Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization (7 page)

But Koba’s experience was not the only experience. Apes could not be driven by hate and fear. Whatever else the humans had done, they had also given apes the gift of intelligence. They might be enemies, they might be friends, and they might choose to live separately from apes. The world was large.

But those decisions could not yet be made, and while they were being considered, Caesar had to lead. He could not be seen as weak.

Koba settled next to him, high in the tree. They both looked in the direction of the city, now vanished with the fall of night.

Blue Eyes is struggling
, Koba signed.
It is hard on him to be in your shadow.

It is natural
, Caesar signed.
He likes you, Koba, because you want to act. He is young and angry, so he also wants to act.

Maybe he is right
, Koba signed. Caesar gave him a hard glance, and he added,
I do not challenge you, Caesar. But let me tell you what we saw today.

Caesar nodded for him to go on.

We followed the trucks to the city
, Koba signed.
Other humans met them there. We followed them to see where they would go, and see how many of them there are.
He hesitated, and then continued.
There was war in the city. Parts of it burned. Many buildings have fallen from the…
He did not know the word for what he wanted to say, so he held out both hands and shook them.

Earthquake
, Caesar signed.

Koba nodded.
Earthquake. But they fought each other. The humans who still live built a wall around their village. Grey and Stone and I watched them, tried to count them.

How many?
Caesar asked.

Hundreds.

Caesar considered this.
More than us?
he signed.

Maybe.

Do they have many guns?

We saw humans with guns, but not that many. They have more trucks. They go through the city looking for things to use. They are…
again Koba paused.
They are like us. They survive, and they are growing. There were children.

The forest is large and the city is far away
, Caesar signed.

Not that far. They found us. They will find us again
.

We must discover what they were doing here
, Caesar signed.

How? Should we go and ask them, so they can shoot us?
Koba started to become angry. Caesar knew what he was thinking—to Koba, thinking often seemed weak. Caesar knew he had to be careful. He and Koba were brothers. They had fought together, they had built this ape village together, they had saved each other’s lives… but Caesar led the apes. He did not want to provoke a challenge, but he also could not tolerate Koba—or, for that matter, Blue Eyes—turning other apes against Caesar’s leadership.

Koba gathered himself and signed again.

For years I was their prisoner. They cut me. Tortured me…
Koba looked Caesar in the eye.
You freed me. I would do anything you ask.

Caesar nodded. He grasped his friend’s shoulder.

We would not have survived without you, Koba
.

But we cannot forget what they are
, Koba added.
We must show strength.

Caesar considered this. How did they show strength without starting a war they might not survive? The ape village was healthy and growing. In ten years, they had learned where to find food, how to prepare for the winters, how to keep themselves safe from the animals that hunted them, mountain lions and wolves and bears… but they lived on a thin edge. Winters were still times of hunger, especially hard on the orangutans, who needed fruit that did not grow in the winter and had to be dried. They were still learning to grow food themselves, and keeping the orangutans alive meant long trips on horseback down into the warmer valleys, where fruit trees grew wild.

Then he stopped himself. He was becoming distracted. The problem before him—right now—was what to do about the humans. And Koba was partly right. They needed to show the humans strength, but they needed to do it without provoking the humans into a fight.

We will, my friend
, Caesar signed.
We will show the humans our strength. Here is how.

Finney was dreaming. In his dream he was at the movies, watching spaceships dart through a field of asteroids, shooting lasers at each other. Then he was on one of the ships, shouting commands and wisecracks at his crew. Then he was riding his motorcycle up in Napa, a woman’s arms around his waist and big plans for later that night.

Living in California
, his dreaming self thought.
Can’t beat it.
Then he and his girlfriend were at a steakhouse down on the waterfront, spending money they didn’t have and enjoying the recklessness. The steak was perfect, hot all the way through but still a little bloody in the middle. She’d even talked him into drinking wine instead of beer. Then they were riding again, but this time horses, on a ranch up in the wine country, headed for a lodge where they would spend the night with nothing for company but a roaring fire and another bottle of wine.

Horses.

Finney had never ridden a horse in his life. That thought intruded on his dream and he started to drift toward wakefulness, reconnecting with the real world even as he clutched at the beautiful vanished world of his dream.

Clip clop clip clop.
The sound of horses’ hooves on pavement stirred him all the way awake. It was dawn. He was at the checkpoint at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge. He hadn’t had a good steak in ten years, and the girl in his dream was dead, like all his other girlfriends, none of whom had survived the Simian Flu. All of that fell into his awakening consciousness as Finney registered the heavy fog that obscured most of the bridge. The horse sounds were coming from that direction, or that’s what it sounded like. The fog made it hard to tell.

He leaned closer to the window of the guardhouse. Was there something out there?

“Damn,” he said softly as a chimp on horseback rode out of the fog.

Was he still dreaming? What kind of chimp knew how to ride a horse? Hell, where had the chimp come from? They’d all been killed right at the beginning of the Simian Flu outbreak. He’d seen it on TV, walls of fire scouring the forest where they’d run to hide after breaking out of their lab. Finney hadn’t thought about that in years. He’d been too busy surviving the flu, the gangs, all the other hellish times that had killed just about everyone he knew before Dreyfus got them all together and kept them alive.

He grabbed his gun. Its stock was cold. Now he was all the way awake. He stepped out of the guardhouse and raised the gun. Nobody was supposed to go through the checkpoint without Dreyfus’s okay. Especially not chimpanzees on horses.

Then a second ape appeared.

Then a third.

Then a dozen more, all on horses, and around them God only knew how many walking and jumping.

Finney turned and ran. His motorcycle—not the sweet tricked-out Harley Electra-Glide from his dream, but a battered Honda dirt bike he wouldn’t have given a second look back in the pre-flu world—was just behind the guardhouse. If he could get on it and get it started before the apes knew what he was doing…

As fast as he’d started running, Finney skidded to a halt. There was his bike, all right, but it wasn’t parked. It was in the air, held six feet off the ground by a
gorilla
. The gorilla threw the bike off the bridge. Almost immediately it was swallowed up by the fog, then there was the splash.

The gorilla dropped back to all fours and growled at him. Finney froze. It could have stomped right into the shack and torn him apart while he was sleeping. But it hadn’t. It had gone right to his bike and gotten rid of it. Finney wasn’t a genius, but neither was he stupid. He put two and two together and came to the inescapable conclusion that the gorilla was trying to stop him from getting away—without killing him.

Right on the heels of that thought came another. If they’d wanted to stop him, the apes didn’t want anyone at the Colony to know they were there. That meant they knew about the Colony. They must have been watching—

Chimps on horseback rode past Finney. One of them, a mean-looking sucker with one eye, glared at him in passing. Finney looked down at the ground. He dropped his gun. He closed his eyes for good measure. Apes ran past him, softly grunting and hooting to each other as they went. He heard them in the bridge cables, too, hundreds of them, it sounded like. But no way was he going to look.

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.

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.