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

44

In the morning, the first thing Malcolm noticed was the sound of the apes arriving in camp for the day’s work. The second was that Alexander was not in his sleeping bag. He leaned forward and out of the bag he shared with Ellie to look out the tent flap. Behind him he felt Ellie stir and grab at the bag to pull it back.

Outside he saw Alexander, sitting with the orangutan, pointing at a page in his comic book. No, wait. The orangutan was holding the comic. Alexander was teaching him how to read it.

“Incredible,” Malcolm said softly.

“What?” Ellie said from behind him. “That you never learned to get up without pulling all the covers off?”

“No, come here.” Malcolm motioned to her. She held the sleeping bag close and scooched over next to him. He heard her catch her breath at the sight. “Can you believe it?”

“Can I believe what?” she said softly. “A fifteen-year-old kid teaching a talking orangutan how to read a comic book? Nothing unusual about that.”

He chuckled, and they snuggled next to each other, amazed that even in this world, where so much had been lost, moments like this were still possible.

Caesar arrived as they were about to head up to the dam site. He watched humans and apes working together. Malcolm had an internal debate about whether to approach him, and then decided what the hell, the direct approach had worked so far.

“We’ll be done today. Like we promised,” he said, coming close to Caesar’s horse. Caesar nodded and looked away, tracking something one of the apes was doing. Malcolm wasn’t quite done, though. “I just want to thank you,” he said. “When we get back, I’m going to make sure everyone knows what you did to help us.”

Caesar looked down from the horse. He reached out and dropped a hand on Malcolm’s shoulder, exactly as Malcolm had done the day before in Caesar’s tree house.

“Trust,” he said quietly.

Malcolm nodded. There was a connection between them. Curious, he looked across the camp to where he thought Caesar’s attention had been drawn earlier. There were Alexander and the orangutan.

“Caesar,” Malcolm said, “do me a favor. What’s the orangutan’s name?”

“Maurice,” Caesar said. “Good friend.”

“Luca the gorilla introduced himself down in the tunnel after the cave-in,” Malcolm said. “And your son?”

“Blue Eyes.”

“What about the other one? And your… woman? Partner?”

“Baby is not named yet. Her name is Cornelia.”

An ape of few words, Malcolm thought. He didn’t want to push the chumminess of the moment too far, but it sure did help to have some names.

“Oh,” he said. “And One-Eye…?”

Caesar looked at Malcolm. “Koba,” he said. “Stay away from him.”

“That’s the plan,” Malcolm said.

They’d spent the morning shooting more holes in the Jeep down by the water, and now McVeigh and Terry had decided that it was lunchtime, if “lunch” meant sharing a bottle of whiskey. They didn’t do it every day, but today just felt like a whiskey day. They sat inside the warehouse, on the ground floor, looking up at the building’s three levels, each jam-packed with crates.

“Man,” Terry said. “We don’t even know what’s in half of those.”

“Take us a year to find out,” McVeigh said. He didn’t care. Already they’d unpacked, test-fired, and inventoried enough firepower to put a gun in the hands of every man, woman, and child in the Colony. The rest of it, hell, it might come in handy someday, but they wouldn’t need it any time soon.

He took what he considered to be a moderate sip from the bottle. Whiskey was one thing that was still available here in the ruins of all that was good and holy.

“This is the good stuff,” he said. “None of that blended crap.”

“What’re you, some kinda connoisseur?” Terry asked.

McVeigh was about to tell Terry that there were three things of which he considered himself a connoisseur—women, guns, and whiskey—when they heard chimp noises.

They looked back toward the door facing the firing range and in came the chimp. Where had he been? McVeigh wondered. Did he disappear into the city somewhere?

He came hooting and shuffling in, making a big happy grimace and waving at Terry and McVeigh as if he hadn’t seen them in a year. “

“Man, is this guy serious?” McVeigh said. “The rest of the apes must have left him behind because he’s such a pain in the ass.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Terry called out. “I thought we told you to go home!”

The chimp did a somersault, then another, rolling right up to them. He grinned at McVeigh and made eating motions.

“I think he likes you,” Terry said.

“Shut up,” McVeigh said. He slugged back a big mouthful of the whiskey and saw the chimp watching the bottle. He looked from one of them to the other, pantomiming with both hands a drinking gesture. McVeigh looked at Terry.

“You want a drink, Fugly?” Terry asked. He had a big false smile on his face. The chimp nodded and rocked back and forth from foot to foot. “Go on, V, give him some. If I had scars like that all over me, and I was blind in one eye, I’d hope someone would give me a drink.”

McVeigh handed the bottle to the chimp, which brought it to his lips and sucked down a good fourth of the bottle. Terry started snickering.

“Whoa, take it easy,” McVeigh said, mostly because he didn’t want the chimp to drink all their damn whiskey, but also because he was feeling a little bad for the guy. Ape or no, he seemed like a harmless goofball. He reached to take the bottle back and the chimp let him have it right back. Something happened in his eye, a shift in the set of the muscles or something… and all that whiskey came right back out of the chimp’s mouth, in a spit-take blast right into their faces.

“Ah, shit!” McVeigh cried, wiping the booze from his eyes. He heard Terry crack up and was about to ask him what he thought was so damn funny about having a chimp spit liquor in your face. Shit, wasn’t that how the Simian Flu had gotten started, from chimps sneezing on people? Terry’s sense of humor was pretty damn weird, when you took a minute to think about it.

Then Terry stopped laughing, and McVeigh blinked the rest of the whiskey from his eyes, and there was the chimp, holding an AK47 in his hands like he knew how to use it. His teeth were bared and McVeigh thought, That’s what he looks like when he really smiles.

The whole thing, the dancing, the grimaces, the somersaults. It was a game. It was a sucker play, and he and Terry had fallen for it.

“Come on, man,” McVeigh said. “We were just kidding around with you. You hungry? We can find—”

The barrel of the gun came up.

He’s not going to pull the trigger, McVeigh thought. No. He’s not—