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

50

In the radio room, Werner was still broadcasting. He was tireless. Since the power had come back on, he’d been glued to the chair, repeating the same message, over and over.

“This is San Francisco, attempting to establish contact. If you are receiving this signal, please respond. Repeat, this is San Francisco—”

The door banged open and a rush of celebratory noise flooded in. Werner broke off, and Dreyfus looked up from pacing back and forth to see one of his officers, Dan DeRosario, gasping for breath in the doorway. Dreyfus had seen a lot of fear in the last ten years, but DeRosario was as scared as any human being he’d ever seen.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Apes,” DeRosario said.

Dreyfus didn’t need to hear any more.

He shoved his way through the celebrating throng, making a cranking gesture over his head as he tried to get the notice of the sentries on the parapet over the gate. On the way, DeRosario gave him a quick rundown.

“We got word from the fort. The apes went through and looted it. They’ve got every gun in the place and they’re on their way here. All of them. Hundreds.”

“Who else knows?” Dreyfus asked. “We need to get these people inside.”

“I already put the word out to the militia,” DeRosario said. “They’re keeping it quiet for now.”

One of the sentries finally noticed and started the siren. It cut through the celebration and the crowd looked toward the gate as Dreyfus got to the bottom of the stairs. He took them three at a time as the gate opened and the Colony militia spilled out to take up firing positions behind the Jersey barriers positioned between the gate and the street. Concrete walls about three feet high, placed end-to-end as used to be the practice when they were used along the highways.

“Keep them off the walls!” he shouted to the deploying militia. Then he looked up to the parapet, shouting louder. “Keep them off the walls!”

Back to DeRosario, he said, “How long?”

“We just got the call,” DeRosario said. “Some of them are on horseback, but most of them are on foot. Not too long. A few minutes.”

The crowd’s energy began to transmute from ecstasy to aggressive uncertainty. Against the siren’s howl, Dreyfus heard people on the ground shouting questions. He would have to make some kind of a statement, settle people down… in a minute. First he had to make sure their defenses were in place. If they couldn’t count on reinforcements from Fort Point, that was bad. But he believed in the people of the Colony. They would hold out because they had do.

He wondered what had become of Malcolm and the rest of that group. If there was an ape army coming after the Colony, Dreyfus had to assume he wouldn’t be seeing any of them again. It was a hard loss to absorb… but at least they’d gotten the power going first. The apes hadn’t sabotaged it, either.

Dreyfus wondered if they were planning to take it over. But not on his watch, no sir. If the apes wanted peace, they could have it. But if they wanted war, they could have that, too.

Below him, recruits were adding material between the Jersey barriers, creating rough battlements. On the parapet over the gate, more recruits were finishing a wall of sandbags, adding a few feet in height and a lot more protection against either bullets or spears. They worked hard and they worked fast, but he could see they were also terrified. He couldn’t blame them. Apes were monsters from their nightmares at this point. It was like being attacked by boogeymen.

At the edge of the parapet a young recruit, maybe eighteen or twenty, was shaking so badly he couldn’t lock the belt into a grenade launcher. Dreyfus went to him, steadied his hands, and guided the belt into position.

“It’s going to be okay, son,” he said. “Believe it.”

He stood back up and found his megaphone on the table next to the manual crank that drove the air-raid siren. He picked it up and signaled to the recruit who was running the siren. It quickly wound down.

“Listen to me!” he called out over the siren’s dying moan. “Everything we’ve been through has prepared us for this night. Everything! We are survivors.” He paced along the parapet, making eye contact with as many of his people as he could. “They may have gotten their hands on some of our guns—but that does not make them men. They are animals! We will push them back. Drive them down. Bury them!”

Some of the crowd shouted back at him, and the roar picked up. They knew they needed to fight, and led by the recruits and his cadre of more seasoned officers, they started to work themselves up to it. Dreyfus led them, raising his own voice and punctuating each phrase with a stabbing motion of his free hand.

“We… will… not… let them through these doors!” The echoes of his voice died away, and in the distance they heard the shrieks of the approaching apes. He left the megaphone dangling and said, loudly but calmly, “Fight with me. Fight for humanity.”

Then he turned to stand with his soldiers and watch for the enemy.

The sound built, but because of the fog, it was difficult to pinpoint the direction. Dreyfus guessed they would be taking the direct approach, straight over the hill and down California Street. He looked that way, seeing lights here and there in the mist. More streetlights were coming back to life even now, hours after the power had started coming in. Still, illumination beyond the immediate vicinity of the Colony was patchy. He heard the sound of hoofbeats. Lots of them, and yes, coming from exactly where he’d expected.

