Two months later….

Landon had been so sure he had been dreaming when his dead son had appeared before him telling him to avenge his murder. His life had been snuffed by that newer ape Caesar, the one who had come in wearing clothes and so uncertain of his new home. After all, as Will had told him, Caesar had never spent any time with other chimpanzees. Landon had just told the scientist that the ape would adjust in his new home and have plenty of companionship.

But Caesar had been much smarter than he or his son had realized and had somehow plotted behind the scenes to unite the apes even across species division and persuade them to rise up against first him and his son and then the rest of San Francisco. His son now appeared in his dreams at night, haunting him by telling him that he would never rest until Caesar and his army had been destroyed.

Landon didn't remember if he talked to his dead son but he would have told him that the scientists he had been holed up with in a decaying section of an abandoned city had been working on the virus. They had tested it but so far the live subject, an orangutan hadn't succumbed to it.

Hadn't even been infected by it so at least it hadn't made him smarter, into Einstein or something…thank god for small favors. But Jacobs told him that his team remained determined and that with each round of testing, perhaps they were getting closer. What was left was finding the particular key that would slip easily enough into the receptor in the right cells inside the apes own physiology. Then the mutated genetic material of the virus could start coding the affected cells to kill themselves in rapid succession, like the 113 virus had done with humans in the brain.

Landon tried to be patient but his son wasn't and sometimes he began seeing him in the daytime or so he thought, standing in the shadows mostly while he'd been alone. He looked remarkably normal for being dead.

Jacobs came in with his usual clipboard. The past two months had made him look even more haggard. He had been losing weight too, probably because there had been less food to eat since it was all going to go bad soon except for a few canned goods and nonperishables.

"Any closer to finding a way to kill those apes," Landon asked.

The former corporate president just stared at him.

"The latest round of tests was encouraging."

Landon snorted.

"They always are but so far that test ape still breathes and lives," he said, "and eats better than we do."

"We need to keep it alive for the tests…"

"But the point is to kill it," Landon said, "So when will that be?"

Jacobs paused.

"We still don't know but it's better than sitting around waiting for us all to die off."

Landon couldn't argue with that but he felt that was happening anyway…not that he cared as much about his own life after losing his son but he didn't want the apes to win.

Caesar looked out from where they had camped on the edge of the Great Plains into where the sun had begun to rise in the East. The apes had set up in a huddle due to the lack of trees to nest in and had spent most of the time trying to keep warm. Autumn had settled in and the weather had gotten even chillier including at night. They still hadn't found many signs of humans in the past two months except for a small group of them holed up in an abandoned town that had once been part of a farming community.

Only the crops had run amuck and then started to die off after bearing an abundant harvest because there had been no one around to tend to them. Everyone had either gotten sick and died or had wandered off in search of someplace else. Maybe whatever humans survived fled into hiding whenever they arrived, which led to Caesar thinking that their time of domination had definitely ended. But would his kind be able to smoothly ascend up the ladder to assume their position? Caesar looked around him at the slumbering apes save for the sentries they kept posted and didn't know how to answer that question. He remembered back to when he'd been growing up and he'd been spending much of his time home with Will's father while the scientist worked in the laboratory. Charles had talked to him and read to him from thick books about the histories of the different civilizations that had populated the earth, with each one ascending up the ranks often taking control through violence to only rule at the top for a short time before the decay began to sink in. Most societies were already dying in a sense before they were swallowed up and replaced by others who would experience the same cycle.

Not his society, he thought, no his would rule supreme the longest. Past his own lifetime into those of the offspring that Alisa carried inside of her and their offspring. Armani, an orangutan who had been one of the sentries came up to Caesar.

"I have seen no sign of him…."

Caesar frowned because Kobas had disappeared several nights earlier when he had been supposed to be on sentry duty and hadn't been seen since. On one hand he had been relieved feeling a huge load off his shoulders that the confrontation he feared soon wouldn't happen. But where had the chimpanzee gone, to try to find others of his kind to team up with and develop a counterrevolutionary force?

He didn't know and right now he couldn't focus because Kobas could have easily had trouble surviving on his own out in this desolate region but Caesar knew he had been upset with what had happened earlier.

When they had come upon a small group of scraggly humans and Kobas had wanted to kill them all. He and two other apes had set off after them, to ambush them outside of a store that they'd gone into probably to scrounge for food.

But Caesar had said no, a word he'd had to say a lot to the larger ape and he and two of his most trusted companions had stopped him….at least long enough for the group of humans to hear the noise of visitors and take off outside the back door disappearing into a field of dying cornstalks behind the store.

