Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

by Alex Irvine

  Some of the crowd shouted back at him, and the roar picked up. They knew they needed to fight, and led by the recruits and his cadre of more seasoned officers, they started to work themselves up to it. Dreyfus led them, raising his own voice and punctuating each phrase with a stabbing motion of his free hand.

  “We… will… not… let them through these doors!” The echoes of his voice died away, and in the distance they heard the shrieks of the approaching apes. He left the megaphone dangling and said, loudly but calmly, “Fight with me. Fight for humanity.”

  Then he turned to stand with his soldiers and watch for the enemy.

  * * *

  The sound built, but because of the fog, it was difficult to pinpoint the direction. Dreyfus guessed they would be taking the direct approach, straight over the hill and down California Street. He looked that way, seeing lights here and there in the mist. More streetlights were coming back to life even now, hours after the power had started coming in. Still, illumination beyond the immediate vicinity of the Colony was patchy. He heard the sound of hoofbeats. Lots of them, and yes, coming from exactly where he’d expected.

  “I can hear them,” a sniper said, standing near Dreyfus along the parapet. He held steady, looking through his scope, but there was a tremor in his voice. “Where are they?”

  Dreyfus looked through binoculars, trying to resolve any kind of detail. All he saw was the dimly diffused light of the Colony’s illumination… then he realized something. The lights he’d seen out in the city weren’t streetlights. They were torches, and as they got closer he could see their motion.

  The apes’ screeching intensified as they must have spotted the Colony’s lights, and the torches started moving faster. They came on with frightening speed, and Dreyfus saw that they weren’t just running along the streets. More were swinging from streetlight poles, in long lines stretching back into the darkness.

  “There!” he shouted, pointing. All along the parapet, rifle barrels swung in the direction he indicated. They were waiting for his command, he realized, for a don’t-shoot-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes moment. He took a deep breath, wanting the perfect phrase to present itself…

  Then out of the fog, the apes began shooting.

  The first sprays of bullets tore into the Colony’s facade, breaking windows and punching into the sandbags along the parapet. The apes kept shooting, and their fire intensified as they got closer and could see their targets better.

  Dreyfus forgot all about an inspirational phrase.

  “Fire!” he shouted. “Fire now!”

  They did, unloading from the parapets and from the makeshift fortifications in front of the Colony’s gate. They had better positions than the apes did, and they knew their weapons better than the apes did, so their first volleys cut into the advancing apes and did more damage than the wild shots the leading animals had fired. But the apes were difficult targets, dark-colored and moving fast. Before the Colony forces could concentrate their efforts enough to make the streets too dangerous, the horseback vanguard of the ape army was practically on top of them.

  The grenade launcher chuffed, and explosions scattered the closest groups of apes. The screeching reached a fever pitch. Dreyfus was amazed that individual creatures could make so much noise… and the screams of wounded horses added a painful dimension to the cacophony. Finney had set up a feed from the radio room on the siren table, and through it Dreyfus heard Werner, his voice getting desperate.

  “This is San Francisco! If anyone out there can hear this, we are under attack, repeat, we are under attack!”

  That we are, Dreyfus thought. He signaled to a small group of recruits at the other end of the parapet and they launched Molotov cocktails out over the Jersey barriers. They smashed onto the pavement and spread into a wall of flames.

  Through the fire came apes on horseback. One, in the center, held a heavy machine gun. Dreyfus recognized him, the one with the blind eye who had looked so longingly at their guns when the ape army had made its first appearance. He did not see the other one—the one with whom Malcolm had talked. Seasoned political hand that he was, Dreyfus put two and two together. This ape had decided that Malcolm and the other ape were too chummy. He was taking matters into his own hands…

  That made it even more likely that he had seen the last of Malcolm and the rest of the team which had gone up into the mountains. Hell of a sacrifice they had made.

  The Colony would honor it.

  He ran along the parapet, pointing at the one-eyed ape.

