by Greg Keyes
Wait, he commanded. Watch.
Then he began picking through the fruit, not sure what he was looking for. Something strange, something out of place. He sorted through some papayas, then a bunch of bananas—and there, fixed to the stem inside the bunch was a white rectangle about the size and shape of the thing Will used to unlock his car from a distance.
A little machine.
A few more minutes of searching and he found another, stuck into a slit in a durian.
Come, he signed. He pulled the thing from the bananas. Find things like this. Take off of fruit and put here. He laid his down.
It was a lot of fruit. They sorted it by moving it, checking each piece carefully as they did so. They found eight of the white rectangles. Then Caesar had them check it again. Reluctantly, the others obeyed.
Some of the fruit had been placed in net bags. Caesar took one of them and tied the rectangles inside. Then he turned to his band.
Take all you can carry back to the troop. Koba, go with my band. Get every ape that can move fast enough, and tell them to come get the rest. Rocket, stay here and set watch, high and low.
What about you? Rocket signed.
Caesar grinned and held up the bag.
10
“If the rest of you matches your eyes,” David said to the receptionist, “you must be pretty hot.”
He knew it was cheesy but, although it was hard to tell behind the filter mask she was wearing, he thought he got a smile from that. At worst she probably thought he was a harmless dufus—which was better than having her know the truth.
A lot was going on at Gen Sys, and most of it seemed to have to do with repairs. The apes had smashed out a lot of windows, and everything else seemed in a general state of disarray. Maybe for that reason, it hadn’t been that hard to get in the front door. Getting past the lobby, though—that might be a trick.
“What can I do for you, sir?” she asked, her voice muffled.
“Well, it’s not official business,” he said. “But an old buddy of mine works here. I haven’t seen him in years, and I was hoping I could surprise him, take him to lunch.”
She hesitated for moment.
“What’s his name?” she finally asked.
“Will Rodman.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry, sir, Dr. Rodman doesn’t work here anymore. He resigned his position the week before last.”
“Ah, shoot, really?” he said. “Did he get another job?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she replied. “But he did quit just before…” She broke off.
Just before Monkeygate, David finished, silently.
“Anyway, he’s not here,” she said, her eyes cutting down.
“That’s really disappointing,” he said. “I really wanted to surprise him. There was this time in college… Oh, hey! I don’t want to bore you. It’s not your concern. You’ve been nice. Thanks.”
The girl looked around, leaned forward conspiratorially, and beckoned him in. He bent toward her.
“I liked Will,” she said. “He was nice, not like some of the people who work here.”
Her fingers went to work on her computer keyboard.
“I have his home address here,” she said. “Maybe you could ambush him there.”
“I knew you were an angel,” he said. “It’s all in the eyes. What’s that address?”
* * *
When he reached the address in Pacific Heights, he found the house with quarantine tape around it. The next house was quarantined, as well. And, for that matter, so were most on the street. All of the homes were upscale, Victorians and the like, and in the distance he could see the bridge. The silence in the neighborhood was eerie. There should have been children playing, dogs barking, cars cruising by, but instead there was just the quiet of a graveyard.
He felt a chill, wondering if everywhere would be like this soon. He wasn’t sure what the latest body count was, but it wasn’t looking good.
After some hesitation, he approached the house and knocked, but there was no answer. He went around back, and got no answer there either, but he found the door unlocked. Figuring the police were too busy with looting and riots, he decided he could risk a little unlawful entry and stepped inside.
“Hello?” he called. “Anyone home?”
He didn’t really expect an answer, nor did he get one, but it set him at ease enough to search around a bit.
It was a nice suburban place with a sunny kitchen and embroidered hand towels in the bathrooms. It seemed in no way unusual until he found the picture on an old upright piano. It featured a man in his thirties with curly brown hair. And he was hugging a chimp, with obvious mutual affection.
“Okay, Dr. Rodman,” he said. “You’re definitely the man I’ve been looking for.” And he began the search in earnest.
The attic was a weird combination of children’s room and monkey playhouse, making it clear that for this family, the chimp had been the child. He kept looking, hoping to find a notepad, computer, some recordings, anything that could tell him more about what Rodman had been working on in the past months, or even years. After a while, it dawned on him. There was no such device in the house. Nothing—no desktop, laptop or tablet. No phones, no file players, nothing on which anything could be stored.
Rodman had either taken it all with him, or it had been removed.
He was on the verge of giving up, reduced to combing through the chimp’s room for the second time, when—in the corner, under a pile of drawings that could easily have been made by a human child—he found a landline handset. The battery had lost its charge, of course, but he hadn’t seen any landlines at all. There had been plenty of plugs for them, but no phones, which wasn’t really all that unusual, since a lot of people were moving solely to portable devices.
He took a last look around, then slipped the handset in his pocket and left.
Back home, he stuck the phone in his charger, hoping it would fit. It seemed to, but he couldn’t really tell if it was working. Then he sat down at his keyboard, and started trying to come at the story from another angle.