Kobas had been furious…signing how Caesar had been some kind of human lover. That the apes would need to fight and they'd need to kill to claim the planet as theirs and any surviving humans, they needed to be the one in cages.

But then Kobas' relationship with humans had been from the perspective of test subject and scientist much different than Caesar's with the humans in his circle. He reminded himself of that every time he wanted to smack Kobas into the nearest tree.

"He's now gone…."

Caesar nodded at Armani.

"We find?"

Caesar shook his head.

"No we go …he gone."

Armani understood that it would be easier for them now without the conflict produced by Kobas.

"Good…"

Caesar didn't know if it was all that good but at least traveling and exploring the landscape they had inherited would go more smoothly now. They had reached the edge of a densely packed forest, much different than the last they'd seen from where they had started. Different trees..different feeling when he looked at them.

He had seen signs pointing north and the forest beckoned to them to take that path.

Tomorrow they would start exploring them….

Caroline felt sometimes as if she'd burst wide open. She still had some time left before her baby would arrive but she felt that sometimes she wished she could move that day closer.

Even as she feared it because she still didn't know how to have a baby in this very different world.

Burke and she had become much closer but he still didn't talk much about his background before the plague hit. She knew he'd lost his family but she also knew to be careful when broaching that subject. She often thought of her own family much of which was on the other side of the world. Were they all dead, most likely and even if they weren't, she had no way to reach them, given that the means of transportation especially to faraway places had grown much more limited.

She sat on the examination table with Glen who had checked her out and pronounced her ready to deliver within the next month or maybe longer. First babies could be unpredictable, he explained to her.

She had prepared for it by moving to the encampment and doing her work there, with Burke joining her most of the time. Occasionally he'd be away for a couple of days back at the original site but most of the time he was with her and she felt better when he shared her cabin with her.

As for Will, she couldn't stop thinking about him whenever she thought about the baby….wanting so much for him to be here. She thought of the decisions that had been made which had irrevocably changed the world. If time could rewind and they could all go back…but then she'd shake her head knowing it was a useless exercise. Time only went forward, not backward and it had no mercy for the whims of the passengers it carried.

She arched her brows at Glenn.

"So you really good at delivering babies…?"

He smiled after jotting down some notes in her file.

"I've delivered a couple in my time," he said, "Caroline, it wasn't under conditions so primitive but women have been having babies for thousands of years."

Yeah she knew that and many of them had died along with the babies because before modern medicine, the mortality rates for both had been much higher. Would they return to those days now and even if the babies lived….what about the plague? Would it return for a next round of victims, stealing yet another generation of humans?

None of these questions could be answered right now, they all played a waiting game. She tried not to think about the future, focusing only on the here and now.

Daniel and Shiloh along with the younger apes had started traveling to further away places so Caroline didn't see them as often.

"You nervous about giving birth?"

She just looked at him without answering for a moment.

"Isn't any new mother?"

He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. She picked herself and stood up without falling over. An image flashed through her of her walking out of a doctor's office smiling to see Will waiting for her but it passed quickly as they often did.

Life was what it was and nothing would change it, not dreams, wishful thinking and she had to remember that.

The man slept in the steel container surrounded by glass and he dreamed while moving through a vast expanse of space.

A poker game with two of his companions flashed behind his twitching eyelids, where cards were dealt, chips were tossed down on some table inside some bar which played honky tonk music in the background. Several women wearing tight jeans and even tighter shirts surrounded them to watch the game.

Then waking up inside a hotel, with tousled sheets and the smell of a woman's perfume wafting from the and walking into the bathroom for his final shave before he got dressed and headed to prepare for the journey he had anticipated since he was a little boy growing up with his parents and two siblings on a farm in the Midwest.

Walking up the gangplank into the massive column of metal and inside the cramped compartment with his three shipmates…two men and one woman who in the past few months had become closer than his family.

They had become his family with all the preparation and hours spent for this trip, his contact with his own family had been reduced to emails and phone calls…except for his brother who he scarcely communicated with at all.

The muffled sound of the engines thrusting and the sudden push forcing him down in his strapped chair….the excitement filing his body, almost a giddiness sheathed with professional calm.

A long journey ahead but now he slept to protect him from boredom and allowing his body to be in stasis so it needed less to survive. The process didn't steal from him his dreams so he lived there for what seemed to be a slice from the huge expanse of time.

But while he slept, something happened and he and his three shipmates slumbered oblivious to the reality that everything had changed. If George Taylor had any inkling about what happened, it didn't find its way into his dreams.