Malakai woke in the gray before dawn. The fog lay thick across the land, and he was as wet as if he had been in a brief rain. He remembered hearing somewhere that fog came on cat’s feet—perhaps it was in a poem. But to him it felt more like it had come in like a giant slug.
He stood and fingered the damp bark of a tree. The water had actually beaded there, as if the tree were a glass of ice water on a warm, humid day. It rarely rained in the Bay Area in summer, but the condensation from the fog provided water for the giant trees and other forest life.
He was reminded powerfully of another forest, another mist—the cloud forest in the Virunga Mountains. He had awoken there, too, cold and damp. He and his uncle had spent the previous day trekking up from the tropical lowlands to a place so strange that his eight-year-old mind could hardly imagine it. He remembered how struck he had been with the beauty of it, and how he said so. Babbling in wonder.
Like Clancy, for God’s sake.
But he had been eight. Clancy didn’t have that excuse. His uncle had cut a trail with his machete, and Malakai reflected that at that time, he had never seen a machete used for anything other than cutting vegetation. It was like being caught up in a magical tale, carving a tunnel through the green forest that might have been growing on a cloud. To him, it had felt as if anything might happen. For long moments, he had almost forgotten the tight emptiness in his belly, and the look of his mother and sister when he last had seen them—drawn, emaciated.
His uncle would point to this and that and call each thing a sign. To Malakai, they mostly just looked like bent leaves and scuffs on the ground. But there was one place even he could spot, an area where branches and leaves had been crushed in a roughly circular area. Some of them looked almost as if they had been woven together.
“A gorilla nest,” his uncle told him then. “And not very old.”
They continued on for a bit, and then his uncle suddenly stopped. Malakai thought something was the matter. But then his uncle pointed across a little valley, and there they were.
He had tried to imagine them from his uncle’s stories, but this was a case where the story did not match reality.
His heart pounded as they moved closer, coming to within ten yards. He could still feel that, the hammering in his chest, the cold of the mist on his skin, the smell of the broken vegetation, the thinness of the air in his young lungs.
And the gorillas.
They watched his uncle and him arrive, peering with almost human regard. The largest, a silverback, crouched a yard or so off of the ground, on a bent tree. Malakai thought they would be attacked, but the gorillas seemed only curious. A small one—a toddler—came over and brushed his uncle’s legs before running back to his mother.
He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.
His mother didn’t like the story because it wasn’t Christian. But for the young Malakai it had created a certain longing. His father, after all, had been a white man, and he had gone west, to America, where all men were rich, and left him to starve with his mother and her people. He dreamed that one day his father would return, and lavish gifts upon him, although his mother said it would never happen.
Yet Malakai was the descendent of both brothers. Shouldn’t some of the wealth fall to him?
Maybe one day.
And at last he was seeing the descendants of the third brother. How amazingly like men they were. According to the story, these were his cousins.
He wondered if a white man or a black man could make a son with a gorilla mother.
* * *
Malakai almost grinned, remembering that childish thought. Looking back, he knew that the story of the three brothers was just another deplorable remnant of European colonialism. Gone was his youthful naïveté.
He turned back to camp to get his things and found Clancy was awake, scribbling in a little book of some sort in the dim gray light of dawn. Like him, she had probably been stripped of her phone, computer, and such.
“Good morning,” she said.
“It is,” he said, surprising himself.
“Do you like sleeping outdoors?” she asked.
“I once swore I would never do it again,” he told her. “When I came to America, I raised my fist and promised myself that from now on I would sleep in soft beds and on clean sheets.”
“Sort of like Scarlett O’Hara,” Clancy said.
“The rich woman who was so sad to lose her black slaves?”
“I guess that was inappropriate,” she said, coloring a little. “I just had that image of her raising her hand, and swearing she would never go hungry again.”
Malakai shrugged. “I swore that, too,” he said. “And yet here I am, sleeping on the ground, and hungry.”
“And agreeing that it’s a good morning,” she added.
“All right,” he said. “Try not to become irritating.”
He gathered up his things as she continued writing, and then set off. Clancy looked up, and called after him.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Where do you imagine?” he replied. “I’m tracking the apes.”
“You’re not going to wait for Corbin?”
“No, I think not,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, stowing her notebook and standing up. “I’m coming with you.”
He shrugged and waited for her to prepare. Then they went down the embankment, and he found the trail again.
“Did you hear anything last night?” he asked. He kept his voice pitched low.
“I thought I did,” she replied. “An orang, maybe. It might have been nothing.”
“No,” he replied. “I heard it, too.”
They walked in silence for a bit.
“I don’t know very much about orangutans,” he admitted. “My experience has been mostly with African apes.”