“I can hear them,” a sniper said, standing near Dreyfus along the parapet. He held steady, looking through his scope, but there was a tremor in his voice. “Where are they?”

Dreyfus looked through binoculars, trying to resolve any kind of detail. All he saw was the dimly diffused light of the Colony’s illumination… then he realized something. The lights he’d seen out in the city weren’t streetlights. They were torches, and as they got closer he could see their motion.

The apes’ screeching intensified as they must have spotted the Colony’s lights, and the torches started moving faster. They came on with frightening speed, and Dreyfus saw that they weren’t just running along the streets. More were swinging from streetlight poles, in long lines stretching back into the darkness.

“There!” he shouted, pointing. All along the parapet, rifle barrels swung in the direction he indicated. They were waiting for his command, he realized, for a don’t-shoot-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes moment. He took a deep breath, wanting the perfect phrase to present itself…

Then out of the fog, the apes began shooting.

The first sprays of bullets tore into the Colony’s facade, breaking windows and punching into the sandbags along the parapet. The apes kept shooting, and their fire intensified as they got closer and could see their targets better.

Dreyfus forgot all about an inspirational phrase.

“Fire!” he shouted. “Fire now!”

They did, unloading from the parapets and from the makeshift fortifications in front of the Colony’s gate. They had better positions than the apes did, and they knew their weapons better than the apes did, so their first volleys cut into the advancing apes and did more damage than the wild shots the leading animals had fired. But the apes were difficult targets, dark-colored and moving fast. Before the Colony forces could concentrate their efforts enough to make the streets too dangerous, the horseback vanguard of the ape army was practically on top of them.

The grenade launcher chuffed, and explosions scattered the closest groups of apes. The screeching reached a fever pitch. Dreyfus was amazed that individual creatures could make so much noise… and the screams of wounded horses added a painful dimension to the cacophony. Finney had set up a feed from the radio room on the siren table, and through it Dreyfus heard Werner, his voice getting desperate.

“This is San Francisco! If anyone out there can hear this, we are under attack, repeat, we are under attack!”

That we are, Dreyfus thought. He signaled to a small group of recruits at the other end of the parapet and they launched Molotov cocktails out over the Jersey barriers. They smashed onto the pavement and spread into a wall of flames.

Through the fire came apes on horseback. One, in the center, held a heavy machine gun. Dreyfus recognized him, the one with the blind eye who had looked so longingly at their guns when the ape army had made its first appearance. He did not see the other one—the one with whom Malcolm had talked. Seasoned political hand that he was, Dreyfus put two and two together. This ape had decided that Malcolm and the other ape were too chummy. He was taking matters into his own hands…

That made it even more likely that he had seen the last of Malcolm and the rest of the team which had gone up into the mountains. Hell of a sacrifice they had made.

The Colony would honor it.

He ran along the parapet, pointing at the one-eyed ape.

“That’s the leader!” he bellowed, pointing to their target. “Take him out!” He repeated it all the way down the line. A spray of bullets tore into the wall around him, stinging him with masonry shards. “Shit!” he cried out. Right in front of him, a pair of recruits was blazing away with their AR-15s. They had a rocket-propelled grenade leaning up against the parapet between them.

“The RPG,” Dreyfus shouted. “Give me the RPG!”

He lifted it to his shoulder, flipped up the sight, and tried to track the ape leader, who raked the parapet with his machine gun. Dreyfus recognized the weapon, and wondered what kind of world it was where apes on horseback shot M240s at you? Try as he might, he couldn’t get a bead. The ape was smart, and didn’t ride in a straight line. But tracking it, he saw a pickup truck with stacks of fuel cans lined up in its bed.

Now that’s not going to move, he thought, and he fired.

The truck and its cans of fuel went up in a huge explosion that cut off the apes’ direct approach to the Colony gate. The lead apes on horseback wheeled around and looked for another way forward, but the scattered debris from the destroyed vehicle burned in their way, and the other street rubble was catching. A few apes charged up and around the fire, using the building facades on either side, but they were cut down as they appeared.

The Colony had halted the ape advance.

“Keep it up!” Dreyfus shouted. His voice was getting ragged. “We’ve got them!” He hoped it was true. If they could handle the initial assault, they had the advantage. A good defensive position was their trump card.