by Alex Irvine
Twenty-three. More inside.
Koba pointed at large metal boxes, big enough to put trucks inside. What is in those? he asked. But neither Grey nor Stone could see.
Then we must get closer, Koba signed. They moved in, slowly. From the closest pillar they dropped to the deck of the ship. Chimps and orangutans could swim, but Koba did not know how. Even if he had, he did not trust the water swirling through the narrow gap between the bridge pillar and the fort. They crept along the railing, and then climbed a metal frame tower coming up from the top of the building on the ship’s deck. They moved slowly, to avoid drawing attention, and watched from the top of the tower.
Just inside the fence, near enough that the apes could hear their voices, two humans were talking while six others used metal bars to pry open crates.
“Bottom line,” one of the humans said. “How much of it still works.”
“We’re still taking inventory,” the other said, “but so far most of the arsenal seems functional.”
The first human nodded.
“Good. Because we may have to go up there, if Malcolm and the others don’t come back down. Deal with those animals ourselves.”
Animals, Koba thought. So be it.
As the tops came off the crates, Koba saw guns. One of the crates held guns like the ones they had burned… yet not the same. They had no wood parts. They looked new. Koba thought about this and decided they must have been in those boxes for ten winters. So the humans were not just taking care of guns they already had.
They were looking for new weapons… and finding them.
The second crate opened. Inside it were long metal tubes with bulbs at one end, shaped like the bulb of a flower just before it bloomed. What were those? On the side of the crate were letters, roughly painted over older, smaller letters.
RPGs
What are RPGs? he signaled to Grey and Stone. Both shook their heads. Koba did not know either. But he intended to find out.
His focus was broken by the sound of gunfire. Many shots, in a burst. He looked across the open area to the fence line on the other side. A large warehouse stood there, built onto one side of the fort itself. The gunshots came from that direction.
The sounds drew Koba. He could not resist them.
* * *
They worked around the fence and along the steep rocky bluff separating the fort from the overgrown area at the base of the bridge. The bluff ran under the bridge and the apes followed it toward the area from which they had heard the gunshots coming.
Koba sped up when they got under the bridge again, unable to stop himself. They got to the corner of the fence and peered through it, around the side of a metal building. Two humans stood with a crate of guns, near a pile of sandbags in a narrow space between the metal wall of the building and another wall inside the fence. One of them removed a curved part of one of the guns, and put it on another. He squatted behind the pile of sandbags and aimed the gun at an old car, out under the bridge on the shore.
Grey and Stone were tense on either side of Koba. He was just still, watching as one of the humans fired many shots, at least ten, the bullets punching holes in the metal body of the car and breaking its windows.
The sound was deafening. Koba loved it.
His hands ached to hold a gun.
We must get closer, he signaled. Stone began to motion as if he might argue, but Grey grabbed his hands and pushed them down. The three apes watched again.
There was a fence in the way. How did they get closer? Koba could be patient when he had to be, especially if he could pass the time watching the two humans firing. One of them was big and hairy, wearing a black leather vest. His chin fur reached over his chest. The other was stringy, with very short hair and no beard. He looked, Koba thought, like any ape could break him in half.
Another burst of fire chewed at the car. Then the firing stopped.
“Terry!” the thin human called. “Jammed.”
The large bearded human took the jammed gun. Koba watched. He would need to know everything about the things. The bearded human, Terry, removed the curved bullet box. Then he pulled on a little lever on the gun. It wouldn’t move.
“Damn,” he said. “I’ll take it inside.”
Inside, Koba thought. He looked at the warehouse wall, seeing the door that until then had blended in. Terry opened it.
“Hold on,” the other human called. “It’s your turn to shoot, man. I don’t want to bogart the AKs.”
“Square deal, McVeigh.” Terry walked back out and took a new gun from the crate. He put the bullet box in it and pulled the little lever. The gun clicked. Koba imagined making that click. He imagined the fear on the face of the human at which he pointed the gun.
