by Alex Irvine
After that, he had shut it away forever.
Koba felt that hunger, and embraced it.
Caesar saw his old chessboard. Then he thought of the chessboard in his tree, up in the mountains. Was it still there? Where were Cornelia and the baby? He moved one of the pieces forward, two spaces as Will had taught him… then he noticed Will’s video camera, still sitting on the table. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, remembering how it worked.
He opened the side of it to expose the screen and pressed the button to turn it on.
Light came from the screen and the camera beeped. On the screen a red rectangle flashed. Caesar knew that meant the battery would die soon. He pressed the sideways triangle and stared as an image came to life.
* * *
Maurice waited. It was almost time. Night had fallen and the guards were whooping and screeching at more human captives, forcing them into the tunnel. He looked up toward Luca, who was watching the mirror.
Luca nodded.
All of the apes reached up and grabbed the bar that ran along the side of the bus over the seats. They lifted themselves up and swung, crashing their feet into the wall and pushing off. The bus rocked to the side, then back. The apes rode its momentum, swinging back as the bus groaned on rusty springs, and then on the return swing smashing into the wall again. They swung a third time, a fourth, and with each swing the bus rocked a little farther.
Between his feet Maurice saw that two of the guards had noticed. The others were too busy with the human captives. The pair of chimps left their post at the fence and came toward the bus. If the prisoners didn’t get out soon, they would be at the mercy of the guards’ guns.
Maurice growled, and the rest of the prisoners took up the sound, roaring and shrieking as together they swung back one last time and drove into the side of the bus, using all their weight.
With a loud groan the bus tipped onto its side. The two approaching apes had made a fatal mistake. They came too close, and were crushed as it toppled onto them. Their dying screeches were drowned out by the crash and the noise from inside.
Maurice heard a thump on the top of the bus and looked up to see Blue Eyes forcing the door open. The prisoners climbed out, still bound at the wrists. Maurice was the last one out and he stood on the bus, amazed at what had happened. Perhaps he would live after all. He looked back at the human pen, and was amazed all over again.
The humans, taking advantage of the guards’ distraction, had forced the gate and were stampeding out of the tunnel. They flooded the plaza, running around both sides of the bus and scattering into the dark in every direction. The three ape guards fired their weapons, but then they were trampled.
Maurice turned to Blue Eyes. He made a circular gesture with one finger. Blue Eyes made a fist. He had a bag over his shoulder and he took a knife from it. It took him only a minute to cut the bonds while the humans kept pouring out of the tunnel, and the shrieks of alarmed apes echoed through the city. The sound was answered from the direction of the tower.
They had gained themselves a little time, Maurice thought. But not much. He looked to Blue Eyes and signed.
Where do we go?
Follow me, Blue Eyes signed.
This was a different Blue Eyes, Maurice thought. He was born of Caesar, but had seemed to want to be Koba instead. Now he was Caesar’s son again, strong and good. Maurice was happy to follow him.
60
On the video screen Caesar saw himself, looking curiously out. The frame moved and he heard Will’s voice.
“Caesar! Caesar, what are you doing? C’mon, give me that…”
The sound of Will’s voice was a joy and a pain. Caesar reached and touched the screen as the view spun around and he saw Will sitting across from him with the chessboard between them.
“Okay, here we go,” Will said. “This is called chess. This is the pawn. You can go one space…” He moved the pawn from one square to the next. “Or two spaces.” He put the pawn back and moved it two squares. Caesar watched his younger self pick up the pawn and look at it.
The video cut and jumped. Now Will and Caesar were in the kitchen. Will made a sign.
“Home,” he said, and he repeated the sign. “Home.”
In the attic, Caesar mimicked the gesture and remembered learning it for the first time. On the screen, he also mimicked it.
“Yes,” Will said. “This is your home. Good.” Caesar leaned in to hug Will. In the attic, Caesar’s arms moved reflexively to do the same.
The viewfinder went black.
Caesar held still, keeping the memory close. He missed Will. He would always miss Will. He wondered what Will would have thought of the village. He wished Will had lived to see Blue Eyes and the new baby.
He reached out and picked up the largest piece on the chessboard, remembering that Will had called it the king. At the same time he noticed Will watching him…
No. That was Malcolm. Caesar closed his eyes. So much time had passed. He had lost much, and might lose more.
“Sorry,” Malcolm said. “I didn’t mean to…” Caesar nodded. Malcolm walked over to him, taking in the room and its contents. “Who was that? On the video?”
“A good man,” Caesar said. After a breath he added, “Like you.”
He saw Malcolm react to this. He was a good man, Caesar thought. He tried to do right even, when right was hard. And he was stubborn. It took stubbornness to be good.
“Your son’s still not back yet?” Malcolm asked. Caesar shook his head. Malcolm watched him, worried. Caesar did not know whether he was worried about Blue Eyes, or about Caesar’s strength, or both. All he said was, “I’m sure he’s okay.”
It was what a father said to another father when neither of them knew what was true. Caesar knew Malcolm was talking to himself about his son Alexander as much as he was consoling Caesar about Blue Eyes. He had too many thoughts in his head.
Koba had only one thought. That was why he had won so far.
