But then he noticed something odd.
All the artillery was pointed outward, away from the camp.
Not at the apes then, but at whom? Relieved to realize that the weapons were being placed to defend the canyon, not massacre his people, Caesar grew perplexed. There was more here than met the eye. What was the true purpose of the artillery—and the wall for that matter? Could it be that—?
Footsteps intruded on his ruminations. Caesar looked away from the soldiers’ preparations to see Red climbing the steps of the platform toward him, gripping a machete in one hand. The smug, vindictive expression on the gorilla’s face promised nothing in the way of mercy.
But was Red seeking his own revenge or acting on the Colonel’s orders?
Fearing the worst, Caesar lifted his eyes toward the Colonel’s watchtower and saw the human commander framed in the window, gazing down at the platform. Caesar remembered how casually the man had shot Percy only hours ago—and Caesar’s family before that.
My turn, Caesar guessed. What’s another dead ape to him?
He looked back at Red, determined to face his executioner. Red paused before him, savoring the moment. The machete in his hands looked sharp enough to avenge Koba, but Caesar would not surrender to fear. He looked Red squarely in the eye and spoke hoarsely.
“What did the Colonel promise you? You really think he will let you live… after we are gone?”
Red’s hair bristled aggressively. He glared murderously at his former leader.
“No matter what you do,” Caesar taunted, “you’ll never be one of them.” He snorted derisively. “You let them call you ‘donkey.’ You are ape.”
Sneering, Red raised the machete and ran a finger along the blade, testing its edge. Disgust contorted his face.
“Koba right,” he snarled. “You think you better… than rest of apes. But look you now.” He bared his teeth. “You nothing.”
He angrily raised the machete above his head. Caesar braced himself for the fatal blow as the weapon came swinging down—and sank into a wooden beam only inches from Caesar’s wrist. The blade hacked through rope instead, freeing Caesar’s arm. He gaped at Red in surprise.
“Kerna… want see you,” the gorilla said.
Caesar looked back up at the watchtower, where the Colonel was still watching from above, his hands clasped behind his back. Had he expected Caesar to beg for his life? Was he pleased or disappointed that Caesar had not?
He respects you, Preacher had said.
Whatever that meant.
The Colonel lingered behind the window for a moment, then turned and vanished into his lair. Caesar’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
What did the Colonel want with him now?
20
A door at the top of the watchtower swung open, admitting Caesar to the Colonel’s command center. Red and Preacher escorted him into the premises, alert to the first signs of rebellion. The young human kept his crossbow at the ready to guarantee Caesar’s cooperation. Red had Caesar on the chain again.
The Colonel did not acknowledge their arrival. His back to Caesar, he leaned over a long table on top of which a large map had been spread out. Fragrant smoke rose from a smudge of sage and grass burning in a tin bowl. The incense struck Caesar as an incongruous touch, out of character with the man’s brutality.
Searchlights situated around the camp swept over the cliffs outside, periodically lighting up the windows of the watchtower. One such sweep briefly illuminated a small chamber just off the command center; Caesar caught a fleeting glimpse of some sort of private sanctuary. A grisly collection of ape skulls, with every breed of great ape represented, were piled upon an altar. The word HISTORY was scrawled across the wall in bold, jagged letters—possibly by the Colonel himself?
The search beam moved on, throwing the grotesque sanctum back into shadow, but Caesar’s momentary look at the morbid collection had been enough to send a chill down the chimpanzee’s spine. Examining the Colonel by the interior lights of the command center, Caesar noted for the first time that the human had old marks on the backs of both hands that looked as though they had been branded there by a red-hot iron.
A scarred his right hand; Ω scarred his left.
“Interfere with the work again,” the Colonel said finally, not looking up from his map, “and I’ll begin slaughtering the apes, one by one. Understand? I need that wall.”
