by Alex Irvine
Koba appeared, launching himself from the next floor up, metal spear raised over his head. Just five days before, Caesar had seen him in the same pose, in the air coming down on the back of the brown bear. Now, seeing it again, he was ready.
At the last moment Caesar dodged out of the way and tore the steel shaft from Koba’s grasp. It pinged from girder to beam, spinning away down into the darkness. Tumbling past, Koba grabbed Caesar’s arm, nearly pulling both of them into the abyss of the building core… but Caesar, with the last of his strength, gripped the lip of the nearest girder with one hand and locked the other around Koba’s wrist. He cried out in pain as Koba’s weight pulled on his wound, but he did not let go.
The steel spear tumbled and clanged away into the depths.
Now Caesar’s grasp was the only thing keeping Koba from dropping.
I hold Koba’s life, Caesar thought. He looked down, teeth bared from the strain, his wound tearing open again inside him… and saw Koba, too, realizing that his life was in Caesar’s hand. The one-eyed ape grinned, looking up at his old friend, taunting him with the words of Caesar’s own creation.
“Ape… will not… kill ape,” Koba sneered.
Caesar hesitated. If ever an ape had deserved to die, it was Koba. But where did that leave apes? If every rule had exceptions when it became hard to follow, what good were rules at all? He stared down at Koba, the grimness he felt in stark contrast to Koba’s mocking grin.
Caesar looked up, seeing all the other apes watching him. What he did next would make the difference between apes living together, and dissolving into warring tribes. He saw Blue Eyes, and felt the burden of doing the right thing as an example for his son. He saw Rocket, and felt the burden of easing Rocket’s pain by taking revenge on his behalf. He saw Maurice, and wished he had the orangutan’s placid strength, of both body and mind.
Other apes looked down at him, too, more than he could name. All of them saw Koba swinging from Caesar’s arm. All of them waited for Caesar’s decision.
He realized something then. Koba hungered for guns and liquor. He hungered for power. He desired revenge. He had turned on the most sacred law of the apes, betraying Caesar and using human weapons like a coward. Even now he smirked, dangling over the hole that dropped all the way down into the underground floors of the tower.
He turned his face back to Koba, his face grave.
“You are not ape,” he said.
Koba’s expression changed. One moment he wore the taunting leer of someone waiting for an enemy to realize his defeat. The next he was the schemer, realizing that his schemes had fatally undermined, not his enemy, but himself.
Caesar let him go.
Koba roared, his last act in life to scream out the rage and hate that had driven him to acts that no ape could forgive. His body grew smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the darkness below.
Caesar closed his eyes. It was a hard thing he had done. Once he and Koba had been brothers. They had fought together, saved each other’s lives… but he who won this battle was he who thought of only one thing. Caesar thought only of the laws of the apes, which existed to keep them unified and strong in a world that had tried to eradicate them. Around him was silence, save for the wind humming through the naked steel.
The apes mourned Koba, as they should, Caesar thought. As he did. Then he heard a hopeful hoot from nearby. He located the ape making the noise and saw him looking away and down, toward the street. Stiff and aching, the wound in his chest bleeding again, he pulled himself up and loped across the beams, joined by other apes curious to see what could interrupt so solemn an occasion.
Coming over the hill and down toward the Colony was a throng of apes, moving in small groups but all together. The females and children had arrived. They were too far away for Caesar to recognize any individuals, but the sight of them filled him with a restored sense of purpose. He had done what needed to be done. Now was the time to begin rebuilding what Koba had tried to destroy.
Ignoring the pain radiating from his wounds, Caesar raised his arms and gestured for the rest to follow him. He dropped over the edge of the steel frame and began the long climb down to reunite with Cornelia. Blue Eyes cut through the crowd to climb with him.
Together, Caesar thought. Apes together strong.
* * *
They reached the courtyard at the base of the skyscraper, on the other side from the wreckage of the Colony gate. Some apes ran north to meet their families and guide the group in. Caesar waited. He did not have the strength to run, and even if he had it was more fitting for him to stay where he was. The leader of apes could not run around like an adolescent.
