Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Page 4

  Wild apes, he said. Apes captured from the wild. They will know what to eat.

  No, Cornelia said. I was born wild. Woods not like this. Different woods. Different food.

  Frustration exploded through Caesar’s weariness. He rose up and bared his teeth. Cornelia slunk back a bit.

  What, then? he demanded.

  She looked up at him. Her posture was submissive—but her gaze? He saw challenge there. As if she was male.

  Wild apes know how to figure out what is food, she said. Need time.

  Good, he signed. Figure it out.

  Quickly, he added.

  Takes time, she repeated stubbornly. Also, many apes are wounded. Cannot keep up this pace. Need to settle, nest. Heal.

  No time, Caesar said. When humans leave, we nest.

  We starve before that, Cornelia insisted.

  That was enough. Caesar lunged at her, and she scuttled back, then began to descend.

  True, she signed, defiantly, once she was out of range. He watched her go, fuming. But then he settled against the tree-trunk.

  Sleep, he told Rocket. And he closed his eyes.

  * * *

  He slept the rest of the day and the night. When he awoke, he found Maurice there.

  Three apes died in the night, the orang told him.

  Caesar absorbed that for a moment, and then acknowledged the news.

  Maybe Cornelia… Maurice began.

  Caesar cut him off with a rough bark. Maurice looked mildly apologetic, but he didn’t back down.

  I know she’s right, Caesar finally said. She was annoying, but she had made good points. She had been thinking.

  And he was tired of reacting. It was time to plan.

  Find Rocket, he told Maurice. We three must talk.

  * * *

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Clancy said, her eyes preternaturally wide. “So beautiful.” She reached up to brush stray strands of straw-colored hair from her face.

  Malakai gazed out the window of the Humvee as it bumped along the service road, considering the massive columns of the coast redwoods and wondering what the trees in the understory were. Back home he could have named any plant you showed him. This forest was a cipher to him.

  “Have you been here before, Mr. Youmans?” the woman asked, apparently undeterred by his failure to respond to her comments.

  “No,” he replied.

  “The first time I came here, I thought it was like the most amazing cathedral anyone could imagine,” she gushed. “It’s like the trees are holding up the sky. Dinosaurs knew trees like this, did you know that? Relatives of redwoods used to dominate the globe. Now they exist in only a few places.”

  Malakai suppressed a sigh.

  He had discovered upon waking in the two-bedroom prefab hut that another occupant had joined him there—Clancy Stoppard. She was a primatologist, she studied at UC Berkeley, and she wanted to help rehabilitate apes to the wild. He got all that within thirty seconds of meeting her. She was pretty and upbeat and twenty-seven years old, and he wondered how long it would be before he killed her. If he had known she was to be on his team—worse yet, in his hut—he might not have signed that contract.

  He hoped another few moments of silence might send the proper message. There were, after all, five other people in the Humvee she could be bothering.

  But such was not the case.

  “Where are you from, Mr. Youmans?” she asked.

  “I’m from San Francisco,” he replied.

  “No,” she said. “I meant… you know, your accent.”

  “I was born in the Belgian Congo,” he clarified. “What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

  “Oh, really? What part of the country?”

  It was funny how often people asked that, even when they knew not the slightest geographic detail of his native land. He would tell them, and they would blather something useless.

  “North Kivu,” he replied. “Near Butembo.”

  He hadn’t thought it possible for her eyes to widen further, but they did.

  “That’s near the Virunga National Forest,” she said. “Where the mountain gorillas live.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “You are quite knowledgeable.”

  “I hope to go there one day,” she said. “Is that where you acquired your knowledge of primates?”

  “My uncle took me to see the gorillas when I was just eight,” he replied. “And many times after that.”

  “That must have been amazing.”

  Amazing wasn’t the word he would have chosen, but he didn’t have much interest in continuing with the conversation. Fortunately, a moment later, the vehicle rolled to a stop.

  Malakai opened the door and stepped out onto the rich leaf mold, looking up toward the treetops, trying to put this forest together in his head. Inwardly, he did find the trees rather impressive, but that was sort of the American thing, wasn’t it? Everything bigger. The question on his mind was how the apes would perceive this place, how they would bend themselves to it and it to them. What they would forage, where they would drink, sleep, and take refuge.

  The other members of the expedition—four men and another woman—piled out of the back and began loading their tranq guns. Two of them, however, had automatic rifles, and they all had sidearms. Malakai found himself longing for one of the weapons himself. He felt naked without a firearm, especially in the woods. And most especially when almost everyone else around him was heavily armed.

  “Guns?” Clancy noticed, too. “Those are real guns?” she said, her expression startled. “We won’t need guns other than the tranqs.”

  “The apes were violent on the bridge,” Corbin said. He was a blunt-faced man of maybe forty years. Malakai had him figured for an ex-Marine.

  “Yeah,” Flores, his guide from the day before, said. “And one of ’em tried to take my head off last night.”

