Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (16 page)

“Damn straight there is. They
made
it. They wouldn’t release it until they made some sort of inoculation or antiviral, or whatever they call it.” He mopped his sweaty forehead and went on. “It’s also a proven fact that the virus disproportionately affects Caucasians. Once this plague has killed off what few
real
Americans remain, those who endure will find themselves under permanent martial law—in a totalitarian state that Stalin could have only dreamed of.”

“So you’re saying the people at Argo ranch were justified in shooting the FBI agents?”

“Patriots like Ted Durham and his followers are the only hope we have left. And there are more of them—of us—than you think. Some of us have been preparing for this day for a long time. They tried to use the threat of terrorism to suppress our liberties, but that didn’t work. Now they’ve shown their true colors, shown exactly what
depravity they will stoop to. Look at what’s happening right here—they call them ‘quarantines,’ but everybody knows they’re death camps.

“Nobody that goes into one of those places comes out. Everyone, everyone that hears the sound of my voice, I call on you to resist. If you have a gun, load it. If you don’t, get one. Fight the tyranny!”

“Oh, shit,” Dreyfus said.

The Argo ranch thing had happened just yesterday, in western Washington State. A reputed militia group had shot at local law enforcement, killing a sheriff and two deputies. The FBI had been sent in and was also fired upon. Now Guard troops had surrounded the place. A similar incident was unfolding in Idaho, although the scale seemed to be smaller.

“Why are they wasting their time on nut jobs out in the boondocks?” Patel wondered aloud.

“They won’t for long,” Dreyfus predicted. “They won’t have the manpower. There’s going to be a lot more of this, people turning on each other—but also banding together.”

“And not in a good way,” his aide added.

Dreyfus shrugged.

“Those guys have a common enemy. They believe they know who’s responsible for their troubles, for everything they think is wrong, and they have a plan for what to do about it. It’s better than ‘every man for himself’.”

“But they’re wrong,” Patel objected. “It’s absurd—the notion that the government did this.” Then he stared at his boss. “Are you suggesting we get behind them, or mimic these claims?”

“That’s not at all what I’m saying,” Dreyfus said. “We need a strategy that unifies everyone, not just people with similar political persuasions. A real common enemy.”

“Wouldn’t that be the virus?”

“No, a disease doesn’t have a face unless you give it one, and everyone is giving it a different face. The fringe right blames the government. The left says it’s the multinational corporations to blame. I’ve heard the claim that it’s God’s punishment for our hedonistic ways—it started in San Francisco, you see. I’ve heard that it’s Gaia, the Earth Mother, punishing us for pollution, or that it’s the virus that killed the dinosaurs, and that it was frozen in polar ice until global warming let it out.

“No, there are too many theories,” he said. “We need a common story.”

“And what would that be?” Patel asked.

“Damned if I know,” Dreyfus said. “Although knowing the truth might be a good start.”

* * *

Thank you
, Maurice signed, before dipping his fingers into the soft flesh of the durian.
I was very hungry.

You’re welcome
, Koba acknowledged, feeling a prickle of some emotion he didn’t recognize. It felt good, but he wasn’t sure he liked it. Or better put, he wasn’t sure he could trust it. He had never been given anything that hadn’t been taken away.

Except pain.

Maurice ate with a deliberation that was hard to understand, as if each taste of the food was important to him. As if getting it into his belly quickly so that no one else could take it wasn’t the main objective.

Maurice noticed Koba watching, and offered him a finger full.

Try
.

Koba took the durian doubtfully and placed it into his mouth. It smelled bad. To his surprise, however, the taste was good. A little like a rotten banana.

I see you remembering
, Maurice said.
Eyes go funny. You shake
.

This happens to you?
Koba wanted to know.

To me, yes. To all of the apes that breathed Caesar’s mist
.

The mist makes us remember?

Makes us smarter
, Maurice said.
Being smarter makes us remember
.

Koba thought about that for a moment. He had known something else was happening to him, without being able to say what it was. Smarter? For him, that word had to do with learning tricks, or using sign. And now that he thought about it, he was using sign differently than he used to. Better.

