by Rich Handley
“The clouds rained blood! And there was… there was… a human there,” the nervous solider continued. “He was ten feet tall, and wearing clothes made of lightning…” His voice trailed off before he broke down into heaving sobs, begged forgiveness, and fled the room.
Ursus turned to Doctor Zaius. “That was the lone survivor of the scouting party that went into the Forbidden Zone a week ago,” the general said. “Five dead. Raving madness from him. And it has something to do with talking humans, like that jabbering circus animal you paraded before the council, Zaius. I demand to know what is going on!”
Zaius considered the huge gorilla before him, watching his muscles visibly tensing, and his breath beginning to labor. “You may ask what is going on, General, but you may not demand,” Zaius said. He hoped the show of authority would diffuse the mood. Military apes understood authority.
“There are things best not known that are best left out there, Ursus…” Zaius began.
“Anything not worth knowing, we will destroy,” Ursus interrupted. “We need land, Zaius. More farmland. And there is good land in the Forbidden Zone inhabited only by the filthy human animals. I will not let my troops go hungry while lazy humans pick the fruits from the trees. I demand to know what’s out there!”
Zaius managed not to visibly react to Ursus’ repetition of the word “demand,” but the orangutan knew what it meant. He’d seen it before, during a long life filled with public service and political maneuvering.
This gorilla general was testing his power, trying to discover what he was capable of.
* * *
Lieutenant Soror’s chimpanzee divers had gone down into the shallow water and attached hooks and lines to the sunken metal object. It was pulled from the water with winches and pulleys, and all things considered, not much effort was required. It took longer to bail out the interior than it did to drag the vessel to shore, and now it sat in the sand like a beached whale, large, grey and inert.
As Milo and his superiors had believed, the craft was, indeed, ancient human technology. That was confirmed when Soror found human artifacts aboard, as well as a preserved dead human—a female, apparently—sealed in a triangular glass tube. Milo wasn’t a biologist, but he had some understanding of such things, and he guessed the corpse was centuries old.
Milo spent hours in the interior of the capsule, pondering the controls and instruments found there. This vehicle, or whatever it was, might have functioned with some sort of electromagnetic power at one point, but the trip to the bottom of the lake had short-circuited the system. Disappointingly, the capsule was dead.
“There will be time to figure it all out when we get it home,” Soror told Milo. “God had a plan, and finding a working piece of human technology was clearly not part of it.”
“Apes make plans and God laughs,” said Milo.
Suddenly, there was a great commotion outside. Chimpanzee voices were whooping and shouting with tremendous excitement. Milo’s heart raced as he thought gorillas were attacking and he was trapped in the capsule, unable to run. But he found a moment’s courage, and bolted outside to find everyone pointing up at the sky.
There, bright as the sun, was another object hurtling toward Earth from out of the heavens. Another giant spear tip, exactly like the one they had already found, was passing overhead, trailing smoke and fire, less than a mile above them, coming down fast.
Milo, too, began to whoop and holler and fill the air with a joyful noise. This event was far more than coincidence. This was God’s plan made manifest. He had chosen a particular ape to find these things, these ancient technological gifts from the heavens—and He had clearly chosen the chimpanzees.
* * *
The last months had been eventful for Cornelius and Zira. First there was the marriage, and the honeymoon. That was something.
Then there had been a visit from another talking human named Brent, who was just like Taylor. He had come in another fantastic flying machine to look for Taylor and bring him home, and now Brent was gone as well—alive or dead, the couple had no way of knowing.
Brent’s existence troubled Zira greatly. Taylor the talking human freak could be aberrant, a fluke, but two such creatures suggested many more were out there, perhaps an entire community of civilized humans deep in the Forbidden Zone who had language and technology and flying machines. Zira wondered if those men would have souls.
For too many years, Zira’s job had included human vivisection, and now, after meeting Brent and Taylor, the morality of it all couldn’t be easily swept away. If man had a soul, what had Zira done to her own?
