Taylor floated through space inside the spaceship that kept him alive. The other three astronauts lay in suspended animation in separate chambers. All of their bodily functions handled by the computer that served as a surrogate mother.

But the astronauts dreamed even as their bodies lay in stasis. Their minds traveled far back to earth, back to the lives they'd left behind.

For Taylor, that meant going back to his ranch in Colorado, one state away from his estranged brother who worked as a mercenary taking jobs around the world. Taylor had tried to scare him straight then to shame him but his brother didn't view what he did as sordid, it embraced his sense of adventure, his sense of fatalism and made him more than enough money to buy his own spread in Montana. Far away from everyone but the hardiest of ranchers and survivalists and away from his family roots.

Taylor's ranch housed horses and cattle and he'd left it to another brother to oversee it during his long stints either going on or training for his NASA missions. Images of his deceased parents flashed in front of Taylor back in the days when he'd looked at his family life through rose colored glasses. Playing baseball on the lot near his elementary school and working at a diner while earning a football scholarship in high school. The local boy made good, that's how the newspaper headlined Taylor's life back in an obscure rural town.

His marriage had been brief, his engagements even shorter. The parties, the pickup football games between the astronauts training for different missions and then his final days on earth before leaving on his mission to Mars.

Mars took several years to reach so he and the other astronauts slept in stasis most of the time until the computer woke them up to prepare for the landing on what would be a new frontier for humans. He'd be the Neil Armstrong of the little red planet and he had his soundbyte to be heard around the world already rehearsed inside his head.

But what Taylor didn't know was that he would never reach his destination. He and the others would reach a destination but already their spacecraft had been diverted from its programmed course and sucked inside what might be called a vortex.

He didn't know that back on earth his ship had been reported missing, that it had apparently vanished and had yet to be seen again. He also didn't know that this had happened even as humanity's own reign of the planet was coming to an end.

All he knew were his memories as his whole life played out in front of him as he slept.


Landon shook his head.

"I think we'll need more wind to disperse the virus."

Jacobs sighed.

"We can't risk it," he said, "We still don't know if it'll harm us."

Landon chuckled.

"I don't see how things could get worse for us," he said, "and we need to get as many of them don't we?"

Jacobs didn't know how to read the man in front of him. He looked more scary with each passing way and he'd heard him talking to himself, only every once in a while the name, Dodge would slip past his lips.

Dodge, his dead son.

If Landon's sanity was slipping away, Jacobs had to be careful around him. He couldn't let him get his hands on any of the aerosols which held the engineered virus. So he had them stashed away in a locked container in one of the bags.

"Where is the virus anyway?"

Jacobs refused to tell him.

"It's safe until it needs to be used."

Landon shook his head.

"I don't think you have the balls to kill anything let alone your own creations."

Jacobs pulled on his collar steeling himself.

"Oh you couldn't be more wrong," he said, "I want these apes to die. I knew we should have just shut the project down after the first one or two failures."

"Yeah right…it's your company," Landon said, "You could have gotten them to do it."

"I only really managed it," Jacobs said, "I had a position on the board but it was more symbolic. The people with the funding held all the cards and they wanted this miracle drug to line their own coffers."

Landon snorted.

"How much could you get for a deadly virus," he said, "Too damn lethal to get far enough to use it as a military weapon?"

Jacobs sighed.

"That wasn't its intended purpose."

Landon stared at him, not blinking.

"It is now."

Jacobs knew that. He didn't need reminding. After all, he had suffered too. God, the publicity once it came out that the apes that'd raised mayhem in San Francisco on their way to freedom were escapees from his lab, stock values had dropped markedly and investigations including one by a Congressional Committee had been launched. He'd been subpoenaed to explain why these apes had gotten so smart. The man they should have put in the hot seat had already been dead.

As bad as that had been, it had been nothing compared to what happened when people started getting sick and dying. The disease started like an innocent cold but soon morphed into something truly horrific. Graphically manifesting itself as a hemorrhagic type illness more suited to Africa than the western United States… he'd seen what Franklin had looked like when they found him dead bleeding out of every orifice alone in his apartment.