  “That’s the leader!” he bellowed, pointing to their target. “Take him out!” He repeated it all the way down the line. A spray of bullets tore into the wall around him, stinging him with masonry shards. “Shit!” he cried out. Right in front of him, a pair of recruits was blazing away with their AR-15s. They had a rocket-propelled grenade leaning up against the parapet between them.

  “The RPG,” Dreyfus shouted. “Give me the RPG!”

  He lifted it to his shoulder, flipped up the sight, and tried to track the ape leader, who raked the parapet with his machine gun. Dreyfus recognized the weapon, and wondered what kind of world it was where apes on horseback shot M240s at you? Try as he might, he couldn’t get a bead. The ape was smart, and didn’t ride in a straight line. But tracking it, he saw a pickup truck with stacks of fuel cans lined up in its bed.

  Now that’s not going to move, he thought, and he fired.

  The truck and its cans of fuel went up in a huge explosion that cut off the apes’ direct approach to the Colony gate. The lead apes on horseback wheeled around and looked for another way forward, but the scattered debris from the destroyed vehicle burned in their way, and the other street rubble was catching. A few apes charged up and around the fire, using the building facades on either side, but they were cut down as they appeared.

  The Colony had halted the ape advance.

  “Keep it up!” Dreyfus shouted. His voice was getting ragged. “We’ve got them!” He hoped it was true. If they could handle the initial assault, they had the advantage. A good defensive position was their trump card.

  51

  The apes massed behind the wall of fire, shrieking and firing blindly through it as their frustration increased. Several of them lay dead in the flames, and others were badly burned, crying and rolling in the street. Ash lay stunned from the blast. Rocket gathered up his son and pulled him back, into the shelter of a car. Blue Eyes joined them, and after a moment so did Maurice.

  Blue Eyes was trembling with fury and the energy of the battle. He wanted to charge back in, find some way through, lead the apes as his father would have done. But Maurice quieted him, putting both hands on Blue Eyes’ shoulders and then lifting one to sign.

  Wait.

  Some of the apes, however, could not. Crazed with the battle, they leaped up onto buildings and rubble around the flames, but the humans were ready for them. Gunfire picked them off before they could bring their own weapons to bear.

  Koba reined in his horse and looked for a way forward. He caught sight of a tangle of heavy wires, mounted to a fallen pole. They led through the flames. Koba shouted something to a group of gorillas and they went to the pole, hoisting it upright and pulling on it until the wires were drawn taut over the fire.

  The humans were still firing from the other side, through the flames, keeping the apes from gathering… but now, Blue Eyes saw, there was a way over. Dozens of apes rallied to the base of the pole, climbing up and massing at the top. Koba held an arm up, commanding them to wait. Blue Eyes saw what he was thinking. It would do no good for a few apes at a time to use the wires. The humans would shoot them down as quickly as they appeared.

  Apes together strong, Blue Eyes thought, recalling his father’s words. Yes. Together they would go over the wires, and the humans would see how strong they could be.

  * * *

  Dreyfus ran up and down the parapet, pointing out individual apes as they tried to make an end run around the fire. The defend
ers of the Colony loaded fresh magazines into their weapons, and dragged their wounded back for treatment.

  He shouted hoarse commands, making sure everyone knew that the battle wasn’t over yet. The apes would not be broken. They would try again. But there was only one other approach, around the block and up the street from the other side. That was covered. If they apes tried it, they’d never make it to the gate.

  As he had that thought, Dreyfus saw motion in the air over the blazing wall of wreckage. He looked, and couldn’t believe what he saw.

  “On the wires!” he bellowed. “Shoot!”

  Apes came, not in small groups but in a single mass, swinging on the old trolley-car wires, using them as a trapeze to fling themselves over the fire. Even—incredibly—running across them, somehow avoiding the grasping hands of the apes swinging below. They fired as they came, more focused and deadly now as they got closer and had a higher vantage to see their targets on the parapet and behind the defensive works in front of the gate.