He turned to look at Caesar, perhaps to make sure the ape was listening, then nodded at Preacher to indicate they were done here. Red and Preacher started to lead Caesar away, but the ape was not ready to leave yet.
“Apes… need food… water.”
The Colonel kept his eyes fixed on the map. “They’ll get food and water when they finish the work.”
“Give them food or water,” Caesar argued, “or they will not be able to finish.”
The Colonel turned away from the table, facing Caesar at last. He chuckled and shook his head, seemingly amused by the prisoner’s audacity.
“You know you’re very emotional.” He looked over the shackled, unarmed, and outnumbered chimpanzee. “What makes you think you’re in a position to make demands?”
Caesar had no ready answer, so the Colonel went back to his map. Preacher prodded Caesar with his crossbow.
“C’mon…”
Preacher had warned Caesar not to provoke the Colonel, hinting at dire possibilities if he exhausted the human commander’s patience, but Caesar didn’t care. Despite the chain tugging on his collar, he refused to budge.
“The soldiers who are coming here… are not coming to join you, are they?”
That got the Colonel’s attention. He turned back toward Caesar, looking more intrigued than before. He smiled at Caesar in what might have been grudging admiration, while Red warily tightened his grip on Caesar’s chain.
“I saw men outside by the wall… preparing for battle…”
It was the only explanation that made sense. Winter had been mistaken when he’d said that the Colonel’s troops were planning to meet up with reinforcements from the north; the Colonel was building the wall to defend himself from the approaching forces.
“I was told you were smart,” the human said appreciatively, “but… that’s impressive.” He paused briefly before confirming Caesar’s suspicions. “No, they won’t be joining me.”
Caesar didn’t care about impressing the Colonel. He just wanted to understand the situation, for his people’s sake.
“They are against you?”
“They fear me,” the Colonel said.
“Why…?”
The Colonel did not reply, but Caesar could guess the answer.
“Because you kill your own men?”
Preacher tensed nearby, clearly not liking where this conversation was going. The Colonel stared at Caesar in surprise, stunned by how much the ape had deduced already.
“We found bodies.” Caesar recalled the snow-covered corpses by the trail and the makeshift cemetery along the shore, as well as that one panicked survivor who seemed to have lost the power of speech. “Something wrong… with these men.”
The Colonel shook his head in amazement.
“Jesus Christ, you are impressive.” He smirked at Caesar, as though he was almost enjoying this encounter. “Well, you paint quite a picture. What must you think of me.”
“I think… you have no mercy.”
The smirk vanished from the Colonel’s face. His expression darkened.
“You came here to kill me. Were you going to show me mercy?”
“I showed you mercy,” Caesar said, “when I spared your men. I offered you peace… and you killed my family.”
“Mercy.” The Colonel grimaced as though the word tasted bad on his tongue. “Do you have any idea what your mercy would do to us?”
Caesar tensed warily. He wasn’t sure what he had said to provoke the Colonel, but the human’s wry amusement had been replaced by a simmering rage that had Caesar keeping one eye on the man’s side
arm while remembering Preacher’s warning earlier. There was no telling what this man might do.
“You’re much stronger than we are,” the Colonel said venomously. “And you’re smart as hell. No matter what you say, you’d eventually replace us; that’s the law of Nature. And the irony is, we created you. We tried to defy Nature, bend it to our will. And Nature’s been punishing us for our arrogance ever since. Testing us. Even now.”
Caesar could have defended Will’s experiments, explained that Will had been a good man who had only been trying to cure a terrible disease, but that was ancient history now, gone with most of humanity. Instead he held his tongue and let the Colonel go on. The more the man talked, the more Caesar learned about what was driving his enemy.
“Ten months ago, we sent out recon units to look for your base. They found nothing. My own son was a soldier with one of the groups. One day he suddenly stopped speaking. He became… primitive, like an animal.” A muscle twitched beneath his cheek. “They contacted me, said that they thought he’d lost his mind, that the war was too much for him. But the man taking care of him stopped speaking too. Their medic had a theory, before he stopped speaking: that the virus that almost wiped us out—the virus that every human survivor still carries—had suddenly changed. Mutated.”
