by concrete and girders—the secret nerve center of the city’s control when it was alive and the center of its activity even in “death.”
The rooms and corridors were a shambles, largely destroyed, crumbling, peeling, scarred, and burned.
So were the people. Crumbling, peeling, scarred, and burned. Destroyed by the radiation around them.
Their leader was Kolp. He was fat and sallow and had watery eyes. He had been lieutenant to Governor Breck, the man who had captured and tried to kill Caesar. He was changed now, his face ravaged by time and radiation. His beard was uneven across the scars. His hands were sometimes palsied, his movements rough and painful, and his voice harsh and grating. His eyes moved constantly, searching back and forth, darting quickly from corner to corner, fearful of sudden noises and unseen assassins. He sat before a shabby, dust-covered console and manipulated its useless dials.
He was not alone. Sitting at another console was a woman named Alma. Once she had been beautiful. She still was, despite the damaging radiation. But her eyes were glazed with madness. Unable to cope with the terrible collapse of her world and everything in it, she had fled into insanity. Only occasionally did she test the waters of rationality, and each time, finding them still too fearful, she retreated once more into fantasy. It was the only response that protected her from pain and from the acceptance of death. Kolp protected her too. Kolp was strong, and she needed someone strong…
Kolp liked to pretend that the city was still alive; it pleased him. He made Alma play the game too— only to Alma it was no longer a game. Alma believed it because Kolp had taught her to. Yet, sometimes… sometimes her brow wrinkled in puzzlement. If the city was still alive, why weren’t there more people? Sometimes she questioned the thought and followed it, but she was always careful not to follow it too far. That way lay rationality and the madness that the rational world had become.
“Alma,” Kolp said suddenly. “Get me the Chamber of Commerce.”
This was one of those moments for Alma. How to solve it? Ah… “There’s still a chamber. Mr. Kolp. But no commerce.”
“I know that,” he growled irritably. “I just want to talk to somebody. Anybody. Isn’t there a doorman or something?”
Alma knew how to play the game. She smiled sweetly in her madness. “There’s no door. You know that too.”
Kolp made a noise deep in his throat. Sometimes Alma could be annoying. Dreadfully so.
“If the bomb hadn’t killed the old governor,” he muttered, “then boredom certainly would have. This is a ghost city. There aren’t enough people to lead. There’s nothing left but bones. I want to put flesh on them.”
“Radioactive flesh?” Alma knew what that meant. They all had taken drugs that made it possible for them to survive the intense radiation of the ruins. The drugs worked to speed up the process of regeneration, helped the ravaged flesh repair itself; the one drawback was that the genetic information was damaged. The cells divided and multiplied but not according to the body’s original plan. The drugs kept them alive; they didn’t keep them beautiful.
Kolp didn’t respond to Alma’s remark; she babbled like that all the time.
“We’re all radiated,” she was saying. “But at least we’re active.” Alma was playing word games again.
Kolp decided to cut her off. “Get me the chief of…”
But suddenly Alma said, “Mr. Kolp!” Her voice was frightened, like a child’s.
“Huh?” He turned to look at her.
She was pointing at her console. A tiny red light was flashing on it. “Look.”
He advanced slowly. The two peered curiously at the insistent signal. “What is it?” He searched his memory.
“It’s a signal. It’s an alert.” Old routines came flashing to memory.
“There’s somebody in the tunnels?”
She touched the console in wonderment, then flicked switches to isolate the location. “F-6,” she said.
“Alert Méndez,” snapped Kolp. “No, I’ll do it.” He hurried out of the rubble-strewn command center, followed by a nervous Alma. She ran in little half-steps after him, she didn’t want to be left alone now—not at a time like this when something new was threatening her lack of rationality.
Kolp moved quickly through his underground world. His palsy vanished in his excitement, although his movements were still jerky. He crossed a balcony overlooking a work area where radiation-ravaged men and women were working at various tasks.
