Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2 Page 34

  Then he spotted the pair he’d seen at the very first: the older tattooed man and his fierce blond daughter. From the way they acted, it was plain they were the leaders of this band of ragged humans. Now they were urging a small group of their people through a stand of thin, new-growth saplings, still trying to get out from under the trees, where the apes wouldn’t have the natural advantage of being able to attack from overhead.

  The old man was wily, Davidson thought, and the woman fierce and brave. Though they were hopelessly outnumbered, they were still fighting. They were taking advantage of the sapling grove, using the tightness of the space between the willowy, graceful trunks as a way to dodge the bigger, heavier gorillas who couldn’t slip through as easily. For a moment Davidson thought they might actually be successful. But as soon as the apes saw that their prey was threatening to escape, they came up with a simple way to nullify the human advantage. Roaring in anger, the huge animals simply yanked the saplings out of the earth by their roots, like pulling gigantic weeds.

  But the old man wasn’t done yet. Even as the apes with the net closed in on him and his charges again, he kept his head about him and watched the approach of the ominously jingling snare carefully. When the apes flung their net, he gave a quick hand signal, and then, with his daughter, dove under the net. Most of the others did likewise, leaving the apes growling in frustration and anger.

  But the escape was only momentary. Before the humans could regroup, the same huge gorilla who had nearly caught Davidson streaked into their midst, snarling and clubbing with wild abandon. This ape moved with such speed, such overwhelming power, and such precision that the humans had no chance to escape his onslaught. Within moments the forest was littered with moaning, stunned people, easy pickings for the mop-up crew of apes that now stormed over them. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, only the old man and the woman remained uncaptured, and from what he saw, Davidson doubted that would remain true much longer.

  A teenaged male, half-naked and scrawny, darted across Davidson’s vision, half a dozen apes in hot pursuit. But with his youthful speed and slithery, slashing moves, the boy managed to keep a few steps in front of the slavering pack, and Davidson found himself inwardly cheering the kid.

  Go on, go, keep on going!

  But youth and agility weren’t going to be enough. Just as Davidson thought the kid would break free and make good his escape, a dark shape swung down from a branch, dangling by hairy, muscular arms. The ape never dropped to the ground. He didn’t need to. His bare, long-toed feet, as nimble as any human hands, snagged the boy and swung him screaming high into the air. The boy struggled, beating against the monk’s massive thighs with his fist, but Davidson could see it was no use. The kid might as well have been trying to punch his way through a brick wall.

  His struggles distracted his captor momentarily, though, long enough for the older man and his daughter to arrive on the scene, running hard toward the little battle. But their quest was hopeless, too. As Davidson watched, two more apes plummeted down from the trees. The first landed feet-first on the man and knocked him to his knees. The second slammed the woman down, rolled her like a bowling ball along the forest floor. The old man scrambled up and flung himself across the woman, trying to protect her. It did no good, just made them a more inviting target when the net settled over them with a harsh clash of bells.

  They both struggled against the tough strands of rope, but to no avail. They were trapped like helpless rabbits, as thoroughly taken as the people they’d tried to lead to safety before. The last thing Davidson saw before he turned to run again was the woman, teeth bared, thrashing like some magnificent wild animal as the apes closed in on her.

  A wild animal…

  Davidson knelt behind a rotted-out tree stump, the sounds of the hunt slowly dying away, not so much from distance—he hadn’t managed to get very far—but from the fact that the hunted had mostly been taken, and the hunters were passing out of their raucous frenzy into quieter, less emotional territory.

  Davidson crouched, breathing hard, for the first time trying to think, to figure out what had happened to him, what sort of insane nightmare he’d stumbled into. The momentary respite lulled him into a dangerous sense of false security, of having escaped the worst of it. He even began to think he might escape this mad hunt entirely—though he didn’t allow himself to consider much beyond that. Getting away would be enough for the moment. He could worry about what he would do after that later—if he was able to survive that long.

  He licked his lips, looked around, began to rise. A gorilla on horseback exploded out of the woods, almost trampling him as he lunged to get away. The gorilla barely noticed him, busy with controlling the net he was dragging, and the two humans entangled in it.

  Something inside Davidson’s brain snapped. He’d had enough! Enough of hiding, of running from monkeys…

  The ape on horseback was almost on top of him now, still paying more attention to his struggling captives than to his surroundings. Davidson threw himself at the hairy rider and caught him by surprise. The force of his launch knocked the gorilla off his perch and sent him spinning several feet away where he landed hard and, obviously shaken, didn’t get up immediately. His mount panicked and skittered in the opposite direction, wall-eyed and snorting. Davidson ran after it, vaulted onto its back. The two human captives struggled out of the net, then fled without a word of thanks.

  Good idea, Davidson thought, and took off after them. He didn’t see the ape in the trees above him until he was plucked from horseback and slammed to the ground with lung-crushing force.