Records showed that Will had just sent him home after a breach in the 113 protocol rather than put him under quarantine. Any chances to contain it…were long gone as soon as Franklin left the building. It had already started spreading when Jacobs had been focusing his attention on what happened on the Golden Gate Bridge.

It had been one slowly unfolding nightmare since and Jacobs cursed Will blaming him for the whole mess and for exiting from mankind's tragedy prematurely leaving people like him to suffer much longer.

"Dodge…we're going to finally do it…we're going to kill Caesar and the others…"

Jacobs looked up to see Landon's eyes glaze over again and he knew that his sanity had slipped once again.


Caroline slept on the mat, thoroughly exhausted from treating two more apes that had eaten the poisoned berries. Both would survive the experience but it had been touch and go for a while. She knew what that must be like having been deathly ill herself.

It had been not long after she had first moved in with Will while she still worked at the zoo. She'd spent a month on a research project in what had been Zaire. It had been one of the most rigorous but rewarding experiences in her life. She'd grown up living around the world with parents who had lived with various indigenous cultures that they had studied so living in an African village was like coming home.

But she'd been happy to return back to Will, Charles and a younger Caesar who had wanted to play with her when she arrived home. She'd done that but within a week of returning to work, she'd been exhausted, feeling rundown and feverish. Her eyes reddened and ached along with her head much worse than one of her migraines.

By the time she'd been rushed to the hospital by Will, she'd gotten splotches on her body and her nose started to bleed.

She had been diagnosed with some strain of hemorrhagic fever related to Ebola. Will had stayed with her from what she'd remembered as much as they'd let him and she vaguely remembered drifting away to what she thought was death.

Then she'd woken up and seen an unshaven Will still sitting there holding her hand and she'd been very weak but feeling better.

How could that be, she'd asked when she asked Will about it while recovering at the hospital and then later at home. The strain she'd contracted was considered nearly 100% fatal and yet she survived it. He'd never really answered her just said that he'd prayed for her a lot but he'd never struck her as being all that religious.

The images of what it'd been like to be deathly ill floated in her head, unable to be held fast before drifting off again.

Suddenly she felt something shaking her. She opened her eyes and saw the ape named Kara looking down at her. Caroline sighed, what?

Kara sighed back that Caesar want, see her.

Caroline got up on her feet, not an easy task these days since she'd gotten to the end of her pregnancy. She put a hand on her abdomen as she reached for something to help her stand while Kara watched. The bonobo loved to touch her abdomen and she did so after Caroline had stood up.

"Baby big?"

Caroline nodded, it certainly felt that way. She'd be going into labor any day now and that unnerved her. She didn't know what she'd do without Ruth or Glenn or anyone who could help her. She'd be on her own given that the apes themselves had little experience with human babies let alone childbirth. She went into the other room and saw Caesar eating fruit that Alisa had brought him.

Alisa looked more pregnant but still had a ways to go before birthing her own baby. Caesar doted on her and Caroline smiled wistfully. She missed Will so much since he'd died but even more so as the reality of having a living reminder of him hit her harder. She wished so much he could be here with her to meet his son or daughter. But he'd been gone for nearly nine months now.

Caesar gestured at her to come closer to where he sat near his bag and then he reached to pull something out of it.

"What," she signed and he pulled out what looked like a locket attached to a chain.

Her eyes widened when she saw it.

"How? Where?"

After all, it had been in Will's possession because she had given it to him to get the clasp fixed. He'd put it off but when she looked at it after Caesar gave it to her, she saw that he had done that.

Her throat tightened.

She knew it would have been one of his final acts in his life. He'd done it before the world around them had gone crazy. She opened it up and saw the photo of Charles and Will together back when Will had been a little boy. Another older dark haired boy that she knew to have been his older brother who had died sat next to Will.

The other was the three of them, Will, her and Caesar back when he'd been younger. It'd been like a family portrait. She started to hand it back to him.

"No…"

She blinked her eyes at his guttural speech.

"You…"

She shouldn't be surprise she supposed but she guessed he felt more comfortable signing than speaking.

"Yours…"

Meaning that the locket was for her to keep, as it had been before all this had happened… So she undid the clasp and put it around her neck where it belonged. She fingered it, her eyes stinging from unshed tears for the past and sighed "thank you" to Caesar.

She had gotten another piece of her life back.