Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

“Please,” he said again. “If I could just show you why we came up here. Then you’ll understand.”

The leader had not moved. His expression had not changed. The orangutan that had ridden next to the leader outside the Colony hooted softly, but the leader did not look at him. One-Eye dropped the point of his harpoon until it was level, pointed straight at Malcolm’s sternum. Malcolm held the leader’s gaze. If he was going to die, he was going to do it with a little dignity.

The leader raised one hand. Nothing else about him changed. One-Eye paused, his harpoon still leveled at Malcolm and his face a mask of frustrated hate. A long moment passed. Malcolm looked steadily at this chimpanzee that held Malcolm’s life in his hands.

“Show me,” the leader said.

They cut along the canyon’s edge, Malcolm on a horse led by an ape who appeared to be one of the leader’s inner circle. When they reached the base of the canyon, Malcolm spoke up.

“We should walk from here,” he said. The ape leader nodded, and they dismounted—he and a group of apes including One-Eye, who still looked like he wanted to dig his harpoon around in Malcolm’s guts. He led them down the face of the canyon to a logjam choking the river, with the roar of a waterfall just beyond it. Soon it was too loud to speak and be heard, so Malcolm waved everyone forward and started working his way out across the logs.

It was a tricky scramble, slippery with a long drop on one side and rolling water on the other that would trap you under the logjam long after you’d drowned. Mist from the waterfall swirled all around them. Malcolm picked his way to the middle of the jam, and looked down.

Here’s where I start to spring my own surprise , he thought.

He jumped… and landed on a catwalk six feet below the logjam. He looked up to see the apes’ heads appear, puzzled at first and then surprised as they saw Malcolm standing unharmed.

He waved for them to join him. They climbed down and looked over the dam’s vast spillway and the concrete retaining walls built to anchor the structure. Surely the apes must have seen this before, thought Malcolm. But if they had, they’d never been on the catwalk—at least not this group. They looked around in wonder and stuck close to Malcolm as he led them to the far side of the walkway, with a hundred-foot slope of concrete below them and the mossy face of the dam above. Water surged down the front of it. In its ruined state, it was a spectacular sight—maybe even more spectacular than it would have been when it was in good repair.

They reached the end of the catwalk, where it seemed to dead-end into one of the retaining walls… until you noticed the rectangular outline and the stainless steel door handle sticking out like a bent finger. Malcolm wrapped his shirt around it to get a better grip, and twisted, then pulled the door open with a squeal that cut through the roar of the falls.

Inside, he led the apes down a cement staircase into the mechanicals room of the dam’s powerhouse. The room was maybe three stories high, with overgrown windows on one side admitting dim light. Immense pipes and valves dominated an end of it, and on the ground floor below these were the control panels, gathered around a central console with an array of knobs and dials. The rest of the room was given over to worktables and tool lockers.

“It’s what we used to call a small hydro,” Malcolm explained as the apes descended the staircase behind him, looking in wonder at the building they had never noticed so close to their village. “It was built to service areas north of here, but we’ve been working to re-route the necessary lines in the city to, um…” He cut himself off. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. See, the city, it used to run off nuclear power, but that gave out years ago. We’ve been running diesel generators, gasifiers—but we’re almost out…”

The ape leader stood before the console, looking at the panels and gauges.

“If we can just get this dam working again, we have a shot at restoring limited power to our…” Malcolm trailed off as he saw the ape leader looking hard at him. He got nervous again, his initial flush of excitement disappearing as he was put in mind of One-Eye’s harpoon. “Is any of this… making sense?” he asked.

The leader held his gaze a few seconds longer.

“The lights,” he said.

Malcolm realized he’d been holding his breath. Now he let it out and smiled. “Yes. The lights. Listen, I know this is your home up here. And we’re not trying to take it away from you, I promise. But if you could just allow us to do our work, please—”

One-Eye cut him off.

“You brought others?” he growled.

Very carefully, Malcolm measured his reply.

“Just a few.” He hoped that would satisfy them. “Look… if you still think I’m a threat, then I guess you’ll kill me. But I swear, I wouldn’t have come back up here if I didn’t have to. I have a son…” He thought this seemed to get through to the leader, and he kept talking. “We’re just trying to survive down there. All we need is a few days, and I give you my word.

“You will never. See us. Again.”

The waiting was killing them. If it had been up to Carver, he would have started the truck and gotten the hell out of there the minute Malcolm was out of sight. But that wasn’t really possible with his woman and his son sitting right there. So he and Foster sat up in the front and Malcolm’s little family sat in the back, Alexander reading the same comics over and over.

Weird kid. Carver didn’t like him. He didn’t like Malcolm either. Ellie was all right, easy on the eyes and pleasant, but he’d have been just as happy to never see any of them again. What he wanted was a wrench in one hand, a beer in the other, and the sure knowledge that they’d come up here with every gun in Fort Point, then used them to put those apes in the ground.

Instead they were sitting in a truck up in the mountains with pine needles raining down all over them. At least he had a cigar. It was hand-rolled in the Colony from lousy tobacco they’d grown themselves, but it was a cigar.

Pine needles. Why were there so many…?

“Oh, shit,” Foster said, as Carver heard rustling in the trees. He pitched the cigar and rolled up the window.

“That’s it,” he said. “We’re gone. It’s probably two hours anyway.” He locked the doors and reached for the ignition as the trees around them were suddenly full of apes.

“It hasn’t been two hours,” Ellie protested. “You can’t—”

“The hell I can’t,” Carver said. “You see what’s out there? Probably one of them brought Malcolm’s head to show us.” He started the truck and jammed it into gear. Around them, the apes drew closer. They were in the mirrors, too, coming around behind the truck. Carver figured he’d have to run over some of them to get out, but that was fine with him.

“Wait! Stop!”

It was the kid. Carver looked back out the windshield and saw Malcolm being marched out of the woods, flanked by two mean-looking chimps. He thought fast and then made his decision. “Nope. We’re gone.”

But when he looked in the mirror again, the path back down the mountain was blocked by a bunch of chimps on horseback.

“Shit,” Foster said again. “We’re dead.” Carver killed the engine as Malcolm and his escorts came to the driver’s-side window. Malcolm motioned for him to roll it down. Carver hesitated, but he did it. Hell, if the apes wanted in the truck, they could get in the truck.

“Give them your guns,” Malcolm said as soon as the window was down. “That was the one condition.”