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

Caesar hesitated only a moment, then swiped it.

Koba made another half-circle around where the fruit lay. He seemed to be looking for something in the trees. After a moment he pointed. There was something attached to the tree above the fruit. It was stripped green and brown, but looked like a machine. Koba picked up a heavy branch, climbed up behind the thing, and hit it. It made a metallic crunching sound.

The bonobo hit it several more times before he seemed satisfied. Then he gestured for them to all come.

Shows us little , Koba explained.

Caesar remembered, then. Will had had a thing that made moving pictures of him. It looked different from the thing Koba broke, but it made sense. There had been things like this in the sanctuary and at Gen Sys, too, all designed to spy on the apes. The humans could watch them without being here.

But even if they could see them take the fruit, how would they know where they took it?

Good, Koba , he said. Smart .

Koba seemed pleased by the praise, but it also seemed as if he was trying to hide it.

The others started coming down as Caesar once again approached the fruit.

Wait , he commanded. Watch .

Then he began picking through the fruit, not sure what he was looking for. Something strange, something out of place. He sorted through some papayas, then a bunch of bananas—and there, fixed to the stem inside the bunch was a white rectangle about the size and shape of the thing Will used to unlock his car from a distance.

A little machine.

A few more minutes of searching and he found another, stuck into a slit in a durian.

Come , he signed. He pulled the thing from the bananas. Find things like this. Take off of fruit and put here. He laid his down.

It was a lot of fruit. They sorted it by moving it, checking each piece carefully as they did so. They found eight of the white rectangles. Then Caesar had them check it again. Reluctantly, the others obeyed.

Some of the fruit had been placed in net bags. Caesar took one of them and tied the rectangles inside. Then he turned to his band.

Take all you can carry back to the troop. Koba, go with my band. Get every ape that can move fast enough, and tell them to come get the rest. Rocket, stay here and set watch, high and low.

What about you? Rocket signed.

Caesar grinned and held up the bag.

“If the rest of you matches your eyes,” David said to the receptionist, “you must be pretty hot.”

He knew it was cheesy but, although it was hard to tell behind the filter mask she was wearing, he thought he got a smile from that. At worst she probably thought he was a harmless dufus—which was better than having her know the truth.

A lot was going on at Gen Sys, and most of it seemed to have to do with repairs. The apes had smashed out a lot of windows, and everything else seemed in a general state of disarray. Maybe for that reason, it hadn’t been that hard to get in the front door. Getting past the lobby, though—that might be a trick.

“What can I do for you, sir?” she asked, her voice muffled.

“Well, it’s not official business,” he said. “But an old buddy of mine works here. I haven’t seen him in years, and I was hoping I could surprise him, take him to lunch.”

She hesitated for moment.

“What’s his name?” she finally asked.

“Will Rodman.”

She blinked. “I’m sorry, sir, Dr. Rodman doesn’t work here anymore. He resigned his position the week before last.”

“Ah, shoot, really?” he said. “Did he get another job?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she replied. “But he did quit just before…” She broke off.

Just before Monkeygate , David finished, silently.

“Anyway, he’s not here,” she said, her eyes cutting down.

“That’s really disappointing,” he said. “I really wanted to surprise him. There was this time in college… Oh, hey! I don’t want to bore you. It’s not your concern. You’ve been nice. Thanks.”

The girl looked around, leaned forward conspiratorially, and beckoned him in. He bent toward her.

“I liked Will,” she said. “He was nice, not like some of the people who work here.”

Her fingers went to work on her computer keyboard.

“I have his home address here,” she said. “Maybe you could ambush him there.”

“I knew you were an angel,” he said. “It’s all in the eyes. What’s that address?”

When he reached the address in Pacific Heights, he found the house with quarantine tape around it. The next house was quarantined, as well. And, for that matter, so were most on the street. All of the homes were upscale, Victorians and the like, and in the distance he could see the bridge. The silence in the neighborhood was eerie. There should have been children playing, dogs barking, cars cruising by, but instead there was just the quiet of a graveyard.

He felt a chill, wondering if everywhere would be like this soon. He wasn’t sure what the latest body count was, but it wasn’t looking good.

After some hesitation, he approached the house and knocked, but there was no answer. He went around back, and got no answer there either, but he found the door unlocked. Figuring the police were too busy with looting and riots, he decided he could risk a little unlawful entry and stepped inside.

“Hello?” he called. “Anyone home?”

He didn’t really expect an answer, nor did he get one, but it set him at ease enough to search around a bit.

It was a nice suburban place with a sunny kitchen and embroidered hand towels in the bathrooms. It seemed in no way unusual until he found the picture on an old upright piano. It featured a man in his thirties with curly brown hair. And he was hugging a chimp, with obvious mutual affection.

“Okay, Dr. Rodman,” he said. “You’re definitely the man I’ve been looking for.” And he began the search in earnest.

The attic was a weird combination of children’s room and monkey playhouse, making it clear that for this family, the chimp had been the child. He kept looking, hoping to find a notepad, computer, some recordings, anything that could tell him more about what Rodman had been working on in the past months, or even years. After a while, it dawned on him. There was no such device in the house. Nothing—no desktop, laptop or tablet. No phones, no file players, nothing on which anything could be stored.

Rodman had either taken it all with him, or it had been removed.

He was on the verge of giving up, reduced to combing through the chimp’s room for the second time, when—in the corner, under a pile of drawings that could easily have been made by a human child—he found a landline handset. The battery had lost its charge, of course, but he hadn’t seen any landlines at all. There had been plenty of plugs for them, but no phones, which wasn’t really all that unusual, since a lot of people were moving solely to portable devices.

He took a last look around, then slipped the handset in his pocket and left.

Back home, he stuck the phone in his charger, hoping it would fit. It seemed to, but he couldn’t really tell if it was working. Then he sat down at his keyboard, and started trying to come at the story from another angle.

He went back over some of the Monkeygate stuff, trying to steer away from speculation and stick with what was actually known. Trying to find connections.

To begin with, Will Rodman had been trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. It was more than a job to him, since his father had suffered from the condition. It was his work that Gen Sys had heralded as a cure until the primary test subject, a chimp, had gone bat-crazy in a room full of investors. In theory Rodman’s work had been shut down, but what if it had continued? What if some new iteration of his “cure” had driven not just one ape mad, but a whole lot them? Yet the first apes to escape had been kept in the San Bruno Primate Shelter, not Gen Sys. One of the employees had been killed during the escape, apparently when an ape turned a hose on him while he was brandishing a high-voltage prod. There were eyewitnesses who said the security tapes showed the incident clearly, and that the apes had a leader, a chimpanzee who stood and acted more like a man than an ape. Somewhere in the fuss, however, the security tapes seemed to have disappeared.