Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (8 page)

“You’re getting so big,” Mary tells him. Then she makes a windy sound.

“Koba,” she says, “I know you won’t understand all of this, but our program funding has been cut. It’s
complicated, but you won’t be living here anymore. I won’t get to see you anymore.”

Mother
, Koba signs.

Mary shakes her head.

“You’re going to a nice place with nice people,” she says. “You’ll be okay.”

And the next day a man comes and put a leash on him. He puts him in a little cage in a thing that moves, and they go to another place. It takes a long time, and Koba cannot even stand up in the cage. He gets sick from moving. He gets scared and bored and unhappy.

* * *

Koba blinked, and stared at the dead apes, at the eyes Caesar had just closed, and then he understood. His mother had been dead. Roger had killed her, somehow, with his bag of oranges.

Something nudged him, and Koba started. It was Caesar.

Koba
, he said.
Go back to Maurice. Be on guard there.

For a moment, Koba felt a flash of anger. Guard the wounded? He wanted to be with Caesar. He wanted to hunt, to fool the humans, to fight them again if need be.

And he wanted to protect Caesar.

But he also wanted to please Caesar, and that meant doing what he said. So he gave submission and reluctantly went up the nearest tree. But he paused and looked back as Caesar and his band went off in the other direction.

Caesar had divided the troop into three smaller bands. One was with Maurice. It was the largest and included the wounded, the infants, and wild apes who knew how to find food. They were staying mostly in one place. The second group was with Rocket—they were to draw humans away from Maurice and his band, to hunt small animals, and to
find human food where they could.

The third group was led by Caesar himself, and would do much the same as Rocket’s bunch. When Caesar had asked Koba to help carry the bodies, he had hoped he would remain a part of Caesar’s band.

But it seemed Caesar didn’t really trust him. No one ever had, he realized. Until now, that had not bothered him. But he
wanted
Caesar to trust him, and he wasn’t even sure why. It would mean something, he thought—but he couldn’t think what it would mean exactly.

* * *

When she got to work, Talia still had a little bit of a glow from her father’s grudging pseudo-approval. But the reality of the situation soon overwhelmed that.

The CDC had been quietly trying to prepare the public for what could be a serious epidemic, rolling out ads on how to best avoid the disease, and what to do and where to go if symptoms manifested. Local and national news caught on a little before things were ready, and this was the result…

The waiting room was packed, and there was a line out the door. A lot of them were wearing masks, some improvised. Everyone thought they had symptoms, although triage was turning most of them away because they were perfectly healthy.

She dove right in, and it was more than an hour before she took a break from setting a broken arm to grab a cup of coffee. The little flat-screen television in the café was on, and she stood and watched for a minute. Dreyfus, the former police chief, was announcing his candidacy for mayor. She wasn’t sure she liked him enough to vote for him, but when he was asked about the retrovirus and he started cautioning against panic, she nodded.

It was the right message. She hoped people heeded it.

She checked her text messages and saw that David Flynn had left one. She hadn’t heard from him in a while, and wasn’t sure how she felt about it now. When she read the message, though, she realized he was writing a piece on the virus, and wondering if she had any insights to share. So she just nodded knowingly, and put the phone away.

Talia was about to look at what was next when she heard screaming coming from one of the triage rooms. She bolted out the door and down the hall.

When she got there, she found a man in his mid-thirties, brandishing a knife at Ravenna. The nurse was visibly shaken, but she didn’t look hurt.

“Okay,” Talia said, holding out her hands, palms forward, and trying to sound calm. “What’s going on here? What’s the matter?”

“What’s going on,” the man shouted, “is this stupid bitch says there’s nothing wrong with me. But I know I’ve got it. I
know
I do. And I want the vaccination or whatever. The cure.”

She heard a scuffle of feet behind her and saw that Biggs, the security guard, was there, with his pistol drawn.

“Wait!” she shouted. “Just hang on. I’ll see you, Mr.—?”

