I don't own Planet of the Apes.

Please let me know what you think of this one-shot.

Struggling Colony.

I had been a kid when the colony was set up on this strange planet. I was born on this world, so many light-years away from Earth and so this place, as much of a hell as its become especially since we have to fight off our own creations just to live for another miserable day, has always been my home.

We crash-landed on this world - I never got the full story of why and how we managed such a blunder, but we ended up on this planet and we were stranded here ever since.

The ship's engines were shot to pieces, the communications' equipment was useless, but even if the antennae worked we would not expect a rescue for at least a few….million years, given the extensive intergalactic distances, from what I was able to understand during my brief physics lessons.

Y'see, I was there.

I was there when the planet's original inhabitants were a threat, and I was a child when the apes that were carried on board the ship were twisted using genetic experiments, splicing human DNA into the apes' genome and accelerated in order to transform them into intelligent warriors who were powerful enough to fight off the inhabitants with their sheer strength.

We were desperate. The planet we'd landed on was teeming with hostile life we were barely a match for, and the apes were the perfect foot soldiers. I'm not justifying what they did; the price we have paid since hangs over us like a dark cloud while Semos's legacy is constantly hounding us. I never witnessed the war, I was a child, so I didn't see the fighting. But I have vague memories of the enemy attacking what was left of the ship, the panic, the screaming of human and ape warrior alike.

But it went wrong. The decision to transform the apes into super-intelligent warriors using human DNA was one of the dumbest things they could ever have done. Apes are incredibly powerful creatures even without human DNA spliced into their own genome. Not only were they intelligent before the gene-splicing experiments, but afterwards they became capable of speech, and higher reasoning. They fought alongside the few of us able to fight. The long term plan was to use the apes as an army while we tried to rebuild and make something of the colony. Their numbers had been growing with dozens of ape children being born, and many of those same children were trained to be soldiers, weapons fighting against a terrible enemy while their overlords just…watched and did little except supply them with weapons, and thanks to their human reason the apes' realised that was all they were.

Weapons.

It was no wonder the apes became angry, restless and Semos rose to power and took control of the pack, and he launched a terrifying rebellion against the humans of the colony.

Every day, the children of the compounds we set up every month just to escape the predators of the planet, and the ape wide patrols who are being sent out deeper and deeper into the forests and into the region where the ship was crashed, ask me how it all happened. D'you know what I always tell them? My memories of that terrible day where our existence in this world became much less kind are a blur, so I tell them I was asleep one moment, and the next I was being shaken by my mother and father, who was bleeding from a nasty injury to his face. I remember being rushed through the corridors, half asleep, the awful sound of the chimpanzees shrieking in the air as people panicked, trying to escape. By the time I was fully awake, I just didn't understand what happened.

It was a massacre. People I'd known my whole life were dead, wounded, screaming in agony while pleading for mercy. But the apes gave us none. We were all to be wiped out. The apes had been well trained, and it showed when they used human tactics along with their own wild skills and savagery to take us by surprise. The apes' weapons were a strange eclectic mix, between brutally advanced and efficient and devastating machine guns and rocket launchers, and primitive weapons like bows and arrows and spears as thick as batons.

I remember seeing my father being set upon by a gorilla and a chimpanzee; while the gorilla was more than willing to just smash my dad to the ground, the chimpanzee gave into its savagery and tore my dad to pieces. I can still remember him screaming at my mother and me to escape to safety. My mother managed to get me and my sister to safety, while Semos and the rest of the apes took over the colony and then moved inland.

But for us…

We had no choice but to escape, moving our own group as far as we could. We had taken only a small amount of technology with us, but the power cells on the fires began to wear down, and we didn't have enough ammunition to defend ourselves, not only from the predators of this damn planet but from the apes.

And the apes just keep coming. Their wide patrols close in on us every single time, followed closely by a battalion who attack us en-masse as they're ordered into battle by Semos, who will not leave us alone and is determined to hunt us down to extinction. Our weapons were able to hold him off, especially when he laid traps, using the planet's natural resources to make gunpowder to slow them down and blow those hairy motherfuckers to hell or use it to make primitive cannons or guns to make up for our dwindling resources.

But the apes keep coming, forcing us to move before we can manufacture the powder to bridge the ever-widening gap between us and them whereas before our higher technology allowed us to subdue them quickly before they knew what was happening. Every time we fought as I grew older, our weapons would explode in their faces and drive them away in a panic. But I saw something else as the years rolled by, we were losing our weapons, the apes would either attack us before we could get to them or they would destroy them.

We human beings have been dependent on our guns for too long.

We have forgotten how to fight with grit, but on this planet, we used our inventive skills to compensate while the apes hunted us down. Over the years, some of the more ingenious members of our group have turned to nature to help them make slingshots, bows and arrows, and even battle axes.

But the apes keep coming, using terrifying brilliant plans to capture or kill us. Our children live in fear. It keeps them alive. My mother knew of the apes back on Earth, and she told me how the gorillas and the orangutans were incredibly smart enough to solve problems, but the chimpanzees are the truly savage apes. My mother showed me a recording once of a pack of chimps hunting down Red Colobus Monkeys, using coordination and teamwork to hunt down and trap the monkeys in a pincer movement before they're torn to pieces.

Maybe, if one or two of the monkeys were lucky, they would survive, but the rest would be torn to pieces, and that image has remained in my mind ever since, and it's never too from my mind every single time we have to cope against the apes. We are the monkeys they are hunting, and when they catch us, they will either kill us or they will enslave us. I have managed to survive such a terrible fate because I know the apes will not be merciful to humans who're captured. Our weapons are dwindling, we have no natural edge over the apes; even the strongest of us know fighting a chimpanzee or a gorilla is a death sentence since they could tear us to bits or snap our spines without even trying. The ever-widening gap. We have to use ingenuity against ape brute strength. But is it enough? Our losses continue to mount, and we struggle to survive.

Every day we are forced to move on, but we have to if we want to survive, and be free; the disease that's the Ape Empire is expanding across the forests and valleys of the planet, forcing us to cope with poisonous plants that the prior surveys didn't pick up on, or have been forgotten in the never-ending war against the apes. They will never give up. The ape population is growing, their settlements are springing up all around their capital city, roads are being burnt into the forests like the veins in my arm, and their armies are being trained with the same lessons their own soldiers were taught by us. And they are hunting us down, Semos had taught the apes too well, we're their enemy and they want us to die.

I am getting old, now. I have been a fugitive for nearly 40 years now, I have been forced to see my children grow up in this horrible world, forced them to learn how to run and to never allow themselves to be caught. In my life, I've had 3 children, and their survival counts on me teaching them the harsh realities of living in this world of pure hell, making it clear to them they will never be allowed to be left alone unless they find a way to escape to a part of the planet where the apes cannot follow them, like across the seas.

It isn't the world anyone would want for their children.