Chapter 4
The ape lumbered over the trembling body of the man he had just nearly trampled. He lifted his fists and letting out a raucous grunt brought them down with a great force. But it was all a ruse. Slade Wilson, his body lying lifeless on the ground mere seconds before, had risen to his feet, and rising to his feet, stood mere feet in front of the great ape, but the suffocating darkness of the cave made sound the only indicator that the two were both present in the cave. The shuffling of Wilson's feet as he rose tipped off the cave ape to his position, and the beast turned and charged yet again. Falling to his back, Wilson only barely escaped the beast's charge by slipping underneath him. A couple futile punches to the ape's back brought Wilson an epiphany; nothing short of solid rock would pierce this hide. Fortunately for the soldier, he and his enemy we're surrounded on four sides by solid, cold, rock. He backed away a few paces, as quietly as he could. 'Maybe this'll be easier than I thought' he thought to himself as he made one last, purposely loud step.
The ape smelled blood. His vision was impaired in the darkness as well, and the ape hoped to use his gargantuan size and strength to win the battle. So, charging blindly in the direction of the noise, his underestimation of Slade Wilson rewarded him with stiff, hard rock to his cranium. The gorilla fell to the floor, unconscious, but alive. Slade walked over very slowly, small bits and pieces on the leg plates of his green-painted armor chipped off and littering the cave floor. He pondered taking the ape's life, but thought against the notion. It was obvious. This ape was not part of the patrol earlier, and neither was he a guard of this forsaken grave pit, a graveyard has no need for guards. The poor creature was as much a prisoner of the stone cave as were the souls of the men that littered the cave with their corpses. "Poor bastard," muttered Slade Wilson from behind his mask. His flashlight had been shattered in the previous melee. Just my luck, he thought.
The following hours were spent by Slade searching for stones to use to make a fire with. After a couple hours, he managed to locate some bits and pieces and produced a fire. As the embers lot up the cave he was in, which he now knew to be small alcove, leading to a deeper set of caves, he also finally realized just how gargantuan the ape he had battled with in the cave really was. As the ape lay, still unconscious a few feet away from where Slade was perched, he sized the beast up as being definitely within the range of 8 to 9 feet in height. Slade pondered his next move, and in that moment realized the hopelessness of his situation. The paper maps he had in his possession had proved useless due to his lack of understanding of the simian language, and the cave door behind him had shut, Wilson having no knowledge of how to re-open it.
He quickly realized that the key to his survival was his unconscious guest in that stone cave. Slade removed his mask, revealing a chiseled face. Slade was in his mid thirties, a handsome man by most definition, with sharp, angular features. He had well-groomed dark hair, dark eyes, accompanied by a dark goatee. Discarding his mask, as he no longer saw the point of it on a deserted island, he spat on the cave floor and, rising to his feet, moved over to his quarry.
His army training had taught him many different methods of torture, but something about the ape gave him the notion that he would need none. It was something that Slade had seen in the creature's eyes for a brief time during their confrontation. It wasn't anger in the beast's eyes, it was regret, something Slade was very familiar with. Slade struggled, almost comically, to wake the great ape. After a short time, his patience was wearing thin. Bill Wintergrey was not going to save himself, and this in mind, Slade raised his fist and then brought it crashing back down, directly down on the forehead of the great ape. The beast of the caves came roaring to life, with a ferocity that would have sent Slade running through the caves, were he a man of lesser resolve. "Where am I?" Slade asked, in a tone less interrogative, more threatening. "There is no need to shout, human." Slade's disbelief was clear when the giant primate responded in English. The ape continued to draw the amazement of Slade Wilson by further explaining that his name was Solovar, and he was a diplomat. Slade would have thought Solovar was taking him for a fool, but he spoke very articulately, even with a voice so monotonous that it seemed to echo through the caves for miles. As they spoke, Slade slowly began to believe Solovar's words, as little by little they began to ring true and run parallel with what Wilson had seen over the past week on the Island.
Solovar told him of he and Grodd's discovery of a meteorite in their South African home, the Sullivan Zoo. At this time both Solovar and Grodd were simple primates, amusement for visitors to the Zoo. The meteorite emitted an otherworldly green glow, that fascinated both apes as they gazed upon it. Immediately, the apes felt a greater sense of awareness of where they were and who they were. Within days, they were solving complex math equations, and within weeks, they rivaled the greatest human scientists in intellect. He also told Wilson the story of he and Grodd's exodus to Gorilla Island, the uncharted island they were presently on, where Bill Wintergrey had vanished months earlier.