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

36

In the mechanicals room, Ellie fidgeted with gear while Alexander ran through the tests his father had asked him to complete. It didn’t take him long. The control panel fuses were all intact, and its wiring was in surprisingly good shape. People who built dams apparently over-engineered things like that, since they knew the equipment had to operate in close proximity to water. After a few minutes, he set down his tools.

“I’m done,” he said. “As far as I can tell, everything’s okay. But we won’t really know until there’s water going through again.”

Ellie paused in the middle of going through one of the tool lockers. She was picking out supplies that met two criteria. First, she thought they would be useful, and second, they were light enough for the group to carry back across the logjam and to the trucks. It felt like busy work. She was frustrated, and irritated that the men had gone trooping off to handle explosives, leaving her here.

“We’ll see,” she said.

Alexander put his equipment away. He picked up a book out of habit—she had never seen a kid who spent every single waking moment reading when nobody was telling him specifically to do something else. Then he put it down again.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” he said out of the blue.

This caught her off guard.

“Yeah. I did,” was all she could think to say.

“What was her name?” Alexander asked.

“Sarah,” Ellie said.

She would have been twelve now, no doubt gangly and uncertain like Ellie herself had been at that age. At three, she was small for her age, a tiny bundle of bossy exuberance. She had already learned the alphabet. She could recognize her name when she saw it written down. Her favorite book was… well, there was a tie. She loved making Ellie read the tongue twisters in Fox in Socks, faster and faster, laughing when she stumbled. But she also loved to hear Goodnight Moon every night before bed.

Ellie had been reading Goodnight Moon when Sarah, nestled in her lap, sneezed blood all over the picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

A nosebleed, she’d told herself. Every kid gets them. But she knew it wasn’t true. She was a nurse, she’d heard colleagues talking about the unnamed epidemic, and she’d heard stories on the news that got everything wrong except the growing sense of public unease. In her own hospital, several people had died of what would come to be called the Simian Flu.

She’d done everything she could, but thirty-six hours later Sara was gone.

Ellie couldn’t tell Alexander any of that. Sarah was hers. She never talked to anybody about her, for fear of diluting her memory by sharing it. She knew it was stupid, knew that she was indulging in a coping mechanism that prevented her from completing her grieving process and moving on… But in a way she didn’t want to move on, because what kind of a person could really ever move on from losing a child?

“I’m really sorry,” Alexander said. Ellie looked back at him from the tool locker and smiled. What a terrific kid he was. Moody, introverted, scarred by growing up when and how he’d grown up… but he had a good heart, undamaged by everything he’d seen. And good hearts were in short supply these days.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well… I have you and your dad now.”

Alexander returned her smile. She thought maybe that was the first time she’d ever seen him really smile at her.

The moment passed, and he looked back at the open access tunnel hatch.

“You think they’re going to take a long time?” he asked. “Those batteries don’t last.” They could hear the men down there, muttering to each other, the words made indistinct by their echoing trip up the tunnel shaft. Ellie wanted to go see how they were doing, but it was pointless. All that would do was prolong the time it took them to finish the job.

“You know your dad,” Ellie said. “He’s going to get through this part of it as fast as he can, especially with…” She trailed off, but she could tell he knew what she’d been about to say. Especially with the apes watching. Both of them—all of them—wanted to get down out of the mountains, out of ape country, as soon as they could.

Although she thought Alexander might not feel that as strongly as the adults. She’d seen him and the orangutan, sizing each other up that morning.

Who knows, she thought. Maybe in ten years people and apes will all be living together. It was kids like Alexander who could make that happen.