Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

“Maybe you ought to let him,” Ellie said. “If that’s the way things are going to go anyway. Why put yourself out front? You have him to consider.” She glanced at Alexander. “And I’d just as soon you stuck around, too.”

“Believe me, we’re on the same page there,” Malcolm said.

“Then let Dreyfus be the big chief.”

“Oh, I am,” Malcolm said. “But you heard that speech. Basically he pointed the crowd at me and said I was going to fix the problem. So either I fix the problem, or the Colony…”

“The Colony what?” she prompted.

“I don’t know,” Malcolm said. “That’s the problem.”

“You don’t know what the chimp will do, either,” Ellie pointed out.

“This is going to sound nuts,” Malcolm said, “but I think I trust him a little more than I do most of the people down here.”

“Based on what? You looked him in the eye and he brought your son’s comics back?”

“That’s part of it. He didn’t have to do that. He was making a good-faith gesture. There’s… he wouldn’t have done that if he really didn’t ever want to see a human again. You know?” Malcolm watched Ellie think this over. She didn’t like it, but he knew her well enough that she wasn’t completely convinced he was wrong.

“This is a lot riding on a snap judgment,” she said.

“I know,” Malcolm agreed. “I wish I had a better idea.”

Two hours later, the truck was back at the turnoff from the highway. It passed through Muir Woods, onto the dirt fire road that led up the valley toward the dam. Carver was driving, nursing the truck over the ruts and boulders while the engine belched and stuttered from the poor quality of the fuel.

“Sooner or later, I’m gonna have to do a complete rebuild on this pig,” he muttered. “My guess is sooner.”

“As long as it gets us home today,” Malcolm said.

“Oh, it’ll get me home. You, I don’t know about, if you’re seriously gonna go flirt with the monkeys.”

“For a policy advisor, you make a great mechanic,” Malcolm replied. Carver snorted and eased the truck down a steep cut in the road, where a flash flood had started to carve the course for a new stream. Everyone held on and waited for the sound of grinding metal—if the truck bottomed out and tore off the oil pan, say, they’d all be walking home.

But that didn’t happen, and Carver worked the truck up the slope. Behind them came the second truck, with Kemp at the wheel. The dam-repair crew was ready to go, depending only on Malcolm’s ability to reach some kind of arrangement with a tribe of fully sentient talking apes.

No biggie , Malcolm thought wryly.

As the road leveled off slightly, they arrived at the clearing where they’d parked the day before. Malcolm figured it was fifty-fifty whether or not the apes would be watching the spot. It didn’t matter, really, since his plan didn’t call for secrecy. A few hundred yards up the valley was the ridge that formed one wall of the dam. A few hundred yards down the valley was the shallow crossing where Carver had gone to fill his canteen.

Carver killed the engine. Malcolm turned so he could see everyone.

“Nobody gets out of the trucks,” he said. “No one.” To Carver specifically he added, “If I’m not back in two hours, get everyone back to the city as fast as you can.”

“You got it. Two hours, we’re gone.”

Malcolm looked at Ellie and Alexander. Now that they had come all this way, he realized what a risk he was taking. He’d known it before, but suddenly it seemed clearer, the way bad decisions always did as soon as they were irreversible. But it was done now. He hoped it was the right thing to do.

Ellie looked scared. Alexander looked as if he was trying not to look scared. Malcolm started to say something to them, but he’d already said it all. Repeating it in front of Carver wouldn’t make it any truer. He opened the door and started to get out.

“You don’t want me to come with you?” Alexander called.

Malcolm leaned back into the truck. He felt a rush of love and pride for his son, trying to be brave when in fact he was utterly terrified.

“I need you to stay in the truck,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Alexander’s nod was the last thing he saw before he shut the door and started walking.

He worked his way down the slope toward the river and paused at the shore below the rapids, re-envisioning the events of the previous day. The damp sand near the water’s edge was trampled, with hundreds of ape footprints clearly visible. Where the wounded ape had been, Malcolm thought he could still see faint bloodstains on a rock face. He walked along the shore, pushing through tree branches that leaned out over the water.

Farther downstream, the water was quieter and deeper. This was as good a crossing as any, he thought, unless he wanted to go all the way back down to the highway bridge, and that would take too much time.

Splashing out into the shallows, Malcolm stepped from rock to rock as far as he could. Then he had no choice but to drop down into thigh-deep water and wade the rest of the way. It was freezing, and he didn’t like the feeling of being exposed out in the middle of the expanse. He pushed hard to the opposite bank and paused, looking around on the off chance he might spot one of the apes, watching. Did they usually post sentries this far from their camp? That was a tough question to answer, since he didn’t know how far the camp was.

He climbed the ridge, wet boots squeaking on the rocks, and reached the top where the apes had lined up the day before. He saw prints here and there. Some of them looked strange to him, not like feet, and then he figured out they must have been left by the knuckles of gorillas. Once he was over the ridge, the ground was fairly level. He followed what looked like a path and was surprised, a few minutes later, when he came out onto a road. He was even more surprised to see an abandoned gas station, its sign overgrown, its parking lot thick with weeds and saplings.

The plate-glass windows that had formed the front wall were long gone. The inside of the station was empty, looted years ago. Three rusting cars sat on flat tires at the side of the building. Malcolm didn’t stop to look through them. He walked up the road a ways, and turned back into the woods when he saw clear evidence that apes had passed by. Small broken branches dangled in the tree canopy, and there was a scattering of freshly fallen green leaves.

Hiking uphill through the woods again, Malcolm started to feel as if something was watching him from every direction at once. Every rustle of a breeze in the leaves brought him up short. Twice he saw animals moving in the undergrowth, and froze until they were gone. He glanced at his watch, which he’d made sure to wind that morning. Thirty-five minutes since he’d left the trucks.

Was he going in the right direction? Ahead of him there was a heavily wooded ravine. If he was an ape, he’d want to be on high ground, but not above the tree line. They were around here somewhere. At the head of the ravine, where it narrowed into the flank of the mountain, might be a good spot.

He started up the center of the ravine, looking up into the trees and trying to keep an eye out for poison oak and the brambles that grew in impenetrable shadowy thickets along the ravine’s walls. It was slow going. Finally he decided he’d be able to move faster if he climbed up out of the ravine, and worked his way up the mountain along its edge.

Just as he was about to do that, he saw a path ahead… and at the same moment, a structure that definitely had not occurred naturally. It was a tripod, made of three tree trunks bound together with rough rope. At the top, in the notch created by the crossing of the trunks, was an eyrie of sticks and brush, decorated with carved totems and a single antlered skull. It had to be an ape nest.