She looked over at him as they set up camp outside another town in a wooded area not far from the Canadian border. They had narrowly missed running into a cadre of gorillas with machetes and makeshift spears who had been patrolling the streets of the town while several of them had tried to drive some of the abandoned vehicles. One had gotten behind the wheel and the sounds of the car lurching as it stopped and started reached their ears.
They remained hidden in the bushes retreating to the forests while the apes had come out of the forests to take over the cities. The irony wasn't lost on anyone but they didn't have much time to think about it because fighting to survive as members of a dying species knocked off its pedestal after meddling with the natural order of things took too much of their time.
She sighed remembering how she had warned him not to mess with what shouldn't be changed but his whole life's work had been consumed with trying to help his ailing father. And when he'd finally passed from the disease that robbed him of his mind first, that's when Will had switched the treatment protocol for the apes towards an accelerative viral agent with one unforeseen side effect.
It killed humans and it proved to be relentless once it became airborne. The ones who survived were left with brains that had been damaged in different ways though others like her were not infected at all for unknown reasons. Perhaps some quirk in their DNA that gave them immunity….but not knowing that while the plague swept through San Francisco and later the world, she had waited to get sick and die….but it didn't happen.
When she did get very ill, it turned out to be from a more ordinary flu which had knocked her down but she had regained her strength quickly once she stopped fighting Burke's efforts to get her healthy again.
She looked over at him crouching in the brush alongside her. He looked so much in his element that she wondered what he'd done before this all happened.
"I think they're getting the hang of it," he said.
She looked at him and he pointed to where the apes were trying out the cars though when she looked, one of them in a VW bug had narrowly missed a light pole.
"If they do, they'll spread even faster," she said, "and maybe Canada won't be far enough."
"It'll be fine," he said, "I know some guys up there and if they survived, they'll set up a camp. Rocky got on the CB last night and there was some sporadic chatter up not too far across."
She nodded, thinking that sounded encouraging. They still had a few days more of travel and the members of their party were getting very fatigued from all the unaccustomed exercise. She still felt weakened by her bout with the flu but once she got over the morning sickness, she was fine the rest of the day. But like everyone else, the numbness that had dominated her mind for the past several months had begun to fade replaced by more raw feelings, like anger, grief and fear. The tension between them had started to build up and nerves stretched tightly leaving Burke to have to break up a couple of near brawls stemming from angry words.
It wasn't personal as much as people's emotions that they had kept suppressed inside of them spilling over even during the daytime. She forced everything out of her head that didn't have to do with surviving until she lay in her sleeping bag at night, looking at the inside of her tent or up at the stars when she slept outside. She had volunteered for surveillance duty at night too and more often than not, she was paired with the burly man next to her.
So different from Will, probably as smart but not in the academic sense. He didn't have the analytical skills of a scientist but thought more on his feet. Much more necessary for survival, the world had been more receptive of a man like Burke than the scientists. But she thought about him a lot as she tried to sleep; sometimes she saw his face when they were doing something fun, or light. He hadn't always been consumed by his work sometimes to the point of obsession; he had allowed her to see the part of him that existed before his father got sick.
The more emotional moments as he grappled with losing touch with his father were still kept below the surface. Her legs cramped as she fought to hold her position, and her mouth became parched so she reached for her bottled water.
"You need a break?"
She looked over at him and shook her head.
"I'm good if you are Burke."
He tossed her an energy bar which she caught and ripped open with her teeth. She had heard her stomach growling, maybe he had too.
"They'll be moving on soon," he noted, "They're still restless as if they don't know what to do with their spoils."
She listened, thinking about what it'd been like to be at ground zero. Both for the revolution and for the birth of the plague that followed…to a place that had fallen first serving as an example for the others to follow. She reached into her jacket and took out a worn photo of the three of them, her, Will and Caesar out in the forest where they had all returned when the revolution began.
The three of them in much gentler times, before the world had changed forever.
Caesar looked over at Alisa and signed at her to come on over with the bowl of fruit. She cocked her head pretending not to notice, and he gesticulated even more forcefully. He sighed, recognizing that his consort had a mind of her own and didn't like being told what to do but didn't hold it against her.
After all, the apes had revolted because they'd been tired of being caged and mistreated, ordered what to do from sunrise to sunset. The time he'd spent caged in the compound where he'd been sent had ripped him away from his human family and that had altered his view of the world. It had introduced him to his own kind and had fed the seeds of rebellion. That and the belief that Will had betrayed him caused his resentment to fester into rage. But Will had proven in the end...but the rest of his kind were not to be trusted.
He left the house where he stayed while in Seattle and went to meet Buster and Armando at the lockup where they kept the humans when they weren't putting them to work rebuilding the electric grid and other necessary tasks. The cages were cramped and they filled them with humans even though there hadn't been many left after the plague. The humans didn't even offer up a token resistance which disappointed Armando and the rest of the gorillas who wanted to beat them into submission.
Caesar thought caging them up would accomplish that.
When he got there, the gorillas were spraying the cages to clean them while the humans cowered in the corners, which caused him to flash back to when he had experienced that treatment. He had been ripped out of the only life he knew and had been confused until he realized what he had to do to not only free himself but liberate his own kind.
After he watched the gorillas settle the humans down before tossing slop in their cages where the humans would then crowd each other out and even fight each other for some morsels, he shook his head and headed back to his headquarters.
Nikita an orangutan met him with some questions, which he signed one after the other and Caesar deftly answered. He sat down on his desk and looked around the room before he reached into a drawer and pulled out a worn photo of the three of them in the forest.
Will, his girlfriend and himself wearing his hated harness. He shoved the photo back in the drawer and picked up an overly ripe peach.
Later that night, she lay on her sleeping bag after having woken up from more broken dreams of her old life. She and Will had been eating out in an Italian restaurant near the Fisherman's Wharf not long after they started seeing each other. He'd been talking about growing up in the city and how on weekends, his father had taken him to the woods.
The same place where he'd died.
She lay back trying hard not to think about the future because so much of it was unwritten. They didn't even know how much of humanity would survive the plague and how quickly the apes would seize control of the planet. They had already seen them capturing humans in some of the towns they passed and forcing them into line but no one knew where they'd been taken. What kind of world would it be with everything familiar gone, and what would it be like for her baby?
Hell, she didn't even know how she'd have her baby, the one conceived in the world that existed before it all fell apart. Before mankind got arrogant and believed it could fool with nature including her baby's father.
She heard the bushes move and her body tensed. Were some ape scouts penetrating their defense perimeter and roaming the camp? But she looked up to see Burke walking towards her with some old blankets.
She leaned up on her elbows and smiled at him. He looked like he'd been awake the whole night even though it wasn't his turn to keep watch.
"I brought you something," he said, "It'll get chillier at night the further north we go."
She accepted a thick blanket and covered herself with it.
"Thanks…"
He shrugged his strongly built shoulders, built rugged like the rest of him.
"No problem Reese."
She bit her lip because she knew that name had been based on a lie but one she felt she needed to tell the people she met.
"No thanks for everything Burke," she said, "I know we didn't get off on the right foot."
A smile quirked his mouth.
"No we didn't but we're all carrying around a lot of stress," he said, "Once we've found a destination then we can focus on rebuilding."
She nodded and as he slipped back into the brush, settled down to get some sleep.