Clancy was frowning, and it seemed in danger of becoming her permanent expression. The happy, babbling girl of yesterday seemed gone—perhaps forever.
One can only hope, he mused.
“There’s an old zookeeper’s joke,” she said.
“Oh, yes?”
“One night while locking up, the zookeeper accidentally drops his keys in front of the gorilla cage. Next morning, the keys are still there, so he picks them up. Another time he drops his keys in front of the chimps. They all start screaming. He looks down, sees that he has dropped his keys, and picks them up. The next night, he drops his keys in front of the orangutan cage. The next morning the keys are gone, the orangutan is gone, and so is every other animal in the zoo.”
“Not exactly a joke, is it?” He smiled. “So they’re smart.”
“It’s more that they’re deliberate,” she said. “They take their time. They don’t freak out the way chimps do. They are really good problem-solvers.”
“Do you suppose it was an orangutan that organized the—I don’t know—prison break?”
“Orangs are sort of solitary,” she said. “They don’t live in social groups the way chimps and gorillas do. But sure, maybe. I mean, none of this makes any sense to me. Sure, some apes could escape from a zoo or shelter or whatever. But everything they did after that—and the way they’re behaving now—it’s completely out of the box. I almost feel like there have to be people involved in leading them.”
“People in ape suits?”
She actually smiled at that.
“I don’t know about that. But apes can be trained to do things way outside of their natural behavior. What I would like to know is what they were being taught in that shelter.”
“Well, that’s a hypothesis,” Malakai said.
“You’re making fun of me,” she said, accusingly.
“No,” he replied. “I was thinking along those lines myself. And I’m also wondering what our contractor friends have to do with all of this.”
“They’re a little scary, aren’t they?” Clancy said.
He nodded.
“You’re scarier,” she said.
“And yet here you are,” he replied.
“Yeah,” she said. “Here I am.”
* * *
They had been on the trail about fifteen minutes when Malakai’s walkie-talkie started squawking, demanding his attention. By that time they were well up the southwest slope of Mount Tamalpais. The trail continued along the ground, and in some cases the chimps had left the trees entirely to traverse grassy meadows.
He took out the walkie-talkie and answered it.
“Youmans,” he said.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Corbin demanded, his voice thin and metallic on the small speaker.
“Hunting for apes,” Malakai said.
“Well, get back down here,” the mercenary demanded. “We’ve got three more bodies.”
“Your men shot them?”
“No. These had old wounds. Probably got them in the fight on the bridge, and just now died of them.”
“Are they near the others?”
“No, down the other way. Almost to the beach.”
Malakai considered that for a moment.
“I’m going to follow this trail out,” he said. “Then I will be back down.”
He shut off the transceiver, and stuck it back in his pocket.
“Three apes died of old wounds, all in one place,” he mused.
“Chimps have been known to drag dead bodies around,” Clancy said. “If they had several dead, they might have put them together.”
“Or they might have moved them miles, to make us look in the wrong place.”
“That’s—”
“Un-ape-like,” he said. “Yes, I know.” He slowed to a stop. They had been crossing a field, but now they came back to a tree line—and there the tracks ended. The last ones were quite fresh.
“They traveled on the ground while it was dark,” he said. “Then they took to the trees.”
“Chimps stay in trees at night,” she replied, giving him a strange look. “They would be terrified of traveling on foot in the dark.”
“Yes, you’ve already noted that. But if they had to travel, it would be best way. You can’t swing from branches you can’t see. And as well, they left us this nice trail—and I guarantee you that if we keep going in this direction, we won’t see a single ape.”
“So you think they’re deliberately misleading us?”
“I do,” he replied.
“This gets weirder all the time,” Clancy said.
* * *
Caesar wondered briefly if it had been a mistake to send Koba back to Maurice’s group. The one-eyed chimp was good in a fight, and it would be good to have him there to protect the wounded. The thing was, Caesar hoped to avoid a fight, and Koba was somewhat impulsive. He had attacked Will, after all.
Caesar wondered about Will. He missed him, sometimes so much that it hurt him inside. But his place was here, with the apes he had liberated.
With the apes he had changed.
Up ahead, Furaha let out a series of small hoots. Furaha had been born wild and captured as an adult. He knew some sign, and had breathed Will’s mist. He was fast, and now he showed it, setting off through the trees with Rafael, another wild-born. Caesar watched with great interest as they separated, then converged, then dropped in a scramble to the forest floor.
A moment later Furaha reappeared, holding something under his arm. When he arrived, he presented it proudly to Caesar.
Food, he said.
Caesar took the limp body. It looked something like a cat, with dark patches around its eyes.
Used to hunt monkeys, Furaha said. No monkeys here.
