by Alex Irvine
“Man,” Terry said. “We don’t even know what’s in half of those.”
“Take us a year to find out,” McVeigh said. He didn’t care. Already they’d unpacked, test-fired, and inventoried enough firepower to put a gun in the hands of every man, woman, and child in the Colony. The rest of it, hell, it might come in handy someday, but they wouldn’t need it any time soon.
He took what he considered to be a moderate sip from the bottle. Whiskey was one thing that was still available here in the ruins of all that was good and holy.
“This is the good stuff,” he said. “None of that blended crap.”
“What’re you, some kinda connoisseur?” Terry asked.
McVeigh was about to tell Terry that there were three things of which he considered himself a connoisseur—women, guns, and whiskey—when they heard chimp noises.
They looked back toward the door facing the firing range and in came the chimp. Where had he been? McVeigh wondered. Did he disappear into the city somewhere?
He came hooting and shuffling in, making a big happy grimace and waving at Terry and McVeigh as if he hadn’t seen them in a year. “
“Man, is this guy serious?” McVeigh said. “The rest of the apes must have left him behind because he’s such a pain in the ass.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Terry called out. “I thought we told you to go home!”
The chimp did a somersault, then another, rolling right up to them. He grinned at McVeigh and made eating motions.
“I think he likes you,” Terry said.
“Shut up,” McVeigh said. He slugged back a big mouthful of the whiskey and saw the chimp watching the bottle. He looked from one of them to the other, pantomiming with both hands a drinking gesture. McVeigh looked at Terry.
“You want a drink, Fugly?” Terry asked. He had a big false smile on his face. The chimp nodded and rocked back and forth from foot to foot. “Go on, V, give him some. If I had scars like that all over me, and I was blind in one eye, I’d hope someone would give me a drink.”
McVeigh handed the bottle to the chimp, which brought it to his lips and sucked down a good fourth of the bottle. Terry started snickering.
“Whoa, take it easy,” McVeigh said, mostly because he didn’t want the chimp to drink all their damn whiskey, but also because he was feeling a little bad for the guy. Ape or no, he seemed like a harmless goofball. He reached to take the bottle back and the chimp let him have it right back. Something happened in his eye, a shift in the set of the muscles or something… and all that whiskey came right back out of the chimp’s mouth, in a spit-take blast right into their faces.
“Ah, shit!” McVeigh cried, wiping the booze from his eyes. He heard Terry crack up and was about to ask him what he thought was so damn funny about having a chimp spit liquor in your face. Shit, wasn’t that how the Simian Flu had gotten started, from chimps sneezing on people? Terry’s sense of humor was pretty damn weird, when you took a minute to think about it.
Then Terry stopped laughing, and McVeigh blinked the rest of the whiskey from his eyes, and there was the chimp, holding an AK47 in his hands like he knew how to use it. His teeth were bared and McVeigh thought, That’s what he looks like when he really smiles.
The whole thing, the dancing, the grimaces, the somersaults. It was a game. It was a sucker play, and he and Terry had fallen for it.
“Come on, man,” McVeigh said. “We were just kidding around with you. You hungry? We can find—”
The barrel of the gun came up.
He’s not going to pull the trigger, McVeigh thought. No. He’s not—
45
The apes had worked like dogs, clearing debris from the part of the access tunnel that had collapsed. Now a couple of them were looking down from the access hatch, one of them holding onto the rope that hung down and looped around Malcolm’s waist. He’d done it to make Ellie feel better about the possibility of him surviving another tunnel collapse, and it had the side effect of making him think constantly that the tunnel might be about to collapse.
He needed to get this done and get the hell back up into the late-afternoon sunshine. If it was still late afternoon.
Pretty soon Caesar was going to come kick them out.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. He was tired enough that he’d started talking to himself. “Almost got it. Let me…” He broke off because he needed all his breath to twist a rusty flywheel. It had been sitting in one place for long enough that it really didn’t feel like moving. One of the apes could have done it must more easily, but this was the last thing. They’d rewired, they’d cleaned, and they’d cleared debris and replaced components. Now they had to see if the turbines would do their turbine thing. As he cranked the flywheel, that would create static electricity, and the turbines would take it from there, and the lights would come on in San Francisco.
