Both Zira and Zaius gawked at him. The orangutan turned to Zira.
“And is this what you want?”
She blinked her tear-swollen eyes, then smiled.
“Yes, Doctor.”
Zaius shook his head. “Very well.” Rummaging through his bag for the wedding scroll, he called to the gorillas who stood a short distance away.
“Lieutenant! Assemble your men. We have another ceremony to perform.”
* * *
Their trek seemed endless. The small patches of mostly dead shrubs that had marked the landscape for days had given way to sterile stone. Taylor could only hope that their provisions would hold out.
Then the rolling landscape of rock and sand morphed into something familiar. Taylor’s gaze darted across the horizon.
“I know this place.”
He was certain of it. Not like he knew the Statue of Liberty, yet this was a place he had been through, and not long ago. On his trek through the Forbidden Zone, with Dodge and…
With Dodge and Landon.
Landon was an excellent navigator out in space, but on the ground he couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag. The Liberty 1 had crashed into a dead lake deep within the Forbidden Zone, and they had crossed the desert for more than a day—yet it had seemed like forever. He’d been forced to endure Landon’s constant sniveling about home, and about the member of their crew who hadn’t survived—Maryann Stewart.
Now they were all gone. Dodge was dead, Stewart was dead, and Landon might as well be, after what the apes had done to him. Taylor looked for the jagged rock—the one where Landon had hung their dog tags. It didn’t take him long to find it. The tags were dirty, and Dodge’s short chain tag had broken away, but the other set was intact.
Taylor’s tags were still complete.
He ran his fingers across the bumps and grooves—the only surviving testament to his existence. Landon’s tags weren’t there—the distressed man had pulled them from the sands and pocketed them like a coveted prize. For all the good it had done him. Dr. Zaius had lobotomized Landon, leaving him little more than a zombie.
“A sort of living death,” Zaius had called it. Taylor was to have been next.
Without uttering a word he went to work, scavenging the petrified branches of dead foliage and fashioning them into crosses. One for Dodge, one for Stewart, and one for Landon. Then he stood back and inspected his crude handiwork.
“There,” he said to no one—as if his companion wasn’t even there. Back home, he hadn’t given a damn about ceremony. Here, it was something to hold tight. They hadn’t been his friends—he had been their commander, and he had been a jackass. He’d thought the graveyard would put his regrets to rest.
He was wrong.
Landon was right. I should have cut him some slack. Taylor shook himself back to reality, stuffing his own tags into the waistline of his ragged loincloth. Some things are worth keeping. An animal grunt brought him back to the present. It came from behind him.
Must be Nova with the horse.
“Sorry about that,” he said without turning. A buzzing droned in his ear, indistinct but definitely there. He waved away any insect that might be the culprit. There were none. Taylor turned. “I had some unfinished business that needed to be—”
There was no Nova.
No horse, either.
Three short yards away stood a nightmare.
The gargantuan pig-like beast grunted, spewing hot air from its fist-sized nostrils. Its acrid breath was palpable—he could taste it even from this distance. The desert air smelled of vomit, and… and something else.
Rotten meat.
The creature was six feet long and four feet high at the shoulder. Its long snout curled past broken, weathered tusks that tapered into a face that seemed to writhe. While it was massive, it was also lean—too lean for its size. It looked emaciated. Hungry. Ribs showed through scar-crossed flesh.
No food in a long time, Taylor guessed. Lucky for him I just happened to be passing through. He wished fervently to have the gun that was holstered on their horse’s saddle, and wondered where Nova had gone.
Then he realized why the face seemed to be moving.
Maggots.
The pig-thing was being eaten alive.
The beast coiled, ready to attack. The buzzing intensified. Taylor crouched, reaching for a nearby rock.
The monster sprung.
* * *
The horizon whirled.
Trapped in the impromptu centrifuge, John Christopher Brent feared he would paint the cockpit with bile. He and his skipper shouted command sequences at each other, desperate to regain control. Maddox’s orders were erratic—rife with indecision. Brent knew they had to move while they still had some working control boards. Their one chance was to disengage the lander command module from the shuttle and ditch the bird before it blew.
Finally, Maddox agreed, but Brent hadn’t waited for his skipper to give the “go” sign. By the time the colonel nodded, the sequence was ready. Once again clamps disengaged. Explosive bolts fired, freeing the lander from the dead albatross of the shuttle. Brent cranked full power into the lander’s thrusters, and she shot out of the shuttle as if she had been fired from a cannon.
It still wasn’t fast enough.
As the shuttle spiraled downward toward its inevitable doom, its one good wing slammed into the side of the lander. The lander—with the command capsule attached to it—corkscrewed through the atmosphere. Even so, Maddox and Brent finally gained some semblance of control.
The skipper smiled. Brent nodded in return. The sound of the ship’s thrusters drowned out nearly everything. Maddox struggled to be heard over the din.
“Find a clearing to land in,” he bellowed.
“Skipper!” Brent responded. “We are still miles from the source of the transponder signal.”
“Forget the damn TX-9—we need to put down now!”
