Alex Irvine: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

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.