He rested and thought about what he had done. He had broken the law that ape shall not kill ape… but he had done it to save other apes. How many were dead because of Koba? Their village burned, the humans made into enemies, and deep divisions created within the troop… all those were Koba’s fault. He had acted like the worst of the humans, making himself unfit for apes. Caesar had done the only thing he could, cutting out the disease to keep the body whole.
Several apes near the closest doors into the building started to screech and grunt. Caesar turned to see what they were doing, and saw yet another unexpected thing, here at the end of a succession of days that had brought one unexpected thing after another.
Malcolm, dirty and battered—blood smeared across his nose and dried in a trickle that ran down the side of his jaw—emerged from the building. The apes surrounded him, baring fangs and screeching. He did not react. Caesar admired his calm. It was one of the human qualities he admired.
“Leave him,” Caesar said over the commotion. He crossed the stone plaza and saw on closer inspection that Malcolm was deeply anxious about something other than his immediate safety. “What happened?” he asked, pointing down. He knew there had been an explosion, and it looked like Malcolm had been a little too close to it.
“Dreyfus tried to bring down the tower,” Malcolm said. “I tried to stop him.” Regarding the hundreds of apes around them, he added, “I guess it worked. This building is built pretty tough. They have to be around here.”
“It worked,” Caesar said.
“What about Koba?” Malcolm asked.
“Koba is gone,” Caesar said. He offered no details, and Malcolm didn’t ask for any.
“Listen,” Malcolm said. “You’re not safe here.” Caesar frowned in confusion. Koba was gone, the humans were scattered and now knew that the apes were under Caesar’s control again… “They made contact,” Malcolm continued. “There are others coming for you. Soldiers. You need to leave while you still can. All of you.”
Leave, Caesar thought. Where? Back into the mountains, where they had almost died in their first months? Where the remains of their village still smoked at the edge of the canyon? Leave, while soldiers landed and the humans saw what apes had done.
“No,” he said. It was too late to run. If there were other humans, no place on earth would be far enough away. Not when soldiers saw that a battle had already been fought.
“Yes,” Malcolm said, his voice low and urgent. “Caesar, you have to—”
“Nowhere left to run,” Caesar said. He looked up the tower, all the way to the top, where he and Koba had finally settled their differences. “Thought fight would end here,” he said sadly, and looked back to Malcolm. This human had risked his own life for Caesar’s, more than once. It pained Caesar to do what he was about to do, but he could see no other choice. “It is you who must go. I am sorry… my friend.”
Malcolm looked as if he might say something. Caesar waited. Malcolm had convinced him to change his mind several times. Perhaps he could do it again. But then Malcolm nodded.
“I’m sorry too,” he said.
They looked at each other, human and ape, knowing they were being torn apart, not by choice, but by events neither of them could control. Caesar stepped back, then turned and walked slowly down the stone steps into the large plaza beyond. A sea of
apes, hundreds and hundreds, bowed and supplicated as he waded through them. He felt their renewed strength, and felt also the burden of what he would have to tell them. But not just yet. Let them be strong together for a little while, let them enjoy the reunion with the females and the children. He picked Cornelia out of the crowd, the baby clinging to her. Blue Eyes had already found her. The four apes came together and embraced. Together. Strong.
In the midst of this moment Caesar looked back toward the base of the skyscraper. Malcolm was gone.
EPILOGUE
It was just daybreak when they got to the bridge.
“Careful here,” the captain said. “No telling what kind of debris is in the channel.” He looked at an old chart. The water under the middle of the bridge was sixty fathoms at its deepest point, and the ship only drew six fully loaded. Now it was drawing maybe four. Should be plenty of clearance, but the captain knew better than to assume anything, after all the things he’d seen.