The commander was right. If they didn’t save themselves, the crew of Liberty 2 wouldn’t be saving anyone else. So the younger astronaut nodded and began scanning the terrain. It wasn’t the most hospitable place, but there was level enough ground for the lander to rest while they made repairs.
He found a likely spot. The lander rotated so that its nose was facing upward and her engines were blasting toward the desert floor below. Vertical, she was suspended in the sky. Soon her thrusters would taper off, lowering her slowly to the ground. They were going to make it. Despite everything, they were going to touch down in one piece.
Retro thrusters activated, and so did the warning signals on Brent’s dashboard.
“Extending landing struts,” Maddox ordered. “Touchdown in T-minus—”
“We’ve got a problem in fuel pod two.” Brent tried to deactivate the pod, rerouting fuel consumption to draw from the other two tanks. He couldn’t do it. The connection had been severed—it would have to be done manually.
“Keep us on descent,” Maddox said. “I’ve got it!” The skipper unbuckled his belt and rolled from his chair, falling to the downward-facing rear of the cabin. His landing was awkward, but he didn’t seem to break anything in the maneuver. He worked his way past the sleep capsules and down to the engine access port. He unshackled the airlock door between the cabin and the lander’s thruster array.
Then the fuel pod erupted.
A searing light blasted the cabin, catching Maddox in the face. Liberty 2’s engines exploded. The lander portion destroyed, the command capsule fell from its vertical descent, belly-flopped, and slammed hard into the desert floor.
Maddox was as good as dead.
* * *
The sea was dead. Few living apes knew what catastrophe had befallen the area surrounding it, deep in the Forbidden Zone—only that it had been this way for centuries.
On its shore, a metal monster gleamed in the afternoon sun. Its nose was conical and sharp, its fused silica eyes set wide. Its shell was hard and battle-worn, and behind what appeared to be wings it t
apered to a crumpled, slender, tubular tail. It was gigantic and intimidating.
Worse than that, it was alien.
A name was stamped brazenly on the side of the tail.
LIBERTY 1
It had been waterlogged, seemingly stuck to the bottom of the inland sea for all time, but nature had another idea. Air pockets trapped within its shell had conspired with a raging storm to dislodge the object from its watery grave. The apes at the site had taken advantage of that, lassoed several lines to the behemoth, and guided it to shore. It beached hard on the rocky crags, irreparably damaging the long cylindrical tube which formed its tail. Once it was partially out of the water, the apes had labored to build a dam around it and drain that small section of lake.
They removed the vessel’s sole occupant, the desiccated corpse of a strangely garbed human female, and buried her beneath a rocky pile some thirty yards from the waterline.
Poring over sun-dried manuals found in the behemoth’s belly, the apes had located the ship’s power source, and discovered how to reactivate it. They had removed circuit boards and let them dry out in the sun before replacing them in their designated slots. Most of the apes on the team couldn’t comprehend what they were looking at, let alone make repairs to such a monstrosity.
The chimpanzee in charge, however, was no common ape. Dr. Milo was a genius among his own kind—the most preeminent engineer and physicist of the ape community. Standing on one of the craft’s side fins, Milo hovered at the behemoth’s yawning side maw, peering inside.
Its belly smelled musty, but there was little to be done about that. From his vantage point he could see the extent of the damage. As much progress as had been made, there was still so much to be done.
Too much, he mused. This is impossible.
As he stepped out of the blazing desert sun and into the damp shade of the forward chamber, Milo sighed. His assistant—a scholarly female named Seraph—was there already, busy removing delicate components. He took one of those components from her hand, its burnt surface obscuring whatever its purpose might have been. He fiddled with the small device, turning it this way and that, in vain.
Seraph rested her hand on his shoulder. He moved away immediately—intimate touch, no matter what the sentiment behind it, made Milo uneasy. His assistant for more than a year now, Seraph should have known better. He decided to let this one indiscretion go unanswered, though, and focus on the task at hand.
“It’s too far gone,” he said, and he stopped playing with the broken mechanism. Too many irreplaceable parts had been damaged. He simply didn’t have the resources he needed to bring this metallic creature back to life. If he could replace the irreplaceable, there would be a chance—no, he was certain he could fix it. But nothing of this sort existed in ape society.
Seraph opened her mouth as if to say something, as if anything anyone could say would make this better.
Abruptly there was a thunderous boom.
Milo blinked. It had come from outside—something big, rolling across the heavens. A storm? Racing to the egress he looked up and witnessed the tail end of a midair explosion. A trail of fire streaked across the sky.
A daytime comet.
Abruptly it broke in two, with one part spiraling downward at an alarming rate. The other half, however, did something astonishing.
Did it just change course? Instantly Milo was ecstatic. His prayers had been answered. The second part of the object arced across the horizon, only to melt into the canyon walls. As the first part slammed into the desert floor, another explosion rang out. It was soon followed by a third that rolled across the desert terrain.
He knew exactly what to do. Where to look.
“Dr. Seraph.” Milo smiled. “Assemble two teams. Leave Doctors Pinchus and Lykos with me.” He tossed the charred and useless component over his shoulder. “Take the rest. Go see what’s out there.”
* * *
Taylor might as well have been a rag doll.