Not true of big caterpillars
, he told Maurice.

Big caterpillars?

From zoo
.

Maurice’s throat suddenly swelled. Koba wasn’t sure what it meant. But it felt dangerous, and he skipped back a bit.

Don’t call them that!
Maurice said.
They are apes, like you, like me. Not as smart maybe, not know sign maybe, but still apes. Apes together—strong. Like Caesar says.

Koba gaped, taken aback by the usually gentle ape’s show of anger. The big caterpillars were apes?

But of course they were. They just hadn’t been taught sign like he had. But they could learn it, as he had. Now that it was pointed out to him, it seemed so obvious, and he felt stupid for not understanding earlier.

Apes together strong
, he signed, feeling a sort of heat go through him. He remembered riding on top of a rolling machine as they approached the big bridge, Koba side by side with Caesar, Maurice, and Buck—the gorilla who died saving them all from Jacobs. He remembered that feeling. Together.

Caesar says this?
he asked.
Why?

Because it’s true
, Maurice replied.

Yes
, Koba said. C
aesar is right. I understand now
.

He wasn’t sure he did, but the concept left him almost gasping. It wasn’t just about respect for Caesar, loyalty to Caesar—it was about respect and loyalty to all apes. Even the ones who couldn’t sign.

All of his life he had felt almost as if he had a weight on one side of him that made him walk crooked. That weight was all of the things humans had done to him, and the hatred that came from that. For the first time in his life, he suddenly felt the possibility of a burden on his other side, too—one that would balance him, let him walk straight.

Even the possibility felt good.

What do you remember?
he asked Maurice.

I was circus ape
, Maurice said.
I did tricks
.

I did tricks
, Koba said.
Not for circus. For little pictures
.

Not understand
.

Koba tried to explain. After a while, Maurice scratched his head.

We had little screens in our prison
, he said.
Had small humans. Sometimes apes. Maybe I saw you
.

Why did they do this?
Koba wondered.
Make us do tricks for them, wear clothes?

Humans think apes funny when they act like stupid humans
, Maurice explained.

Why?
Koba asked.

It took so long for Maurice to answer that Koba thought that he had refused to do so, or had forgotten the question, perhaps lost in a reverie of his own. But finally the orangutan lifted his hands.

I think maybe they hate themselves
, he said.

* * *

After a time, Koba left, and Maurice was once again alone. Beautifully, wonderfully alone. He ate a little more of the durian, feeling warm inside, more content than he had felt in a long time. He listened to the forest, the quiet breath of the wind, to the singing stars of his own thoughts, the
questions
forming there, elegant connections between this and that thing that he had somehow never noticed before.

The feel of bark on his fingers was a luxury he had never imagined. That was an added thing. But he also reveled in absence. The absence of people looking at him, poking at him, yelling at him.

A deep part of him wanted permanent solitude, and at first—just after they left the city—he had thought to strike out on his own. He could explain Caesar’s vision to Koba well enough, but part of him resisted the idea of living together with so many apes.

And yet it seemed to him that resisting an instinct was sometimes the only way to move forward. To improve. To understand. And there was so much more he wanted to understand. More than that, he owed Caesar his freedom, and all of this, even these small opportunities to be by himself. Whatever else happened, he owed Caesar his support, his presence, anything he could provide.

So he did not mind when he saw Caesar approaching.

A good trick
, he told Caesar.

A trick that nearly got me killed
, Caesar replied.
A trick that won’t work again.

There are always new tricks
, Maurice told him.

Caesar seemed agitated. He was better than most chimps at keeping still, but the tension in his body betrayed him. Still, Maurice waited for him to speak. It wouldn’t do to hurry him.

While I was hiding, I heard the humans talking
, Caesar said finally.

Maurice focused his attention on Caesar’s account of the disease, and how humans thought apes had something to do with it.

If they think we have this sickness, why come after us
, Caesar asked.

