Kara saw him several days later after the meeting. Caesar had settled into allowing Maurice to run the new research committee They had headed off to the zoo to discuss how to best observe the human's behavior in captivity. Armando and the other gorillas had gone to inventory the weapons stash found at the police station and Alisa had taken it upon herself to check out some overgrown fruit orchards that had been discovered a few miles east of Seattle.
The tension that had been developing between the different factions of apes hadn't been lost on either one of them. Kara said that they needed to put their animosity aside and engage in some fellowship, using tactile contact to build their relationships, to strengthen the ties that had grown between them during the initial uprising. A common adversary had drawn them together but it hadn't lasted long.
Caesar signed back that when he had first encountered apes, they had all been segregated by species, and hadn't crossed those lines at all until he had taught them that they shared more in common than differences. Even before they had grown smart, he had sown the seeds of solidarity between them, but in the relative calm that separated one storm from the next, they had fallen into dissention.
They still needed to work together as long as the humans still remained in large enough numbers to be a threat to their new society. Their populations had nearly been depleted but he knew pockets of them remained, beyond those that had been enslaved or caged by them. The gorillas had wanted to send out search parties while the other chimpanzees thought they should be squashed before they were allowed to regroup.
Kara thought perhaps a truce could be developed between the two sides but Caesar wouldn't hear that. He opposed using them for dissection or any invasive research but he didn't believe they should be free either. In the beginning of the revolution, he had hopes that apes and humans could coexist together in some form of system where the world could be shared between them.
But humans had never been good at sharing anything be it land or other resources even with each other. When Cro-Magnums had first arrived, it hadn't taken long for the earlier developing Neanderthals to disappear from the canvas. Mankind had driven many animal and plant species to extinction. Rainforests had been carved away from where they had once dominated, serving as the planet's lungs but not without a price as deforestation had led to the exposure of humans to a wide sort of virulent diseases including Ebola. Caesar had learned all about this when Will's father had been alive and his cognitive abilities had been at their sharpest.
It hadn't taken him long during the revolution to realize that mankind couldn't be trusted, even those who had meant him and his kind no harm. His lot was with his own species, a message he honed into the man who'd raised him when he refused to leave the imprisonment of the sanctuary to go home with him. But his time with Will had led him to harbor some hope that they could still coexist until what had happened with Cornelia, and that final meeting with Will in the forest. The first time that Caesar had ordered his kind to kill.
And it had been more than in self defense, it had been to send a message to humans not to come after them. He and the others had waited for an even more powerful response from more people but it never arrived.
What had mystified Caesar had not been mankind's harsh treatment of his kind but how it treated its own kind. Beginning back with how Will's neighbor had harassed his father who had mistakenly got in his car and crashed it. The prejudice he saw by certain groups of people against others. Murder and other crimes depicted on the news broadcasts he used to watch. Man killed man with impunity it seemed, a concept foreign to the apes.
"It's their way," he signed to Kara. After all Will had been cut down by them, when trying to negotiate Caesar's safety. Maybe the scientist had some belief that the two species man and ape could share the same rung of the evolutionary ladder but as it turned out the majority of mankind hadn't been prepared for the likes of Caesar. If it hadn't been for the plague would he or those other apes be alive?
Apes couldn't go down that same treacherous path; they wouldn't follow in the footsteps of the human race and turn on each other. Kara had her ideas about how to avoid that road and so did he. Negotiating with the humans wasn't an option.
Kara would work on him but she hadn't seen what he had seen. She and her kind had sat out most of the uprising waiting to see how it would fall out.
"I go you."
He looked at her and considered it. He'd pick his squad to take with him east very carefully but perhaps Kara would play a pivotal role. He'd think about that some more and run it across others like Maurice, Armando and Alisa. He'd thought about taking his key lieutenants but some had to stay behind to lead the others and keep an eye on the likes of Kobas and any others that might be aligned with him.
He looked over to where the other chimpanzee conferred with others like him and it made him nervous. If he went on this scouting trip, what would be waiting for him when he returned?
Jacobs looked at the photograph of Virus 113 that had been taken before it'd gotten loose. A bit blurred and grainy, he made out its shape along with Alex, a female scientist.
"It looks like Ebola, see the small hook at the end of the strand?"
Jacobs nodded.
"Why does it look almost hairy?"
"Because it's an airborne virus and that hair as you call it is a protein coating that protects it from the environment."
Jacobs sighed.
"I was the one who approved it when Rodman said he wanted to make sure the human body didn't neutralize it. Like it did with 112."
Alex didn't know how to respond to that.
"Well he and the others succeeded in doing that if that was their intention," she said, "I'm glad I was assigned to the hair growth product development instead of 113."
Jacobs fingered 113.
"We need to study the protein coat to see if there's any way to insert new DNA inside of it," he said, "I'd be interested in seeing why it looks so much like Ebola."
Alex shrugged.
"Will would never have used an agent like that when he tinkered with it, would he? I mean the guy was reckless but even he…"
Jacobs sighed again.