He went back over some of the Monkeygate stuff, trying to steer away from speculation and stick with what was actually known. Trying to find connections.
To begin with, Will Rodman had been trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. It was more than a job to him, since his father had suffered from the condition. It was his work that Gen Sys had heralded as a cure until the primary test subject, a chimp, had gone bat-crazy in a room full of investors. In theory Rodman’s work had been shut down, but what if it had continued? What if some new iteration of his “cure” had driven not just one ape mad, but a whole lot them? Yet the first apes to escape had been kept in the San Bruno Primate Shelter, not Gen Sys. One of the employees had been killed during the escape, apparently when an ape turned a hose on him while he was brandishing a high-voltage prod. There were eyewitnesses who said the security tapes showed the incident clearly, and that the apes had a leader, a chimpanzee who stood and acted more like a man than an ape. Somewhere in the fuss, however, the security tapes seemed to have disappeared.
Like a lot of things—and people—involved in Monkeygate.
After they had escaped San Bruno, the apes seemed to have split into two groups. One went to Gen Sys and busted it up, freeing all of the apes located there. The other bunch engineered the breakout at the zoo. Then they all had stampeded through town, converging at the Golden Gate Bridge.
How would the apes at the shelter have known where Gen Sys was?
Which brought him back to Rodman, who clearly had owned a chimp of his own. One of the test subjects maybe. He checked through the Sentinel’s police reports, looking for anything to do with apes, monkeys, or chimps—cross-references that also mentioned Rodman. And after a bit of digging, he found what he was looking for.
Rodman’s chimp had bitten one of his neighbors, charges had been pressed, and the animal had been removed to the San Bruno shelter. So there was the f
irst connection to Gen Sys—an ape owned by a lead scientist there was in San Bruno, where Monkeygate presumably began. The second was that the escaped apes had gone back to Gen Sys. The third was that Steven Jacobs—the man in charge of the Gen Sys labs—had died in a helicopter accident, along with the San Bruno police chief.
Now the fourth connection—according to Clancy—was that the parent company of Gen Sys was using a military contractor it also owned to clean up what was left of the apes. Clearly they were still trying to protect themselves from something. Something other than a bunch of escaped primates.
He looked over Clancy’s list of file names again. At first glance, he still didn’t see anything, but he checked again, just to be sure. Reading them aloud.
When he came to RV113 he stopped. Was that familiar?
It was somehow. He did an Internet search on it, but what came up was something by a composer named Vivaldi, which probably wasn’t what he was looking for. So he went back though his typed notes. A search through them didn’t turn up anything, but then he remembered a letter-number combination, and so a quick breeze-through found it.
ALZ112.
That was disappointing. The letters were wrong, and the number was off by one. But what if they were part of a sequence?
He had assumed that the ALZ stood for Alzheimer’s, since that was what Rodman had been trying to cure. Presumably there had been an ALZ110, and an ALZ111. In theory there would be no ALZ113, because he had stopped the research after his big failure. But—again—what if he hadn’t? What if he had carried on?
Yet why change the ALZ to RV? What could RV stand for?
No, he had to be barking up the wrong tree. It was all a series of coincidences—his reporter’s brain was trying to find a pattern that wasn’t there.
He went and got a beer, cracked it open, and turned on the news. Then he checked the phone, and found that it had taken the charge. He started scrolling through its record of calls. The last recorded call was from several days ago, presumably around the time when the battery called it quits. It was from someone name Linda Andersen.
He turned down the sound on the TV, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed the number. It rang and then went to messages.
“Hi, Linda,” he said. “My name is David Flynn, and I’m a reporter from the San Francisco Sentinel. I have some questions I’d like to ask if you have the time. Don’t worry. They aren’t personal.”
He hung up. Another long shot. She was probably Rodman’s cleaning lady or something.
He turned the sound back up and took a drink of the beer, flipping through the channels in the vague hope of finding something mindless to watch. Instead he ended up being arrested by the weird smile of Jean Vogel, a prominent pundit with strong religious views and apparent aspirations to the US House of Representatives.
“…a deliberate misreading of what I said,” she was saying. “People like to take me out of context. But I’m all about context.”
“Then when you said that the Federal Government shouldn’t be providing aid to such cities as San Francisco and New York,” the show’s host responded, “are you telling me you didn’t mean it?”
“As I said, Brett,” she said, again smiling her strange, unfriendly smile, “that statement, taken out of context, makes no sense.”
“Well, would you care to contextualize it for me then?”
“I would be delighted to, Brett,” Vogel replied. “I say that this disease is a local problem, to be solved by the state and local governments. Because if you look locally, where is this disease located? Not in Montana. There are only three cases there. Or Oklahoma—two verified instances. Mississippi, none at all. You can go down the list. These are all places where real Americans love God and fear him, where they do not pass laws allowing the ungodly union of homosexuals. These places are being spared. These places have the mark on their lintel that the angel of death passes by.”