The beast charged low, scooping the astronaut up with its tusks and throwing him over its head. He rolled off the pig-thing’s desiccated back, slammed into the desert floor, and narrowly escaped its trampling hooves. Somehow he still held the rock he had grabbed. As he rolled into a crouch, Taylor felt the sting of burning on his arm. There, glowing wriggling things inched their way toward his armpit. Some of the worms infesting the pig’s face had come loose on him.
Hot to the touch, he thought. Radioactive!
Quickly he flicked them from his skin, and then scanned the terrain for the boar. Somehow, it had gotten behind him. As he turned, it pounced, knocking him on his back. The wind whooshed out of his lungs.
The hum in his ear grew louder.
The creature’s rancid jaws yawned wide.
BOOM!
The sky let loose a massive explosion. The beast recoiled and looked upward, confused. That was all Taylor needed. He swung the rock, landing a solid blow on the creature’s skull. Glowing maggots flew from its face. Taylor scrambled.
The beast howled.
Its weight fell on him, and the howl became a screech. He was coated in glowing grubs and hot wet ichor. The screech rattled in its throat, and it issued one last putrid breath.
What in hell?
A beautiful savage peeked over the top of the husky corpse, fearful eyes begging for his.
“Nova!” he exclaimed.
She had impaled the thing. A petrified stick, modified into a cross, protruded from its back. One of the grave markers he had made for his dead friends, it was sunk in deep. Taylor pulled himself out from under the dead monster and pulled her close. His eyes squeezed shut, the astronaut held her against him.
“Nova, I—” There was a clattering behind them. Something… changed.
The makeshift cross fell to the ground.
The pig-thing was gone.
The animal’s blood evaporated. The burns on his arm disappeared, as did the glowing maggots. He bore no wounds, no bruises.
They were alone.
Taylor looked to Nova for any indication of what had happened, but her worried features and grasping embrace didn’t offer any answers. Her lips were chapped. His throat was dry.
Hallucinations… He licked his finger and ran it across her ragged lip. It had to be the dehydration. Despite it all, Taylor realized how happy he was to have her. Of all the horrors he had endured—the Pacific, Japan, Korea, even Ape City—the one thing he couldn’t face was isolation. Not now. Nothing would be worse than being alone.
Irony for the man who hates everyone.
Then Nova’s eyes sparked. She pointed to a nearby crest. He pushed aside his fears, and together they mounted the horse.
“Alright,” Taylor said. “Let’s see what you found.”
CHAPTER 5
THE WORLD WE’D MADE
Pacific Theater of War
1944
Three angry shark-faced planes pierced the clouds above the dark and briny sea.
The sky was moonless, the clouds dense and milky. Part of the 45th Fighter Squadron, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawks flew in staggered formation. In the lead was First Lieutenant Edward Rowark. A Bronx boy on the short side, “Eddie” was a former street brawler. When he had a shot at flying for the Air Force, he gave up the gang life for the military.
Eddie was followed by his wingman, Flight Officer Joseph Tagliante. “Joey” was a braggart from the lower east side of Manhattan. Whether because he was brave or just stupid, Tagliante was fearless. He didn’t talk about home, and the rest of the squadron suspected he had signed up to get away from it.
Bringing up the rear was Second Lieutenant George Taylor. In his early twenties, Taylor was already an ace pilot. With twenty-eight confirmed kills in only two years, he was cocky, arrogant, and insufferable. Despite this, or because of it, he and Rowark got along.
Having engaged the Japanese and taken heavy losses, the three pilots were on their way home. Their ammo depleted and their fuel low, they were running silent—no ra
dio contact. Taylor wasn’t sure where the rest of the 45th had gotten to—or even if any of them had survived.
All he knew was that he wanted a cold beer.
Lost in the thought of frothy hops, he almost didn’t notice the dim light that crept into the darkness. As the glow increased, he scanned the sky for a source. Straining his neck behind him, he found it.
“What the hell?”
It was a burning sphere. Its size and distance were indeterminate—the wall of cloud cover saw to that—and it seemed to hang in the sky, like a far-off celestial body. It was no moon, however, and it certainly wasn’t a star. The phosphorescent orb burned white through the fog, always keeping pace. Taylor decided to test it, yet it always matched any course correction.
Becoming concerned, Taylor reached for his radio. Running silent or not, Rowark and Tagliante needed to know about this. Before he could speak, the radio squawked.
“George, Joe, you seeing this?” Rowark said. “I’ve got a bogey off the starboard wing. Looks like a goddamn foo fighter, over.”
Taylor looked around in the haze. What Eddie was seeing wasn’t his ball of fire—there were at least three others around them, all matching speed and course. He depressed the call button.
“Looks like we’re surrounded, boys. Over.”
“Copy that, over,” Tagliante replied.
The closest ball of light seemed to pulse from white to a dull orange and back.
“Well,” Taylor said to himself, “what the hell are you?”
He never got his answer. The fireballs came alive, burning red and zigging around in wild arcs. Coming right for them.
“Holy shit!”
The closest one barreled toward Taylor’s Warhawk. He threw up his arm to shield himself, a futile gesture at best. It made no difference.
Death of the Planet of the Apes Page 5
