Alex Irvine - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Until Caesar had freed them.

Koba pushed the thought away. Caesar had led when apes needed him. Now apes needed Koba. He turned his attention to his assembled troop.

“More humans out there,” he said. “Find them!”

Immediately the apes started to move out.

Blue Eyes moved with the mass of apes around him, and they began to break up into search parties. A gap opened up, and across the space outside the fence he saw a bus with a pair of armed apes standing at each door. He looked more closely and saw the hulking shape of a gorilla inside. Luca. Other apes, too. Rocket was there, staring out the window, emptied by the death of his son. Maurice was pressed in the back of the bus, and in the midst of Blue Eyes’ shock, the orangutan looked up.

He started to sign, keeping his hands tight against his belly so only Maurice would see.

I will —

But Maurice shook his head. He raised his hands and Blue Eyes saw they were bound together. Struggling with the bonds, Maurice signed back.

Protect yourself . Suddenly Blue Eyes realized eyes were upon him. He moved out with one of the search parties, not caring which one.

Apes together strong , he thought. Koba had led them for only a day, and already the old ways were dying. As he moved he started to ask himself whether he was Koba’s follower, or Caesar’s son. He knew he could not be both.

Malcolm moved as quickly as he could on foot, sticking to side streets wherever possible and coming down from Pacific Heights through Japantown and the Tenderloin, both of which were utterly deserted.

He got close to the Colony and began scouting, to make certain he knew what they were up against. Also, if he was going to get at Ellie’s medical kit, he had to figure out a safe way in. Crouching out of sight, he heard ape noises and looked up at the nearby rooftops and light poles, then crept forward. He got to a corner a short distance from the Colony, and peered around.

What he saw shocked him. The gated archway had collapsed, a tank was stalled against one of the fallen pillars and apes were moving freely in and out. There was no sign of living humans, but there were plenty of dead. They lay in heaps where the apes had put them, just outside the destroyed defensive works.

Dozens of people, mostly men but some women and children, too.

Where are the rest of them? The Colony had held more than a thousand people.

An ape patrol started out into the street, coming more or less in Malcolm’s direction. He ducked back out of sight and looked around for a quick to escape. He wouldn’t be able to do Caesar—or anyone else—any good if he let himself be caught.

It had been stupid to come here, but the hospital was too far for him to reach. He’d never get there and back before Caesar died, and if there weren’t any supplies there, it all would have been a waste of precious time. The sure bet was Ellie’s place inside the Colony, now overrun with apes.

Back down the block was the entrance to a BART station. Malcolm headed for it, trying to move fast, stay out of sight, and keep quiet all at the same time. He got to the entrance and opened the glass doors, careful to keep his hands from leaving visible smudges in the decade’s worth of dirt on the clear panels. He went down into darkness, following the wall when it got too dark to see, and moving by memory.

He followed a tunnel to a utility stairwell door. Once through, he saw a glow—a single light bulb at the bottom of the stairs still burned, surprising him. Good thing someone got the lights turned back on , he thought. Ha.

Further down there was a fire door that led into a construction zone. He was lucky. Though there was some smoke, no doubt from the fires above, it was exactly like he’d remembered. When the Simian Flu hit, BART had been in the middle of expanding this station so that it would connect to the lower levels of the new tower. The expansion had only gotten as far as tunneling and framing. The apes wouldn’t know about it unless they’d decided to explore the tower’s sub-basements, and Malcolm didn’t think that was likely. From what he knew about apes, they preferred going up to going down.

On the other hand, these weren’t ordinary apes. He was taking a big chance, maybe even bigger than going back to the ape village and risking Caesar’s wrath.

Hey , he thought. That worked out. Why not press my luck?

He stayed close to the wall, moving through the poorly lit space, skirting the edges of the pools of light cast by the few working bulbs. There was yellow construction tape everywhere, and abandoned equipment—concrete mixers, Bobcats, pallet jacks next to skids of cement bags and rolls of conduit. When he got to the wall on the far side, he found a door that—if he had it right—would open into the lower levels of the tower.

Malcolm passed through and continued slowly, listening at every corner. He went through the tower’s sub-basements and up to the ground floor. He came up inside of the building, in total darkness. Moving by touch, he followed walls until he saw a glimmer of light ahead. He went toward it, and paused to listen. The only sound was his breathing, and he was trying to keep that quiet, too.

He opened a door and emerged into the back of one of the retail spaces the Colony had commandeered. It was trashed, and there was blood on the floor, but no sign of apes or humans. He skulked to the front of the shop, which the Colony had repurposed as a trading post. The shelves had been lined with all kinds of bric-a-brac, from needles and thread to glue and sunglasses. There had been medicines, hand-mixed by the Colony’s few doctors. Now everything was all scattered on the floor—there was nothing he could use.

When he got to the front of the shop, Malcolm had a clear view of the market area, straight up to the destroyed gate. Bullet holes pocked the storefronts, the floor, everything. Piles of rubble and trash covered the floor. Their home was gone. Now it was just a ruin like everything else.

But where were the humans?

As desperate as he was to know, that was a question to answer once they had saved Caesar’s life. So Malcolm cut across a corner of the market and headed up to Ellie’s apartment. It was on the third floor of a smaller building that faced the main tower, across a street that was contained entirely within the Colony. He slipped in and started stuffing everything that looked vaguely medical into a duffel bag.

When he’d been in her apartment maybe two minutes, he heard a crash from outside and went to the window. There was a pair of apes, forcing two women out of hiding and onto the street. He pressed his face to the glass. The apes were sweeping the Colony again. Three of them were just going into Ellie’s building, directly below him.

Malcolm stuffed a small first-aid kit into the duffel and headed for the door. When he came out into the hall, he hesitated. Left or right? There were stairs in both directions, equidistant from the apartment door.

Left , he decided, and headed for the stairwell. He let the door close softly behind him and started down the stairs, then heard apes below and turned to head back up. His feet scuffed a little, and the sound echoed down the stairwell, alerting the apes. They roared out an alert and Malcolm ran back up two floors of stairs without stopping. He paused to glance down, and saw them right on his trail.

So he kicked open the next door and rushed into a hallway that looked just like the one on Ellie’s floor… only here, everything was wrecked. The apes had been thorough, smashing out walls and ransacking the apartments. Darting into one of them, he ducked in and out of holes between apartments, trying to put as many twists and turns as he could between him and the pursuing apes.