Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

by Greg Keyes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783292257

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783292264

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2014

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ™ & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  Dedicated to Terri Hunnicutt and Warren Roberts

  PROLOGUE

  Roger Mason was crossing the middle ground between wakeful and asleep when something snapped him to full awareness. He wasn’t sure what it was, although he felt as if it had been a sound of some sort.

  He glanced around slowly to get his bearings.

  Fog drifted through the massive coast redwoods, and it felt in that moment as if he wasn’t just a few miles from San Francisco, but in some distant era when this forest had stretched unbroken from what was now Santa Cruz all the way to southern Oregon. Other than his campsite, there was nothing visible of the works of man.

  He was slumped against the trunk of one of the ancient titans, facing his tent. He had only closed his eyes for a matter of minutes, or so it seemed.

  What had he heard?

  Trying to stay still, he listened intently, but whatever it was, it didn’t repeat itself. Maybe it had just been the start of a dream, the nonsense music of hallucination.

  “Nothing,” he sighed. As usual. Maybe it was time to go home. He had been out here for more than a week, alone, without a phone or any other ties to the rest of the world. Normally, he loved these trips. The illicit thrill of outsmarting the rangers, of camping where it wasn’t legal. The solitude. The possibility that finally, after all of these years, his dreams would come true. But now, at last, he began to think that not only was it time to go home, but to stay there.

  For almost thirty years he had camped in the Muir Woods, among some of the tallest trees on Earth, searching for evidence of the creatures that the Native Americans called ‘Sasquatch,’ and that others called ‘Bigfoot.’ Many times in that first couple of decades, he’d felt certain that he had barely missed seeing one of the elusive, ape-like creatures, only by the smallest hair. That just one more trip would pay off big.

  He knew the arguments voiced by the skeptics—that there couldn’t be just one or two Bigfoot. That for a species to survive, it needed a breeding population that numbered in the hundreds, at least, and that such numbers of giant creatures couldn’t possibly stay hidden for as long as they had. But the mountain gorilla had managed to remain hidden until the twentieth century, hadn’t it? And there were other such examples.

  Bigfoot was most likely the descendant of Gigantopithecus, an ancient relative of the orangutan that had died off in Asia, but crossed the land bridge into the Americas. Orangutans lived pretty solitary lives, never in large groups. One could walk through a jungle, close to a breeding population of orangutans, and never know it. It stood to reason that Gigantopithecus had exhibited similar habits, and Bigfoot would be just as invisible.

  Or so he had thought. Lately, though, he had begun to have his doubts. It felt as if he had wasted a lot of his life, and had nothing to show for it.

  With a sigh, he pushed himself up and prepared to break camp.

  That’s when he realized that he couldn’t hear anything. Anything. No birds singing, no squirrels chattering. The forest was silent as a church on Monday.

  Roger felt the hair on his neck prick up a little.

  Then, in the stillness, he heard it, the sound he had thought was a dream—something between a hoot and a grunt, a rising tone repeated again and again. Sounding almost—but not quite—human.

  “Holy hell,” he muttered. Because he knew the sound, or something very like it. He had done his research, prepared himself to be able to recognize the signs. What he had just heard sounded very, very much like the long call of an orangutan.

  Or Bigfoot.

  “This is it,” he said under his breath. “This is really it.”

  He tiptoed over to his sound recorder and turned it on. For a long moment he thought the call wouldn’t reoccur. But to his delight, it did—closer and louder than before.

  He moved through the trees, treading as silently as possible, and reached the edge of a clearing. There he gingerly reached for his video camera and raised it, trying to keep still. Judging from past experience, he probably only had one shot at this.

  These things spooked so easily.

  The moments seemed to stretch on forever, the way the days before Christmas had, when he was a kid. Then he saw the trees rustle, and at the edge of a small clearing something moved. He suddenly knew what it was like to be born again, to have an epiphany, to have his life completely validated.

  It walked upright, but not with a human gait, and it was entirely covered in dark fur. There could be no mistaking what it was, although perspective made it seem smaller than he had imagined all those years, when thinking of this moment.

  He almost forgot to start his camera as the Sasquatch continued on its solitary journey. He zoomed in as close as possible, remaining at a safe distance, trying to get enough detail so that this film couldn’t be dismissed as some sort of a fraud—as so many others had in the past. His would be the definitive, the incontrovertible, most famous Bigfoot film of all time.

