Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Caesar thought about what he and his troop had done. He wondered whether it would be enough.

Maurice, next to him, hooted—a soft questioning sound. Caesar looked at him, and then glanced over his shoulder. Koba was riding a short distance behind with Grey and Stone. Caesar signaled to Maurice, making sure Koba could not see.

They are desperate , he said. This may not be the last we see of them. We must prepare.

Maurice nodded solemnly. But for what?

That was the problem. Caesar did not know.

Koba watched Caesar and Maurice, and knew they were signing. He also thought he knew what they were saying. Caesar had done exactly what he had wanted to do, just as he had told Koba the night before. We will go to them in strength , Caesar had said. And while we are strong, we will give them a gift.

A gift? Koba had said. We pay tribute to humans? His outrage had nearly made him say something unforgivable.

No. Not tribute , Caesar responded. We give them a gift that means much to them, but costs us nothing. From this they will know that we understand them and that we do not wish for war. But showing them our strength will let them know that we also do not fear them. We will meet as equals.

But we are not equals , Koba had protested. The humans scavenge the ruins of their city. They are rats. We are apes.

Whether we believe we are equals or not , Caesar had signed, we will tell them that. If we appear weak, they will try to kill us because they think they can. If we appear strong and wanting a fight, they will fight because they think they have no other choice. If we meet them face-to-face, strength-to-strength, they will respect us.

Koba had considered this then, and thought it might work. But he was disappointed. What he had wanted was a reason to kill every human that survived. Caesar would not give him that reason. He had left angry, though he had not told Caesar that. Now, this morning, he was riding angry because he had hoped to make a show of strength involving human blood, instead of hard looks and gift-giving.

Caesar led the apes, but he did not have the only good ideas. Koba watched him and Maurice. The orangutan was very smart, but lacked the stomach to fight. Maybe that was because he ate only fruit. Whatever the reason, he always counseled patience, patience, patience. Koba believed there was a time for patience… but he also knew that one of the times patience was most important was during a hunt, when the hunter had to wait for the prey to make a mistake.

The humans would make a mistake, he thought. He had seen their fear and their hate, just as they had seen his. They would strike at the apes, Koba was sure of it. When that happened, the apes would strike back. He would make sure of that.

The noise inside the Colony at dawn had been nothing compared to the din now. Every single citizen, every surviving human being in San Francisco who was able to walk, was crushed into the space just inside of the gate.

There was an almost palpable air of panic. Knots of people shoved and grappled to get closer to Dreyfus, shouting their questions and venting their terror. Dreyfus himself stood with his back to the gate, holding a battered police megaphone to his mouth and raising his other arm in an effort to calm people down. Malcolm watched from the edge of the crowd, with Alexander and Ellie right with him. Alexander clutched his satchel. Both of them looked scared, and they had every right to be. This crowd was a bomb, and the appearance of the ape army had lit its fuse.

From the barrage of questions, a few were repeated enough that Dreyfus made an attempt to answer them first.

“We’re all immune!” he shouted through the megaphone. “We’re all immune or we wouldn’t be here!” He cut his eyes at Ellie as he said this, and Ellie in turn looked to Malcolm. She had said this to Dreyfus the day before, and if it turned out not to be true… well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

“Now please, try to— try to calm down ,” Dreyfus said. From somewhere in the crowd a man shouted.

“How did they find us?” Several other voices took up the question. Dreyfus waved the megaphone, trying to settle them enough that they would be able to hear his response. There was a brief pause, or at least a slight lessening of the general pandemonium.

“We, uh… we found them,” Dreyfus said. “Just yesterday. There was—”

He didn’t get a chance to go on. The crowd exploded. From the uproar came a dozen variations on a single question, given full voice by another man, right in the front. He shoved forward, until he was up against the cordon of Dreyfus’s unofficial police guard.

“You knew they were out there, and you didn’t tell us?” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

Malcolm gathered Ellie and Alexander closer to him, trying to protect them from the sudden surge and crush of the crowd as people jammed forward, their furious panic abruptly redirected from the apes to Dreyfus’s failure. Dreyfus’s guards held their rifles across their bodies and forced the crowd back, but the circle of space around the Colony’s leader was getting smaller by the moment.

This is going to turn violent , Malcolm thought. Any second now.

Dreyfus seemed to be thinking the same thing. His voice pitched higher as he shouted into the megaphone.

“I was only waiting to—”

“What if they come back?” a woman shouted between two of his guards. They shoved her back, but the crowd was on the verge of clawing its way through the cordon. Malcolm started to look around for the best way to get the hell out of there if the situation really spiraled out of control.

Dreyfus climbed part of the way up the scaffolding that supported the parapet. He waved for silence, but the crowd’s panic was a feedback loop. They were almost beyond any one person’s ability to keep them from rioting.

“If they come back,” he began, and realized not enough of them could hear him. Malcolm saw him frightened—maybe for the first time ever—and he began again, louder this time. “ If they come back, they’re gonna be sorry they ever did! ”

This got the crowd’s attention. They wanted a rallying point. They needed someone to focus their attention and their emotions, to give them a place to displace their anxiety about this new… threat?

Were the apes a threat?

Malcolm wasn’t sure.

The crowd settled down somewhat. They were still rowdy, still shouting, but Dreyfus saw that he had a chance to make a point.

“We may not have the manpower this city once did, but we have the firepower. Those stockpiles left behind by FEMA, the National Guard, we have it all.” He let that sink in, gauging the reaction of the crowd. They continued to be restive, still on edge, but for the moment most of them were listening.

“Look, I know why you’re scared,” Dreyfus continued. “I’m scared, too, believe me. But I recognize the trust you all placed in me, I do. We’ve been through hell together. When we settled here, it was because we’d had enough of living in fear, living like animals. We spent four years fighting that virus, then another four fighting each other after the city came apart.

“It was chaos—worse than anything I’d seen in all my years on the force, and I want you to know, there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about that. It wasn’t until we came here—and started working together—that we finally started to live again, like human beings. And I would never do anything to jeopardize that, I promise you.”

Malcolm could only admire the skill Dreyfus was demonstrating. He’d taken a sliver of a chance to turn back the tide of panic, and now he was already rallying everyone together by recalling their common experience. A master of his craft, the man looked from face to face in the crowd, making eye contact with the people who moments before had been ready to lynch him.