“Then do I understand you to say that San Francisco and New York have been singled out by God because they recognize marriage equality?” the reporter said. “That this plague is his punishment?”
“Amongst other things, Brett. My point is, they brought this upon themselves. It is their problem. There’s no reason that the tax dollars of decent, hard-working Americans—citizens with real values—should pay to salvage Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“But Ms. Vogel,” the host protested, “the disease has spread to many other places. Paris, for instance—”
“Don’t even get me started on the French,” she said. “It only proves my point.”
“But it’s well known that diseases like this spread most quickly in densely populated areas with national and international hubs of transportation. The places you mention are mostly rural—”
“Is it?” Vogel countered. “Is that really ‘well known’? Or is this just more of the same propaganda from the liberal secular scientists who tell us that we came from monkeys? Look, here’s some science, if you dare to hear it. The first warning was AIDS. It was a shot right across our bows, as clear a message as anyone could want. And yet look how it was ignored.” She leaned forward. “AIDS was a retrovirus. The current plague is a retrovirus. This is how God works his will.
“I have it on very good authority,” she continued, “from a prominent archaeologist, that the plague of the firstborn in ancient Egypt was a retrovirus—”
“That’s enough.” David sighed, changing the channel again, this time to a cooking show. He drank his beer and listened to some guy talk about brisket.
Then he sat up.
“Oh, shit,” he said aloud.
RV113.
Retrovirus 113.
Implying there had been a 112. What exactly had been in ALZ112? He knew viruses were sometimes used in gene therapy…
The phone rang, and he jumped. He picked it up, hoping it was Linda, but the number was unfamiliar.
“Hello?” he answered.
There was a long pause.
“Is this David Flynn?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Linda?”
Another pause.
“No,” the woman said. “Linda died. Of the virus.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“She was my sister, Mr. Flynn. May I ask what you wanted to speak to her about?”
“I’m trying to find out some information about a man named Will Rodman.”
“He was Linda’s team leader,” she said. “At Gen Sys.”
He paused, not quite sure what to ask next, but the woman on the other end of the line spoke first.
“I’m just not sure,” she said. “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
He took a mental deep breath, and plunged right in.
“Is this about ALZ113?” he asked.
He heard her breathing, and prayed she didn’t hang up.
“Yes,” she said, finally. He waited patiently for her to go on. “I have something I think Linda would have wanted you to have,” she finally said.
He felt his pulse speed up a little.
“Is that so?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Well, can we meet somewhere?”
“I don’t like to go out,” she said. “I’m afraid of the virus. But I’ll meet you in Delores Park. I’ll give it to you there.”
“When?”
“Now, if you can come.” She paused, and then continued. “It scares me to have it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m on my way. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
“It will take me a little longer,” she said. “I’ll be in a lime-green sweater. I have red hair. I’m, well, thirtyish.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. “I’m tall, with blond hair. I’ll be in jeans and a plaid shirt, I’ll wear a hat—a Forty-Niners cap.”
As he hung up, he felt sort of like someone in a spy novel.
Then it also occurred to him that if this was a spy novel, he might wel
l be walking into some sort of trap.
11
“What happened to the goddamn camera?” Corbin snapped.
“I think we have to assume the chimps got it,” Malakai replied. “One or all of them must have known what it was.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Malakai, Clancy, Corbin and his crew were gathered around the monitors in the command centre.
“Not really,” Clancy said. “A lot of these guys have been monitored by cameras all of their lives.”
“They didn’t notice it when they first found the fruit.”
“No,” she said. “But this might be a different group.”
“It might be the leader, this time,” Malakai added.
“Leader?” Corbin grunted.
“Everything they do is organized,” Malakai said. “Very well organized. That implies a leader—and, furthermore, a leader with superior intelligence. Or perhaps, in fact, human intelligence.”
Corbin looked like he’d eaten something sour.
“There was a guy,” he said. “He followed them out here when they first came. We thought at first he might be leading them. But he wasn’t.”
“How sure are you of that?” Malakai asked.
“Very sure,” a new voice said. Malakai looked up to see that Trumann Phillips had entered the room. “He had been the owner of one of the chimps, that’s all.”
“So you talked to him?”
“He was interviewed, yes.”
“That doesn’t rule out the possibility that they have a human leader,” Malakai said.
“No,” Phillips responded, “I suppose it doesn’t. So how are things going?”
“Some of them found the fruit a while back—six, seven maybe. They ate some of it and left. They didn’t carry any with them, so the tracking chips are still there.”
“Maybe they went and got the rest of the, what, herd?” Phillips said.
“Troop,” Clancy corrected.
“So maybe the troop is gorging on fruit salad even as we speak, every living one of them.”
“That could be,” Clancy said. “Our theory is that there is one large group of them somewhere, and several smaller bands that are foraging. Based on their behavior in the grocery stores in Mills Valley, we assumed that if they found fruit, they would bring it back to the rest—to the slower ones, the infants, the injured.”
