Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12 page)

Koba sees a leash and hands it to Milo. He motions for Milo to put it on him. At first Milo does not understand. He puts the leash down. But then Koba tries again. Milo tentatively comes forward with the leash. Koba hoots and jumps back. Milo tries again, and once more Koba hops back, hooting laughter.

Then Milo starts laughing, too, and the chase begins. They run all around the room. Milo eventually catches Koba, and they tussle on the floor. Only once, when Koba playfully grabs at Milo’s ear, does Milo get angry. He scowls and pushes Koba away. But then Koba tickles him, and they start playing again.

After a while, they grow tired, and Milo leads Koba around the house. Tommy is where he was, but now he is asleep, a can of the stuff he was drinking still in his hand. Milo makes the sign for “quiet.”

In one room there is a big white box, like the one he was supposed to get the bananas off of, at the place where he and Milo do their tricks. This one is smaller though, and has food in it. So do some other boxes—each one a different size. Milo finds them sweet things to eat. They play some more and then curl up next to each other to sleep. It feels good to sleep lying down, and not standing up in the cage.

Koba wakes with Milo plucking at him. He sees light coming through the windows. Something is making a ringing noise, and Tommy is stirring on the long chair.

Milo pulls him frantically toward the cages.

Tommy
, he signs.
Stick
,
stick
—
come in cage. Quick!

Koba remembers that it was Tommy that let them out
of the cages, but he does what Milo says. The cage doors click shut.

A moment later, Tommy appears, the stick in his hand. He looks at them.

“Huh,” he says, and then scratches his head. He walks off.

* * *

It is the next night, and Tommy lets them out again. This time he watches them play. Koba does the trick they have been practicing; he pretends to be crying, and then Milo comes and gives him a hug. Koba is hoping for a cookie, but instead Tommy offers him the stuff he is drinking. It still smells bad to Koba, and he does not want to drink it, but Tommy shows him the stick and tells him to drink it.

It burns in his nose and throat, and he wants to spit it out, but Tommy has the stick. And so he swallows it.

After it stops burning, it sits in his stomach, turning warm. It feels a little like being groomed, and he remembers his mother. He remembers outside, and the wind, and soon he feels a little warm wind in his head. Milo drinks some too, and then they play together some more. Things are funny that shouldn’t be, like when Koba misses his handhold and cracks his head on the floor.

Milo laughs, and so does Koba, although it hurts.

Like the night before, they find Tommy asleep in front of the tiny moving people, and like before Milo finds them some things to eat and they curl up together.

But this time they wake up with Tommy hitting them and yelling at them. He chases them to their cages and makes them get in. Koba stands there, cramped and miserable. Something is wrong with his head. It hurts, and his stomach feels wrong. He can see that Milo doesn’t feel well, either.

* * *

It is the next morning, and they are at the place where the little people copy the big ones. Milo is trying to do his trick, but he keeps falling. Tommy hits him again and again, but he doesn’t get it right. Tommy leaves to put one of the smoking sticks in his mouth. Most of the other people wander off. Milo is sulking.

A boy Koba has only seen today goes over to Milo and pokes him with his finger.

“Come on,” he says. “Do something.” Milo just backs up a little.

The boy pokes him again.

“Come on, you stupid monkey, do a trick.”

Koba can see that Milo is getting agitated. The boy is challenging him, threatening him. But the boy is not Tommy. The boy does not have the stick.

“You’re such a dumb monkey,” the boy says. “I bet you eat your own shit, don’t you.” He pushes Milo on the head. Milo looks confused, and then he is suddenly angry. He screams and lunges forward, biting the boy on the nose. It isn’t much of a bite—most of the nose is still there—but it bleeds a lot. The boy starts screaming, and Milo goes behind a chair and puts his hands over his head.

All the people come back, including Tommy.

Tommy hits Milo many times with the stick. Then he puts them in their cages on the truck and they go home. When they get home, Tommy takes Koba from the truck and puts him in his cage in the house, but he leaves Milo in the truck. Then Tommy leaves Koba again, and he is alone.

