Greg Keyes: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm

That was a sign and a word he had never known, until Caesar had taught it to him.

Free .

He returned to the human’s camp and hunted through the things he found there. After a moment he located a bag of food. Gripping it under one arm, he returned to Caesar, lowering his head as he approached, offering the bag.

Caesar touched Koba’s arm, and then his cheek. Good , it meant. He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder in a peculiar, human-like way, and scrambled up the nearest of the trees. Koba and the others followed, to where the rest of the troop waited, still in the high canopy.

In a moment they were all on the move again, the soft rustling of the trees the only sound marking their passage.

Because now Caesar required silence. Silence was their survival.

The dark sky had come and gone five times since Koba’s liberation and the battle with the humans and their killing tools. They had won that fight, but the humans hadn’t stopped chasing them, of course. Their flying cages crossed the skies above, and troops of them roamed the woods, but Caesar was clever. He sent out scouts to find small groups of their pursuers, or loners like the one Koba had just encountered.

They were to be frightened, though not harmed. They would report their meetings, but when hunters came, the apes would be gone to some other place. In this way they had led their pursuers in vast, twisty circles. In this way, they survived, here in this awesome place that was at once so strange and so familiar.

For this place, Caesar had taught Koba another new word, another new sign.

Home .

David Flynn woke around four in the morning, as he usually did. It didn’t matter what time he went to bed, how much he’d had to drink, whether he had run a marathon or spent all day writing. At four, he woke up. It had started when he was in his early twenties, when he’d moved from Atlanta to the Bay Area. Even after ten years, his body wouldn’t let go of the Eastern Time Zone.

He started to sit up, and felt the extra weight in the bed before remembered that Clancy was still there. Her fine, long hair spread out on the pillow. It looked dark in the faint light, but in the day it was the color of hay, with touches of goldenrod where the sun had lightened it. She was only half-covered by her sheet, and he studied her a moment, wanting to trace the contours of her body with the tips of his fingers. He liked the feel of her skin, the shape of her.

But he didn’t want to wake her. She usually didn’t stay over, but she had some sort of early appointment downtown, and his apartment was a lot closer than hers. He was pretty sure “early” didn’t mean four o’clock.

He eased out of bed, went into his small living room, and glanced at his laptop. He could stand to tighten up the piece on the appropriations cover-up in City Hall, but he was frankly kind of sick of it at the moment. So he switched on the television, cruised through several infomercials and syndicated comedies before one of the news channels caught his eye. They were showing footage of the bizarre events on the Golden Gate Bridge five days ago, when hundreds of apes had escaped from all over the city, fought their way through police blockades, and escaped across the span. It was certainly the strangest event on record in San Francisco, and what made it stranger was the complete blackout of information that had followed it. All of the parklands north of the bridge—the Muir Woods, Mount Tamalpais—everything had been closed, and all but the most essential roads blockaded.

While there were a lot of rumors swirling around about how the apes had escaped in the first place, there was very little of what he as journalist would call fact . Mayor House and Chief of Police Burston had assured the public that everything was under control, that the numbers of the apes had been exaggerated, and that the eyewitness reports given by those who had been there were the result of hysteria.

Most of the footage of the event, flickering across the screen, was amateur, taken with cell phones, and it had been a particularly foggy day, anyway, so it was difficult to assess the claims one way or another.

The scene cut to a studio, where a local talk-show host was interviewing a man with a dark, thin face. David recognized him as Clancy’s boss, Dr. Roberts, so he turned up the sound a little.

“…primatologist at Berkeley,” the host was saying. “People involved in the incident claim very peculiar behavior coming from the animals. They say that the apes acted with organization and purpose, and seemed to have a plan. As someone who studies primates, how would you assess these claims?”

“Well, first of all,” Roberts began, “apes are intelligent, and capable of learning a wide range of behaviors. They are also social, and do act in concert. Chimpanzees, for instance, will sometimes band together to hunt colobus monkeys for food.”

“I thought apes were vegetarian.”

“That’s a misconception,” Roberts pointed out. “Chimps are omnivores—they eat a lot of insects, in particular. Gorillas a little less so. The only species that is almost entirely herbivorous are the orangutans.”

“Interesting,” the host said. “But we’ve gotten off subject.”

“I think several things are going on here,” Roberts said, nodding. “The first is that we humans tend to see everything in our own image. We anthropomorphize. We do it even with dogs and cats—assign human motives and emotions to them. We have an even greater tendency to do that when apes are involved, because they seem more like us. The other factor is that most of these apes were born in captivity, and in many cases trained to act human—for movies, television, circuses. The apes you see on TV are usually young, still cute, and not too dangerous. But when they get older and lose some of their charm—not only in appearance, some get very aggressive—they are often ‘retired’ to shelters or sold to laboratories for medical testing. So they may well have been superficially mimicking human behavior. The final thing I think that comes into play here is ourselves.”

“You mean other than anthropomorphizing?”

“Right. We humans are natural storytellers. It’s what we do. There have been some pretty good studies that demonstrate that eyewitness accounts of any kind—especially when strong emotions like fear and surprise are involved—are substantially inaccurate even a few hours after the events. That’s because to make sense of what we’ve seen, we background it with some sort of logical framework. We tell ourselves a story that makes sense in our own minds—then we tell the story to each other. The details that make the most sense to the most people stay in the story, while the rest drop out. It gets bigger.”

“So you’re saying that what Mayor House says is true…”

David actually jumped out of his seat when a hand fell on his shoulder.

“Sorry,” Clancy said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Wow,” he said. “Yeah. Was the TV too loud?”

“Not really.” She nodded at the television. “It was Piers’s voice. Thought I was back in his class or something.”

“With no clothes on?” He raised an eyebrow.

She glanced down at her state of dishabille and grinned.

“Funny man,” she said. “I can put something on, if you want.”

“No,” he said. “No need to go out of your way.” He turned the sound down. “There,” he said. “Better?”

“Yep.” She nodded. “So why are you up? Bed too crowded?”

“No,” he said. “I always wake up around four. I’ve learned I can either lie there, staring at the ceiling, or get up for an hour or so and piddle. Then I can fall back asleep.”