Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

207 Pages·2014·1.07 MB·English

by  Keyes Greg

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm
Print edition ISBN: 9781783292257
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783292264
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: May 2014
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and
does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ™ & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights
Reserved.
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the subsequent purchaser.
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Dedicated to Terri Hunnicutt and Warren Roberts
PROLOGUE
Roger Mason was crossing the middle ground between wakeful and asleep when
something snapped him to full awareness. He wasn’t sure what it was, although
he felt as if it had been a sound of some sort.
He glanced around slowly to get his bearings.
Fog drifted through the massive coast redwoods, and it felt in that moment as
if he wasn’t just a few miles from San Francisco, but in some distant era when
this forest had stretched unbroken from what was now Santa Cruz all the way to
southern Oregon. Other than his campsite, there was nothing visible of the works
of man.
He was slumped against the trunk of one of the ancient titans, facing his tent.
He had only closed his eyes for a matter of minutes, or so it seemed.
What had he heard?
Trying to stay still, he listened intently, but whatever it was, it didn’t repeat
itself. Maybe it had just been the start of a dream, the nonsense music of
hallucination.
“Nothing,” he sighed. As usual. Maybe it was time to go home. He had been
out here for more than a week, alone, without a phone or any other ties to the
rest of the world. Normally, he loved these trips. The illicit thrill of outsmarting
the rangers, of camping where it wasn’t legal. The solitude. The possibility that
finally, after all of these years, his dreams would come true. But now, at last, he
began to think that not only was it time to go home, but to stay there.
For almost thirty years he had camped in the Muir Woods, among some of the
tallest trees on Earth, searching for evidence of the creatures that the Native
Americans called ‘Sasquatch,’ and that others called ‘Bigfoot.’ Many times in
that first couple of decades, he’d felt certain that he had barely missed seeing
one of the elusive, ape-like creatures, only by the smallest hair. That just one
more trip would pay off big.
He knew the arguments voiced by the skeptics—that there couldn’t be just one
or two Bigfoot. That for a species to survive, it needed a breeding population
that numbered in the hundreds, at least, and that such numbers of giant creatures
couldn’t possibly stay hidden for as long as they had. But the mountain gorilla
had managed to remain hidden until the twentieth century, hadn’t it? And there
were other such examples.
were other such examples.
Bigfoot was most likely the descendant of Gigantopithecus, an ancient
relative of the orangutan that had died off in Asia, but crossed the land bridge
into the Americas. Orangutans lived pretty solitary lives, never in large groups.
One could walk through a jungle, close to a breeding population of orangutans,
and never know it. It stood to reason that Gigantopithecus had exhibited similar
habits, and Bigfoot would be just as invisible.
Or so he had thought. Lately, though, he had begun to have his doubts. It felt
as if he had wasted a lot of his life, and had nothing to show for it.
With a sigh, he pushed himself up and prepared to break camp.
That’s when he realized that he couldn’t hear anything. Anything. No birds
singing, no squirrels chattering. The forest was silent as a church on Monday.
Roger felt the hair on his neck prick up a little.
Then, in the stillness, he heard it, the sound he had thought was a dream—
something between a hoot and a grunt, a rising tone repeated again and again.
Sounding almost—but not quite—human.
“Holy hell,” he muttered. Because he knew the sound, or something very like
it. He had done his research, prepared himself to be able to recognize the signs.
What he had just heard sounded very, very much like the long call of an
orangutan.
Or Bigfoot.
“This is it,” he said under his breath. “This is really it.”
He tiptoed over to his sound recorder and turned it on. For a long moment he
thought the call wouldn’t reoccur. But to his delight, it did—closer and louder
than before.
He moved through the trees, treading as silently as possible, and reached the
edge of a clearing. There he gingerly reached for his video camera and raised it,
trying to keep still. Judging from past experience, he probably only had one shot
at this.
These things spooked so easily.
The moments seemed to stretch on forever, the way the days before Christmas
had, when he was a kid. Then he saw the trees rustle, and at the edge of a small