He pushed, and the flywheel turned. He kept cranking it. The apes looked down from the hatch. Malcolm figured they were probably signing at each other about how weak he was. That was fine. He’d have the last laugh.
It was working.
He couldn’t believe it. There was without question a thrumming beginning to come from the turbines. And if there was a thrumming coming from the turbines, they would be making electricity.
Malcolm cranked harder. The flywheel loosened up and its momentum started to take over. The humming started to get louder. If he could get it cranking fast enough, enough power would return on a loop from the turbines that the flywheel would turn itself. But how would he know? He was stuck down here in the tunnel.
He kept cranking, listening to the turbine hum and praying—really praying, the kind of prayer that only the non-religious can make—that it was really going to work.
“Alexander! Kemp!” he shouted. “Is it working?” He didn’t know whether his voice would carry over the grind of the flywheel and the rising hum. His arms were like wet noodles, but he kept cranking.
Then he heard Ellie screaming from the powerhouse. He let go of the flywheel and scrambled to the base of the ladder. She was calling his name. He couldn’t tell whether it was fear or elation pitching her voice so high until he saw her face in the hatch opening.
“Malcolm!” she said.
“What?” he panted. “What’s happening?”
“You better get up here and see.”
As he scrambled up the ladder, he paused just long enough to get another look at the flywheel. It spun along without his help, and it didn’t seem to be slowing down.
He climbed fast, hearing a growing commotion above.
* * *
They could see it from the catwalk, a glow in the trees. But it wasn’t until they got down to the bottom of the canyon, along the overgrown road that petered out somewhere in the resurgent forest, that they really knew what they were looking at. The orange ball of the gas station, the numbers glowing a warm indigo against the vivid orange.
Malcolm and Ellie got there with Alexander, Foster, and Kemp just as the clop of hooves announced the arrival of Caesar, Maurice, Rocket, and their group. All of them looked up at the orange globe, stunned. Ellie squeezed Malcolm’s hand.
“You did it, Dad,” Alexander said. Malcolm couldn’t tell whether he was amazed at the sight of the globe, or surprised that his dad had pulled it off. Maybe both.
“We all did it,” he said. As he spoke, he looked at Caesar and added, “Apes, too. We couldn’t have gotten it done without you.”
There was a loud pop, startling all of them…and then music started to play. It was an old song, a classic-rock chestnut that had been old when Malcolm was a kid. A wave of nostalgia hit him so hard that it brought tears to his eyes. There had been a world with music everywhere, and light when you wanted light, and hot water, and enough to eat…
All of that seemed to come through the old speakers set under the awning of the wrecked gas station, as a long-dead singer sang a song nobody had heard in ten years. Maybe this was where it started all over again. M
aybe this was where they could begin to believe that the Simian Flu wasn’t the end of humanity, but a hard and necessary corrective.
We can do better this time, Malcolm thought. That’s what second chances are for.
Caesar dismounted and walked over to Malcolm.
“Can’t believe it worked,” Malcolm said. A thought occurred to him. “Up here at least. We won’t know about the city until we’re back.”
Caesar considered this. He started back toward his horse, gesturing for the humans to follow.
“Come,” he said.
* * *
Koba’s plan took shape as they rode back into the mountains. He could not face Caesar directly. The apes had not come to his aid when he faced Caesar at the dam. and they would not do so now. So he would give them another enemy.
They slowed as they rode up the path leading to the humans’ trucks, and dismounted. Silence, Koba signed. Grey and Stone nodded. They tied the horses far enough away from the trucks that their sounds would not reach the human. Then they crept to the edge of the clearing and looked. They smelled smoke, and Koba had another idea to add to his plan. He considered it and decided it would work. In fact, it would make everything that much easier.
