Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

“Damn, monkey,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t have shot you, but take it easy.”

Then he was gone. Malcolm looked around. He stuffed a few vital things into Kemp’s backpack, which was the only one he could see. When he had stuffed the pack, he climbed up and paused before using the gorilla as a ladder. “You have a name?”

It nodded. With one finger it wrote in the air, concentrating hard. Malcolm saw it spell out L-U-C-A.

“Thanks, Luca,” he said, and climbed into the light.

Twenty minutes later, Malcolm and Kemp had been back down and up the ladder three times recovering gear. After the third trip, he motioned to the gorilla.

“That’s it, Luca. Couldn’t have done it without you.”

The gorilla eased the wall slab back into place. With a rumble, loosened debris fell to the bottom of the tunnel. A moment later, Luca squeezed through the opening the apes had dug around the side of the wall slab. Malcolm climbed up ahead of him and reflexively reached to give him a hand up out of the shaft. Then he caught himself, realizing how dumb it was for a human to lend strength to a gorilla.

Luca worked his way up through the hatch—a very tight fit—and knuckled his way up the stairs and out of the powerhouse. Malcolm and Kemp followed him along the catwalk and up onto the logjam. Seeing Malcolm struggle with the heavy pack, Luca stopped to lift him up. He did the same for Kemp. They got back to the open, rocky flat near the edge of the impoundment, with the logjam and waterfall below. The waterfall wouldn’t last long now that the penstock tunnel was draining the impoundment. Before a few days had passed, the top of the dam would be visible again.

The group of humans sat under the watchful eyes of maybe a dozen apes. One of them was Caesar, on horseback. He saw Malcolm and dismounted. Next to him, a younger chimp did the same, and then a baby—God, Malcolm thought, it couldn’t be more than a few days old—reached out and rode the young chimp’s arm down to the ground.

He paused on his way to talk to Caesar, checking on Carver. Ellie and Alexander were bandaging his leg. Sticking out from either side of the bandage was a stick she had used as a splint.

“Like this?” Alexander asked, holding the end of the roll of bandages.

Ellie nodded. “That’s good.”

He brushed a hand across her shoulders and ruffled Alexander’s hair as he passed them. Then he met Caesar.

“Thank you,” he said. “You saved our lives.” Caesar nodded. Malcolm gestured toward the young chimp and the baby. “Your son?”

Another nod.

“Both of them?”

This time Caesar came close to a smile of fatherly pride. Malcolm waved a greeting at the young chimp, who kept his distance. The baby dodged in and out of his older brother’s legs.

“Well,” Malcolm said, “we got the water running. Now we just need to repair the generators, clear debris so the intake doesn’t jam, and we’ll be in business. I hope.”

He was about to go on and explain the use of C-4, wanting to make sure Caesar knew why they’d had to use it, when the baby chimp bounded away from his brother toward the humans. He hopped on Ellie’s back, startling a short scream out of her. Then she saw it out of the corner of her eye and quieted, allowing it to climb over her shoulders and tug at her hair.

“My God,” she said. “You just couldn’t be any cuter, could you?”

It dropped down in front her, looking up at Alexander, who stopped what he was doing with Carver’s bandage to reach out and let the baby grab his finger.

“Dad, check this out,” he said. Malcolm was watching. He saw Caesar was, too.

Building trust , he thought. Maybe this would all work out.

“Come on, wrap it tighter. It’s gonna fall off,” Carver said, irked by their attention to the chimp. Ellie shot him a look, but she went to work finishing the bandage. Nurses were used to the ill grace of their patients.

The baby chimp swung from Alexander’s hand and let go, tumbling over toward the heap of supplies and gear. It poked into bags, jingled loose carabiners, and tugged the loose end of a coil of rope. Carver looked over at it just as it started to lift the latch on his toolbox.

“Hey! Get away from there!” he shouted, lunging over to swat the baby chimp.

It shrieked, and every ape within earshot was suddenly on high alert. The baby chimp scrambled away from Carver as he slapped at it again. Carver started to get to his feet and Caesar’s son, enraged, leaped in front of him and shoved him back, screaming a warning in his face.

Caesar and Malcolm both stepped toward the confrontation, but Kemp got there first. He put himself between Caesar’s son and Carver as the baby chimp scurried away to cower behind the heap of gear.

“Just take it easy—” he began.

Caesar’s son shoved him, too, advancing toward Carver. More apes closed around them, picking up the alarm. Some of them picked up weapons, too—rocks and sticks, anything close to hand. Foster got in the way, saying something to Caesar’s son. Malcolm couldn’t quite catch it. The young chimp son bared his fangs and Foster took a step back.

“Whoa, whoa!” he said. “Everybody just relax!”

Then the unmistakable ratcheting sound of a shotgun pump cut through the shouting and everyone, human and ape, fell silent.

They turned to see Carver, leaning heavily on his one good leg, wide-eyed and shaking. He held a sawn-off shotgun pointed at Blue Eyes.

“You touch me?” he said. “You fucking dare touch me? I’ll kill you—”

Before he got out another word, Caesar crossed the distance between them, ripped the gun from his hands, and smashed it into the man’s injured leg. Carver screamed and hit the ground hard, raising his arms to protect himself as Caesar held the shotgun by the stubby barrel, high over his head. One blow would break open Carver’s skull, and Malcolm could see from the look on Carver’s face that he knew it.

“Don’t,” Malcolm said.

Caesar turned to look at Malcolm over his shoulder, his gaze burning with anger at this betrayal of trust.

“Caesar, please,” Malcolm said. There could not be a killing. All it would take was one, and it wouldn’t stop until either human or ape was wiped from the earth.

For a long moment he thought he’d lost the battle. They’d made a deal and Carver had broken it. To Caesar it wouldn’t matter whether Malcolm knew or not, especially not when Carver had tried to hurt his baby. Caesar held the gun high, his breath coming in fast, angry grunts… then he turned and hurled the gun away, out over the logjam and the waterfall beyond.

He took a step toward Malcolm, and Malcolm could see that Caesar was still teetering just this side of killing all of them.

“I swear to you, I didn’t know he still had a gun,” he said.

Stopping just short of physical contact, Caesar growled, “Humans. Leave… now! ”

He turned his back on them and went to pick up his baby son, leaving Malcolm to wonder just how the hell everything had gone so wrong so fast.

After that, there was nothing to do but get back to the campsite before one of the more aggressive apes lost his temper and went after them. Kemp and Foster helped Carver while Malcolm, Ellie, and Alexander stormed ahead. When they got to the camp, Carver limped over to sit by himself near the ashes of the fire, pointedly doing nothing while the rest of the team packed up their gear.

Malcolm was nearly angry enough to kill Carver himself.

So much for peace between human and ape , he thought. So much for trust. So much for humans putting the general well-being in front of their own prejudices. It was only because Caesar had more self-control than any human that Carver was still breathing. He could have easily gotten them all killed.