When Terry began to shoot at the car, Koba jumped from the rocks over the fence. Grey and Stone came immediately after. He motioned them to stay back, near the fence while he scooted toward the door which Terry had left open.
Terry fired and fired.
Koba got to the door and looked in.
He could not believe what he saw. Crate after crate after crate, all like the gun crates and the RPG crates. They were stacked higher than Koba’s head, higher than a human’s head. Rows and rows, hundreds of crates… thousands of guns. Koba moved into the warehouse, unable to resist. He came closer to the nearest crate and reached out.
“What the—?”
Koba spun around to see the spindly human, McVeigh, pointing a gun at him. Not the jammed one, a new one.
“Don’t you move. Understand me? I know you can talk.” He called out over his shoulder. “Terry! Get in here quick!”
Koba did not move. He showed the human no fear, but neither did he show aggression. He had not yet decided what to do.
Terry came through the door.
“Holy shit,” he said. Koba didn’t know the word holy, but he knew shit. Terry pointed his gun at the ape.
Behind the two humans he saw Grey and Stone, peering in. Koba made a small sign, as small as he could possibly make it. Back. They eased out of view, but he knew they would stay close by. Then he studied the humans again, deciding what to do next.
34
McVeigh and Terry looked at each other, then at the chimp. Then back out the door.
“What do we do?” McVeigh asked. Terry might look like a meth-head but he wasn’t stupid.
Terry shrugged, but the barrel of his AK didn’t move.
“Where’d he come from?”
“I just found him,” McVeigh said.
“Should we shoot him?” Terry asked.
McVeigh didn’t know what to say about that.
“Maybe,” he said. “Yeah. I mean, no. I don’t know.”
“Dreyfus should know about this,” Terry said.
That was for damn sure. But McVeigh didn’t want to leave this ape here while they went and got Dreyfus. He was leaning toward killing it, especially since it just stared at him. Didn’t move, didn’t blink, no expression on its face.
Don’t borrow trouble, he told himself. Apes show up in the fort, the day after they make a big deal about not getting in each other’s space. That happens, apes get shot. Simple. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You are one ugly sonofabitch, aren’t you?” he said, working himself up to it.
The truth was, McVeigh liked shooting guns, but he didn’t like shooting people. Or animals, for that matter. He liked the swagger of guns, the feeling they gave him. But he’d killed a man when he had to, in the second year after the plague had petered out. A bandit, caught breaking into the Colony. Bam. No second thoughts. He had to go down.
This situation didn’t feel like that. But McVeigh couldn’t put a finger on why.
“You gonna do it?” Terry asked, looking freaked out. McVeigh figured he probably looked pretty freaked out, too. He sure as hell felt that way.
“I don’t know. Do you? Shit. One of us should go get Dreyfus.” McVeigh wanted to be the one, but he knew if he suggested it, Terry would want to do it instead, which would
put McVeigh on the hook if he stayed here and the chimp split. Nope, he didn’t like that idea.
“Let’s just shoot it,” Terry said.
The chimp, which throughout their conversation had not moved so much as a whisker, suddenly stuck its tongue out and let go the longest and wettest Bronx cheer McVeigh had ever heard. He looked at Terry, just to make sure his friend had seen it, too. Both of them quickly looked back at the chimp, AKs still leveled at it. But now it started prancing around, and making faces like it was…
“Damn,” Terry said. “You think maybe it used to be some kind of circus chimp?”
“I thought they didn’t have chimps in the circus anymore,” McVeigh said. “I mean, anymore before the flu.”
Thinking of the flu made him want to shoot the chimp again. But it was kind of funny. He couldn’t help it. He started to chuckle. The chimp did a series of somersaults, completing a circle and ending up where it had started. It bowed and then pinched two fingers and the thumb of its right hand together and pantomimed eating something held in them.
“Dude, I think he wants something to eat,” McVeigh said, still laughing.
“He must have gotten separated from the others,” Terry said. He bent down so he was closer to the chimp’s eye level. “You lost?” he said, too loud. “Trying to get home?”
