Three months earlier….

Caesar sat on the top of the redwood tree that morning. His prehensile feet gripping the trunk allowing him to fall asleep over 100 feet off the ground if he chose to do so.

But he remained awake, looking for any encroaching armies that might be using the covering of that darkness before dawn to launch a secret attack.

They had thwarted two attacks already but in the past week, it had grown eerily quiet in the forest. Although he led the revolutionary movement, he insisted on doing his share of the growing workload which meant surveillance detail. So he had left his lieutenants some hours ago to climb up the tree.

But the attacks never resumed, and soon he'd be sending in some scouts to San Francisco which had lit up the horizon with the reddish shade of orange and yellow glow which signaled the fires that had been set several days ago dying out. He had been mystified by the appearance of the expanding halo of flames but they had opted to remain in the forest and watch from a distance. He tried not to think too much of his past or remained very selective in his memories. Focusing instead on the worst of his treatment by the humans, like Dodge for example to stoke the embers of his rage towards them.

Rather than remembering the kinder treatment he had received from one family of two men, a father and a son who both had left this earth after radically changing it. His human father Will had reset the deck between apes and humans by his genetic research to cure his father's ailment. But ended up destroying his own kind instead and what was left of it would only serve to work under the yoke of apes like him. Humans just weren't good for anything else, he told himself and when the images of Will and his father, and the female scientist he had know crept into his thoughts, he pushed them aside quickly.

He had to remain hardened and keep honing his skills as a revolutionary leader prodding his charges into a new era where they'd be able to stake their place in it at the top of the chain. It wouldn't be overnight, not in a world of billions of the life forms they would replace but it would be done.

He sighed as he realized that the sun would rise soon so he nimbly shimmied down the tree and swung through the branches, not as good as the monkeys who served as their messengers but well, as good as any chimpanzee.

No, as good as any ape. They had to dispense with the separate titles for each other designating species. They were all the same, all equal, chimpanzee, orangutan and gorilla.

Some bonobos had dropped by their settlement two days ago and tried to tell them how it was going to be but they had rebuffed their attempts to place themselves at the top. The smallish versions of chimpanzees eschewed all forms of violence choosing to negotiate their terms…through some rather interesting means. But this was not a peaceful revolution, but one where blood had been shed.

His own would have been a month earlier if it hadn't been for Will. His human father had searched the familiar territory of the forest of his earlier years to try and find him, not knowing he was being followed himself by an attack squad. But he'd taken the gunfire meant for Caesar losing his own life. Caesar had made sure he had been left where the humans could find him.

Caesar jumped the remaining feet to the ground in front of Charron and Alisa the newer female.

He signed to them.

"What you find city?"

They glanced at each other and then Charron nodded.

"All dead…streets empty."

Caesar had heard similar accounts in recent days but figured that they were holed up somewhere planning a new offensive against the apes.

"They gone."

Maybe, Caesar thought, but he decided they'd wait until they had more signs of what had happened. He needed to find some way to communicate with others of his kind that he knew existed out there. So that they could launch similar revolutions and find freedom…and never see the inside of a cage again.

One month ago…

She woke up, her vision blurry until it came gradually into focus. She had heard two voices talking but when she looked up, she saw a pair of brown eyes looking down at where she lay.

Her muscles felt cramped and she could barely move, her mouth parched. She wanted some water desperately. As if reading her mind, the man sitting by her reached for a pitcher and poured her a glass.

She tried to lift herself up to drink it and he helped her. It felt cool if not cold and slid down her throat in a way that refreshed. But she knew it wouldn't be enough for long. She felt as if she were in the middle of a desert.

The man she had dreamed about, she knew was gone forever. But in her dreams, he had been alive and they'd been walking in the forest where the trees disappeared as you looked up at them, into the heavens. He had been calling for Caesar who had run off again, off leash. They had argued over removing it, and she sighed remembering that the world had changed.

The apes had gotten smart. They had grouped under Caesar's leadership and had wrecked much of San Francisco.

But it had been the plague which followed that killed most of its people. The bodies had started to pile up at the hospitals after less than a month as the virus swept through the city barely allowing a window of time when it could be isolated let alone identified. Even as she treated people with her limited medical skills, she knew where it had come from, the laboratory that had given birth to Caesar. Something that Will had been working on, before his death at the hands of his own kind.

When he had run into the dense forest to find Caesar and hadn't returned.

Neither had the army and they realized quickly enough that they had all been killed by the apes. But if they hadn't, the plague would have gotten them soon enough. She had spent the past month constantly moving with some people, who lived, or died or split up into other confused migrating groups. No one knew what to do in the earliest moments of the apocalypse.

She had just kept busy, eating very little as the food either rotted at the grocery stores or markets or had remained untouched. The disease had claimed its victims too quickly to create enough of a panic to send the city's residents rushing to stores to clear the shelves while stocking up.

What had finally gotten to her she didn't know, she just remembered being too tired to even move and then she must have collapsed. At first she thought the virus had finally breached her defenses and had come to claim her. She had been ready at that point, as most of the people she had known, she had worked with, loved had been wiped off the face of the now changing earth. Society teetered on the edge of collapse and she feared what would replace it.

But she hadn't died. She didn't know why but she didn't remember much of those days that stretched out into weeks, where she lay while she decided to join others like Will and his father.

Or to remain alive as everything she knew deteriorated around her. But in the midst of it, she'd heard a soft voice, its timbre bass and felt the strength of someone's hand in her own. Someone calling her back from someplace that awaited her.

She didn't know why she didn't die but she did remember opening her eyes and seeing the sturdiness of the man sitting next to her, his face highlighted by more than a hint of shadow. She reached up faintly with one hand to touch him.

"You're not him…"

The man smiled.

"No I guess not," he said, "I'm Burke…I've been taking care of you since you took sick."

So that's why she felt weak, almost as if she had nothing inside her but jello, and her muscles felt sore like she'd been hit by a truck. Her mind felt fuzzy like had happened to the handful of people who had survived the virus but then it slowly grew clearer.

"It's not…"

He shook his head.

"No it wasn't the virus," he agreed, "It was an entirely different breed of flu but you're better now."

She didn't feel like it but maybe she would as time passed. But then suddenly in a moment of clarity, she remembered the man in front of her and made a face, albeit weakly.

"You…"

He smiled again.

"Yes it's me," he said, "The guy you tore a new one in the other day and you were half right."

"What?"

He stroked her brow, where some strands of hair had dried during her illness.

"Later…now you need to get some rest," he said, "We'll talk again when you're stronger."

She nodded and then closed her eyes again. This time her sleep had been seamless, unbroken by dreams.

She looked back at her illness as inevitable, you couldn't keep the hours on the move as she had been doing and not pay the price. But it hadn't been the lethal brand of flu that had taken so many lives. She didn't know why it hadn't struck at her But then there had been a few others like her who had worked in labs with animals who hadn't taken ill either. Some of them had since been killed or enslaved by apes they had encountered while fleeing.

After finishing her breakfast, she headed off towards the main dwelling where a strategic meeting would take place. She had been instrumental because she had anticipated moves by the apes. They just didn't know about her close ties to Caesar or his family while he grew up.

They didn't need to know her ties to the man whose actions to save his father had doomed humanity.

But looking up at Burke as he waited for her, slipping his arm around her shoulder, she wondered how long she could keep her own identity hidden in a world that had drastically changed forever. A lot of identities had been wiped clean, maybe hers would be as well.

Hers and that of the baby she carried inside her.