Caesar picked up one of the kings from the chessboard. He placed it in the center of the board and started putting other pieces around it. He thought better when he had something in his hands. He looked at the pieces, shifted some of them around, and stopped when he had put the king in the center of a ring of rooks and knights, with pawns in circles around them.
“What are you thinking?” Malcolm asked.
“Koba will protect himself,” Caesar said.
Malcolm nodded, looking from the board to Caesar. “You have to draw him out.”
“But he must not see me coming.”
Malcolm thought about this. If Koba was staying up on the tower where Blue Eyes said he’d gathered his apes…
“Maybe I can help with that,” he said. He was about to explain about the BART station and the subterranean approach to the tower when the brush growing up the front of the house rustled. The sound was clear in the night silence. Caesar crossed to the round window—the one Malcolm had noticed when they pulled up to the house. Malcolm followed.
In the yard, figures were approaching through the brush and vines that covered the yard and part of the street. Malcolm felt Caesar tense next to him. Then both of them relaxed when they saw the orangutan.
“Maurice,” Malcolm said.
Next to Maurice was Rocket, and with them was Blue Eyes. Caesar placed his palm on the window, filled with pride at the sight of his son. Many more apes, perhaps twenty, followed through the brush, picked out by a bright moon. Blue Eyes looked up and saw his father in the window. Both apes smiled. Malcolm couldn’t help but smile, too.
Blue Eyes had pulled off his part of the plan. Now they would see if Malcolm could do the same.
* * *
An hour later they were moving fast through a BART tunnel, coming up on the station Malcolm had used to access the Colony. This time they’d entered the system one stop farther south, giving the Colony and Koba’s patrols a wide berth. The time would come for fighting, but it had not come yet.
Malcolm’s flashlight was their only illumination. He kept it pointed ahead of them, on the floor. The apes moved nervously around him. He was right. They didn’t like being underground. They got to the access door leading to the utility stairwell and Malcolm halted them at the top of the stairs so they could listen.
“Down this way is the construction site,” he said to Caesar, keeping his voice low in case Koba’s apes had figured out about the basements, and were now guarding the entrance. “We go through it, and then up into the tower, but sound really carries in this kind of space. We have to be absolutely quiet.”
He held his flashlight beam on Caesar’s hands so all the other apes could see him repeating the instructions. Then they went down and into the construction site. Hanging sheets of plastic drifted in the breeze of their passage, but none of the apes made a sound—not even Luca, who moved with incredible silence, given his size.
At the edge of the construction zone, they paused.
“We’re close,” Malcolm whispered to Caesar. “How are you holding up?”
Caesar nodded. He looked pretty good, considering the fact that Ellie had dug a bullet out of him, just the day before. Malcolm started to move forward, then threw himself on the ground and scrambled back into the bottom of the utility stairwell as gunshots boomed from inside the construction zone. Malcolm killed the flashlight and they all waited for the echoes to die away.
Koba’s apes were there, it seemed. Then a human voice cut through the darkness.
“Who’s there?” Malcolm recognized the voice right away. It was Finney. “If you’re human, you better say so, and I mean right now.”
The apes looked at Malcolm. He held out a hand to keep them where they were, and called out.
“It’s okay! It’s me, Malcolm.”
He turned to Caesar and pointed back up the stairs, then cocked his wrist to indicate a turn.
“Go back that way, how we came. Then find the closest stairs. You’ll come up on the street there.”
Caesar nodded. He reached out and cupped the back of Malcolm’s head.
“Thank you,” he said.
Malcolm was unexpectedly moved by the gesture. He nodded back.
“Good luck.”
The apes vanished up the stairs, again moving with unnerving silence as a flashlight beam and the crunch of boot soles on rough concrete heralded Finney’s arrival. He caught Malcolm in the beam, and then swept it up the stairs.
“Damn, Malcolm, we’ve been looking for you,” he said. “How’d you find us?”
“Us?” Malcolm repeated. “Who else is down here?”
Finney gestured with the flashlight beam.
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
* * *
He led Malcolm through the construction zone to another part of the tower’s unfinished basement.
“The apes are all over the tower,” Finney said as they walked. “They don’t know we’re down here.” Malcolm nodded, letting the man talk and feigning ignorance for the moment. He wanted to know what was going on before he gave away too much about his last couple of days—especially the fact that Caesar was still around.
Malcolm realized then that when he’d crossed through this space the day before, Finney had already been there. But since the footprint of the building covered an entire city block, both of them had remained unaware.
And he wasn’t alone, Finney said. There was the radio engineer Werner, and Dreyfus himself. They were in a makeshift fort made of construction materials, piled together, with lit flares strewn on the floor nearby. There was a fan running to blow most of the smoke away. Malcolm had noticed it before, but thought it was smoke from the fires above, circulated down somehow through the building’s ventilation system.
There were crates of weapons and boxes of ammunition stacked inside the makeshift bunker, even though Malcolm saw only the three of them.
“We got this together over the last day or so. Made runs up top and dodged monkeys the whole way,” Finney said proudly. “And that’s not all we got, but I’ll let Dreyfus tell you the rest.”