  Glancing up from the eyepiece, he was startled to see another of the creatures appear behind the first.

  “A pair…” he murmured, under his breath. His luck was unbelievable. Only rarely had more than one Bigfoot been found together, and never with visual proof.

  But then there was another.

  And another. Five, twenty…

  “Oh, my God,” he gasped, still filming. “This is incredible!”


  All of a sudden the one in the lead stopped and slowly turned its head toward Roger. In that instant, all he could see in his viewfinder were its eyes—green-flecked, intense, intelligent.

  And the Bigfoot saw Roger.

  Suddenly he didn’t feel safe at all.

  Snap!

  A twig broke behind him. He whirled around.

  The face filled his vision—savage, inhuman, with one milky, blind eye and a livid, glaring one. Its expression was of a malice so pure that it struck Roger like a physical blow. He felt suspended in terror, unable to speak, to move. Incapable, even, of closing his eyes against the terrible visage confronting him.

  Then it opened its mouth, and it shrieked at him.

  Roger didn’t remember dropping the camera, or screaming, or running. But when he came back to himself, much later, his hands were empty, his lungs were heaving, and his throat was raw. He glanced behind him and saw nothing but the immense boles of the redwoods, and the fog enshrouding them.

  Then he began running again.

  * * *

  With a decidedly grim satisfaction, Koba watched the human flee. He did not care for humans much. He had suffered at their hands and the tools those hands had held. He hoped this was the last one he ever saw.

  But he had his doubts.

  Once he was satisfied that the man was gone, he turned and looked out through the huge trees to where Caesar was watching him from the clearing.

  He feared for a moment that Caesar would be displeased, as he had been when Koba had attacked Will, who had followed them into the trees. But then the ape leader tilted his head in approval, and Koba felt a rare flush of satisfaction. Caesar approved of his actions; therefore Caesar approved of him.

  Koba dropped to all fours and ran to join his leader, but a gesture cut him short.

  Food, Caesar signed.

  Koba paused, chagrined that he had forgotten. Things were happening inside of him, strange things—images, thoughts, connections he had never made before. Sometimes it was distracting. The outdoors itself was distracting, the feel of wind, the smell of leaves, the great wide sky overhead. For so long he had lived in darkness, in pain and misery. And now to be free…

  That was a sign and a word he had never known, until Caesar had taught it to him.

  Free.

  He returned to the human’s camp and hunted through the things he found there. After a moment he located a bag of food. Gripping it under one arm, he returned to Caesar, lowering his head as he approached, offering the bag.

  Caesar touched Koba’s arm, and then his cheek. Good, it meant. He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder in a peculiar, human-like way, and scrambled up the nearest of the trees. Koba and the others followed, to where the rest of the troop waited, still in the high canopy.

  In a moment they were all on the move again, the soft rustling of the trees the only sound marking their passage.

  Because now Caesar required silence. Silence was their survival.

  The dark sky had come and gone five times since Koba’s liberation and the battle with the humans and their killing tools. They had won that fight, but the humans hadn’t stopped chasing them, of course. Their flying cages crossed the skies above, and troops of them roamed the woods, but Caesar was clever. He sent out scouts to find small groups of their pursuers, or loners like the one Koba had just encountered.

  They were to be frightened, though not harmed. They would report their meetings, but when hunters came, the apes would be gone to some other place. In this way they had led their pursuers in vast, twisty circles. In this way, they survived, here in this awesome place that was at once so strange and so familiar.

  For this place, Caesar had taught Koba another new word, another new sign.

  Home.

  1

  David Flynn woke around four in the morning, as he usually did. It didn’t matter what time he went to bed, how much he’d had to drink, whether he had run a marathon or spent all day writing. At four, he woke up. It had started when he was in his early twenties, when he’d moved from Atlanta to the Bay Area. Even after ten years, his body wouldn’t let go of the Eastern Time Zone.

  He started to sit up, and felt the extra weight in the bed before remembered that Clancy was still there. Her fine, long hair spread out on the pillow. It looked dark in the faint light, but in the day it was the color of hay, with touches of goldenrod where the sun had lightened it. She was only half-covered by her sheet, and he studied her a moment, wanting to trace the contours of her body with the tips of his fingers. He liked the feel of her skin, the shape of her.

  But he didn’t want to wake her. She usually didn’t stay over, but she had some sort of early appointment downtown, and his apartment was a lot closer than hers. He was pretty sure “early” didn’t mean four o’clock.