Some of the mutated men were trying to repair a fleet of lumbering gray military vehicles. Others were polishing and oiling weapons, putting them in readiness for what unknown battles they couldn’t guess. The women were collecting huge mounds of canned food and clothing; there were daily search parties scavenging throughout the city. The life of the underground levels was the life of the pack rat and the scavenger. Nothing was wasted, this was a society of ragpickers and tramps. They moved like zombies, with an almost mechanical efficiency, the same kind of nonvolitional activity one might associate with a beehive or an ant hill.
This huge underground vault was a partially collapsed public air raid shelter. Now it had become one of the collection centers for the salvaged remains of the city’s wealth in goods.
Overlooking the far end of the vault was another control center. This one was more extensive than the one that Kolp had made his headquarters. Méndez, Kolp’s chief lieutenant, used it for coordinating the collection and distribution of supplies. He too was marred by radiation, as were all the mutants living in the levels below the ruins. He was devoted to Kolp, slavishly so; he was happy to play at war, but even happier that there was no enemy to fight.
“Méndez!” barked Kolp, striding up to him in his control center. “Someone’s breached the warning signal at entry point F-6.”
Méndez was calm. “Must be one of our scavengers.”
“No. That entry’s locked. We’ve never used it.”
Méndez scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “The warning is still operational?”
Alma nodded eagerly.
“So it can’t be one of us,” insisted Kolp. “It must be someone else. I want the security forces alerted.”
“Well,” said Méndez doubtfully. “I don’t know. We ought to check it first. Sir,” he added.
“Well, then do so!” snapped Kolp. “And quickly!”
Méndez led them to a set of consoles; here was a bank of still functioning television screens. He leaned across the control panel and began switching them on. One after the other, the monitors blinked alive, flickering with images of the underground corridors and of the blasted city above.
“Come on,” said Méndez impatiently.
Méndez began stabbing buttons. The images on the screens began to flicker and change with dizzying rapidity. Then suddenly, abruptly, there was a startlingly close shot of a fierce-looking chimpanzee, a curious orangutan, and a nervous black man, moving cautiously through a dimly lit passage. The i
mage flickered on to another. Kolp almost screamed.
“No! There! Go back!”
Méndez reversed the scan. The image of the three, reappeared on the soundless monitor.
“My God!” gasped Kolp.
“What is it?” asked Alma. Méndez looked at him sharply. Kolp’s face was ashen. “It’s Caesar!”
“Caesar?”
“That damned chimpanzee! He’s come back to reconquer the city!”
“Doesn’t he know that the bombs did that?” Méndez’ voice was edged with bitterness.
“He must know now…” They watched as the two apes and the man moved into a brighter section of corridor.
“It’s cleaner here,” Virgil was saying. He was referring to the radiation count. He moved slowly ahead of Caesar and MacDonald, watching his meter carefully.
“Could anything live here?” asked Caesar. “I mean after so long?”
Virgil was matter of fact in his answer. “Oh, yes. But I don’t think it would be much of a life.” The three moved on slowly, carefully. MacDonald had his machine gun loaded and ready; its muzzle swung back and forth, searching for targets.
Watching them on the monitors, Kolp wished the microphones were still working. He would have given anything to know what they were talking about.
“Who are the others?” asked Alma.
Kolp said angrily, “The black man is the brother of Breck’s personal assistant, the one who helped Caesar escape. It figures—it must run in the blood. Damned traitors! Betrayers of the human race! His name is MacDonald; he used to supervise the general archives. Now he’s helping apes!” He spat the words. After a moment he added, “I don’t know who the orangutan is.”
Caesar, Virgil, and MacDonald climbed over a sudden pile of rubble where a wall had collapsed, then turned a corner. They stopped in shock. Ahead of them in the tunnel, in the midst of all the dirt and tumbled concrete, were fragments of newspapers, rotting briefcases, bits of old clothing, and bones. Lots of bones. A skull grinned hollowly at them.