He peered at Caesar, scanning the ape’s mud-splattered face to see if he was following this. Caesar understood, but the Colonel spelled it out anyway.
“And if it spread, it would destroy humanity for good this time. Not by killing us, but by robbing us of the things that make us human. Our speech, our higher thinking. It would turn us all into beasts, not unlike what you all used to be. You talk about mercy?” he accused Caesar. “What would you have done?”
Caesar thought of the mute girl Maurice had adopted, and the wild-eyed soldier grunting like an animal before escaping into the woods with a bullet in his back. He recalled the caked blood beneath the noses of the dead soldiers and recognized belatedly the telltale symptoms of the virus. The idea that the mutated virus could now reduce humans to animals was a sobering one. Caesar had gone to great lengths to raise his own people’s intellect, elevating them from their primitive origins. How far would he go to keep them from slipping back into savagery?
“Well, it was a moment of clarity for me,” the Colonel said. “I realized I would have to sacrifice my own son, so that humanity could be saved. I held that gun in my hand and I pointed it at my only child.” His eyes moistened at the memory; raw emotion cracked his voice. “He looked at me with trust in his eyes, which was all he had left in his primitive gaze. And I pulled the trigger.”
He took a deep breath, regaining his composure. He blinked to dry his eyes.
“It purified me. It made my purpose clear.”
Caesar had no response. Knowing that the Colonel had killed his own son as well as Caesar’s was almost enough to make Caesar pity the man, but only almost. And he understood now, more than ever, just how ruthless this human was. If the Colonel could execute his own son, he was capable of anything. The glint of madness lurking in his eyes made perfect sense now. Killing his son had twisted the Colonel’s mind somehow. He didn’t realize it, but it seemed to Caesar that the Colonel had already lost his humanity…
“I gave orders to kill the others infected, all of them, and anyone who might have been in direct contact with them, even if they showed no symptoms. We burned their belongings, anything that might spread contamination.”
The torched personal effects at the cemetery, Caesar remembered. The charred dog tags and belt buckles.
“Some of the men questioned my judgment,” the Colonel continued. “I was asking them to do what I had done: to sacrifice their families, their friends. They refused… so I had them killed too.”
No wonder Preacher is so afraid of his own leader, Caesar thought. The Colonel will kill anyone, human or ape.
Even his own soldiers and their families.
“Others with children deserted into the woods,” the Colonel said darkly, still quivering with resentment. “One of those cowards fled to my superiors up north. They sent officers down to restrain me. They tried to convince me that this plague could be dealt with medically, that they were already looking for a cure.” He let out a bitter laugh. “That’s when I realized that they had learned nothing from our past.”
Caesar could predict what happened next.
“You killed them too…?”
The Colonel looked at the young soldier standing guard with his crossbow. “What did I do, Preacher?”
Preacher gulped before answering.
“You severed their heads, sir.”
“Except for the one I spared,” the Colonel clarified, “so he could return to deliver my message: if they wanted to relieve me of my command, they’d have to meet me here, and do it themselves.”
Why here? Caesar wondered. Why this place?
The Colonel responded to the ape’s baffled expression. “This place used to be a weapons depot. They turned it into a relocation camp when the crisis was just beginning. But the weapons are all still here, inside that mountain.”
The artillery, Caesar realized. That’s where it came from.
“This is a holy war,” the Colonel declared. “All of human history has led to this moment. And if we lose, we’ll be the last of our kind. It will be a planet of apes… and we’ll become your cattle.”
Caesar tried to imagine it: a world ruled entirely by apes, with the last remnants of humanity no more than animals, treated perhaps as humans had once treated apes, as zoo exhibits or lab specimens or circus performers, confined to cages or hunted to near-extinction. An endangered species.