When he heard the music, he froze. It took a little while for him to understand what was happening, and where it was coming from. Then Stone pointed, and Koba spotted the glow of the orange ball through the trees. He bared his teeth. The human, Malcolm, had done it. He had brought the lights back.
All the more reason to strike now, Koba thought. With lights, the humans would spread out again. They would find the apes, and with their building full of guns they would shoot until there were no more apes.
That was what would happen if Caesar led the apes.
That was why Caesar could no longer lead.
He left Grey and Stone at the edge of the clearing and approached the lead truck alone. In the truck’s mirror he saw the human react to the music.
“Son of a bitch,” the human said, and laughed.
Yes, Koba thought. Laugh now. All of you humans, laugh now. You will not laugh long.
The truck window was open and Koba saw the flare of fire from within. The human was keeping his… cigar—that was the word. Apes knew that word because many of them had been on television shows where the humans thought it was funny to make them smoke. The human was keeping his cigar going.
He walked right up to the window and stood, waiting for the human to notice him.
The human reached out to tap ash through the open window. As he did, he noticed Koba. His eyes widened and the cigar fell from his fingers. Before he could do anything else Koba reached through the window and dragged him out. The human tried to fight him, but Koba flung him to the ground. Before he could get up, Koba unslung the rifle from his back and smashed the butt into his head.
The human went down and his hat fell off, tumbling a few feet away. Koba hit him again. He tried to raise his arms and Koba raised the rifle like a club, bringing it down with all his strength. First he broke the human’s arms. Then he kept pounding until the human’s head broke open.
He stopped. From the edge of the clearing Grey and Stone were hooting with bloodlust. Koba looked back at them. His fury—with nowhere to go again now that the human was dead—began to build inside him. The music drifting through the trees just made him angrier.
Grey, Koba signed. Pick up the… cigar. He stumbled over that sign, making the letters as best he could. Keep its fire alive. Stone, pick up the hat.
They went on toward the village, but did not enter through the gate. Leaving the horses on the path beyond the totem gate, the three apes ducked off and began the climb along the face of the canyon wall. They could not be seen. Not just yet.
46
The music carried better than Malcolm would have thought. Even up in the ape village they could hear it. The apes came out of their dwellings, looking around uneasily. Many of them were younger than ten, and had never heard recorded music before.
Or any music, probably, Malcolm thought. They were also nervous seeing the humans, after the rocky start to the human-ape relationship over the past couple of days. But he and Caesar walked together, and Caesar’s calm assurance seemed to spread as more and more apes saw that they were together and united.
Caesar led the five humans and his closest apes through the gathering area at the center of the village and to the edge of the raised stone slab that seemed to be a kind of throne. The apes climbed up and reached back to help the humans. It was a pretty good view, Malcolm thought as he got his feet under him. The whole canyon was visible, with the river rushing down toward the dam impoundment. The dam itself wasn’t visible, but the mountains to the west made for quite a vista. He turned to see what the view to the east was like.
“Oh my God,” he said.
San Francisco, in the distance, glimmered and twinkled with a thousand lights. Lights from houses whose power had failed and whose occupants had died without bothering to turn off the switches. Lights from sources directly connected to the grid. Fort Point blazed, the airport runways were outlined in red and green, beacon lights at the top of the bridges shone into the deepening dusk as fog spread through the strait and across the bay. The elated humans hugged one another.
“Damn if you didn’t do it,” Foster said.
“All of us did it,” Malcolm said. He wondered what kind of pandemonium was breaking out in the Colony right then. How do you like that, Dreyfus? he thought, gloating just for a moment. Alexander, who barely remembered electricity, gaped at the sight. Malcolm was overcome, partly with pride and partly with a joy that his son would grow up, not as one of the last survivors of humanity, but as one of the first generation who would make their way in this new world.
Even the apes seemed affected by the sight. Maurice studied it and signed something at Rocket, who signed back. Malcolm wished he knew their sign language.
