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

Dreyfus thought about that for a moment.

“What else would you need to make this work?”

“Enough men to actually encircle the beasts—that would be nice,” Phillips said. He was beginning to radiate confidence.

“That’s going to be tough, given that every able body on the force, in the Guard, and in the reserves is already on task somewhere.” Dreyfus sat back. “Still, if I sell it right, I think I can get the governor to commit more National Guard. But I need to know you won’t screw it up this time. That you’ll get it done.”

“I’ll get it done,” Phillips replied. “But I want something in return.”

“I’ll bet you do,” Dreyfus said. He leaned forward again. “I want you to understand something. I don’t like you, Phillips. I would love to see you burn. But if there is a chance to stop this disease, we’re going to take it, and you’re what I have. You and your team already know the situation. If you get this right, I might just be able to rewrite history enough to keep you from being torn limb from limb by an angry mob.”

Phillips lips twisted into a faint, sardonic smile.

“That’s the best deal I’ve heard today.”

“It’s the best deal you’re going to get,” Dreyfus said. “The next best deal—you wouldn’t like that very much.”

“Well, then. Shall we shake on it?”

“I’d rather not,” Dreyfus said. “I feel dirty enough just talking to you.”

Phillips didn’t look pleased—he clearly wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in this manner.

“There are some details of the plan—” he began.

“I know all that I want to know,” Dreyfus interposed. “Get some of those things alive. I don’t care how you do it. And just to make it clear, I don’t want anything from Anvil, or Gen Sys, or anyone else involved in this. Just do your job and quietly go away. I have enough to deal with.”

Koba stared up at the moon. He worried about it sometimes, worried that it might fall on him, fall on all of them. Fall on Caesar. He couldn’t see what kept it up.

Until Caesar led him into the woods, he had never seen the moon.

Koba wakes and he is not in the sky. He is on something cold.

He is in a cage again, but it is not Tommy’s cage. This cage does not force him to stand up, but the floor is hard, and gritty, and cold. The cage is also not very big. He looks around for Milo, but doesn’t see him anywhere. There is something in the next cage. He signs at it, but it looks at him blankly, and he realizes it is a big caterpillar.

The light in the place comes from long tubes, high overhead. Sometimes they go off for a long time.

Someone comes to feed him. She reminds him of Mary, so he signs to her. She doesn’t seem to notice, so he does his “smile,” his “talk,” his “funny walk.”

She chuckles a little.

“Aren’t you funny,” she says. “I wonder what happened to your eye.”

He tries to tell her by sign, but she just moves on and feeds the caterpillar.

Koba remembers outside and tries to get out of his cage, but finds no way out. Over the next cycle of light and dark he realizes that there are many, many cages, and that they all contain big caterpillars. He is the only one who isn’t, he realizes. Some sort of mistake has been made. The next time someone comes to feed him, he tries to explain this, but they won’t talk to him. He knows they can talk, because they do the sound talk to each other. Why won’t they talk to him?

He hopes that soon they will realize their mistake and that he should be someplace doing tricks, even if his eye is ugly now.

On the other hand, no one has hit him with a stick since he arrived.

The next time someone comes, he tries again. It is two men. They still won’t talk to him, but they point to a little bed they have brought with them and open his cage. They put a leash on him. He tries to show them that he already knows the trick of lying in bed, not curled up but lying out straight.

“Good boy,” one of the men says.

Then they put things on his hands and feet and across his chest, so he can’t move. At first Koba thinks of it as part of the trick, and he tries to “smile” and “look silly.” When he does that, they stick something in his mouth, so he can’t close it, and they push it in so far that he can’t open it any further either. He thinks of Milo with his mouth wired shut, and he starts to panic. He tries to ask them to stop, but he can’t use his hands.

They think he is a big caterpillar, and they are going to do to him whatever it is they do to big caterpillars.

They take Koba to a very bright room and they give him a shot. He knows what shots are. Mary used to give them, and said they would keep him from getting sick. They don’t want him to get sick, so he feels a little better.

Except that he does get sick. First his stomach hurts, and then he starts to vomit. The thing in his mouth won’t let anything out, so he is breathing his own vomit, and he can’t get any air.

The next thing he knows he is back in his cage, on the hard floor, still sick. He keeps shaking. The thing they put in his mouth is gone, so his teeth chatter together.

He is like this for several cycles of the lights. Then they come to get him once more. He tries to sign to them again, but he is too weak. He sees that the little bed is ready for him, but he is scared and backs up into the corner of the cage.

“He went quiet last time,” one of them says.

“Yeah,” the other says. “He’s catching on fast.”

He pulls out a thing like Tommy pointed at him, like the other man in the house pointed at him. There is a strange, explosive sound.

Something hits him in the chest and knocks him back against the wall. He looks down and sees another thing sticking out of him, like the one that hit him in the tree.

Koba good , he signs desperately. But it’s too late. He is starting to feel dizzy and sick and sleepy.

Koba is back in his cage, feeling a horrible pain in his side, like something has been stuck all the way through him. His head hurts, and he starts vomiting again.

He misses Milo and he wants someone to sign with him. He even misses Tommy. He is used to the stick. He could guess when Tommy was going to use the stick, and why. Here, pain just happens.

For a long time nothing happens at all. People come and feed him. They ignore him when he tries to talk to them, and he begins to wonder if he is signing right. Maybe he doesn’t really know how to sign, and it is just the colors that come into his head at night that make him think he can.

Maybe Koba really is just a big caterpillar.

There is nothing to do in the cage, and he never leaves it except when they hurt him. He has no toys, so he begins plucking out his hair and arranging it on the floor. He thinks maybe he can make some buttons to talk with. He arranges his plucked hair in the symbols he remembers, but the hair doesn’t stay arranged. It moves, it gets disturbed. It is annoying, and so sometimes he screams at it.

He begins signing to himself, signing onto the floor, sometimes for a whole light cycle. His fingers and knuckles bleed from signing against the floor.

There is a long period he cannot remember. Then one day someone comes to his cage. Two people. Koba does not look at them.

“Koba,” one says. He knows the sound. It seems familiar.

“This is a waste of time,” another voice says.

“Koba,” the man repeats.

Koba gradually turns his head. The man is doing something with his hands. At first he doesn’t recognize the motion, it has been so long. But then he understands, and a tiny part of him remembers.