Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm - The Official Movie Prequel

20

“All of them,” Clancy said.

He had heard her crying most of the night. Now she was in the aftershock, he knew—the terrible still place when the initial animal grief finally drains and leaves a numbness that borders on insensibility.

“Mom, Dad, Renee, Jack—how could it happen so fast? I saw them three weeks ago. They were fine.” She looked off into the distance. “Like San Francisco was… fine.”

“I am truly very sorry for your loss,” he said.

She looked at him, and he saw a spark of anger there.

“Do you really feel anything?” she asked.

He shrugged. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t know. After a certain point, it’s better not to, you know?”

“God,” she said. “Why does it have to be you? Why do you have to be the only one I can talk to in this stinking place?”

The remark took him off-guard—not because it was surprising, but because he was thinking the same thing.

“What about this fellow you ‘hang out’ with? You have your phone now.”

“He’s an asshole,” she said. “I asked him to quietly check something out, and two days later it’s on the front page. He never even tried to warn me—I checked. Anyway, it’s hard to call anyone, given the shape the network is in. It was a miracle I got through to Uncle Hamm.” She closed her eyes. “Ten missed calls from him. I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but damn. I was going to see them at Christmas. What the hell am I going to do at Christmas?”

“They don’t live here?”

She shook her head. “They’re on the other coast, in the DC area. My dad is an engineer and Mom is…” She stopped, started again. “Dad was an engineer. Mom was an art teacher. Renee was going to graduate high school. Jack was only eight.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks again, and her countenance was that of utter devastation. He had seen it so many times he had once joked that it just bored him now.

Do you feel anything?

He really didn’t know.

“You have other family?” he asked, more to be polite now.

“I have cousins I’m not very close to,” she said. “My grandfather on my mom’s side, maybe. Uncle Hamm didn’t know if he was okay or not. And Uncle Hamm.”

“Well, that’s something.”

She shook her head. “What if they die, too?”

She glanced over at him.

“What about you? Do you have anyone? A wife?”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t even tried. There really isn’t anyone.”

He put his palms on his thighs and pushed himself to standing.

“I think,” he said, “I shall take a walk.”

She nodded and looked down. Then she started weeping again.

He sighed. “Would you like to come with me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I was alone with this all night. I don’t think I can take being alone any longer.”

“There’s always ‘C’ hut,” he pointed out.

“Right. Get all buddy-buddy with the guys who were maybe going to put bullets in our brains. No thanks.”

The fog had retreated for the afternoon, and the sky above was a clear, bright blue. Clancy’s words hung with him, and he imagined Corbin placing the barrel of a gun to her head.

He remembered another man, a mercenary.

“What are you thinking about?” Clancy asked.

“I am certain you don’t want to know,” he said. He glanced up at the trees. “You were right, by the way. They are quite beautiful.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s kind of weird that the park is so empty. Usually when I came here, there were people everywhere. Now…” She frowned. “What if everyone dies, Malakai?” she asked. “What if nothing stops this disease?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It is strange. I haven’t thought about it.”

“You don’t think much about the future, do you?”

“Not so much,” he admitted. “Thinking about things that aren’t yet real can distract you from the man who is about to kill you.”

“I guess when you join the army at twelve, you can start thinking like that.” She turned to him. “I mean, have you always been fighting?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “When I joined Simba, they were almost done already. We killed so many people, more than the other side, perhaps. Just people, going about their lives, with no interest in political matters. There was no sympathy for us in the countryside…”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Why is this of interest to you?” he asked. “My life? The things I’ve done?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because you’re the first person I hate and like at the same time. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand you and I don’t understand myself any better, I guess. And I don’t want to think about me right now. I guess I keep hoping you’ll say something to tip me one way or the other, so I don’t have these mixed feelings.”

He took a few more steps. Then he shrugged.

“The other guys were also stronger,” he said. “The Belgians eventually came in, and the US, as well. Once again my uncle spirited me away. We couldn’t go home—it was too dangerous, and there was nothing to go home to. So we went to Burundi. We started poaching chimpanzees.”

“I thought chimps were too close to people to eat,” she said.

“So my mother believed,” he said. “Others did not think so. But we were trying to catch them alive, to sell to westerners. It was there in Burundi I met my wife.”

“I thought you said—”

“Well, I don’t, now,” he told her.

“Oh.”

He met Solange when he was seventeen. She was of the Tutsi tribe, and her family had a small cattle ranch in the hills. He and his uncle did day labor for her father. He and Solange began meeting in a place with a waterfall and a small pool. She was fifteen to his seventeen, small, dark-skinned for a Tutsi. Beautiful to his eyes. Some other young men said her face was too round and her mouth too wide, but those were the things that made her appealing to him.