Good. Caesar said. How do we eat it?
Furaha made a gleeful little sound, and started to tear the thing up.
Caesar was so hungry he ate more than he had intended before letting the others finish it. It tasted strange, and he was reminded of the time he bit a human’s finger. The taste of blood.
We hunt more, he said to Furaha. You show us.
* * *
They returned to the larger troop as the sun started down the sky. They were laden with a variety of game. His band had all fed as they hunted, so they laid these carcasses out to share. The other apes came signaling their deference to him, crouching and holding their hands out—although some were so hungry it was clearly a strain. None would come near the meat Caesar placed in front of himself, though. He motioned to Maurice.
Come, he motioned. Yours.
Maurice stared at him for a moment. He looked very weak.
Not food for me, he signed.
I give it to you. You need it.
Not food for me, Maurice repeated. Orangs don’t eat meat. Eat fruit.
Chimps eat fruit, Caesar said. Chimps eat meat.
Orangs eat fruit, Maurice said.
Caesar thought about that for a minute, then motioned his band over.
We hunt again, he said. Hunt different food.
* * *
As they walked back over their own tracks, Malakai mulled the situation over. His first instinct was to just walk away. He could pick any direction and find civilization in a few hours—less, if he chose the right compass point. But regardless of his misgivings, he was starting to become intrigued with the situation.
Who actually employed Anvil? The City of San Francisco, it would appear. But why would the city use contractors, when they had a police force, National Guard, and other trained professionals to engage in this situation?
He had been certain from the beginning that someone was hiding something—that this was about more than a bunch of apes loose in the wilderness north of town. Was Clancy right? Was some sort of terrorist organization using trained apes for some unknown purpose? Or perhaps the US government? Whatever the case, the apes were clearly evidence that needed to be eliminated.
Oddly, he had begun to wonder why.
In carrying out his mission to find the apes, following the trails they had left was clearly the wrong way to go. But there were other ways. Figure out what they needed, for instance, and find the sources of those things.
Water came first—all animals needed water. But water wasn’t really a problem, as waking up half-soaked had proven. There were plenty of streams, large and small, so staking out a waterhole wasn’t going to accomplish anything. Food, though—food would be hard to come by. Chimps could probably forage the easiest. Tree bark, mushrooms, some leaves should be edible. They also ate insects, and when chimps got hungry enough they hunted monkeys and other small mammals.
Gorillas preferred fruit, but could get by on tree bark, leaves and bamboo for a while.
“What do orangutans eat?” Malakai asked.
Clancy glanced at him.
“I’m not sure I want to be involved with this anymore,” she replied. “These guys play too rough. It might be their job to capture these apes, but they don’t seem to mind killing a few in the process.”
“It’s hard to capture an ape without killing a few,” he said.
“You sound like you know that from experience.”
He didn’t reply to that.
“Listen,” he said instead. “I can call Corbin. I’m sure he can find out what orangutans eat—probably by looking online for half a minute. But if I call, he’s going to wonder why the mission primatologist wouldn’t answer even a basic question.” He paused to let that sink in. “The way I see it, the only person involved in all of this, who has the welfare of the apes at heart, is you. So now you plan to remove yourself from the situation? I don’t believe it.”
Clancy walked a few paces ahead, then slowed again.
“You have a sneaky mouth,” she said. Then she sighed. “They eat mostly fruit. Tropical fruit, like durian.”
“I’ve had durian before,” he said. “It stinks.”
“Not to orangs.”
“What else?”
“Not much else. Honey, if they can get it. A few kinds of bark and leaves. But what they really need is fruit.”
“So where are they getting it?” he asked.
“Maybe they aren’t,” Clancy replied. “Maybe they’re starving. Or if I’m right, and there’s a person or a group of people behind this, they’re probably crating food in for them. I don’t think Anvil has enough manpower to secure the borders of this entire area, do you?”
“No,” he said, “I do not.”
Up ahead of them, the Humvee appeared on an access road they had crossed that morning. Malakai had suspected that their walkie-talkies doubled as tracking devices—now he was sure of it.
Corbin watched them come. His expression was, to say the least, unfriendly. When they reached the vehicle, he cut the mercenary off before he could get started.
“This trail goes nowhere,” Malakai said. “I’m just as sure that the one with your new corpses is no better.”
“This is ridiculous,” Corbin muttered. “They’re just stupid monkeys.”
“Monkeys aren’t stupid,” Clancy said. “And apes are even less so.”
“Are you saying you can’t find them?” Corbin asked.
“No,” Malakai said, “I didn’t say that. I just need a different tool.”
“And what might that be?” Corbin asked.
“A computer, I should think,” Malakai replied. “But first I will have a bath and something to eat.”