  He eased out of bed, went into his small living room, and glanced at his laptop. He could stand to tighten up the piece on the appropriations cover-up in City Hall, but he was frankly kind of sick of it at the moment. So he switched on the television, cruised through several infomercials and syndicated comedies before one of the news channels caught his eye. They were showing footage of the bizarre events on the Golden Gate Bridge five days ago, when hundreds of apes had escaped from all over the city, fought their way through police blockades, and escaped across the span. It was certainly the strangest event on record in San Francisco, and what made it stranger was the complete blackout of information that had followed it. All of the parklands north of the bridge—the Muir Woods, Mount Tamalpais—everything had been closed, and all but the most essential roads blockaded.

  While there were a lot of rumors swirling around about how the apes had escaped in the first place, there was very little of what he as journalist would call fact. Mayor House and Chief of Police Burston had assured the public that everything was under control, that the numbers of the apes had been exaggerated, and that the eyewitness reports given by those who had been there were the result of hysteria.

  Most of the footage of the event, flickering across the screen, was amateur, taken with cell phones, and it had been a particularly foggy day, anyway, so it was difficult to assess the claims one way or another.

  The scene cut to a studio, where a local talk-show host was interviewing a man with a dark, thin face. David recognized him as Clancy’s boss, Dr. Roberts, so he turned up the sound a little.

  “…primatologist at Berkeley,” the host was saying. “People involved in the incident claim very peculiar behavior coming from the animals. They say that the apes acted with organization and purpose, and seemed to have a plan. As someone who studies primates, how would you assess these claims?”

  “Well, first of all,” Roberts began, “apes are intelligent, and capable of learning a wide range of behaviors. They are also social, and do act in concert. Chimpanzees, for instance, will sometimes band together to hunt colobus monkeys for food.”

  “I thought apes were vegetarian.”

  “That’s a misconception,” Roberts pointed out. “Chimps are omnivores—they eat a lot of insects, in particular. Gorillas a little less so. The only species that is almost entirely herbivorous are the orangutans.”

  “Interesting,” the host said. “But we’ve gotten off subject.”

  “I think several things are going on here,” Roberts said, nodding. “The first is that we humans tend to see everything in our own image. We anthropomorphize. We do it even with dogs and cats—assign human motives and emotions to them. We have an even greater tendency to do that when apes are involved, because they seem more like us. The other factor is that most of these apes were born in captivity, and in many cases trained to act human—for movies, television, circuses. The apes you see on TV are usually young, still cute, and not too dangerous. But when they get older and lose some of their charm—not only in appearance, some get very aggressive—they are often ‘retired’ to shelters or sold to laboratories for medical testing. So they may well have been superficially mimicking human
behavior. The final thing I think that comes into play here is ourselves.”

  “You mean other than anthropomorphizing?”

  “Right. We humans are natural storytellers. It’s what we do. There have been some pretty good studies that demonstrate that eyewitness accounts of any kind—especially when strong emotions like fear and surprise are involved—are substantially inaccurate even a few hours after the events. That’s because to make sense of what we’ve seen, we background it with some sort of logical framework. We tell ourselves a story that makes sense in our own minds—then we tell the story to each other. The details that make the most sense to the most people stay in the story, while the rest drop out. It gets bigger.”

  “So you’re saying that what Mayor House says is true…”

  David actually jumped out of his seat when a hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” Clancy said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Yeah. Was the TV too loud?”

  “Not really.” She nodded at the television. “It was Piers’s voice. Thought I was back in his class or something.”

  “With no clothes on?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She glanced down at her state of dishabille and grinned.

  “Funny man,” she said. “I can put something on, if you want.”

  “No,” he said. “No need to go out of your way.” He turned the sound down. “There,” he said. “Better?”

  “Yep.” She nodded. “So why are you up? Bed too crowded?”

  “No,” he said. “I always wake up around four. I’ve learned I can either lie there, staring at the ceiling, or get up for an hour or so and piddle. Then I can fall back asleep.”

  “I can think of a third alternative,” she said, stepping around behind him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m kind of tired, and I know you need your rest.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, kissing the nape of his neck. It sent tingles through his whole body.

  “Now, that’s not fair,” he said.

  “I never said I was fair,” Clancy replied, kissing him again, working around toward his ear. She reached around his chest to pull him against her.