Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

“What the—?”

Koba spun around to see the spindly human, McVeigh, pointing a gun at him. Not the jammed one, a new one.

“Don’t you move. Understand me? I know you can talk.” He called out over his shoulder. “Terry! Get in here quick!”

Koba did not move. He showed the human no fear, but neither did he show aggression. He had not yet decided what to do.

Terry came through the door.

“Holy shit,” he said. Koba didn’t know the word holy, but he knew shit. Terry pointed his gun at the ape.

Behind the two humans he saw Grey and Stone, peering in. Koba made a small sign, as small as he could possibly make it. Back. They eased out of view, but he knew they would stay close by. Then he studied the humans again, deciding what to do next.

McVeigh and Terry looked at each other, then at the chimp. Then back out the door.

“What do we do?” McVeigh asked. Terry might look like a meth-head but he wasn’t stupid.

Terry shrugged, but the barrel of his AK didn’t move.

“Where’d he come from?”

“I just found him,” McVeigh said.

“Should we shoot him?” Terry asked.

McVeigh didn’t know what to say about that.

“Maybe,” he said. “Yeah. I mean, no. I don’t know.”

“Dreyfus should know about this,” Terry said.

That was for damn sure. But McVeigh didn’t want to leave this ape here while they went and got Dreyfus. He was leaning toward killing it, especially since it just stared at him. Didn’t move, didn’t blink, no expression on its face.

Don’t borrow trouble , he told himself. Apes show up in the fort, the day after they make a big deal about not getting in each other’s space. That happens, apes get shot. Simple. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You are one ugly sonofabitch, aren’t you?” he said, working himself up to it.

The truth was, McVeigh liked shooting guns, but he didn’t like shooting people. Or animals, for that matter. He liked the swagger of guns, the feeling they gave him. But he’d killed a man when he had to, in the second year after the plague had petered out. A bandit, caught breaking into the Colony. Bam. No second thoughts. He had to go down.

This situation didn’t feel like that. But McVeigh couldn’t put a finger on why.

“You gonna do it?” Terry asked, looking freaked out. McVeigh figured he probably looked pretty freaked out, too. He sure as hell felt that way.

“I don’t know. Do you? Shit. One of us should go get Dreyfus.” McVeigh wanted to be the one, but he knew if he suggested it, Terry would want to do it instead, which would put McVeigh on the hook if he stayed here and the chimp split. Nope, he didn’t like that idea.

“Let’s just shoot it,” Terry said.

The chimp, which throughout their conversation had not moved so much as a whisker, suddenly stuck its tongue out and let go the longest and wettest Bronx cheer McVeigh had ever heard. He looked at Terry, just to make sure his friend had seen it, too. Both of them quickly looked back at the chimp, AKs still leveled at it. But now it started prancing around, and making faces like it was…

“Damn,” Terry said. “You think maybe it used to be some kind of circus chimp?”

“I thought they didn’t have chimps in the circus anymore,” McVeigh said. “I mean, anymore before the flu.”

Thinking of the flu made him want to shoot the chimp again. But it was kind of funny. He couldn’t help it. He started to chuckle. The chimp did a series of somersaults, completing a circle and ending up where it had started. It bowed and then pinched two fingers and the thumb of its right hand together and pantomimed eating something held in them.

“Dude, I think he wants something to eat,” McVeigh said, still laughing.

“He must have gotten separated from the others,” Terry said. He bent down so he was closer to the chimp’s eye level. “You lost?” he said, too loud. “Trying to get home?”

Confused, the chimp waddled up to McVeigh and tried to take his hand. McVeigh pulled it away, and the chimp stood there looking up at him.

“Maybe not all of them can talk,” he said. “I don’t know, what do you think? I feel kinda bad for the guy. We got some stale bread or something we can give him?”

Terry looked at the chimp for a long time. Then he said, “Go on, get out of here. Stupid monkey.”

That was fine with McVeigh. Monkey gone, they wouldn’t have to tell anyone about it, and they wouldn’t have to clean up the mess and answer questions after shooting it. The perfect solution.

So he waved his gun toward the doorway. Then he noticed that the chimp seemed to be looking out that way, at something. McVeigh glanced over his shoulder and didn’t see anything.

“You heard him,” he said to the chimp. “Get out of here.”

The chimp waddled out the door, waving bye-bye with big flapping motions of its hands. When it was gone, McVeigh decided to forget all about it. There were guns to check, and so many of them that he’d get to shoot all day.

Inside the mechanicals room, Malcolm and his team staged their equipment and got ready for the first big obstacle they’d have to surmount. That was getting water going through the dam again. Right now its sluices were dry, and the water pouring through the logjam at the top of the dam was ample evidence that the intake was not—as the professionals would have said—taking in.

Once they had that happening, they would be able to take a look at the wiring inside the mechanicals room and see what needed work. Then, with any luck, they could fire some juice across the hills, under the bay, and into the city.

To get water going through the dam again, they had to get to the flow mechanism in the dam’s interior. And to do that, they needed to go through a series of tunnels inside the structure. Foster and Kemp secured ropes around a heavy vertical pipe mounted into the wall of the mechanicals room, and tested the knots, hauling with their combined weight until they were satisfied nothing would slip. Carver and Malcolm scraped ten years’ worth of rust from around a hatch set into the floor of the powerhouse, and levered it open with a crowbar from one of the tool lockers.

Looking through the contents of the lockers, Malcolm thought that if nothing else, they would come away from this trip with useful supplies for the Colony—spools of wire, hand tools, unused lengths of pipe and conduit, all kinds of stuff. The powerhouse hadn’t been looted, probably because it was in the middle of nowhere and most people had no idea where their electricity actually came from. So it wouldn’t have occurred to them to go digging through a dam to see what might be inside.

When he and Carver got the hatch open, they dropped the ropes into the access tunnel. It was barely three feet in diameter, with metal rungs set into the wall. They were slick. Everything in here was slick. The water had enjoyed ten years to find ways in.

Alexander had the solar flashlights, all charged up yesterday. They were good for at least an hour of light. Malcolm hoped this first part of the dam operation wouldn’t take that long. The teen handed each of the men a flashlight. They had carabiner clips, so Malcolm hooked his onto a belt loop. Kemp did the same. Foster and Carver had vests with loops, and attached their flashlights to those.

“Who wants to go first?” Malcolm asked.

Carver shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll go.”

He flipped a belay rope around his forearm a couple of times and lowered himself into the tunnel, feeling for the first rung. When he got it, he bounced lightly, testing the steel’s integrity. Then he took another step down. “Solid,” he said, and started climbing down with the rope in a loop around behind him. As he reached from rung to rung, he flipped more slack into it. It wasn’t a classic belay, since they hadn’t brought climbing equipment, but if one of the rungs proved too slick, or snapped off, having the rope right there increased your chances of not taking a bad fall.