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

48

In the Colony, there was jubilation. Every man, woman, and child surged through the market, marveling at the lights. So many lights! The children too young to remember electricity were awed, and some were terrified. Their parents explained with happy tears in their eyes. And word began to spread. Malcolm had done it! This was the start of a new day.

Almost literally, since it was nearly midnight.

The lights had been on for a few hours, and the celebration was just settling as a real party. Until that moment, everyone had been too shocked to celebrate, and too afraid that something would go wrong and the lights would go out again, crushing their hopes just when they had been raised. But belief took hold quickly, and soon they were dancing and drinking and raising hell from the pure joy of being alive.

Dreyfus’s back stung from the number of times it had been slapped. His hands were scraped and aching from being shaken by what seemed like a thousand people. Finally he excused himself from the festivities, because there was something he needed back in his quarters.

It took him a while to find it, buried under a pile of maps on a shelf in the corner, but before long he was standing in front of an electrical outlet, an iPad in one hand and its power plug in the other. Moving with the care of a priest performing a mystic ritual, he plugged it in and closed his eyes when he saw the lightning bolt on its screen.

He watched it, hearing the joyful sounds outside but caring only for the tiny sliver of red that appeared on the battery icon. The tablet powered up, and Dreyfus tapped the photo icon. He swiped through photos of old Army buddies, fellow police officers, him at different social functions and fund-raisers… and there was what he had come for. Maddy and their boys, Edward and John. Standing on the viewing platform at the top of the Coit Tower, they smiled for the camera in that distant year of 2012, when the Simian Flu was just a public-health concern and nobody had imagined what the next ten years would hold. Dreyfus blinked tears from his eyes and looked, drinking in every last detail.

Electricity wouldn’t just give them a future, he thought. It would give them back their past. He looked up and out his window, over the mass of revelers. Above them, blinking against the sky, was the light at the top of the antenna on the unfinished skyscraper. If the light was on, the antenna had power. If the antenna had power, they could make themselves known, and at last—at long last—they could hear other human voices.

If any were left.

He took another look at his family, kissed his fingers and touched them to each of the three faces in turn. Then he set the tablet on his desk and composed himself. It was time to be the leader again.

The radio room was set back in a corner of the Colony away from the market and near the edge of the workshop area. Dreyfus headed for it, enduring more backslaps and handshakes, smiling and high-fiving, and at last getting clear of the crowd. He entered the radio room, and the first thing that struck him was the sound.

Static.

Two men, Finney and Werner, were working with the transceiver. They sat at a table piled high with a wall of recovered equipment. They had everything from military-grade amplifiers to CB radios scavenged from old trucks. Those had taken some searching. In the age of the Internet, the CB had been almost as dead as the eight-track tape. But they had them. And they had everything else they could find that might send or receive a signal, all wired through stacks of drum-shaped signal boosters that gave them a broadcast range of hundreds of miles… in theory, anyway, and depending on the fog and atmospheric conditions…

Werner leaned into a microphone, headphones on, speaking over the thrum of current from the boosters.

“This is San Francisco, attempting contact. If anyone is receiving this message, we ask that you identify yourself and your location, over…” He noticed Dreyfus and nodded at the mountain of gear, proud of what they had done. “We’re out on over two hundred frequencies now.”

Dreyfus nodded. They all watched the speakers, looked from dial to dial on the dozens of sets piled together on the table. The static was broken by a sharp crackle and they all froze, listening harder. Had there been a hint of a voice?

The crackle lasted only a second. Then the static returned.

“Keep trying,” Dreyfus said. Hell, static was a big step forward.