  The tumble knocked him out for a moment. When he came to, he was flat on his back. A fearsome growl sent chills down his spine as a shadow moved slowly over him, blotting out the sun. He stared up helplessly at the reddened eyes and grinning fangs of the huge gorilla standing over him…

  3

  The first thing he smelled was the stench of terror-sweat choking his nostrils. Davidson let out a soft moan as he sat up, wincing as each movement found a fresh knot of pain somewhere in his battered body. Nausea gripped his belly. His head ached horribly. He wondered if he’d picked up a concussion somewhere in the fight. He felt bad enough…

  He closed his eyes and sucked air slowly into his lungs, ignoring the too-ripe medley of stenches that accompanied his shallow sips of oxygen.

  He was sitting on hard-packed earth with a small group of a dozen or so beaten, thoroughly terrorized prisoners. He didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t matter. The whole scene had a nightmarish aura to it anyway. He came from a time and a place where people who lived like this had utterly disappeared from the Earth, even in its most remote and primitive places. People who wore animal skins and crudely woven cloth, who washed little or not at all, who covered their faces and bodies with myriad tattoos, whose knuckle creases and unshorn fingernails were so caked with ancient dirt it appeared to be an integral part of their flesh and bone—such people were the stuff of videos and e-readers in his time. They no longer existed in what he thought of as the real world.

  But he knew his neighbors weren’t hallucinations. His own mental figments could not, he was sure, smell as bad as these people did. If he were dreaming them, he would have done a cleaner job. Not to mention the bitter, distinctive scent of the apes he could see moving briskly about the temporary encampment. He pushed himself up on his knees for a better look, and discovered the source of the creaking sound. Several yards from where he sat was a line of bizarre carts covered with barbaric colors and intricate patterns that held no meaning for him.

  But on these carts were high cages with metal bars, whose purpose was immediately obvious: as he watched, he saw a crew of apes being directed by the huge black gorilla leader who’d first attacked him. This beast made businesslike gestures as other monkeys grabbed shrinking, shivering, terror-stricken human savages and brutally tossed them into the mobile pens. And though Davidson had come to this place from a world in which the word wa
s not even used any longer, he knew what he was looking at… he was looking at slaves.

  Human slaves.

  Slaves being thrown into cages by animals that, in any proper world, would be living in cages themselves. His throat thickened and he began to shake with rage, but there was nothing he could do except watch.

  A small scuttle caught his attention and he saw the apes struggling with the blond woman, who was kicking and scratching and hissing with magnificent ferocity. Her resistance was so inspiring that Davidson found himself cheering inwardly for her, but before he could shout encouragement, the hulking muscles of the gorillas decided the battle and the woman went flying into a cage with the others. He watched as other familiar humans followed: the man who’d carried the little girl, and the teenaged boy, spitting and squirming, after him. Finally the monkeys dragged up the old man, the leader, who was barely able to walk, so badly had he been beaten. His face was bruised, swollen, and patchy with dried blood. The apes paid no attention to his injuries, just heaved him in after the rest.

  Davidson didn’t think he could get any angrier, but watching how those beasts manhandled that broken old man, he half-rose onto his haunches. He didn’t consciously think about it. It was as if something basic to his very existence was commanding him to attack the apes and defend his own kind against them. But his slight movement must have attracted attention, because a huge gorilla appeared behind him, grabbed his wrists, whipped a rope around them, and yanked them tight.

  Davidson tried to turn, to confront this new indignity, when he noticed that all the humans around him were bowing their heads, cowering like whipped dogs, refusing to lift their eyes from the ground. Whatever had spooked them so badly was masked by the blazing glare of the sun, and when Davidson tried to look, all he could see was a dark, amorphous shadow slowly approaching his group.

  The big gorilla leader suddenly snapped to attention. Davidson didn’t consider himself any kind of expert about reading monkey facial expressions, but he would have sworn the black ape looked smugly pleased, dripping with pride about hunting down tattered human prey so efficiently.

  Then the light shifted a little, and Davidson finally could see what the big commotion was about. A figure too small to be a gorilla, but a monkey nevertheless, rode toward them on the back of a gigantic black charger. The monkey—a chimpanzee, Davidson decided—was tricked out in a glittering suit of armor that looked as if it were made of solid gold.

  At the approach of this splendid figure, everything stopped. The human groans of agony trailed away, and even the apes all turned toward this demigod, following the example of their leader, the black gorilla. Davidson couldn’t be sure, but he sensed a nearly religious awe in the way the monkeys regarded the newcomer.

  So this one is the real big cheese, then… he thought, as he stared at the gleaming figure atop the huge horse. He didn’t notice that he was the only human watching the approaching monkey, and even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have understood what that meant.

