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

23

The noise inside the Colony at dawn had been nothing compared to the din now. Every single citizen, every surviving human being in San Francisco who was able to walk, was crushed into the space just inside of the gate.

There was an almost palpable air of panic. Knots of people shoved and grappled to get closer to Dreyfus, shouting their questions and venting their terror. Dreyfus himself stood with his back to the gate, holding a battered police megaphone to his mouth and raising his other arm in an effort to calm people down. Malcolm watched from the edge of the crowd, with Alexander and Ellie right with him. Alexander clutched his satchel. Both of them looked scared, and they had every right to be. This crowd was a bomb, and the appearance of the ape army had lit its fuse.

From the barrage of questions, a few were repeated enough that Dreyfus made an attempt to answer them first.

“We’re all immune!” he shouted through the megaphone. “We’re all immune or we wouldn’t be here!” He cut his eyes at Ellie as he said this, and Ellie in turn looked to Malcolm. She had said this to Dreyfus the day before, and if it turned out not to be true… well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

“Now please, try to—try to calm down,” Dreyfus said. From somewhere in the crowd a man shouted.

“How did they find us?” Several other voices took up the question. Dreyfus waved the megaphone, trying to settle them enough that they would be able to hear his response. There was a brief pause, or at least a slight lessening of the general pandemonium.

“We, uh… we found them,” Dreyfus said. “Just yesterday. There was—”

He didn’t get a chance to go on. The crowd exploded. From the uproar came a dozen variations on a single question, given full voice by another man, right in the front. He shoved forward, until he was up against the cordon of Dreyfus’s unofficial police guard.

“You knew they were out there, and you didn’t tell us?” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

Malcolm gathered Ellie and Alexander closer to him, trying to protect them from the sudden surge and crush of the crowd as people jammed forward, their furious panic abruptly redirected from the apes to Dreyfus’s failure. Dreyfus’s guards held their rifles across their bodies and forced the crowd back, but the circle of space around the Colony’s leader was getting smaller by the moment.

This is going to turn violent, Malcolm thought. Any second now.

Dreyfus seemed to be thinking the same thing. His voice pitched higher as he shouted into the megaphone.

“I was only waiting to—”

“What if they come back?” a woman shouted between two of his guards. They shoved her back, but the crowd was on the verge of clawing its way through the cordon. Malcolm started to look around for the best way to get the hell out of there if the situation really spiraled out of control.

Dreyfus climbed part of the way up the scaffolding that supported the parapet. He waved for silence, but the crowd’s panic was a feedback loop. They were almost beyond any one person’s ability to keep them from rioting.

“If they come back,” he began, and realized not enough of them could hear him. Malcolm saw him frightened—maybe for the first time ever—and he began again, louder this time. “If they come back, they’re gonna be sorry they ever did!”

This got the crowd’s attention. They wanted a rallying point. They needed someone to focus their attention and their emotions, to give them a place to displace their anxiety about this new… threat?

Were the apes a threat?

Malcolm wasn’t sure.

The crowd settled down somewhat. They were still rowdy, still shouting, but Dreyfus saw that he had a chance to make a point.

“We may not have the manpower this city once did, but we have the firepower. Those stockpiles left behind by FEMA, the National Guard, we have it all.” He let that sink in, gauging the reaction of the crowd. They continued to be restive, still on edge, but for the moment most of them were listening.

“Look, I know why you’re scared,” Dreyfus continued. “I’m scared, too, believe me. But I recognize the trust you all placed in me, I do. We’ve been through hell together. When we settled here, it was because we’d had enough of living in fear, living like animals. We spent four years fighting that virus, then another four fighting each other after the city came apart.

“It was chaos—worse than anything I’d seen in all my years on the force, and I want you to know, there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about that. It wasn’t until we came here—and started working together—that we finally started to live again, like human beings. And I would never do anything to jeopardize that, I promise you.”

Malcolm could only admire the skill Dreyfus was demonstrating. He’d taken a sliver of a chance to turn back the tide of panic, and now he was already rallying everyone together by recalling their common experience. A master of his craft, the man looked from face to face in the crowd, making eye contact with the people who moments before had been ready to lynch him.

His tone changed a little, now that he’d brought them back from the brink.

“But you all know what we’re up against. We’re almost out of fuel. Which means no more power—which means we could slip back to the way things were. That dam up there was the answer. We just had no idea… they were up there, too.”

“So what do we do now?” someone cried. It was the same woman who had asked what they would do if the apes returned. Dreyfus had turned her attention toward the future, toward action rather than reaction.

Malcolm had always taken Dreyfus’s leadership for granted. The survivors of the flu had fallen into place around him because he had been the police chief, and then the mayor as the entire world sneezed blood and died. But now Malcolm saw that there was a reason for that. Whatever intangible characteristic it was that defined a leader, Dreyfus had it.

Maybe Malcolm had a little of it, too. He wondered about that. At least the ape chief seemed to think so.

“We will find another way,” Dreyfus said. “You all know Malcolm,” he added, pointing him out. Heads turned to look. “He’s not just a brilliant architect, he cares about the future of this community as much as I do. And I’ve already spoken to him about finding an alternative power source.”

Just like that, Malcolm’s opinion changed. He kept looking at Dreyfus, not trusting himself to stay impassive—much less hopeful—if he had to interact with the crowd at that moment.

Because there was no alternative power source. Dreyfus had suddenly gone all politician on the crowd, and on Malcolm in particular, waving a sign of hope that only Malcolm knew to be false. If they didn’t get the dam running, there would be no power, except what they could keep squeezing out of the generators. That would only last as long as they could keep finding drips and trickles of fuel, which were growing scarcer and scarcer.

That son of a bitch, Malcolm thought. What Dreyfus had done, more or less, was take the bull’s-eye off his own back and put it on Malcolm’s. It was one thing to lie in a political speech, but it was another entirely to tell a bald-faced lie in a life-or-death situation.

Especially when it was Malcolm’s death they were talking about. If they couldn’t get the dam operational and there was no other power option, the Colony would blame him. It wasn’t just possible, but probable that someone in the Colony would be so desperate and angry about the failure of the power project, that he would put a bullet or a knife in the person he blamed for it.

The crowd now focused on him. First Dreyfus had shifted their attention away from the apes. Then he’d shifted it away from himself. Dreyfus had made Malcolm the fulcrum of their hopes. And now he swung into full-on rallying mode.

“Because power isn’t just about keeping the lights on. It’s about giving us the tools to reconnect to the rest of the world. To find out who else is out there, so we can start to rebuild—and reclaim—the world we lost.” He paused for a professional beat, bringing the crowd back to him. “We will get there. You have my solemn promise.”

By which, Malcolm thought, he meant they had Malcolm’s promise.

Dreyfus wrapped up his speech by exhorting the assembled citizens of the Colony to return to their necessary business. They still had machines to repair, fuel to find, food to cook, children to raise.

“This is our home,” he said. “Nothing will take it from us, and nothing will stop us from rebuilding our civilization and reclaiming what was once ours. Now let’s get to it.”

The crowd started to break up, encouraged by Dreyfus’s guards spreading out and moving them along. Malcolm, Ellie, and Alexander stayed where they were, near the base of the stairs leading to the top of the parapet. A few people looked their way, but none approached them.

“That was quite a performance,” Ellie said.

“Yeah,” Malcolm said, watching the passers-by and keeping his voice low. “It sure was.” Then he looked straight at her. “I’ll catch up with you in a bit. Right now I have to find out what the hell he thinks he’s talking about.”