As they approached, Werner had his portable set plugged in and running, using the steel frame of the skyscraper as an antenna.
“I had them back for a minute, but they dropped out again,” he was saying as Finney and Malcolm appeared.
“Keep at it,” Dreyfus replied. He looked up at Malcolm and, without smiling, walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “I didn’t know if you made it out,” he said.
No thanks to you, Malcolm thought. He held his tongue, though. This wasn’t the time to pick a fight.
“Don’t worry,” Dreyfus said with a wink. “We’re about to turn this around.”
“What do you mean?” Malcolm asked. Something about Dreyfus’s tone made him nervous. “How? And who’s ‘them’?”
“What?” Dreyfus said, and he looked confused.
“Werner said he ‘had them back’,” Malcolm said. “Who?”
“Tell you later,” Dreyfus said. “First, follow me.”
This level of the basement held the seismic damping equipment once required of all skyscrapers in California. Malcolm couldn’t see all of it in the poor light, especially with the smoke from the flares, but it looked like a pretty ordinary base-isolation setup. The building was designed on a table that would absorb the lateral force of an earthquake. Its floor design would also be earthquake-conscious, with a heavier core surrounded by lighter beam structures that allowed it to flex more easily.
The builders might have even planned to add a mass damper of some kind on the upper floors, but there were only girders above thirty stories, so no one would ever know without digging blueprints out of the city planning office.
The building foundation itself, resting on the table with some kind of damping material between them, looked fairly standard. Concrete pillars stretched across the space, no doubt reinforced with rebar. Malcolm hadn’t worked in large buildings, but he knew enough about the principles to see…
“Oh my God,” he said.
That was when he noticed the gray bricks stuck on the sides of some of the pillars. Then he saw the open crates, filled with similar blocks. Some of the C-4 already had bridgewire trailing away from it, presumably to a detonator.
Dreyfus looked at his work like a proud dad.
“We take the tower down, and we get almost all of them at once,” he said, bending to pick up another brick of C-4. He tossed it to Malcolm. “Welcome to the war.”
Malcolm nodded, staring at the brick in his hand. He had to delay this plan. Caesar might be in the building right now, and if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t be long.
“When’s the big boom?” he asked, trying to sound both casual and anticipatory.
“Soon as we get a brick on every pillar,” Dreyfus said. “Then we’ll wire the rest up in the crates just for good measure, get to a safe distance, and watch the show.”
61
Caesar took a long time watching the apes moving in the naked girders of the tower. He saw them pass in front of the lights on the higher floors. Once, long ago, he’d asked Will why skyscrapers had lights on the top, and Will had told him it was so planes did not crash into them. Caesar remembered thinking how ridiculous it was to think that a plane could not notice something the size of a skyscraper.
He steeled himself to fight. His wound was deep, and his strength was less than it should be. But he would not back down from Koba. Surprise would be his ally, and he thought the nature of apes was on his side, too. When they discovered what Koba had done, many of them would return their loyalty to Caesar. Not all, but many. Once that happened, all would depend on Caesar’s ability to defeat Koba in a fight. One of them, he thought, would not live through the next day.
He thought of Blue Eyes, and Cornelia, and his tiny new son, and he grew stronger.
“It is time,” he said to Blue Eyes.
There were fewer patrols around on the side of the skyscraper away from the Colony gate. The hundreds
of apes on the beams and girders were mostly looking down on the site of the battle, or preoccupied with their daily routines. Caesar led his apes around. They scaled the walls of the Colony and rested a moment at the base of the skyscraper itself.
Any ape may leave this fight, Caesar signed. It is not yours. It is mine.
No one moved. Blue Eyes, standing in the middle of the group, looked strong. Calm and resolute, rather than angry and nervous. Caesar took this as a good sign. He smiled, and ducked his head to them, showing respect for their loyalty and their courage. Then he turned to the wall, and they began to climb.
The apes gathered on the beams above the finished part of the building started to notice them when they were only a few stories below. They screeched down at the interlopers, and the sound drew more apes, until the border between the finished and unfinished parts of the skyscraper was lined with them.
The escaped prisoners climbed together, in ranks of five or six. Rocket, Blue Eyes, Maurice, and Luca were in the first rank. They reached the edge and climbed over it, as the screeching of Koba’s apes grew louder and higher-pitched.
But those apes backed away when the escapees held themselves strong, shoulder-to-shoulder with the massive gorilla and orangutan in the middle, flanked by Blue Eyes and Rocket. More of Koba’s apes dropped down from the higher beams, adding to the shrieking and posturing. When the mood began to shift and the defenders had just about worked themselves up to attack, the escapees parted, and Caesar, alone, walked through the gap to face them.
He willed himself to stay tall and strong as he walked, his steps measured even though he was already tired from a climb that should have been child’s play. Caesar hid his pain. The raging apes immediately fell silent, shocked, eyes widening as if seeing the impossible. On the levels above, more and more ape heads looked down. They, too, were stunned, and could not believe what they saw. None of them rushed to attack. None of them asked him a question.
Each of them, he thought, has something to answer for. They know it. But at that moment he did not care. He had one thing on his mind, and only one.
