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

They caught up to a troop in an upland basin. Patrick was the first to spot one, but by the time he did, the chimps already knew they were there, and were making quite a bit of noise.

“Walk forward slowly,” Patrick said. “Try not to seem threatening. We’re looking for a little one, a baby. Those are easiest to carry and to sell. No one wants an old buck.”

Malaki kept his weapon down as they moved into the trees. The chimps were scampering all around them, now, and some of the bigger ones were starting to make him nervous—coming too close, making aggressive movements. He tried to count them, but it was hard because they kept moving. He figured there were about twenty.

“There we go,” his uncle murmured. He pointed ahead, to where a baby clung to its mother. When the mother saw them, she clambered into the low branches of a tree. One of the big males started screeching even louder as they approached.

His uncle had the net ready, and moved slowly toward the chimp and her baby. When he was close enough, he tossed the net.

The little chimp nimbly dodged it, hopping onto the mother’s back. Simultaneously one of the big apes leapt right up into Uncle’s face.

Patrick’s rifle roared, and the chimp pitched back. The other chimps screamed and retreated, but as soon as the men started toward the juvenile again, they came back with a vengeance. The mother, on the other hand, backed off, letting the rest of the troop defend her.

A big one dropped down right in front of Malakai, and for a moment he was arrested by its gaze—not so much angry as panicked, a look he had seen on plenty of human faces. It snapped at him with its teeth, and without putting a thought into it Malakai shot the beast. It screeched and bounded back, pawing at the wound.

Then Patrick shot the mother.

She tumbled off of her perch and thudded to the ground. The baby managed to jump free, but it immediately leapt down and crouched behind her. She wasn’t dead, yet; she reached back and took the baby in her arms, still trying to defend it as she scooted away on the jungle floor.

They were forced to kill fifteen chimps before the troop finally backed off enough for them to retrieve the baby. It was still clinging to the mother. Malakai remembered the mother looking up at him, with the dimming light in her eyes.

He aimed his gun and sent her permanently out of the bright world. They put the baby in the cage and cut some saplings to help them carry it. Then they started back down from the hills.

Three days later he had his bride price, and the next week he and Solange were married. He spent the next couple of years poaching chimpanzees to support them, and the little boy they soon had.

His beautiful boy.

He and Clancy were walking back toward the camp by the time he finished the story.

“What did you name him,” she asked, “the boy?”

“Joseph,” he said. “After his mother’s father. He looked like her.”

They were interrupted by the sound of trucks moving up the road. A moment later the first of them arrived, and began disgorging National Guard troops.

“I wonder what that’s about,” Clancy said.

“I would be surprised if it was anything good,” Malakai replied. Then he swore under his breath. For a Humvee pulled up next to the first truck, and out stepped Trumann Phillips.

Phillips saw the two of them and waved them over. Malakai and Clancy met him in the center of the compound.

“Can you find them again?” he asked. “The apes?”

Malakai stared at him for a moment. Something had happened. Phillips was back in charge.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. I have some better ideas about how to do it now.”

“The mayor wants them captured?” Clancy said, then added, “He said we were free to go.”

“He wants us to proceed as planned,” Phillips said. “And you are free to go if you wish, but I need you. I wasn’t at liberty to tell you this before, but now it’s all out in the open, and you might as well know. Gen Sys is responsible for the virus, and the apes have it. We need captive apes to try and find a cure. That’s what this has been about, all along. What it’s still about.”

Malakai considered that. What he really wanted was to be quit of the whole matter. It still stank like a rotting elephant carcass.

“I’ll help,” Clancy said. Her voice was a little funny, and she had a distant look in her eyes.

“That’s excellent,” Phillips said. “And you, Mr. Youmans?”

“Sure,” he said, trying to hide his reluctance. “I’ll help finish this.”

David watched the television, trying to keep his eyes open. He reached for the glass of water by the bed, but accidentally knocked it to the floor.

After sending the article he’d fallen asleep, and now he came in and out of consciousness. He felt hot one moment, and freezing the next. He wasn’t always sure what was happening, and had turned the television on to give himself something on which to focus.

But it wasn’t helping. If anything, what he saw there made it worse.

He fumbled with the phone again, to try and call Sage, but the line was still dead.

The images on the screen blurred into each other—scenes of fire and chaos, soldiers, mobs of people trampling over one another. It took him a little while to realize that was he was seeing wasn’t local, but scenes of rioting and looting in Paris, London, Rome, Shanghai. A nuclear plant melting down in Byelorussia because it was understaffed. It seemed to go on for a long time. He closed his eyes again, feeling the heartbeat in his side, the liquid fire in his veins.

He most have dozed, because when he woke next, it was to an epidemiologist talking about the characteristics of the virus, how valuable it had been to discover that it had begun as a form of gene therapy, because now they knew it had been engineered specifically to overcome the human immune system.

David felt a flutter of elation. He had finally written something worth writing. Something important. He really owed Clancy big time.

Clancy , he thought. What’s happened to her? The email she’d sent, supposedly in secret, hadn’t been private at all. He knew that now. Someone had found out about it—and tried to kill him, very nearly doing so.

They still may succeed , he mused. But if they had tried to kill him, had they killed Clancy, as well? Had he killed her, by publishing the article?

He continued watching. The scene switched instead to a fire, raging out of control. It was a quarantine center, and another case of arson by the organization identified on the screen as ‘Alpha/Omega.’

As he stared at the flames, he felt the cloud coming back over his brain. He reached for the water again, and remembered that he had knocked it over.

The images on the television hazed together, and then dimmed into darkness.

Malakai studied the map.

“This isn’t going to work,” he told Phillips. “Not as it stands.”

“Why not?” Philips demanded.

“You’re encircling the entire area, then contracting, hoping to force them all to a common point, where you can launch a concentrated strike.”

“Exactly,” Philips replied.

“It looks fine on a flat piece of paper, but there’s a vertical dimension to this. They can go over your line.”

“If they try, then we’ll make it rain monkeys,” Phillips said. “Shoot them out of the trees. Some may not survive the fall, but we can’t afford to be too precious.”

“Beautiful,” Malakai said. “But you’ll need three times the ground forces you have to make that work—because you have no way to know where they will try to punch through your line. They’ll find your weakest point, and exploit it.”