Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization (20 page)

“City looks alive,” Caesar said. “Maurice is happy for humans.”

“Humans are happy for humans, too,” Malcolm said. “And listen, now that we’ve got power, we can help you, too. There’s no reason we should keep on being afraid of each other, right?”

Caesar thought about this.

“Maybe not,” he said. He saw Cornelia and Blue Eyes emerging to look at the city. Malcolm tapped Ellie’s shoulder and nodded up.

“She looks a lot better,” he said.

“The wonders of antibiotics,” Ellie said. Cornelia held the baby in the crook of one arm. Caesar climbed up to her and greeted her, stroking the side of her face and then doing the same to the baby. Blue Eyes stood a little apart. Malcolm could read his body language as clearly as if the young ape was carrying a sign. He was contrite, but unsure whether his father had forgiven him for yesterday’s outburst.

Then Caesar reached out and gestured for Blue Eyes to join his family. The young ape did, kneeling at arm’s length and extending a supplicating palm. Caesar reached out, but did not swipe his son’s palm. Instead he grasped Blue Eyes’ arm and pulled him up, embracing him.

Now here was an unexpected bonus, Malcolm thought. Twenty-four hours ago, Caesar was on the verge of killing us. Now we got the juice going, and everybody’s reconciling, human and ape alike. He started to envision a future where the two species intermingled, building a new civilization together.

Amazing
, he thought.
Who could have predicted this?

* * *

Koba watched ape and human celebrating together, and his rage and disgust grew. He had been right. Caesar had betrayed them. Now that humans had the lights, they would come for the apes. Koba saw clearly. He knew what he had to do.

He looked down the slope at Grey, who had the dead human’s cigar in his mouth. He puffed to keep the fire alive. Grey looked at Stone, and they both turned their faces up to Koba. He nodded. Grey took a last puff. The end of the cigar glowed bright and hot. Then he tossed it into a cluster of dry bushes, with a litter of dead leaves and pine needles underneath it. Smoke rose instantly, and then fire.

Koba looked back up toward the mass celebration. Caesar and Blue Eyes broke their embrace and Caesar rubbed his son’s head. Blue Eyes smiled back and both turned. Koba knew they were looking at the lights in the city. They smiled! How could they smile at
this
?

As he had seen the humans do, he braced the butt of the gun on his shoulder and looked down the barrel with his good eye. A small piece of metal stuck up at the end of the barrel. If that was on the target, that is where the bullet would hit. Koba waited for Caesar and Blue Eyes to separate a little farther. He needed Blue Eyes.

Below the flames grew. Soon every ape would smell the smoke and know it did not come from the fire in the courtyard.

The time to act was now.

Caesar turned, as if he sensed something, and walked to the edge of his perch, peering over the steep drop-off and into the canyon. He saw Koba, and Koba saw Caesar look first surprised, then welcoming. He smiled and started to beckon Koba to come up.

Then he saw the gun. In the split second before Koba fired, he saw Caesar’s understanding.

Yes
, he thought.
With human tools I kill you. With human tools I will kill humans. Then power will be Koba’s. Power over apes, power that runs through wires.
But as his finger tightened on the trigger, the words from the wall ran through his mind.
Ape shall not kill ape.

Caesar had saved them all. But now Caesar would let them be killed. Koba would survive. If Caesar had to die, if one ape had to die so the rest would not return to a life of cages and needles and scars…

He pulled the trigger.

At the crack of the shot, Malcolm ducked, gathering Ellie and Alexander to him as he looked to see where it had come from.

“Get down!” he shouted. Kemp and Foster hit the deck, too. Who was shooting? The apes had destroyed all the guns they’d brought with them… hadn’t they?

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.

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.”