It was an… unsettling vision of the future.
“Look at you,” the Colonel said, noting the ape’s troubled visage. “You think I’m sick, don’t you?”
Caesar forced himself to focus on the crisis at hand. “How many… will be coming?”
“Probably all of them. But don’t get any ideas; the only thing they fear more than me is you apes.” He chuckled bitterly. “They never questioned my methods when it came to you.”
He stepped closer to Caesar, his tone softening to a degree.
“I didn’t mean to kill your son…”
Caesar stayed totally still, waiting for his enemy to get just a little bit closer. His near proximity to the Colonel was agonizing. Caesar was acutely aware of the chain holding him back and of Preacher’s crossbow, both keeping him from his revenge.
“But if his destiny was to inherit your unholy kingdom,” the Colonel said of Blue Eyes, “then I’m glad I did.”
The Colonel’s callous words unleashed the fury Caesar had been carrying since he’d lost his wife and son. All thought of caution and patience and self-preservation fled from his mind as he lunged for the Colonel, reaching for his throat. The startled human threw himself backward barely in time, so that Caesar’s nails only grazed the Colonel’s neck before his target tumbled out of reach, crashing onto the floor as Red hauled on Caesar’s chain with both hands, yanking Caesar backwards with all his strength, so that the collar dug into Caesar’s neck, choking him. The Colonel’s flask fell from inside his jacket. Preacher leveled his crossbow at Caesar while crying out frantically.
“Hey! Hey-hey-hey!”
Caesar strained against the chain, but Red was too strong and he was too weak after his ordeals. Consumed by rage, he growled and bared his teeth, maddened by the need to lash out at the insane human who had murdered his family without regret.
How dare he brag about killing my son!
Shaken by his close call, the Colonel recovered his flask and tucked it back into his jacket. He backed further away from Caesar and staggered to his feet. Grimacing, he reached up and touched his neck where Caesar had scratched him, probing the shallow nicks with his fingers, which came away stained with blood. He smiled, no doubt realizing just how much worse things could have turned out for him. He regarded his assailant, who was still struggling agains
t the chain holding him back. Caesar would have given everything for just a few more feet—and time enough to do far more to the Colonel than just scratch him.
He needs to die, Caesar thought, at my hands.
“So emotional!” the Colonel said, mocking him.
Caesar’s furious battle against the chain slowly ebbed. After being whipped and strung up on the cross, he lacked the endurance to keep up his attack. Not with a gorilla at the other end of the chain.
“I can see how conflicted you are,” the Colonel said, his smile fading. “You’re confused in your purpose. You’re angry at me because of something I did that was an act of war. But you’re taking this all much too personally.”
He walked toward Caesar, seemingly unconcerned for his safety. He got too close to the vengeful ape for Preacher’s comfort.
“Sir…”
The Colonel held up his hand to silence the nervous soldier. He stepped closer to Caesar until he was just out of reach. Caesar seethed, tortured by the agonizing gap between him and his revenge. The Colonel scowled at Caesar, a trickle of blood dribbling down his neck.
“What do you think my men would have done to your apes… if you had killed me?”
Despite his fury, Caesar grasped what the Colonel was saying. Killing the Colonel would surely cause all of the other apes to be slaughtered in retaliation. Was his own revenge worth the lives of his people?
What about Cornelius? And Lake? And the rest?
Confident that Caesar had gotten the message, the Colonel tempted fate by stepping right up to the ape, within striking range. His gun remained holstered at his hip… Caesar guessed because he knew he wouldn’t need it.
“Or is killing me more important?”
Caesar knew this was probably his best and last chance of avenging his family. Every muscle in his body ached to attack the Colonel, to tear him apart before Red or Preacher could stop him.
I could do it. I could kill him now.
But at what cost? He would gladly sacrifice his own life to destroy the Colonel, but was he willing to sacrifice his people as well?
No, Caesar thought. And the Colonel knows that.