  “Flores,” Corbin said, “shut up.” He gestured with the muzzle of his AR-15. “This way.” He led them about a hundred yards from the road, then pulled out a handheld global positioning device and studied it. He gestured, and they continued a short distance.

  He didn’t have to tell Malakai when they reached the site. The scuffle of prints, the empty shell casings and shredded vegetation did that. Malakai walked carefully, trying to see everything without disturbing it.

  “This is a chimp print,” he heard Clancy say. She picked up a spent rifle round. “Somebody was shooting at them.”

  Well, Malakai allowed, she isn’t a total idiot.

  “They came down from the trees here,” he said. “Five, maybe six. They weren’t all chimps.” He stooped to look at a larger print.

  “That’s an orangutan,” Clancy said. She frowned. “They said this happened at night?” she added. “Why would they come down to the ground at night? Chimps and orangutans are diurnal. They stay in trees at night, where they’re safe.”

  “Maybe because they weren’t so safe in these trees,” Malakai replied, nudging one of the casings with his foot. “That’s a big round, .50 caliber, probably from a mounted weapon. Somebody was shooting from the air. It was probably fired from a gun mounted on a helicopter.”

  Clancy’s brows lowered, and she frowned.

  “I was told we were trying to recover the apes,” she said. “Not kill them.”

  “They’re dangerous,” Corbin asserted.

  “How dangerous could they be to helicopters?” she demanded.

  “They took one down on the bridge,” Flores said.

  “Flores!” Corbin barked.

  That wasn’t in the news, Malakai thought, but he didn’t show it. He was following the tracks again. He remembered that a policeman had been killed in a chopper accident, but no mention was made of the apes causing the crash.

  “The idea,” Corbin said, still talking to Clancy, “was to force them to the ground so troops with night-vision gear could capture them.”

  “Capture them?” she snapped. “
With machine guns?”

  “The choppers just raked the treetops,” Corbin replied, looking exasperated. “They didn’t shoot down at them. Which would have meant shooting down at us, by the way. We only meant to tranq them.”

  “You were on this detail?” Malakai asked. “All of you?”

  Corbin nodded.

  “Here’s where the ambush occurred,” Malakai said, pointing.

  “Chimps can’t see at night,” Clancy persisted. “They would have been helpless.”

  “And yet you didn’t manage to hit any of them,” Malakai noticed. He turned to Corbin. “Am I right?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Corbin replied. “And let’s keep it down. They could be near.”

  “They aren’t,” Malakai said, walking about ten yards. “They went back up into the trees… here.”

  “So there’s no telling where they went?”

  Malakai bent to study a dark spot on the leaf mold.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he replied, and he started moving uphill to the north.

  “Is that blood? Clancy asked. “That’s blood, isn’t it?”

  Malakai pretended he didn’t hear her.

  * * *

  Following the blood trail wasn’t easy. The chimps kept changing direction, although they were generally moving up toward Mount Tamalpais.

  The task became even harder when they came to the source of the blood, late in the afternoon. A chimp was curled into a fetal position at the base of a tree. Malakai approached with some caution, but judging by the amount of blood present beneath the ape, he didn’t think he had too much to worry about. His suspicions proved true when he nudged the chimp with his foot. He reached and grasped an arm, lifting it, and pulled.

  The chimp flopped over on his back.

  “He hasn’t been dead for more than a few hours,” he told Corbin. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.”

  “Gross,” one of the others said.

  Malakai heard Clancy sob, and glanced in her direction. Her face had gone white, and tears were running down her face.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. She stepped nearer the body. The chimp’s eyes were open and glassy, staring out of the bright world and into the darkness beyond. Clancy looked at Malakai as if there was some question he could answer.

  Oh, for God’s sake, Malakai thought, and suddenly he was angry. She was upset about a dead ape? How many men, women, and children had he seen like this?

  Ridiculous.

  “I thought you weren’t using real bullets,” Clancy said in a shaky voice.

  “That must have been the one that jumped me,” Flores muttered. “He just came out of nowhere, and I dropped my rifle so I pulled my sidearm. Pure instinct.”

  Malakai shut out the rest of the exchange. He hunted around the vicinity some more, and then began moving north again.

  The sun was well on its way into shadow—and he was on the verge of giving up—when he found a track. And then another. The apes had come back down from the trees—again, at night. He tried to picture the entire scenario. They had been driven down from the trees by the helicopter, and they ran into a detail wearing night-vision goggles. When fired upon by the ground troops they had gone back up into the trees, but only long enough to outdistance their pursuers. Then—against their natural inclinations—they had come back down.

  That was—strange.

  * * *

  Near sundown they crossed a road, and after a bit of fiddling with his GPS, Corbin determined that it was the same road on which they’d left the Humvee, so he sent Flores back to retrieve it.

  “We’re less than a mile from where we started,” he complained.

  Malakai shrugged. What could he say to that? They weren’t trying to set a land-speed record. They were trying to find some very peculiarly acting apes.