“Max,” the guy said. “I’m Max.”

“Okay, Max, I’m Dr. Kosar. Come with me.”

The man looked uncertain.

“Come on,” she said, and she gestured gently with her fingers.

He lowered the knife. Talia stepped over as Ravenna edged away. She studied Max for a bit.

“Yes,” she said. “The nurse made a mistake. Come with me.”

He looked wary, but followed her, knife still in hand.

“Randy,” she said, as soon as they were out of earshot
of the waiting room. “Prepare an IV for Max here, and make sure the MH and sodium levels are adjusted.”

She turned back to Max.

“We’re just going to give you some fluids, get you hydrated. We call it buffing, here in the ER.” She glanced pointedly at the knife. “You won’t need that anymore.”

“I think I’ll hold onto it,” Max said.

“Fine,” she replied.

“You’re pretty for a doctor,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “Okay, here’s the IV. Ever had one of these before?”

“I guess,” he said. “When I was a kid.”

“So I have to find a vein and put a needle in it. Are you okay with that? You’re not going to stab me if I prick you? It’s going to sting a little.”

“No,” he said. “I can handle it.”

“All right, then let’s get it done.”

It seemed like a long time before she found the vein and got the catheter in. She felt as if her heart was trying to push itself out of her body. Max’s pupils were dilated and she was pretty sure he was on something—meth, probably. She wouldn’t have time to move if he used the knife.

But then it was in, and Randall hooked up the bag.

“All right,” she said. “That’s all we need to do for now. Why don’t you just lie down, get comfortable?”

“I think I’ll stay sitting,” he said. “And I want someone to stay with me. So that guy with the gun don’t come in here.”

“I’ll stay for a few minutes,” she said. “But I have other patients I need to see.”

“I’m sorry I was rough on that other girl,” he said. “But she kept saying I don’t have any of the symptoms, but I do. This friend of mine, Jay-Cee, he got it. He said he got it from a monkey or something. And he and I… you know,
we smoked a little weed together. So I know I’ve got it.”

“Well, you were right and she was wrong,” Talia said. “When we have this many, it’s hard to be right all the time.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

The knife fell out of his hand as the methohexital took effect, and she caught him as he fell face-forward toward the floor.

“Tell security they can have this asshole now,” she said.

Malakai woke in the gray before dawn. The fog lay thick across the land, and he was as wet as if he had been in a brief rain. He remembered hearing somewhere that fog came on cat’s feet—perhaps it was in a poem. But to him it felt more like it had come in like a giant slug.

He stood and fingered the damp bark of a tree. The water had actually beaded there, as if the tree were a glass of ice water on a warm, humid day. It rarely rained in the Bay Area in summer, but the condensation from the fog provided water for the giant trees and other forest life.

He was reminded powerfully of another forest, another mist—the cloud forest in the Virunga Mountains. He had awoken there, too, cold and damp. He and his uncle had spent the previous day trekking up from the tropical lowlands to a place so strange that his eight-year-old mind could hardly imagine it. He remembered how struck he had been with the beauty of it, and how he said so. Babbling in wonder.

Like Clancy, for God’s sake.

But he had been eight. Clancy didn’t have that excuse.
His uncle had cut a trail with his machete, and Malakai reflected that at that time, he had never seen a machete used for anything other than cutting vegetation. It was like being caught up in a magical tale, carving a tunnel through the green forest that might have been growing on a cloud. To him, it had felt as if
anything
might happen. For long moments, he had almost forgotten the tight emptiness in his belly, and the look of his mother and sister when he last had seen them—drawn, emaciated.

His uncle would point to this and that and call each thing a sign. To Malakai, they mostly just looked like bent leaves and scuffs on the ground. But there was one place even he could spot, an area where branches and leaves had been crushed in a roughly circular area. Some of them looked almost as if they had been woven together.

“A gorilla nest,” his uncle told him then. “And not very old.”