Confused, the chimp waddled up to McVeigh and tried to take his hand. McVeigh pulled it away, and the chimp stood there looking up at him.
“Maybe not all of them can talk,” he said. “I don’t know, what do you think? I feel kinda bad for the guy. We got some stale bread or something we can give him?”
Terry looked at the chimp for a long time. Then he said, “Go on, get out of here. Stupid monkey.”
That was fine with McVeigh. Monkey gone, they wouldn’t have to tell anyone about it, and they wouldn’t have to clean up the mess and answer questions after shooting it. The perfect solution.
So he waved his gun toward the doorway. Then he noticed that the chimp seemed to be looking out that way, at something. McVeigh glanced over his shoulder and didn’t see anything.
“You heard him,” he said to the chimp. “Get out of here.”
The chimp waddled out the door, waving bye-bye with big flapping motions of its hands. When it was gone, McVeigh decided to forget all about it. There were guns to check, and so many of them that he’d get to shoot all day.
35
Inside the mechanicals room, Malcolm and his team staged their equipment and got ready for the first big obstacle they’d have to surmount. That was getting water going through the dam again. Right now its sluices were dry, and the water pouring through the logjam at the top of the dam was ample evidence that the intake was not—as the professionals would have said—taking in.
Once they had that happening, they would be able to take a look at the wiring inside the mechanicals room and see what needed work. Then, with any luck, they could fire some juice across the hills, under the bay, and into the city.
To get water going through the dam again, they had to get to the flow mechanism in the dam’s interior. And to do that, they needed to go through a series of tunnels inside the structure. Foster and Kemp secured ropes around a heavy vertical pipe mounted into the wall of the mechanicals room, and tested the knots, hauling with their combined weight until they were satisfied nothing would slip. Carver and Malcolm scraped ten years’ worth of rust from around a hatch set into the floor of the powerhouse, and levered it open with a crowbar from one of the tool lockers.
Looking through the contents of the lockers, Malcolm thought that if nothing else, they would come away from this trip with useful supplies for the Colony—spools of wire, hand tools, unused lengths of pipe and conduit, all kinds of stuff. The powerhouse hadn’t been looted, probably because it was in the middle of nowhere and most people had no idea where their electricity actually came from. So it wouldn’t have occurred to them to go digging through a dam to see what might be inside.
When he and Carver got the hatch open, they dropped the ropes into the access tunnel. It was barely three feet in diameter, with metal rungs set into the wall. They were slick. Everything in here was slick. The water had enjoyed ten years to find ways in.
Alexander had the solar flashlights, all charged up yesterday. They were good for at least an hour of light. Malcolm hoped this first part of the dam operation wouldn’t take that long. The teen handed each of the men a flashlight. They had carabiner clips, so Malcolm hooked his onto a belt loop. Kemp did the same. Foster and Carver had vests with loops, and attached their flashlights to those.
“Who wants to go first?” Malcolm asked.
Carver shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll go.”
He flipped a belay rope around his forearm a couple of times and lowered himself into the tunnel, feeling for the first rung. When he got it, he bounced lightly, testing the steel’s integrity. Then he took another step down. “Solid,” he said, and started climbing down with the rope in a loop around behind him. As he reached from rung to rung, he flipped more slack into it. It wasn’t a classic belay, since they hadn’t brought climbing equipment, but if one of the rungs proved too slick, or snapped off, having the rope right there increased your chances of not taking a bad fall.
Kemp went next, then Foster. Waiting to give them a little clearance so he wasn’t stepping on Foster’s fingers, Malcolm looked from Ellie to Alexander.
“This is the fun part,” he said.
“I’ll start testing some of the switches,” Alexander said. He had a voltage meter and some other electrician’s tools, along with a battery they could use to run test current through parts of the control panel.
“I expect a full report when we get back,” Malcolm said with a wink. He looked to Ellie. “Dam spelunking,” he said. “Life leads in unexpected directions.”
“That it does,” she agreed. “Be careful.”