clearing something moved. He suddenly knew what it was like to be born again,
to have an epiphany, to have his life completely validated.
It walked upright, but not with a human gait, and it was entirely covered in
dark fur. There could be no mistaking what it was, although perspective made it
seem smaller than he had imagined all those years, when thinking of this
moment.
He almost forgot to start his camera as the Sasquatch continued on its solitary
journey. He zoomed in as close as possible, remaining at a safe distance, trying
journey. He zoomed in as close as possible, remaining at a safe distance, trying
to get enough detail so that this film couldn’t be dismissed as some sort of a
fraud—as so many others had in the past. His would be the definitive, the
incontrovertible, most famous Bigfoot film of all time.
Glancing up from the eyepiece, he was startled to see another of the creatures
appear behind the first.
“A pair…” he murmured, under his breath. His luck was unbelievable. Only
rarely had more than one Bigfoot been found together, and never with visual
proof.
But then there was another.
And another. Five, twenty…
“Oh, my God,” he gasped, still filming. “This is incredible!”
All of a sudden the one in the lead stopped and slowly turned its head toward
Roger. In that instant, all he could see in his viewfinder were its eyes—green-
flecked, intense, intelligent.
And the Bigfoot saw Roger.
Suddenly he didn’t feel safe at all.
Snap!
A twig broke behind him. He whirled around.
The face filled his vision—savage, inhuman, with one milky, blind eye and a
livid, glaring one. Its expression was of a malice so pure that it struck Roger like
a physical blow. He felt suspended in terror, unable to speak, to move.
Incapable, even, of closing his eyes against the terrible visage confronting him.
Then it opened its mouth, and it shrieked at him.
Roger didn’t remember dropping the camera, or screaming, or running. But
when he came back to himself, much later, his hands were empty, his lungs were
heaving, and his throat was raw. He glanced behind him and saw nothing but the
immense boles of the redwoods, and the fog enshrouding them.
Then he began running again.
*
With a decidedly grim satisfaction, Koba watched the human flee. He did not
care for humans much. He had suffered at their hands and the tools those hands
had held. He hoped this was the last one he ever saw.
But he had his doubts.
Once he was satisfied that the man was gone, he turned and looked out
through the huge trees to where Caesar was watching him from the clearing.
He feared for a moment that Caesar would be displeased, as he had been when
Koba had attacked Will, who had followed them into the trees. But then the ape
Koba had attacked Will, who had followed them into the trees. But then the ape
leader tilted his head in approval, and Koba felt a rare flush of satisfaction.
Caesar approved of his actions; therefore Caesar approved of him.
Koba dropped to all fours and ran to join his leader, but a gesture cut him
short.
Food, Caesar signed.
Koba paused, chagrined that he had forgotten. Things were happening inside
of him, strange things—images, thoughts, connections he had never made
before. Sometimes it was distracting. The outdoors itself was distracting, the feel
of wind, the smell of leaves, the great wide sky overhead. For so long he had
lived in darkness, in pain and misery. And now to be free…
That was a sign and a word he had never known, until Caesar had taught it to
him.
Free.
He returned to the human’s camp and hunted through the things he found
there. After a moment he located a bag of food. Gripping it under one arm, he
returned to Caesar, lowering his head as he approached, offering the bag.
Caesar touched Koba’s arm, and then his cheek. Good, it meant. He took the
bag, slung it over his shoulder in a peculiar, human-like way, and scrambled up
the nearest of the trees. Koba and the others followed, to where the rest of the
troop waited, still in the high canopy.
In a moment they were all on the move again, the soft rustling of the trees the
only sound marking their passage.
Because now Caesar required silence. Silence was their survival.
The dark sky had come and gone five times since Koba’s liberation and the
battle with the humans and their killing tools. They had won that fight, but the
humans hadn’t stopped chasing them, of course. Their flying cages crossed the
skies above, and troops of them roamed the woods, but Caesar was clever. He
sent out scouts to find small groups of their pursuers, or loners like the one Koba
had just encountered.
They were to be frightened, though not harmed. They would report their
meetings, but when hunters came, the apes would be gone to some other place.
In this way they had led their pursuers in vast, twisty circles. In this way, they
survived, here in this awesome place that was at once so strange and so familiar.
For this place, Caesar had taught Koba another new word, another new sign.
Home.