Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization

20

Malcolm snapped awake at the sound of pounding on his bedroom door.

“Dad! Dad!” Alexander was shouting from the other side. Ellie scrambled out of bed and started getting dressed. Malcolm did the same, pulling on yesterday’s pants and hurrying to the door. “Alexander, what is it?” he said as he opened it.

Alexander looked scared.

“There’s something going on,” he said.

“What do you mean, something going on?”

“Dad, if I knew more I’d tell you—come on.” Alexander looked ready to run out the door. Malcolm could hear the sounds of a crowd gathering in the market.

“All right, give me a second,” he said, irritated at being rushed right out of bed. He turned back into the bedroom to grab a shirt, and without thinking opened the door, presenting Alexander with a view of Ellie just putting on her shirt. She shot him a glare, then looked awkwardly at Alexander.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he answered, just as awkwardly.

Malcolm grabbed his own shirt on and headed past them.

“Come on, then, let’s go,” he said. It was getting louder outside.

“Smooth,” Ellie muttered to him as he passed. There was nothing Malcolm could say that wouldn’t either make the situation worse or delay them getting out the door, or both, so he didn’t say anything. As he passed through the kitchen, he heard the rising whine of the Colony’s air-raid siren.

Uh oh, he thought. Ellie’s pissed, Alexander’s embarrassed, and the whole Colony’s been put on alert. This is a hell of a way to start the day.

By the time they got out into the plaza, just inside the Colony gate, they were fighting through a crowd the likes of which Malcolm hadn’t seen since the early months of the Simian Flu, when San Francisco had seemed like one great panicked mob surging from hospitals to police stations to grocery stores… Eventually that mob had turned on itself, and the city had burned for more than a year, until there were no longer enough people to carry on the looting and violence.

Now the survivors jammed their way through the gates, some with guns, trying to shout at each other over the sound of the air-raid siren. Malcolm looked up onto the platform built above the arched entrance, where a sentry named Leonel was cranking away at the siren while looking back and forth from the crowd to something outside. He was clearly terrified.

Where was Dreyfus? Malcolm pushed forward, trying to get to the scaffolding that led up to the platform. Then he caught sight of Dreyfus, reaching the platform and pushing through to stare out into the city.

The look on his face was one of… fear?

Malcolm got to the stairs. Dreyfus had left guards to stop the crush of people from flooding up, but the first man recognized Malcolm and let him through.

“Stay together!” he called to Ellie and Alexander as he climbed up.

It was crowded on the platform, but nothing like down below. More and more people were screaming questions up at Dreyfus, demanding to know what was going on. Good question, thought Malcolm. I’d like to know myself. He got next to Dreyfus and looked out into the street beyond.

What he saw stunned him absolutely.

“Oh my God,” he said.

Dreyfus signaled the sentry to stop cranking the siren, and it cut off abruptly. But it was far from silent—the crowd was in full voice, hundreds of people calling out questions and demands.

Malcolm looked back to the street outside, where hundreds and hundreds of apes stood in perfect silence, massed along the entire block facing the Colony gate. In the center were several dozen on horseback, with the leader right up front. Gorillas loomed, flanking the horses, with chimpanzees ranked beside and behind them. All of them were armed. A forest of spears stood upright, and those without spears held clubs and stone axes. Malcolm also saw the gleam of steel. The humans weren’t the only ones who had scavenged the ruins for weapons.

“This is a hell of a lot more than eighty,” Dreyfus said. Malcolm nodded. What he had seen on the ridgeline up in the mountains was a hunting party. This was an army.

It was an impossible sight. How had this many apes stayed completely out of sight of humans? More importantly, how had this many apes come into the city and planted themselves at the Colony’s front gate without anyone knowing? Malcolm had a bad feeling about whoever had been standing guard at the bridge.

He fought down an urge to panic. If the apes had come to kill them, they would already be fighting… or so he hoped. The truth was, he was still thinking of them as apes, when they clearly were more. Rumors had flown in the months after the outbreak of Simian Flu—conspiracy theories about top-secret military projects to create ape super soldiers, and other ridiculous fever dreams. Some of the scientists from a biotech lab where apes had broken free hinted at experiments to increase their intelligence.

But Malcolm hadn’t believed any of it. That was the stuff of pulp science fiction, not reality. He’d always figured that some enterprising microorganism had made the jump from ape to human, and biological incompatibility had done the rest. But now he had to face facts. He’d heard two of the apes speak. He’d seen them organize themselves. Now he was looking at an ape army.

And unless he was mistaken, they hadn’t come for battle. From the look of things, they wanted to parley.

“I’m going to talk to him,” Malcolm said.

“Him?” Dreyfus said. “Who’s him?”

Malcolm pointed at the chimp on horseback, front and center.

“See the one with the red on his face? That’s the one who spoke before.”

“Spoke, like said words out loud,” Dreyfus said.

“That’s what I told you before,” Malcolm said.

“I know you did, but I didn’t believe it.”

“You believe it now?”

Dreyfus, still looking out at the ape army, replied, “I don’t know what the hell to believe. You want to talk to him? You sure?”

“I have a feeling that’s why they’re here,” Malcolm said.

Behind them, one of the sentries said, “I got a feeling they’re here to kill us.”

“If that’s what they wanted, you’d already have a spear in your gut,” Malcolm said. “Look at them. You think they couldn’t get in if they wanted to?”

The sentry didn’t answer.

Dreyfus leaned in close to Malcolm.

“You think you can talk to them, go ahead,” he said. “I’ll even come with you. But they make one move, and we’re going to protect ourselves.”

Malcolm looked the chimp leader in the eye. He was met with a steady gaze.

“Don’t be in a rush to start a war,” he said to Dreyfus, quietly. “Let’s see what they have to say.”