They continued on for a bit, and then his uncle suddenly stopped. Malakai thought something was the matter. But then his uncle pointed across a little valley, and there they were.

He had tried to imagine them from his uncle’s stories, but this was a case where the story did not match reality.

His heart pounded as they moved closer, coming to within ten yards. He could still feel that, the hammering in his chest, the cold of the mist on his skin, the smell of the broken vegetation, the thinness of the air in his young lungs.

And the gorillas.

They watched his uncle and him arrive, peering with almost human regard. The largest, a silverback, crouched a yard or so off of the ground, on a bent tree. Malakai thought they would be attacked, but the gorillas seemed only curious. A small one—a toddler—came over and brushed his uncle’s legs before running back to his mother.

He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.

His mother didn’t like the story because it wasn’t Christian. But for the young Malakai it had created a certain longing. His father, after all, had been a white man, and he had gone west, to America, where all men were rich, and left him to starve with his mother and her people. He dreamed that one day his father would return, and lavish gifts upon him, although his mother said it would never happen.

Yet Malakai was the descendent of both brothers. Shouldn’t some of the wealth fall to him?

Maybe one day.

And at last he was seeing the descendants of the third brother. How amazingly like men they were. According to the story, these were his cousins.

He wondered if a white man or a black man could make a son with a gorilla mother.

* * *

Malakai almost grinned, remembering that childish thought. Looking back, he knew that the story of the three brothers was just another deplorable remnant of European colonialism. Gone was his youthful naïveté.

He turned back to camp to get his things and found Clancy was awake, scribbling in a little book of some sort in the dim gray light of dawn. Like him, she had probably been stripped of her phone, computer, and such.

“Good morning,” she said.

“It is,” he said, surprising himself.

“Do you like sleeping outdoors?” she asked.

“I once swore I would never do it again,” he told her. “When I came to America, I raised my fist and promised myself that from now on I would sleep in soft beds and on clean sheets.”

“Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara,” Clancy said.

“The rich woman who was so sad to lose her black slaves?”

“I guess that was inappropriate,” she said, coloring a little. “I just had that image of her raising her hand, and swearing she would never go hungry again.”

Malakai shrugged. “I swore that, too,” he said. “And yet here I am, sleeping on the ground, and hungry.”

“And agreeing that it’s a good morning,” she added.

“All right,” he said. “Try not to become irritating.”

He gathered up his things as she continued writing, and then set off. Clancy looked up, and called after him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Where do you imagine?” he replied. “I’m tracking the apes.”

“You’re not going to wait for Corbin?”

“No, I think not,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, stowing her notebook and standing up. “I’m coming with you.”

He shrugged and waited for her to prepare. Then they went down the embankment, and he found the trail again.

“Did you hear anything last night?” he asked. He kept his voice pitched low.

“I thought I did,” she replied. “An orang, maybe. It might have been nothing.”

“No,” he replied. “I heard it, too.”

They walked in silence for a bit.

“I don’t know very much about orangutans,” he admitted.
“My experience has been mostly with African apes.”

Clancy was frowning, and it seemed in danger of becoming her permanent expression. The happy, babbling girl of yesterday seemed gone—perhaps forever.

One can only hope
, he mused.

“There’s an old zookeeper’s joke,” she said.

“Oh, yes?”

“One night while locking up, the zookeeper accidentally drops his keys in front of the gorilla cage. Next morning, the keys are still there, so he picks them up. Another time he drops his keys in front of the chimps. They all start screaming. He looks down, sees that he has dropped his keys, and picks them up. The next night, he drops his keys in front of the orangutan cage. The next morning the keys are gone, the orangutan is gone, and so is every other animal in the zoo.”

“Not exactly a joke, is it?” He smiled. “So they’re smart.”

“It’s more that they’re deliberate,” she said. “They take their time. They don’t freak out the way chimps do. They are really good problem-solvers.”