  He glanced at Clancy. She hadn’t said much since they had found the dead chimp. He could be grateful for that, at least. Her lips were set in a tight line, and she looked miserable.

  He took Corbin aside.

  “When Flores gets back with the truck,” he said, “why don’t you have him take the young lady back to base?”

  “Hell,” Corbin said. “That sun’s almost down. Unless they’re over this next ridge, we’re all going back.”

  “I’m not,” Malakai said. “I’m camping here.”

  “Why? Do you think they’ll come back?” He looked around, as if the thought disturbed him. “We can be back at camp in half an hour, and be back here before the sun rises to pick up the trail.”

  “I’m camping here,” Malakai repeated. “I don’t know this place, these woods. I need to become acquainted with them. And I may hear something useful. If there are hundreds of apes out here, they will surely make some noise. An orangutan call can travel a great distance, I’ve heard.”

  “We have listening posts all over,” Corbin said. “I’m not under orders to sleep out here, and we didn’t bring any camping gear.”

  “I don’t require company,” Malakai said, “or gear, although a blanket would be nice.”

  Corbin hesitated.

  “I’m not staying with you,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” Malakai replied. He stepped away from the man, and searched around a bit, looking for a suitable site.

  “I’ll be up there,” he said finally, pointing to a bit of high ground with a sheltered eastern side. With that, he began to climb.

  * * *

  He was gathering twigs to start a fire when he heard the Humvee arrive below, then leave. A few moments later he heard footsteps and looked down to see Clancy climbing the slope. She was carrying something in a bundle.

  “They had some rain ponchos in the back,” she said. “We can use them as blankets.”

  He nodded and continued gathering wood for the fire. Though he was determined not to show it, he was irritated. He had been looking forward to being alone with the night and his thoughts.

  When he didn’t say anything, Clancy began helping gather wood. When they had cleared a space around the little pile, he produced his lighter to start it, she coughed up a humorless chuckle.

  “Pretty sure this is illegal,” she said.

  “No doubt,” he replied. He watched as the little flame fed on the smallest twigs and moved out to the larger. Then he sat on a bare spot, and stared into the fire.

  Clancy sat directly across from him, but she wasn’t looking at him.

  “You think I’m an idiot,” she said, after a moment.

  He sighed.

  “I think you’re naïve,” he said.

  “I am that, obviously,” she said. “But I’d rather…” Suddenly she stopped.

  “Rather what?” he asked, regretting it the instant he spoke. He wanted her to stop talking, not continue.

  She watched the fire for a moment.

  “I knew the chimp was dead when I saw its eyes,” she said, finally.

  “Sure,” Malakai replied. “It’s easy to see when the life is gone.”

  “It just seems to me,” she said, pausing, “your eyes are just like his.”

  He poked a stick into the fire and watched the sparks weave upward.

  “That’s quite poetic,” he told her.

  “How did you get to be like that?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  “I was born,” he said.

  “I know there’s been a lot of war where you come from—”

  “Look, miss,” he said. “I’m here to do a particular job. I intend to do that, and nothing more. I am not an ethnographic subject for you to study. If you stayed here so that you could interview me, then you’ve made an error.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Think something else,” he said.

  The fire was going pretty well now. He started arranging the poncho. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Clancy spread hers and lie down. He lay on his back, staring up at the night. The clouds that had covered the heavens for much of the day were gone, and the stars w
ere staring back at him. He remembered lying like this on Mount Virunga, with his uncle—so very long ago, it seemed. The constellations were different here, and Mount Tamalpais was hardly a mountain at all, so the feeling of familiarity was… surprising.

  “I didn’t,” Clancy said, her brittle voice breaking the stillness. “Didn’t come up here to interview you. I stayed to keep an eye on you. You know something the others don’t, and you haven’t said anything about it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Apes don’t act like this. Chimps—and most certainly orangutans—they just don’t.”

  “Well,” he said, “you noticed that, did you? So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said quietly, making a decision. “You know these people we’re working for—they can’t be trusted.”

  “I get that, believe it or not. The whole thing is too hush-hush.” She looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure I want to know what they’re really up to.”

  “Yes, you do,” he told her. “You say you saw me back there, saw something missing in my eyes. But I also saw you. If you did not want to know, you would have already quit. You would be on your way home right now, to your boyfriend, no doubt.”

  That actually drew a half-hearted laugh from her.

  “You really think you have me pegged, don’t you?” she said.

  “Am I wrong?”

  She was silent for a long time, long enough that he thought she might be asleep.

  “No,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Some things couldn’t be avoided, and the weekly dinner with her father was one of them. It wasn’t that Talia didn’t love him, but she knew what he was working up to, and she didn’t really want to deal with it at the moment.

  But she was here, in a steakhouse where she couldn’t afford the entrees, feeling underdressed and very young. She might be almost thirty, but her father had a way of making Talia feel twelve.

  “How’s your fish?” he asked, eying her seared Alaskan char with some suspicion.

  “It’s delicious,” she said. “How’s your steak?” she countered, eyeing the massive Porterhouse.