As he climbed down the ladder, Malcolm switched on his flash, and looked back up at the circle of light. He saw Ellie hold up one hand, fingers crossed. He shot her a grin and then had to concentrate on the rungs. Three points of contact, shift the grip on the rope, repeat. The tunnel was tight, and by the time they were thirty feet into it, the sounds of their breathing and the scrape of boots on metal rungs were the only things they could hear.
The roar of the waterfall was gone. Malcolm glanced down and in the swaying beam of his flashlight he saw that the other three men were already at the bottom, jammed together in a small landing area. He joined them and disengaged himself from the rope.
The next step was to see if they could get through the sealed door that opened from the access tunnel to the much larger penstock tunnel that channeled the water from the dam’s intake down to the power-generating turbines below. The door was set into synthetic rubber seals that in theory should have survived sitting in place for ten years just fine… but they had no idea what might be on the other side of it in the penstock tunnel. Malcolm shot the bolts holding it in place and leaned against it.
It didn’t move.
“Need a hand here,” he said. Kemp and Carver braced themselves against the door. There was no room for Foster. They pushed again, and with a loud peeling crackle, as rubber seals parted for the first time in more than a decade, the door pushed open.
Malcolm leaned through it and shone his flashlight into the much larger penstock tunnel.
“Breathing room,” he commented.
“Good,” Kemp joked. “I was getting to know you guys a little too well.”
The penstock tunnel angled sharply upward toward the flow mechanism, which was far enough away that their flashlight beams didn’t reach it. Malcolm stepped onto a small level platform set into the angled tunnel wall. The interior of the tunnel was concrete, pitted enough to provide toeholds but slick enough that the best way to climb was close to a belly-crawl, keeping enough of your body in contact with the tunnel that friction had a better chance of keeping you in place while you searched for the
next place to plant a finger or the tip of a boot.
They climbed, slowly and carefully, until they reached the flow mechanism at the top. Here was a level area, more than large enough for all of them to drop their packs and get a look at the massive shuttered door. It was engineered to open by degrees, regulating the flow, as well as the level of water left in the artificial lake the dam had created. On the other side of those shutters, Malcolm thought, there was a million tons of water wanting to get down the penstock tunnel and get back to the ocean.
The dam operators had shut it down for some reason, and now there was no way to mechanically open it—not after ten years. They didn’t have the time or the expertise to take the control systems apart, clean them, put them back together, and then hope there was nothing wrong with the electronics.
He wished there was a way to make full use of the mechanism, but they weren’t here to be perfect. If they couldn’t operate it from above, they’d just have to force it open, and forget about regulating the amount of water coming through.
“So, you want to blow this?” Kemp said. “Have to be careful not to crack the dam, you know? Be a damn shame to come up here and accidentally breach it.”
“It sure would,” Malcolm said. “Foster. How much do you think we’ll need? Conservatively. I’d rather do this twice than use too much the first time.”
Foster reached into his pack and pulled out a brick of C-4. He flipped open a pocket knife, looked at the flow shutters, looked back at the pocket knife and set it about six inches from one end of the brick. “Give or take,” he said.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. “Conservative, like I said. We just need it open.”
Foster started cutting the explosive as Kemp got a spool of wire from his pack and started unspooling it back down the tunnel. Foster molded the C-4 into a fist-sized blob at the bottom of the shutter assembly, right in the middle where the shutters came together. “I figure if we pop the bottom open, the water and gravity’ll do the rest. Make sense to you, Mr. Architect?” he said to Malcolm.
“It does,” Malcolm said. When Foster had the explosive set the way he wanted it, he took the wire ends from Kemp and stuck them deep into the blob. Then they made their way back down the tunnel, Kemp pausing frequently to unspool more wire. Malcolm was quietly terrified by this part of the operation. He imagined some kind of static buildup setting off the charge before they got back into the access tunnel. If the explosion didn’t kill them—which it probably would, since the focused blast wave coming down the tunnel would probably turn their internal organs to jelly—the force of the water would batter them to death even before they had a chance to drown.