  Dreyfus ducked out of the field of fire and picked up his own rifle. He came back up, sighting at the wires over the fire, and saw the apes dropping by the dozen onto the street, firing as they came. Gorillas, one at a time, swung behind them and picked up pieces of flaming debris as they dropped back to the ground. The debris crashed down behind the Jersey barriers, scattering the defenders and giving the chimps cover that enabled them to advance.

  Dreyfus saw the leader, jumping through the flames on his horse.

  “That one! He’s the one! Get him! Get him!” He aimed and fired, but missed.

  Near him, the teenager with the grenade launcher aimed at the one-eyed ape. Out of the corner of his eye, Dreyfus saw motion. On the roof of a trolley car across the street, an ape had spotted the grenade launcher. Dreyfus switched targets, but he was too late.

  The ape fired and Dreyfus heard the bullets hit the boy. He spun back and dropped in a spray of blood, the grenade launcher falling over the parapet and down into the street.

  The ape on the trolley car bared his teeth and screeched at One-Eye, who answered the cry.

  For the first time, Dreyfus thought they might not survive. He aimed and fired, aimed and fired, but there were too many targets. The one on the trolley car dodged back and forth, mocking them. Apes leaped onto the facade of the Colony building and were shot down. But they kept coming.

  Dreyfus was about to call a retreat when he heard a sound he hadn’t heard since his days in the army—the unmistakable thump of artillery. A split second later the trolley car disappeared in a massive fireball that caught a dozen other apes and rolled up the front of the building across the street, shattering its remaining windows.

  Dreyfus turned and saw a tank rolling down the street, smoke from its turret blending with the fog. From its hatch, a fire-control officer shouted commands, and the tank’s .50-caliber machine gun opened up, tearing through the apes in the street.

  Cheers broke out along the parapet and from below, in front of the gate. Help had arrived. Dreyfus shouted into the radio-room feed.

  “Finney! Get that tank driver on the radio and tell him to park it right across the gate!” There was a crackle of static, and again Dreyfus had the fleeting sense he’d heard a voice. Then it was gone.

  “On it, boss,” Finney said.

  The one-eyed ape turned and snarled at the tank as it fired again. This time the shell plowed up a huge section of pavement between the skeleton of the trolley car and the burning hulk of the pickup. Apes and pieces of apes tumbled through the air. The cheering on the human side got louder, and Dreyfus was right with them.

  “Yeeeahhhh!” he screamed. “Let’s go, let’s go! Hit these bastards, now!”

  Rifle and grenade fire from the parapet and the defensive bulwarks focused on the apes coming over the wires. They got a lot of them, but more and more kept coming. As soon as the tank got into position in front of the Colony gate, its .50-caliber would keep the apes off practically all by itself.

  Dreyfus heard another crackle and the tank operator’s voice blared out on the parapet.

  “Bet our monkey pals wish they hadn’t missed us out at the point,” the man said, cool as could be. Dreyfus smiled.

  Out in the street, One-Eye wheeled his horse around and charged at the tank. The .50-cal gunner was keeping his fire concentrated across the front of the defensive positions, making it harder for the apes to get close. He caught sight of One-Eye coming his way and tried to drop the .50’s barrel down, but One-Eye blasted away at the turret and the gunner flinched down behind the shield. That gave One-Eye the moment of extra time he needed.

  His gun clicked empty and he threw it away at the same moment as he threw himself off his horse, hurtling toward the gunner feet first. He hit the tank turret with one foot and gripped the gunner’s neck with the other. The barrel of the .50-cal swung up and out, stitching a line of holes up across the facade of the Colony. One-Eye flung the gunner off the tank. Apes descended upon him almost before he hit the pavement.

  They started to run parallel with the tank, watching One-Eye as he leered down into the hatch, and when he dropped down into the tank they leapt onto it and screeched, pounding their fists and the butts of their rifles on its armor.

  From the radio room feed came Finney’s voice.

  “Boss?” In the background Dreyfus could hear screams.

  “I know,” Dreyfus said.

