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

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They cut along the canyon’s edge, Malcolm on a horse led by an ape who appeared to be one of the leader’s inner circle. When they reached the base of the canyon, Malcolm spoke up.

“We should walk from here,” he said. The ape leader nodded, and they dismounted—he and a group of apes including One-Eye, who still looked like he wanted to dig his harpoon around in Malcolm’s guts. He led them down the face of the canyon to a logjam choking the river, with the roar of a waterfall just beyond it. Soon it was too loud to speak and be heard, so Malcolm waved everyone forward and started working his way out across the logs.

It was a tricky scramble, slippery with a long drop on one side and rolling water on the other that would trap you under the logjam long after you’d drowned. Mist from the waterfall swirled all around them. Malcolm picked his way to the middle of the jam, and looked down.

Here’s where I start to spring my own surprise, he thought.

He jumped… and landed on a catwalk six feet below the logjam. He looked up to see the apes’ heads appear, puzzled at first and then surprised as they saw Malcolm standing unharmed.

He waved for them to join him. They climbed down and looked over the dam’s vast spillway and the concrete retaining walls built to anchor the structure. Surely the apes must have seen this before, thought Malcolm. But if they had, they’d never been on the catwalk—at least not this group. They looked around in wonder and stuck close to Malcolm as he led them to the far side of the walkway, with a hundred-foot slope of concrete below them and the mossy face of the dam above. Water surged down the front of it. In its ruined state, it was a spectacular sight—maybe even more spectacular than it would have been when it was in good repair.

They reached the end of the catwalk, where it seemed to dead-end into one of the retaining walls… until you noticed the rectangular outline and the stainless steel door handle sticking out like a bent finger. Malcolm wrapped his shirt around it to get a better grip, and twisted, then pulled the door open with a squeal that cut through the roar of the falls.

Inside, he led the apes down a cement staircase into the mechanicals room of the dam’s powerhouse. The room was maybe three stories high, with overgrown windows on one side admitting dim light. Immense pipes and valves dominated an end of it, and on the ground floor below these were the control panels, gathered around a central console with an array of knobs and dials. The rest of the room was given over to worktables and tool lockers.

“It’s what we used to call a small hydro,” Malcolm explained as the apes descended the staircase behind him, looking in wonder at the building they had never noticed so close to their village. “It was built to service areas north of here, but we’ve been working to re-route the necessary lines in the city to, um…” He cut himself off. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. See, the city, it used to run off nuclear power, but that gave out years ago. We’ve been running diesel generators, gasifiers—but we’re almost out…”

The ape leader stood before the console, looking at the panels and gauges.

“If we can just get this dam working again, we have a shot at restoring limited power to our…” Malcolm trailed off as he saw the ape leader looking hard at him. He got nervous again, his initial flush of excitement disappearing as he was put in mind of One-Eye’s harpoon. “Is any of this… making sense?” he asked.

The leader held his gaze a few seconds longer.

“The lights,” he said.

Malcolm realized he’d been holding his breath. Now he let it out and smiled. “Yes. The lights. Listen, I know this is your home up here. And we’re not trying to take it away from you, I promise. But if you could just allow us to do our work, please—”

One-Eye cut him off.

“You brought others?” he growled.

Very carefully, Malcolm measured his reply.

“Just a few.” He hoped that would satisfy them. “Look… if you still think I’m a threat, then I guess you’ll kill me. But I swear, I wouldn’t have come back up here if I didn’t have to. I have a son…” He thought this seemed to get through to the leader, and he kept talking. “We’re just trying to survive down there. All we need is a few days, and I give you my word.

“You will never. See us. Again.”