Next to him, the navigator was muttering a continuous stream of minor corrections, his instructions sent down to the engine room. The ship was a dinosaur, without any advanced electronics. They practically had to communicate with cans and string. But they got it done. The most advanced tech they had was the radio setup, and the captain glanced over to see one of his men coming onto the bridge.
“Still nothing on the radio,” the man said. “Last contact was ten hours ago.”
The captain considered this. The contact was confirmed. There were people in San Francisco. And judging by the tone of their communications, they were in trouble. They’d come all this way, so they might as well get a look at the city and see what kind of shape it was in. Surviving groups of humans were few and far between. If they could help these people, they would.
It wouldn’t be the first time the captain had led a force against organized gangs or bandit groups. Slowly but surely, they were bringing order back to northern California.
He watched the battered central span of the Golden Gate Bridge as it passed over them, and ordered a little more speed as they came out from under it. Currents here were tricky, and would drag the ship all over the place if they didn’t have at least a little head of steam to get through them.
Next to him, the navigator began scanning the city with binoculars. The fog wasn’t as thick on the bay side of the bridge, but it still wasn’t fully light.
“I see the beacon!” the navigator said, pointing. The captain saw it too, a bright light shining from high on an unfinished skyscraper.
“Get a closer look while we figure out if there’s a place we can dock,” he ordered. The ship started to clear the bridge and the captain looked along the waterfront. There were plenty of piers, but they would have to take the approach very slow. It might be best to send out scouts in a small boat, to look for wrecks around the ends of those piers. Wouldn’t do the survivors of San Francisco any good if the ship tore its bottom out on a sunken ferry stack, and sunk a hundred yards from the Embarcadero.
The navigator looked through binoculars at the skyscraper. He adjusted the focus.
“What the hell is that?”
“What is it, soldier?” the captain asked. He reached for the binoculars and stepped around the navigator to get the best angle on the source of the beacon.
For a long moment he stared into the binoculars, unable to believe what he was seeing.
* * *
From the top of the tower, Caesar watched the ship come under the bridge, its outline indistinct in the morning fog. It churned into the bay, black smoke flowing up to darken the fog, and as it came closer, he saw that the deck of the ship was covered with humans. Soldiers, in uniforms, all bearing guns.
Malcolm had been right. He had warned Caesar that this would happen. In return, Caesar had made certain that all of the humans had supplies and were guided out of the city safely. What they did after that was up to them. Malcolm was his friend, but not every human would be.
Caesar’s obligation was to his troop.
Around him, a thousand apes saw what Caesar did. He leaned out from the girder and roared. Apes had fought for this city. Apes had died. They would have peace if peace was to be had, but if not…
His apes joined his roar, raising their arms, thundering out their challenge. It rolled out across the city just lit by dawn, and they waited for the humans to choose.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first to Pierre Boulle, of course, for the story that we’re all still riffing on fifty years later; to Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell and the rest of the cast of the first movie, for bending my head when I saw it on a Saturday afternoon Creature Feature; to Cath Trechman, Steve Saffel, and Alice Nightingale at Titan, for bringing me in and for perspicacious reading; to Josh Izzo at Fox, for answering some key questions at key times; to Michael Erard, for a fascinating conversation about language over beers one night; and to everyone involved in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for giving me so much to work with. I hope everyone enjoys reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Irvine has written somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty books. His original novels include Buyout, The Narrows, and A Scattering of Jades. On the licensed front, he has written novelizations of Pacific Rim, The Adventures of Tintin, and Iron Man 2. Some of his other licensed fiction is Transformers: Exodus, Batman: Inferno, Supernatural: John Winchester’s Journal, The Seal of Karga Kul, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. His comics work includes Daredevil Noir, Iron Man: Rapture, and Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox. He currently writes the games Marvel: Avengers Alliance, Marvel War of Heroes, and Marvel Puzzle Quest. He is working on another game project as well as several new comics, novels, and scripts. He lives in Maine with his wife Lindsay, three kids, two dogs, a snake, a bird, and a fish.
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