Maurice thought somehow there might be a connection to the question Koba had asked him a little while ago—the one about why humans made apes act like foolish humans—but the connection was dim in the constellation of his new thoughts. He would have to work on that later, when he was alone.

Don’t know
, he replied, instead.
But this might be good.

How?
Caesar wondered.

If enough of them die, maybe they will forget about us. That would be a very good thing
.

Malakai understood long before they found the tracking devices what had happened, but he also knew Corbin wouldn’t believe him, so he let the whole thing play out. He was pretty sure Clancy had figured it all out, too.

They found the tags in the back of a truck parked in front of a restaurant in the small town of Stinson Beach. Corbin swore colorfully for what seemed like a long time.

“They fricking hosed us,” he said. “Smoked us like a cheap cigar!”

“Maybe we should try again,” Flores said. “Use smaller transmitters. I’ve seen some smaller than a dime.”

“If you did, it was in a movie,” Corbin snapped. “The ones we used are the smallest they make.”

“That’s not even the point, really,” Clancy said. “That point is, they figured out what we were up to, and used our plan against us.”

“Well then, expert,” Corbin said, turning to Malakai, “what next?”

“Drive back to that place you stopped,” he responded. “The bottom of that trail.”

“Right, that makes sense,” the mercenary agreed
grudgingly. “Let’s get moving, then!”

They made the drive in silence. When they reached the spot he had suggested, Malakai got out, carefully observing the ground. It didn’t take him long to find the tracks.

“Well, do you know where they’ve gone?” Corbin demanded, hovering over him as he crouched close to the ground.

“Not ‘they’,” Malakai said, after a moment. “Him.”

“What do you mean?” Corbin asked.

“There was only one of them. ‘They’ didn’t figure out what we were trying to do.
He
did. Or
she
, perhaps.”

“No need to be politically correct,” Clancy said. “Apes have their gender roles pretty well mapped out.”

“Yes, but we aren’t dealing with apes here,” Malakai said.

“The tracks are human?” Corbin said.

“No,” Malakai said. “It’s the spoor of a chimpanzee. But the mind attached to the foot that made that track is not the mind of an ape. Up until now I’ve believed that the apes had a human leader, despite your assurances to the contrary. I no longer believe that.”

“Couldn’t it have been trained to do this?” Corbin asked. “Haven’t apes been used in robberies or whatever?”

“Sure they have,” Clancy said. “In those movies Flores has been been watching, the ones with the tiny tracking devices.” That earned her a nasty look, but she didn’t seem to care.

“Imagine the sequence of events,” she went on. “He recognized the camera, inferred what it was there for, and then disabled it.”

“You said that wasn’t a big deal.”

“That alone, no. But then he figured out—or at least guessed—what the tracking devices were, and why they
were there. He then systematically searched the fruit until he found not one, not a few, but
all
of the devices. Then he used them to draw us away so the rest of his troop could take the fruit. I’ll guarantee you there isn’t a single piece remaining where you left it. He must have known there was a road over here, with cars on it.

“It’s just too much,” she concluded.

“What are you saying?”

“Malakai is right. At least one of these apes is smart—really smart. Maybe he’s a mutation, the next step in chimpanzee evolution. Or maybe he was deliberately altered in a lab. Chimps are ninety-nine percent genetically the same as us, so maybe someone spliced in the last one percent.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“But this is good news,” Malakai said, before Corbin could erupt again.

“How’s that?” Corbin asked.

“For one thing, I actually have a better concept now of where they really are,” he replied. “And it gives me an idea.”

* * *

Koba is at the place where they do their tricks and make the little pictures, but they haven’t done anything. People seem upset, and some have water leaking from their eyes. He knows now that they call it crying.

He remembers Mary crying because his mother wouldn’t move, and it makes him feel anxious. He tries not to fidget, because Tommy will punish him if he does. But Tommy isn’t really paying attention to him. He’s speaking loudly to a man who is speaking loudly back. Koba feels as if any minute one will challenge the other, and that makes him feel even more distressed. But finally the men stop yelling at each other.