On days like this one, she missed him.
The sun shone brightly over a forest far away from the one they had hiked in several years ago. The trees were dense, cloaking the roads which wound through the forest after they had crossed the border into Canada. Those had been the best of times, when she and Will had started bonding over something besides a common interest in Caesar and the ape had still been isolated from his own kind.
Way before he rallied them up, made them smart and then created an army. He had united gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, subspecies which normally had little to do with one another. How he had done that, she still didn't know. Maybe Will did but had taken that knowledge with him.
He'd given his life to save the chimpanzee he had raised since it had been a baby, whose mother had died defending him. They had thought she'd gone stir crazy from the experimental serum she'd been given to make her IQ jump about a hundred points. It was only later beneath her limp body that they found him. Will had taken him back to his house to raise not so willingly at first because even the chimp's mother had meant nothing to him, except as a test subject for the serum before his boss had shut those experiments down.
She thought it should have stayed that way, had warned him time and time again not to change the natural order of things but even she had no idea what would happen when it came out that the serum had been a virus that had a two prong approach.
It made apes smarter and it wiped humans off the face of the earth, providing the apes with the perfect setting to use their new found intelligence.
That chaotic day on the Golden Gate Bridge when the apes had fought with the police while dazed commuters held hostage by the battle stared. One gorilla had leapt off the bridge towards a helicopter and at first, she had been so sure he'd miss and go ker-splash in the water. But he'd crashed the damn thing into an explosive mass of torn metal on the bridge and then one of the gorillas had pushed it off where it sank into the harbor.
Will had been trying to rush around to rein in Caesar but once the revolution had gotten started, there hadn't been much of that given that the chimp thought the man who had raised him had betrayed him. It had been like something taken out of a Shakespearean drama depicting conflicts between fathers and sons. But even then she didn't know that would be his last day and that humanity would follow him into the grave. It had been his drive to find a cure for the disease that had robbed him of his own father that had been mankind's last act of both altruism and arrogance.
Plenty of time left for the surviving stragglers to contemplate what had gone horribly wrong. Burke said that they didn't have much time for that because they needed to survive first. She felt that too mainly because of the new life she carried that had arisen in the old world. She hadn't told him or anyone else about her pregnancy because it had been a secret that needed to be kept.
Especially considering the identity of the father, a man who if he were still alive might be lynched by some angry human mob which wouldn't wait to take answers to its questions. There hadn't been much time for the world to find out the origins of its own demise, only that it had some relationship with the escape of apes from the laboratory that they had both worked.
Burke stopped the vehicle in front of a cluster of cabins and gazed at her.
"You okay…you look tired."
Blunt, was his nature and she just looked over at him gamely.
"I'm fine…we need to set up here if we're going to stay here for a little while."
They were deep in a mountain range near a river that led to a lake, shimmering blue with whitecaps that they'd passed on their drive. She looked around and saw others getting out of their caravan vehicles, stretching and just gazing around them. She walked over to a woman and smiled.
"Need help with that," she said, about a bag.
The woman just stared at her as she'd been one of the virus' survivors, forever changed by it. Burke walked up to her and removed the heavy bag from her and took it to one of the cabins and the woman just followed him. Reese ran her hand through her hair and wound it into a bun with a band and then went to help others move food into the main area of what had once been a wilderness camp for teens. It had been abandoned because it probably had been used seasonally and by the time the summer had rolled around again, humanity had no use for it or perhaps even institutional memory of its existence.
The apes would have no idea it existed if they ventured this far. They kept it a distance away from the CB tower where they communicated with other bands of survivors threaded across the continent.
After they got the generators working again, with thankfully plenty of gasoline that had been in storage in a tank nearby they cleaned out the refrigerators and stoves in the large kitchen and then started putting the food away.
Tiring work and Reese had felt the now familiar fatigue creep up on her and so after they were done, she poured herself some juice that someone had made from some powder and went to sit on the wooden steps looking out into the forest.
She thought of that other forest when Caesar had taken off like he'd just come back home scurrying up the tallest trees, the ones that appeared to disappear into the cloud cover. Will would be worried but she just marveled at the sense of joy and freedom she sensed from him until he had to reluctantly return to harness again.
Each time he'd come back to his leash more reluctantly, she didn't blame him for that. He had asked Will if he were a pet like a dog on a lease and Will had said no, but hadn't really given him any real explanation of his role in the scheme of things.
So Caesar had created his own reality.
Burke came up beside her and she let him sit down beside her.
"It's great," she said, "You were right to come here."
He shrugged.
"Well it's remote and its sheltered," he said, "The apes won't find us and if any scouts come our way, it's defendable. We'll all be doing some sentry duty."
Nothing new about that, she thought and she thought back to the past several months.
"But you look tired," he said, "It's been a long day and it's bound to catch up with all of us."
She bit her lip knowing that wasn't the only reason she felt like she needed to just crash in a bed or flat surface somewhere. She'd learned to fall asleep anywhere at any time thanks to their life on the constant move.
"There's a cabin for you," he said, "It's clean enough, just some dust and well insulated."
She got up and folded her arms.
"I don't need a cabin," she said, "I can sleep anywhere."
He got up beside her, his large frame dwarfing her own.
"Now hold on, there are plenty of cabins here for everyone," he said, "so come along and stop worrying about it, so you can get some rest okay?"
His voice had softened and she just looked at him and nodded.
"We'll be sharing one…"
That gave her a bit of a start.
"What do you mean," she said, "I thought I'd be rooming with another woman."
He smiled.
"Relax, this cabin's got a nice couch in the living room," he said, "You can take the bedroom."
She looked at him warily.
"As long as you understand, I'm not interested in…"
His gaze turned serious.
"I know you're not and I'm not looking for anything either," he said, "except to figure out what to do when each day comes."
She nodded, feeling suddenly foolish. That's all any of them could do was to struggle to survive, to wake up with the sunrise and figure out how to stay alive and free by sunset.
So she followed him back into the cabin and when he opened the door, she liked what she saw. The living room with a fireplace, a small kitchenette and bathroom and a bedroom where she'd be sleeping…after they got some linins on the bed if her tired body would wait that long.
"They're working on the pump for the water," he said, "but you look like you're going to fall asleep on your feet."
She smiled at him feeling that way and after he'd found some linins in a closet, she took the stack from him and thanked him.
"Now go get some rest," he said, "before we try to rustle up some dinner tonight."
She left into the bedroom to do just that.
Caesar and Alisa ate the fruit from the trees that thronged the local park, watching the lights flicker from attempts to restore the power grid. A couple humans had been electrocuted including one who'd been shoved against it by a frustrated chimpanzee who thought he worked too slowly.
He sighed, thinking that these impulsive acts of violence had to be reined in. He didn't know whether they were caused by their accelerated intellectual development or were just residual anger from their lives of enslavement.
She signed at him as they walked through the park about whether or not they'd stay in the green city.
He thought about it, Seattle had many reasons to stay but he also felt restless. He remembered Will's last words before he expired in the forest and he felt them gnaw at him. If it hadn't been for Will and his father, he would never have survived and he knew now that he'd tried to help him.
But Caesar knew that no human could help him realize his destiny. Only apes could determine their fates in the new world.
Alisa pressed him for an answer and he looked at her, signing.
"Now Stay Later Not Know…our world out there waiting."
As close to an answer he could give.