She obsessed over this for days, and finally spoke to her husband about finding the city of men she was convinced was out there in the Forbidden Zone. She wanted to leave in the morning, but he argued. “It’s the Forbidden Zone, dear. Not the Invited Zone. We can’t just go any time we want.”
“We can, Cornelius,” Zira grinned. “Doctor Zaius has left with the gorilla army to look for human lands to conquer. Before departing, he put you in charge of the Science Council. You don’t have to ask permission of yourself.”
Cornelius was dumbfounded. She was right, of course. She always was. He began to pack.
“We’ll take a northeastern route,” Zira said. “I don’t want to run into any of the gorillas on their travels. They give me the shudders.”
* * *
Milo had found the second crash site with his auto-gyro late in the day, and, unwilling to wait until his team showed up, he put his small craft down near the charred hull of the thing from the sky.
This time, the hull was badly bent and torn, still hissing from re-entry blisters, but the cockpit was miraculously intact. The lights were on inside the interior and the instruments seemed curiously undamaged.
Milo found something else at the site that chilled his blood. It was a small collection of stones piled up deliberately by willful hands, next to which lay a tiny flag that matched markings on the side of the capsule hull.
This was a grave marker. After a momentary hesitation, curiosity overtook the chimpanzee and he pushed aside the pile of stones to discover the dead human underneath. It was wearing the same shiny, metallic clothing as the dead woman they’d found at the other site, but unlike the mummified corpse found earlier, this body was fresh, and someone had buried it recently.
Milo’s heart stopped in his chest with that realization. He scrambled back to his aircraft and retrieved his pistol. Then he searched the area, frantically focusing his eyes down onto the sand and rocks at his feet. Soon, he saw what he was greatly afraid to find: ape and animal prints leading off to the north. There was someone else in the Dead Areas, and they’d been here within the last twenty-four hours.
He began to salvage what he could from this wreck as quickly as possible, while his auto-gyro slowly recharged. Milo had no idea how long he was going to be alone at this site. Someone had already been here today.
* * *
After four trips into the Forbidden Zone, Cornelius had become familiar with the uneasy feeling that accompanied venturing into the desert, past the human habitations. It was more than the lack of vegetation out here; it felt like something was physically pushing them away. Cornelius attributed it to the very name of the place: the Forbidden Zone. “Who wouldn’t be nervous in a land with so awful a title?” he said to his wife.
Zira blamed her nerves on the gorillas, even though they had left Ape City some days ago, and they hadn’t seen them since. Her thoughts kept falling back to the repulsive harvest and slaughter of men that was going on back in the green belt.
Zira didn’t know exactly how to find the civilized human settlement she knew in her heart was out here, but Cornelius’ old archeological site along the shore of the Eastern Sea was the last place they had seen Bright Eyes some months ago, and it was as good a place to start as any.
Early morning on the second day of their journey, something caught Cornelius’ eye off to the east. At first, he thought it was a fire
fly hovering in the pre-dawn twilight, but focusing attention on it, Cornelius determined it was something actually much larger, perhaps the size of a horse and rider, a few miles away, floating in the air and projecting a small light from somewhere. It crested a rocky mesa and hovered above it for five minutes before disappearing behind another hill.
Cornelius and Zira dropped their jaws. It was either a real-life dragon, or else an equally improbable flying machine, just as Taylor had described. Cornelius had never believed in dragons—or flying machines, for that matter—but one of the two was out there flying over the desert to the east.
So, Cornelius and Zira turned east.
* * *
This was Milo’s final trip to the beta site. This time, he had packed enough ordnance to destroy what remained of this second capsule, now that he had gutted it of all its component parts. His expedition didn’t have the capacity to bring two capsules home, so he had to destroy at least one of them, in case gorillas came to get it later. Milo had spent the last few hours removing power cells and instrument casings, and inserting explosive charges in their place, and now he was ready to detonate the explosion. He primed the blasting cap and headed toward the auto-gyro to set it off from the air.