“What did they say?” he asked Caesar.
“City looks alive,” Caesar said. “Maurice is happy for humans.”
“Humans are happy for humans, too,” Malcolm said. “And listen, now that we’ve got power, we can help you, too. There’s no reason we should keep on being afraid of each other, right?”
Caesar thought about this.
“Maybe not,” he said. He saw Cornelia and Blue Eyes emerging to look at the city. Malcolm tapped Ellie’s shoulder and nodded up.
“She looks a lot better,” he said.
“The wonders of antibiotics,” Ellie said. Cornelia held the baby in the crook of one arm. Caesar climbed up to her and greeted her, stroking the side of her face and then doing the same to the baby. Blue Eyes stood a little apart. Malcolm could read his body language as clearly as if the young ape was carrying a sign. He was contrite, but unsure whether his father had forgiven him for yesterday’s outburst.
Then Caesar reached out and gestured for Blue Eyes to join his family. The young ape did, kneeling at arm’s length and extending a supplicating palm. Caesar reached out, but did not swipe his son’s palm. Instead he grasped Blue Eyes’ arm and pulled him up, embracing him.
Now here was an unexpected bonus, Malcolm thought. Twenty-four hours ago, Caesar was on the verge of killing us. Now we got the juice going, and everybody’s reconciling, human and ape alike. He started to envision a future where the two species intermingled, building a new civilization together.
Amazing, he thought. Who could have predicted this?
* * *
Koba watched ape and human celebrating together, and his rage and disgust grew. He had been right. Caesar had betrayed them. Now that humans had the lights, they would come for the apes. Koba saw clearly. He knew what he had to do.
He looked down the slope at Grey, who had the dead human’s cigar in his mouth. He puffed to keep the fire alive. Grey looked at Stone, and they both turned their faces up to Koba. He nodded. Grey took a last puff. The end of the cigar glowed bright and hot. Then he tossed it into a cluster o
f dry bushes, with a litter of dead leaves and pine needles underneath it. Smoke rose instantly, and then fire.
Koba looked back up toward the mass celebration. Caesar and Blue Eyes broke their embrace and Caesar rubbed his son’s head. Blue Eyes smiled back and both turned. Koba knew they were looking at the lights in the city. They smiled! How could they smile at this?
As he had seen the humans do, he braced the butt of the gun on his shoulder and looked down the barrel with his good eye. A small piece of metal stuck up at the end of the barrel. If that was on the target, that is where the bullet would hit. Koba waited for Caesar and Blue Eyes to separate a little farther. He needed Blue Eyes.
Below the flames grew. Soon every ape would smell the smoke and know it did not come from the fire in the courtyard.
The time to act was now.
Caesar turned, as if he sensed something, and walked to the edge of his perch, peering over the steep drop-off and into the canyon. He saw Koba, and Koba saw Caesar look first surprised, then welcoming. He smiled and started to beckon Koba to come up.
Then he saw the gun. In the split second before Koba fired, he saw Caesar’s understanding.
Yes, he thought. With human tools I kill you. With human tools I will kill humans. Then power will be Koba’s. Power over apes, power that runs through wires. But as his finger tightened on the trigger, the words from the wall ran through his mind. Ape shall not kill ape.
Caesar had saved them all. But now Caesar would let them be killed. Koba would survive. If Caesar had to die, if one ape had to die so the rest would not return to a life of cages and needles and scars…
He pulled the trigger.
47
At the crack of the shot, Malcolm ducked, gathering Ellie and Alexander to him as he looked to see where it had come from.
“Get down!” he shouted. Kemp and Foster hit the deck, too. Who was shooting? The apes had destroyed all the guns they’d brought with them… hadn’t they?
Cornelia screamed from above them and Malcolm jerked back around in time to see Caesar fall from the platform built out from the trunk of his tree. He crashed through the brush and disappeared, the sound of his fall continuing for a terribly long time as his body tumbled down the steep slope into the ravine.