Koba doesn’t like being alone. Being in the cage was bad, but at least Milo had been close. Koba grips the cage and shakes it. He jumps and bangs his head on the top,
where the food comes down. He begins to think that Milo and Tommy will never come back.

Milo and Tommy do come back, and Tommy puts Milo in his cage. Milo is asleep. His face looks strange, swollen. Koba tries to wake him up, but Milo doesn’t hear him, and after a while Tommy comes in with the stick.

“Shut up,” he says. “Or you’re next.”

Koba does not know what Tommy means.

After a long time, Milo does wake up. He looks around and sees Koba. Milo tries to hoot-pant, or at least that’s what Koba thinks he’s doing, but it comes out muffled because Milo is not opening his mouth. Milo starts to panic. He shakes the cage, and claws at his face. He pulls his lips up and does the “smile,” and when he does, Koba can see something shiny toward the back of Milo’s jaw.

After a long time, Milo tires out. He looks desperately at Koba.

Mouth not open
, he signs.

Koba doesn’t understand. What has happened to Milo’s mouth?

It is the next day, and Tommy is making them practice their tricks. Milo seems to feel better, but he still can’t open his mouth. Tommy feeds him through a straw. Tommy looks at Koba.

“This is what happens,” he said. “This is what happens when you don’t behave. You get your goddamn jaw wired shut. You remember that, you little pissant.”

Milo is still able to do most of his tricks. He can even “smile”, although he can no longer “talk.” Koba does most of the talking now.

Tommy still lets them out sometimes, but Milo isn’t the same. He doesn’t play long. He doesn’t look for food in Tommy’s boxes. He goes back to his cage. He doesn’t sign very much, and even with Milo there, Koba feels lonely.

* * *

Koba felt dizzy as the memories pushed through him, and he realized that while he hadn’t been asleep, he hadn’t really been aware of what was happening around him, either.

He saw one of the big caterpillars looking at him. They had found the big caterpillars at the zoo. He had wondered why Caesar freed them, along with the apes. They couldn’t sign, and they were stupid.
Go away, caterpillar
, he signed. But of course it just stared at him. Disturbed, he climbed away from it, hoping he didn’t start seeing things again.

A bit later he found Caesar, and felt excited when Caesar approached him. He quickly supplicated.

Koba
, Caesar said.
My band is smaller now. I need fast, strong apes with me.

I’m with you Caesar.

It’s dangerous. Some have died.

Humans have done much bad to me
, Koba responded.
Happy to fight them.

We don’t fight them
, Caesar said.
We trick, we avoid. We save apes.

He waved at the hundreds in the troop.

Koba understands
, Koba said, slightly disappointed. But Caesar was the leader. Caesar was smart. He knew what was best for them all.

* * *

David woke at four, as usual. He heard sirens in the distance, and looked out his bedroom window. All he saw was San Francisco, in darkness. It wasn’t all that unusual to hear sirens now and then, but in the last few days and nights the number and frequency of them had multiplied. Things were definitely getting more than a little crazy. He had covered a triple homicide in Chinatown the night
before, which had turned out to be a sort of robbery gone wrong. The rumor had gotten out that monkey penis could cure the virus, and so Chinese apothecaries were being ransacked.

Three groups had shown up at the same place and had a shoot-out.

Over monkey penis.

He went to the living room and flipped on the TV, where they were rehashing the riot that former Chief of Police Dreyfus had managed to quell. Then they started showing clips of him from various local talk shows. He was always urging calm, and he came off as smart, deliberate, and in control. Mayor House, by contrast, seemed to be steadily losing it. The polls were starting to look very good for Dreyfus.

He turned off the TV and picked up his tablet to check his messages.

Unsurprisingly, there was an email from Clancy. He had tried to call her the day before, to make sure she was okay, but then he realized she probably didn’t have reception up there.

What was surprising was the content of the mail. He read it, then read it again, wondering if it was some sort of prank, but it seemed pretty serious—and while Clancy was playful, she wasn’t actually the practical joker sort.

Okay
, he thought,
let’s have a look at this.