As he moved to attach the now powered-up battery to the rotor, he saw two figures cresting a rocky shelf overhead. Milo cursed himself for being careless and quickly reached for the pistol on his belt, terrified of the fight he knew was coming.
It was then that he saw the new arrivals were not gorillas, but chimpanzees. He’d never seen them before—they weren’t part of his crew, and they certainly weren’t supposed to be wandering alone on a dead continent, thousands of miles from home—but they were chimpanzees. That relaxed him a bit, but not enough to put down the gun. Milo gestured for the chimps to come over, which they did, rather casually. Their attention was focused far more on the large metal ship grounded in front of them, and the smaller, lightweight auto-gyro Milo was now standing beside.
“Who on earth are you?” both Cornelius and Milo said at the same time.
Milo went first. “Since I have the gun, why don’t you answer a few questions of mine first? What are you doing out here in the Dead Areas?”
Zira gestured at the auto-gyro and began to speak. “We saw that… thing over there, flying in the air! We came over to see what it was. What it is. What is it? I’ve never seen anything like it. And what’s that metal triangle thing over there?”
Cornelius began poking at the hatchway of the capsule, so Milo shouted, “Get away from that! You’ll get hurt!”
Cornelius turned, amused rather than threatened. “You don’t scare me with the gun, sir. Apes don’t kill other apes. You can lower that weapon.”
What a strange notion, that apes don’t kill other apes, thought Milo. Where he came from, gorillas killed chimpanzees and chimps killed gorillas as a matter of course. But he was a fellow chimpanzee, true enough, and Milo didn’t want to hurt him.
“There are explosives all over that ship. I don’t want you setting them off accidentally,” Milo said, holstering his weapon as Cornelius scrambled away from the hull with some speed.
“I am Cornelius, grand councilor pro tem of the Science Council of Ape City, and this is my wife, Zira, chair of veterinary science on that same council,” Cornelius said, composing himself. “You obviously don’t have permission to be in the Forbidden Zone, or I either would have known about it or would have given it to you. So I ask you again, what you are doing out here?”
Milo looked puzzled. “You would have given me permission to be here?” he asked. “And you’re from the Ape City Grand Councilor Pro Tem? I’ve never heard of any of that. Where did you come from?”
“We’re from the city. That’s where the council is,” Zira replied, a bit annoyed. “I don’t know what county farm you’re from, but you should know my rather important husband by now. He’s been on the Council for months. Don’t you hear news where you live?”
“I’m from further away than you might think,” Milo said. “I came here on a large ship from across the great ocean to the south. Do you know the ocean?”
Cornelius and Zira considered this. “Across the ocean? Oh, no… no, you didn’t. There’s nothing out there but more ocean. Certainly not other apes,” Cornelius said. “The Sacred Scrolls tell us that.”
Zira tugged on her husband’s arm. “Ask him about that flying machine. Where did he find it? Does it belong to Taylor?”
Milo’s thoughts raced. They didn’t understand the ocean, and they thought Milo knew one of their friends, someone named Taylor. Did that name actually ring a bell? This odd pair of chimpanzees lived nearby, close enough to travel here on foot. The possibility was startling. They claimed there was a city back where they came from, on this barren continent. Milo wondered if that were even possible.
“Where is the city?” Milo asked.
Zira looked suddenly sympathetic and gestured over her shoulder. “Why, it’s back there! A few days’ travel. Poor thing. You’re lost? It’s a good thing we found you. We’ll get you home.”
Cornelius lay a gentle arm on Milo’s shoulder. “It’s a good thing we found you, and not Doctor Zaius and his army. They’d likely have you arrested for being out here. And Lawgiver knows, gorillas love to arrest people.”
Milo startled, terrified. “Gorillas?”
“It’s all right,” Zira said, trying to calm him down. “The gorillas are miles away… off that way, hunting men.”
