Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

There was ample sign of the dead, however. Most of the open space was closed off behind a fence, with signs hung on its wire. Caesar read them.

Bullet holes punched through the signs and pockmarked the nearby buildings, where other signs read CURFEW LIMITS STRICTLY ENFORCED. The gate was open, but inside the fence were only bones and the shredded remains of what must have been tents. Caesar counted skulls, and stopped when he realized that to count them all would take too long.

Other signs on the fence, pieces of paper in plastic covers, showed smiling pictures with words below them—MISSING PLEASE HELP—over and over, with name after name. Bits of paper, pulped by ten years of rain, still clung to the wire around them. On the buildings, more signs were plastered on the few unbroken windows and doors.

Many of the buildings had burned.

The fence line had once extended into the tunnel, Caesar saw. Now the poles were fallen down and the wire trampled mostly flat, but he knew there would be more bones back in the dark parts of the tunnel. San Francisco was full of bones now, many more bones than people.

Caesar gestured, and the apes moved out, skirting the fence. He saw messages painted on walls: MONKEYPOCALYPSE and THIS IS THE END and MOTHER EARTH FIGHTS BACK and 7 BILLION AND COUNTING. There were pictures here, as well, on long stretches of wall without windows. Even as they died, the humans made pictures. Apes dancing along the lit fuse of a bomb. Ape heads on the bodies of monsters. Burning buildings, skulls and bones, clenched fists, strings of letters that made no words Caesar knew…

One of them he did remember. ALZ113. He remembered Will saying it, but not what it meant.

He lingered over one long wall, painted from side to side with a series of images.

Koba saw it, too. He caught Caesar’s eye and Caesar was certain he knew what he was thinking. You see? This is what humans will do to us if we give them the chance.

Caesar nodded without speaking. They would not give humans that chance. But neither would they seek a war, if it could be avoided.

He motioned the apes forward. It would be best if they reached the human settlement before all the humans were awake.

Malcolm snapped awake at the sound of pounding on his bedroom door.

“Dad! Dad!” Alexander was shouting from the other side. Ellie scrambled out of bed and started getting dressed. Malcolm did the same, pulling on yesterday’s pants and hurrying to the door. “Alexander, what is it?” he said as he opened it.

Alexander looked scared.

“There’s something going on,” he said.

“What do you mean, something going on?”

“Dad, if I knew more I’d tell you—come on.” Alexander looked ready to run out the door. Malcolm could hear the sounds of a crowd gathering in the market.

“All right, give me a second,” he said, irritated at being rushed right out of bed. He turned back into the bedroom to grab a shirt, and without thinking opened the door, presenting Alexander with a view of Ellie just putting on her shirt. She shot him a glare, then looked awkwardly at Alexander.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he answered, just as awkwardly.

Malcolm grabbed his own shirt on and headed past them.

“Come on, then, let’s go,” he said. It was getting louder outside.

“Smooth,” Ellie muttered to him as he passed. There was nothing Malcolm could say that wouldn’t either make the situation worse or delay them getting out the door, or both, so he didn’t say anything. As he passed through the kitchen, he heard the rising whine of the Colony’s air-raid siren.

Uh oh , he thought. Ellie’s pissed, Alexander’s embarrassed, and the whole Colony’s been put on alert. This is a hell of a way to start the day.

By the time they got out into the plaza, just inside the Colony gate, they were fighting through a crowd the likes of which Malcolm hadn’t seen since the early months of the Simian Flu, when San Francisco had seemed like one great panicked mob surging from hospitals to police stations to grocery stores… Eventually that mob had turned on itself, and the city had burned for more than a year, until there were no longer enough people to carry on the looting and violence.

Now the survivors jammed their way through the gates, some with guns, trying to shout at each other over the sound of the air-raid siren. Malcolm looked up onto the platform built above the arched entrance, where a sentry named Leonel was cranking away at the siren while looking back and forth from the crowd to something outside. He was clearly terrified.

Where was Dreyfus? Malcolm pushed forward, trying to get to the scaffolding that led up to the platform. Then he caught sight of Dreyfus, reaching the platform and pushing through to stare out into the city.

The look on his face was one of… fear?

Malcolm got to the stairs. Dreyfus had left guards to stop the crush of people from flooding up, but the first man recognized Malcolm and let him through.

“Stay together!” he called to Ellie and Alexander as he climbed up.

It was crowded on the platform, but nothing like down below. More and more people were screaming questions up at Dreyfus, demanding to know what was going on. Good question , thought Malcolm. I’d like to know myself. He got next to Dreyfus and looked out into the street beyond.

What he saw stunned him absolutely.

“Oh my God,” he said.

Dreyfus signaled the sentry to stop cranking the siren, and it cut off abruptly. But it was far from silent—the crowd was in full voice, hundreds of people calling out questions and demands.

Malcolm looked back to the street outside, where hundreds and hundreds of apes stood in perfect silence, massed along the entire block facing the Colony gate. In the center were several dozen on horseback, with the leader right up front. Gorillas loomed, flanking the horses, with chimpanzees ranked beside and behind them. All of them were armed. A forest of spears stood upright, and those without spears held clubs and stone axes. Malcolm also saw the gleam of steel. The humans weren’t the only ones who had scavenged the ruins for weapons.

“This is a hell of a lot more than eighty,” Dreyfus said. Malcolm nodded. What he had seen on the ridgeline up in the mountains was a hunting party. This was an army.

It was an impossible sight. How had this many apes stayed completely out of sight of humans? More importantly, how had this many apes come into the city and planted themselves at the Colony’s front gate without anyone knowing? Malcolm had a bad feeling about whoever had been standing guard at the bridge.

He fought down an urge to panic. If the apes had come to kill them, they would already be fighting… or so he hoped. The truth was, he was still thinking of them as apes, when they clearly were more. Rumors had flown in the months after the outbreak of Simian Flu—conspiracy theories about top-secret military projects to create ape super soldiers, and other ridiculous fever dreams. Some of the scientists from a biotech lab where apes had broken free hinted at experiments to increase their intelligence.

But Malcolm hadn’t believed any of it. That was the stuff of pulp science fiction, not reality. He’d always figured that some enterprising microorganism had made the jump from ape to human, and biological incompatibility had done the rest. But now he had to face facts. He’d heard two of the apes speak. He’d seen them organize themselves. Now he was looking at an ape army.