  The tank lurched and turned, slowing down some but rolling steadily forward.

  “Boss?” This time it was the sniper just to his right. He was pointing down to the tank, which crossed the street and angled straight toward the defensive emplacement in front of the Colony gate.

  “I know,” Dreyfus said again.

  The tank crushed the outer part of the breastworks, ground its tracks against the Jersey barriers, and pushed over them, as well. The defenders scattered and the apes, adopting tactics used by soldiers since the invention of the tank during World War I, sheltered behind it. It rattled and bounced up the stairs and drove straight into the pillars dividing the Colony gate in thirds. Its engine roared and with a rolling boom, the columns collapsed into the Colony gate.

  It held. For longer than Dreyfus would have thought, it held.

  Then it collapsed inward and the apes poured through the breach into the Colony.

  52

  The parapet sagged, and part of it collapsed, spilling the defenders down into the rubble and the throng of apes. Outside, no organized defense remained. The apes owned the street. The tank stalled against the pile of rubble, and One-Eye climbed part of the way out, savoring the damage he had done. Then he realized the full extent of it, and a savage light seemed to shine in his empty eye.

  Dreyfus, looking down at him, realized he had a perfect shot. He brought up the barrel of his gun, and at the moment of truth a group of fleeing humans rushed through his field of vision.

  “Dammit,” he growled, and held the rifle pointed at One-Eye. “Move,” he said. “One of you, human, ape, I don’t care. Just give me one… clear…”

  “Dreyfus!” Finney screamed. “Let’s go!”

  There were too many people around. Dreyfus knew that, viewed from the distance of history, a dead bystander would be deemed a good trade-off for a dead One-Eye. But this was not history. This was life, right now, and he could not bring himself to pull the trigger.

  So he ran after Finney as more pieces of the parapet fell away underneath him. As he started to retreat, he saw apes climbing up the ruined gate. It was time to split up, guerrilla-style, and figure out how to fight. The irony of the term did not escape him.

  The tank, he thought. Who would have figured it would show up, and lose us the goddamn battle.

  Finney started climbing—well, mostly sliding—down an angled piece of one of the Colony gate’s pillars. It sloped away from the main market area, which was a sea of hand-to-hand fighting. Absolute carnage, worse than anything Dreyfus had ever seen. He blotted it out, not because he th
ought he was above it, but because his people needed him to think. How the hell was he going to do that while seeing the beginnings of a slaughter? What he had to do was get out of there, bring as many of the Colony citizens as he could with them, and then turn the tables on the goddamn apes if it took a year, or ten years, or twenty to make it happen.

  “Boss! Boss!” Werner’s voice was screaming from the radio room feed. Dreyfus didn’t have time to listen. He concentrated on the column, on getting down it without dumping himself into the midst of a sea of bloodthirsty apes. He couldn’t tell if Werner was excited about something, or being dismembered by a pair of gorillas.

  He made it down the column, putting his hands and feet exactly where Finny had. Then, from the scaffolding, they hopped across into the main building. Shortly after that, as they climbed down a steel ladder into the depths of the building’s unfinished sub-basements, they got one more surprise.

  Werner was down there.

  “I grabbed the portable set and got the hell out of the radio room,” he said before Dreyfus could ask. “There was fighting right outside the door, but I pushed through the back wall.”

  This was one of the virtues of living in a place where every dwelling was at least partly assembled out of scrap plywood, Dreyfus thought.

  “But that’s not the reason I brought the portable,” Werner went on. Dreyfus looked at him. It irritated him when people said things, and then waited for you to ask obvious questions.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “This little guy has a recorder,” Werner said, patting the transceiver hanging against his hip. “And I’ve got some sound for you, boss. I think you’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “First we get the hell out of here,” Finney said. He led them further down into the sub-basement. The apes would look up first—Dreyfus was counting on it. They weren’t naturally drawn to dark or confined spaces. If he could avoid capture—or worse—for a little while, they might have a chance to figure out what to do next.