That comment did little to reassure Milo. He barely heard anything after the word “gorillas.” He retreated to the chair in the flying machine and moved his hands over a series of levers and dials. A moment later, the rotor blades of the engine began to spin, making a quiet humming sound as they cut the air.
“You have to move away from this area!” Milo shouted above the sound of the engine. “I have to destroy the capsule. I can’t leave anything behind for the gorillas to find! Go! Run!”
As soon as he had said it, Milo realized he had something of a duty to these two chimpanzees not to leave them behind. That’s what they must have been doing in the desert. They had been on the run from the gorilla army—probably escaped slaves. His conscience wouldn’t let them be captured if he could help.
“Wait. You can come with me.”
“Fine,” said Zira.
“What?!?” shouted Cornelius.
“We can’t let him leave, Cornelius!” Zira told her mate. “He has a flying machine, just like Bright Eyes. This has something to do with Taylor and Brent and their people. We can’t let him go!”
Cornelius and Zira got in the back of the auto-gyro, amidst the last of the salvaged equipment, and within a minute, the little airship had finished its takeoff and was in the air. As the wheels left the ground, Cornelius managed a scream that was easily louder than the propellers.
He was still screaming minutes later when Milo detonated the explosives packed into the capsule below.
* * *
Zaius, Ursus, and the gorilla army had been marching into the desert of the Forbidden Zone for days. They were hot, tired, and demoralized by their journey, and growing irritated by the constant sound of the attack bugle when there had been absolutely nothing to attack for mile upon mile of dull marching.
Small rumblings began on the fourth day, after the commanders had ordered the army to skip lunch. There wasn’t much fresh fruit left anyway, as they had expected to encounter lush human settlements to raid and replenish their supplies by now, but so far they had found none.
It was at this low ebb in morale when the army experienced a series of terrible visions. First, they saw a wall of fire leap up from the rocky ground, radiating immeasurable heat. And then they saw a statue of the Lawgiver appear from nowhere, bleeding and crying and crumbling into dust. Finally, the infantry and cavalry and everyone present saw a vision of themselves, crucified and crying out, screaming a warning to go back home.
It was the most terrifying thin
g every gorilla there had ever seen, and they fell to their knees, or rocked back and forth, unable to move past their fear, but commanded by their general not to turn and run.
Doctor Zaius shouted that he didn’t believe in the reality of the fire, and he rode into it unhurt while Ursus stayed behind with the rest of the army, cowering. As soon as Zaius lifted his arms and shouted, the fire dissipated. He had banished the false visions with his voice. It was like something directly out of the Sacred Scrolls, vividly brought to life. It was the most inspiring moment in the life of every gorilla there, except for Ursus, who did not wish to share the admiration of his soldiers with the orangutan.
In the rear squad of the infantry was a rifle carrier named Krute. An undisciplined beast of a gorilla, prone to fights and fits of temper, Krute had chosen the army in lieu of prison some years ago when confronted by a criminal record and a generous judge. Krute had a problem with authority, and authority had a problem with Krute, so when he spotted something against the horizon—something that he at first thought was a dragonfly, but that seemed to be much larger, and much further away—he chose to bring this information to the attention of Doctor Zaius, and not his commanding officer, Ursus.
Zaius listened intently as Krute described what he had seen. Zaius believed this “giant dragonfly” of Krute’s was another clever illusion, sent by unseen forces to distract the army into heading in the wrong direction. But the orangutan recalled Taylor talking at some length about a flying machine, and because of that, he decided Krute’s sighting was worth investigating. He allowed Krute to take a dozen infantry with him to look into the vision of the dragonfly and report back when they rejoined the column the next day.
Zaius enjoyed the idea of dispatching a small squad of Ursus’ army without consulting the general. It mattered who truly commanded here, and as this campaign continued, Zaius would instruct the gorilla on who demanded things from whom.
Later that day, Krute and a dozen well-armed gorillas broke off from the much larger column and headed to the northeast.
* * *