They talked a great deal, and over time there was some fondling and kissing, but she was very Christian, and although he knew he might press her to have sex, he also knew she would regret it, and he wanted her to have no regrets. He felt as if she was a wind coming through him that would blow away the past and bring him a new future.

Her parents didn’t dislike him, but he knew that they would never let him marry her if he could not come up with a bride price—which he would never make watching cows and mending fences.

“We’ll hunt chimps,” his uncle said. “I know a man who knows a man—we can get a good price.”

And like that, they went back into the poaching business.

The first morning of the hunt found them in the deep hills, waking around the remains of a fire. Besides his uncle and himself there were two other men, Patrick and Emery, both of whom had hunted chimps before. Malakai wasn’t particularly happy with that—he didn’t know the men that well. Still, the cage they had with them was heavy enough empty. It would be good to have more men to carry it when it was full of apes.

They ate a cold breakfast of boiled cornmeal and then started out to where Patrick insisted that chimps could be found. Chimpanzees, it turned out, were far easier to find than gorillas. They often used human trails, and their sign was everywhere. And they were noisy.

They caught up to a troop in an upland basin. Patrick was the first to spot one, but by the time he did, the chimps already knew they were there, and were making quite a bit of noise.

“Walk forward slowly,” Patrick said. “Try not to seem threatening. We’re looking for a little one, a baby. Those are easiest to carry and to sell. No one wants an old buck.”

Malaki kept his weapon down as they moved into the trees. The chimps were scampering all around them, now, and some of the bigger ones were starting to make him nervous—coming too close, making aggressive movements. He tried to count them, but it was hard because they kept moving. He figured there were about twenty.

“There we go,” his uncle murmured. He pointed ahead, to where a baby clung to its mother. When the mother saw them, she clambered into the low branches of a tree. One of the big males started screeching even louder as they approached.

His uncle had the net ready, and moved slowly toward the chimp and her baby. When he was close enough, he tossed the net.

The little chimp nimbly dodged it, hopping onto the mother’s back. Simultaneously one of the big apes leapt right up into Uncle’s face.

Patrick’s rifle roared, and the chimp pitched back. The other chimps screamed and retreated, but as soon as the men started toward the juvenile again, they came back with a vengeance. The mother, on the other hand, backed off, letting the rest of the troop defend her.

A big one dropped down right in front of Malakai, and for a moment he was arrested by its gaze—not so much angry as panicked, a look he had seen on plenty of human faces. It snapped at him with its teeth, and without putting a thought into it Malakai shot the beast. It screeched and bounded back, pawing at the wound.

Then Patrick shot the mother.

She tumbled off of her perch and thudded to the ground. The baby managed to jump free, but it immediately leapt down and crouched behind her. She wasn’t dead, yet; she reached back and took the baby in her arms, still trying to defend it as she scooted away on the jungle floor.

They were forced to kill fifteen chimps before the troop finally backed off enough for them to retrieve the baby. It was still clinging to the mother. Malakai remembered the mother looking up at him, with the dimming light in her eyes.

He aimed his gun and sent her permanently out of the bright world. They put the baby in the cage and cut some saplings to help them carry it. Then they started back down from the hills.

Three days later he had his bride price, and the next week he and Solange were married. He spent the next couple of years poaching chimpanzees to support them, and the little boy they soon had.

His beautiful boy.

He and Clancy were walking back toward the camp by the time he finished the story.

“What did you name him,” she asked, “the boy?”

“Joseph,” he said. “After his mother’s father. He looked like her.”

They were interrupted by the sound of trucks moving up the road. A moment later the first of them arrived, and began disgorging National Guard troops.

“I wonder what that’s about,” Clancy said.

“I would be surprised if it was anything good,” Malakai replied. Then he swore under his breath. For a Humvee pulled up next to the first truck, and out stepped Trumann Phillips.

Phillips saw the two of them and waved them over. Malakai and Clancy met him in the center of the compound.

“Can you find them again?” he asked. “The apes?”

Malakai stared at him for a moment. Something had happened. Phillips was back in charge.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. I have some better ideas about how to do it now.”

“The mayor wants them captured?” Clancy said, then added, “He said we were free to go.”

“He wants us to proceed as planned,” Phillips said. “And you are free to go if you wish, but I need you. I wasn’t at liberty to tell you this before, but now it’s all out in the open, and you might as well know. Gen Sys is responsible for the virus, and the apes have it. We need captive apes to try and find a cure. That’s what this has been about, all along. What it’s still about.”

Malakai considered that. What he really wanted was to be quit of the whole matter. It still stank like a rotting elephant carcass.

“I’ll help,” Clancy said. Her voice was a little funny, and she had a distant look in her eyes.

“That’s excellent,” Phillips said. “And you, Mr. Youmans?”

“Sure,” he said, trying to hide his reluctance. “I’ll help finish this.”