There were really two parts to what she had sent. One was a brief essay describing the relationship between Gen Sys and Anvil, and her suspicion that the cover-up Gen Sys had begun was still going on under Anvil. The other was a list of the names of the encrypted files she had come across. Ol86G, AgniP3, Chl223, RV113, Teetot, AH1/2F.

None of them meant anything to him, nor did an Internet search turn up anything that looked as if it might be a lead.

A quick search established the basic facts of the matter, however. Anvil and Gen Sys were indeed owned by the same parent company. After searching “Gen Sys + Apes,” he found an article that was eight years old. It was about a shareholder’s meeting in which the results of a drug trial were to be released, apparently with much fanfare. The drug, ALZ112, was supposed to be a cure for Alzheimer’s, and they had tested it on a chimpanzee. The chimp in question had shown considerable cognitive improvement, and was to be introduced to the public as proof that the drug was effective at helping the brain build new cells and repair itself.

Bizarrely, the chimp had gone berserk, broken into the meeting room, and been put down by a security guard. The drug was deemed too dangerous for further trials, and apparently that was that.

He leaned back.

That was that.
Except that Gen Sys had been trashed by apes in the lead-up to the whole Monkeygate thing. And now Anvil seemed to be trying to cover something up, as well. And Anvil was in the employ of the City of San Francisco.

From his investigation of hijinks in appropriations at City Hall, he was already convinced that there was a lot more money moving around there than there should be if everyone was on the up-and-up. What if the mayor was being bribed to cover something up? What could be that big?

This was definitely worth checking out. Everyone was focused on the plague. This story could be very big—and it could be all his.

* * *

Talia wasn’t sure how long she had been on her feet, but they were numb. She had lost count of the hits, and had been admitting people all day. They just kept coming, one train wreck after another.

Her prediction to her father had proven all too true—almost all of the staff were dealing with the retrovirus, leaving her and a handful of others to deal with gun- and knife-wounds, vehicular casualties, and the like. What she was coming to realize was that that sort of morbidity wasn’t remaining at the rate she was used to—it was rising. Most particularly she was seeing an increase in assault victims, people with wounds from broken glass, bats, fists, and feet. As the local death toll from the virus hurdled over a thousand, everything else was ratcheting up, as well.

Some of the assault injuries came from their own waiting room, which was now being used for triage. Those who had tested positive for the disease were escorted to one bus, those who weren’t symptomatic went to another. The sick were then driven to isolation camps, while everyone else went to quarantine because they had potentially been exposed.

Security was being provided by National Guardsmen. Talia found it unnerving to look out at the waiting room and see men holding assault rifles, but she knew things would be far worse without them.

“Somebody’s been tweeting that we’ve got the goddamn cure again,” Randal said. They were patching up an eighteen-year-old boy who looked as if he’d met the business end of a switchblade. “We’re going to get mobbed, like St. Francis did.”

“They didn’t have National Guard at St. Francis,” she pointed out, stitching up an intestine.

“Yeah, but people’re just getting more and more desperate,” he said. “There was a kid in here yesterday—you missed it. His mom had given him some kind of herbal medicine, thinking it would cure him. I still don’t know what it was, but he was convulsing when she brought him in. He was in acute renal failure. Died on the table. And of course the mother broke down, started screaming about
how our western medicine was to blame. It was a mess.”

“Jeez,” she said. She noticed how tired Randal looked, and figured she probably looked worse. “That’s too bad. He would have died anyway, but this way she blames herself.”

“No, she blames us,” he said. “Weren’t you listening?”

She shrugged. “You really can’t expect a mother to be rational two minutes after her son has died. They usually find someone to blame.”

“How about the quack who sold her the medicine?”

“That would be way too logical,” she said. “Okay, thanks—I think I’ve got this one now.”

“Right,” Randal said. “I’ll go see what’s next.”

As he was getting up, he suddenly sneezed. Talia looked up and saw that his mask was spattered red.

“Oh, God, Randal,” she said.

For a moment, Dreyfus thought Maddy was going to slap him.

He could see it in the set of her shoulders, the thin line of her lip. After twenty years of marriage he knew her that well. She was trying to decide.