"Who knows, all the techs who worked directly with him are dead. Starting with the guy that was found dead after a breach in the safety measures taken."
"They used ventilators and full body suits didn't they?"
Jacobs nodded.
"One of the apes convulsed while being treated with the new virus and somehow the virus infected someone."
Alex shook her head.
"That's all it takes, but god, we didn't have the facilities for something like Ebola."
Jacobs rubbed his forehead.
"It gets worse; some of the canisters came up missing even before the apes broke in the lab."
Alex might have looked shock if she weren't so worn out already. The virus had wiped out most of her energy and when she'd woken up from a state of unconsciousness, she felt like someone she didn't recognize.
"I can't remember most of what I knew," she said, "My mind it's like someone erased a computer hard drive and what I do…it's fuzzy."
"You have to try," Jacobs said, "We've got to come up with a way to kill them. If humanity's going down so must they."
Alex laughed without mirth.
"Good luck, I'm afraid we've lived long enough to see an evolutionary shift."
Jacobs gazed at the virus in front of him, an elegance to its design that belied its lethality.
"Like hell, they're going to succeed us," he said, "This is our planet."
She shook her head.
"We destroyed ourselves, and we destroyed everyone else with us."
Jacobs couldn't believe that it had really been their fault. Rodman had been the one who wanted a leaner, meaner virus to cure his father's illness. The rest of them had been along for the ride.
"They should have just nuked the entire city before either they or the virus escaped."
Jacobs shook his head.
"Maybe they didn't have a chance."
Caroline and Burke watched the chimpanzees, three of them gathering in front of their nesting area. They appeared to be neatening their surroundings before going out and exploring the area. They'd been doing that more and more for longer periods of time. Following them had been difficult because the apes were more athletic and skilled at moving through the forest.
"You think they're scouts," she asked.
He nodded.
"Probably of some type, or they could just be trying to regroup with others of their kind."
She watched the littlest one emulate its parents.
"They're a family maybe from a zoo?"
The two of them were crouched behind a brushy area, watching the apes. Both of them were used to long-term surveillance, he through his military experience and she because she'd done this before in Africa.
"Could be, but they've caught that smart bug going around."
She realized that to be the case based on what she saw them do and they knew rudimentary signing even the youngest one. Maybe they'd been part of a research project. She'd picked up some sign language living with Caesar and Will but she couldn't read what they were communicating from her.
She needed to get closer but Burke had chosen this vantage point so they wouldn't risk being seen.
"You used to doing this," she asked him.
He adjusted his position again.
"Yeah when I was doing military operations," he said, "back when I was a Marine."
He hadn't really talked that much about himself and next to nothing about his service to the country's defense.
"You saw combat didn't you?"
He paused, and then nodded.
"A few times, I gave them 10 years of my life," he said, "Kathy…she, she was my wife, she wanted me to quit because she got tired of packing up and moving all the time."
She looked at him, so he'd been married at some point yet she no longer was in his life. But then everyone in their group had lost loved ones in the past few months, too many to name.
"Yeah I moved around a lot when I was doing research," she said, "I lived out of a duffel bag, ready to travel."
He smiled.
"Me too, or a pack out in the field…then when I went into the private sector, and did the same thing."
She furrowed her brow.
"You were a mercenary?"
"Security for hire," he said, "Mostly in Africa and the Middle East where the biggest demand was for protection."
She knew that her time in Africa had been broken up by civil wars and other revolts in several of its countries and that the boundaries of some of them had been redrawn more than once. By the time she took the job in San Francisco's zoo taking care of the great apes, she'd been more than ready to settle down in one place. But she'd still kept herself busy with her work, to the expense of the rest of her life. Until she met Will and Caesar.
"How did Kathy handle that?"
His face froze for a moment and she saw him in the past. She'd grown used to members of their party retreat to the days and years before the plague but it seemed different with Burke.
"She…she didn't like it much."
Caroline nodded.
"It's tough having relationships when you're all over the place and don't have any place to call home."
He still looked a bit distant.
"Yeah, well none of us are home now."
The realization of that always hit her like a sharp pain as it had the first time. When she had left the home she shared with Will in San Francisco for the last time, with some of his journals in her pack. She'd returned there after spending countless days trying to nurse her dying friends from the zoo even though she hadn't worked there by the end. She wondered what happened to their house, sitting there empty and quiet in a city that had turned from a vibrant urban center of culture and prosperity to a couple weeks of chaos and panic, as that center collapsed.
But by the time she left, it had fallen eerily quiet with no signs of life except the breeze rustling through rows of leafy trees and dogs wandering in packs through the empty, debris filled streets.
She'd come many miles since then but she still remembered sitting on the porch with Will, their arms around each other looking out into the reassuringly regular activity of suburbia for the night.
That last morning of the old world, she'd woken up next to him and seen only the familiar and had gotten up not knowing that by the time night fell, the end would begin. She wondered if it had been like that for Burke, and occasionally glanced at him sideways to read him as they watched the apes disappear into the trees of the vast forest.