Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Ellie had been reading Goodnight Moon when Sarah, nestled in her lap, sneezed blood all over the picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

A nosebleed , she’d told herself. Every kid gets them. But she knew it wasn’t true. She was a nurse, she’d heard colleagues talking about the unnamed epidemic, and she’d heard stories on the news that got everything wrong except the growing sense of public unease. In her own hospital, several people had died of what would come to be called the Simian Flu.

She’d done everything she could, but thirty-six hours later Sara was gone.

Ellie couldn’t tell Alexander any of that. Sarah was hers. She never talked to anybody about her, for fear of diluting her memory by sharing it. She knew it was stupid, knew that she was indulging in a coping mechanism that prevented her from completing her grieving process and moving on… But in a way she didn’t want to move on, because what kind of a person could really ever move on from losing a child?

“I’m really sorry,” Alexander said. Ellie looked back at him from the tool locker and smiled. What a terrific kid he was. Moody, introverted, scarred by growing up when and how he’d grown up… but he had a good heart, undamaged by everything he’d seen. And good hearts were in short supply these days.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well… I have you and your dad now.”

Alexander returned her smile. She thought maybe that was the first time she’d ever seen him really smile at her.

The moment passed, and he looked back at the open access tunnel hatch.

“You think they’re going to take a long time?” he asked. “Those batteries don’t last.” They could hear the men down there, muttering to each other, the words made indistinct by their echoing trip up the tunnel shaft. Ellie wanted to go see how they were doing, but it was pointless. All that would do was prolong the time it took them to finish the job.

“You know your dad,” Ellie said. “He’s going to get through this part of it as fast as he can, especially with…” She trailed off, but she could tell he knew what she’d been about to say. Especially with the apes watching. Both of them—all of them—wanted to get down out of the mountains, out of ape country, as soon as they could.

Although she thought Alexander might not feel that as strongly as the adults. She’d seen him and the orangutan, sizing each other up that morning.

Who knows , she thought. Maybe in ten years people and apes will all be living together. It was kids like Alexander who could make that happen.

When they had the penstock door sealed and bolted, Kemp checked the wires, moving them gently back and forth to see if he could tell whether they’d been broken when the door shut. “They seem okay,” he said, giving them a last tug. “But I guess there’s one way to find out for sure.”

The other three men pointed their flashlights in front of Kemp so he could see what he was doing. He unscrewed the end of his flashlight, exposing the battery terminals. He set the flashlight on the ground, terminals pointing up, and clipped the wires off the spool. He separated them and stripped about an inch of insulation off each. Then he looked up at Malcolm.

“You want to do the honors?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Malcolm said.

“Go ahead,” Carver said. “It was your idea.”

“Okay,” Malcolm said. He handed his flashlight to Kemp and knelt, taking the wires and holding one end in each hand. Some of the fear he’d felt in the penstock tunnel was still with him. You never knew exactly what would happen when you detonated an explosive charge. It might work exactly the way they’d planned, it might not go off at all, or the whole dam and powerhouse might come down on their heads.

Carver, Foster, and Kemp all stared at him, waiting. There was no turning back now, Malcolm thought.

“Brace yourselves,” he said.

They all jammed themselves together against the wall across from the penstock door. Then Malcolm reached out and touched the exposed wire ends to the terminal nubs. A small spark arced in the darkness.

The sound of the explosion rolled down the penstock tunnel, reverberating through the tiny chamber at the bottom of the ladder. All four of them instinctively ducked and covered their heads. Malcolm wondered what the apes thought about it. He was going to have some explaining to do, the next time he saw Caesar, but what else was new?

As the initial boom echoed away, Malcolm heard Ellie call from the hatch.

“Is everyone okay?”

Kemp was closest to the ladder. He looked up and shouted.

“Yeah, we’re okay!”

Malcolm heard something.

“Shh! Quiet!” he said. They all listened. “You hear that?”

Everyone strained to hear, holding their breaths… and they all looked at each other as from the penstock tunnel came the unmistakable sound of rushing water. Malcolm grinned like an idiot.

“We’ve got water.” He reached out to shake Foster’s hand. “Just right,” he said.

“Hell, yeah,” Kemp said, exchanging a cramped high-five with Carver.

Malcolm leaned across Kemp to shout up the access tunnel.

“Ellie! We’ve got—”

He stopped as they heard another sound. It was a long groaning rumble. Dust and gravel fell from farther up the shaft. “Oh, shit,” Carver said. They all froze, then they all started for the ladder together, but it was too late. With a deafening rumble, the access tunnel collapsed around them.

Malcolm ducked and covered, crossing his arms over his head and hunching down to put his head between his knees. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye , he thought. A piece of stone or concrete hit him hard on the back, not too far from where the rock had dug into his shoulder blade when One-Eye had dragged him up to the ape village. He cried out, but every moment he was still able to feel pain was a good thing.

The noise of the cave-in subsided to the sporadic rattle of smaller rocks and the grind of something larger, shifting somewhere out of sight. Malcolm coughed and started to sit up. He couldn’t stand. Next to him, Kemp was coughing, too. Foster and Carver were silent. Malcolm saw one of the flashlights, partially buried in dirt and gravel. He dug it out and shone it around.

Let’s see how bad this is.

Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The wall on the downstream side had fallen in, huge slabs of concrete toppling to choke off the tunnel and smaller pieces jumbling below them… and, presumably, above. He and Kemp and Foster were okay. Foster rubbed at the back of his head and his hand came away bloody, but he was swearing with enough vigor that Malcolm didn’t think he was badly hurt.

In an irony he would appreciate later—if he survived, he thought—the penstock door was clear. They could have gone right out that way if they hadn’t filled the tunnel with water. He kept swinging the flashlight beam around and at last saw Carver, pinned under a rectangular piece of concrete as big as he was. Malcolm couldn’t see his legs at all. Loose earth and small rocks cascaded around him as he struggled to free himself.

“Oh, crap,” he moaned.

He heard Ellie’s voice, very faintly, from above. He thought she was calling his name. Then he heard Alexander. He didn’t want to shout back at them in case the sound of more voices might dislodge more debris. They were one little shift from being crushed or buried alive. Malcolm joined Kemp and Foster at Carver’s side. Dust in the confined space gave the flashlight beam a ghostly quality, and also made it hard as hell to breathe. Carver coughed hard and rubbed dust out of his eyes.

“My legs, man, shit. I’m stuck.”