  The chimp jerked cruelly on the reins of his steed, making it cut and prance as it wheeled toward the knot of humanity where Davidson stood staring at him. The monk’s shiny black gaze flashed across the group, passed on, then suddenly swept back as the rider riveted his full attention on Davidson.

  For a long instant the two were frozen, their gazes locked as surely as any duel. Then the chimp’s eyes widened in outraged surprise. He threw up one long arm, and pointed a stiff, quivering finger at Davidson.

  “Attar, this one looked at me!” the chimpanzee general roared, turning to glare at the dark-pelted gorilla commander standing stiffly on the ground.

  “He won’t do it again!” Attar snarled.

  Davidson reacted in reflexive shock. He grabbed Attar’s wrists and stared at him in disbelief.

  “You talk…” he said, amazed at an ape speaking a recognizably human tongue.

  The black gorilla commander pulled back angrily. “Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!”

  He smashed Davidson’s chin with stunning force, sending him spinning away. The gorilla commander looked up at his general.

  The Golden General nodded, jerked his horse aside, and rode on.

  * * *

  Seasick…

  That was Davidson’s first thought as he slowly drifted back to consciousness. The rolling, heaving motion he felt, along with the steady, rhythmic creaking that filled his ears, reminded him of his first few times on a large sailboat. He’d spent most of his time draped over the railing, consigning the contents of his belly to the surging waves. He felt the same way now, but the feeling lasted only a few moments before memory came rushing back, and he remembered what the incessant creaking really meant.

  His next thought, as he opened his eyes, was that he was getting pretty damned tired of waking up this way. How many times had he been knocked out recently? Not that there was a hell of a lot he could do about it right this minute…

  Grunting with effort, he managed to sit up, surprised to find he didn’t feel any worse than he had the last time he’d awakened. He didn’t feel any better, either, but at least no worse. Maybe, in the larger scheme of things, that was an improvement. He wasn’t sure, but he was happy to take whatever he could get.

  The stench was, if anything, worse than before. For one thing, there were a lot more people in an even smaller space. The interior of the tiny enclosure was packed with bloody, sweating people; when he sat up, he pushed others aside without noticing. Now he saw them staring at him with empty expressions on their battered features.

  None of them looked particularly interested in striking up a nice, friendly chat. Well, that was okay, too. He wasn’t feeling very chatty himself.

  He craned his neck, the better to see over the unwashed who surrounded him. The cage that held them was as he remembered, a boxy affair that looked crude but also looked more than strong enough to withstand any efforts from the sickly, beaten humans he shared it with.

  His cage and cart were one of a caravan of several, moving slowly along a winding road that rose gradually toward a city sprawled across a hilltop in the hazy distance. Squads of heavily armed ape soldiers trudged alongside the wagons, paying no attention to the miserable humans penned like cattle for slaughter inside. But that wasn’t what drew Davidson’s horrified attention. That was reserved for the beasts of burden putting their work-scarred shoulders to the traces as they slowly dragged the carts along. These dray beasts were young, muscular men, each one wearing blinders that prevented him from looking anywhere but straight ahead.

  He’d seen similar contraptions on horses, in history studies of times from mankind’s nearly forgotten past. And what had they called those blinkered animals? Beasts of burden.

  He winced as, from somewhere at the rear of the slaver train, he heard the sharp crack of a whip, and imagined he could see a cruel flail laying a bloody stripe across straining human flesh.

  Up at the head of the column he spotted the black gorilla commander, riding on a horse that looked as if it was used to much better treatment than the pathetic young men dragging the carts. What had that chimp general called the big ape? Attar? Yeah, that was it…

  There was something about, the smug arrogance of the overgrown monkey, glittering in his armored breastplate, sneering down from his prancing horse at the misery that surrounded him, that made Davidson long to get close enough with a brick to smash that fang-filled grimace right through the back of the arrogant ape’s skull.

  He held that thought tight in his heart and let it warm him as the cart train moved closer and closer to the city at the top of the hill. Yet even though he knew what to expect, he was still weirdly shocked when Attar cantered up to the city gates and waved a casual salute at all the apes who swarmed there. Somehow, it hadn’t yet quite penetrated Davidson’s worldview that this city had been built by monkeys, for monkeys, and not by men. But as his wagon creaked slowly through the gate, and Davidson got his first panoramic glimpse of what
lay beyond, it hit him with numbing force: this was a city of apes, and if men had any place in it at all, it was only at the very bottom. Were men slaves here? No. Does a man enslave his dog, his cat, his horse? Not at all. So men weren’t slaves here, either. They were something else. Something lower than slaves.

  Could humans be subhuman? Or was the proper term here sub-ape! But before he could consider the matter further, the sheer spectacle of what he saw overwhelmed him.

  The city was sprawling. It rambled across the top of the low hills in a seemingly endless profusion of stone, bright colors, and teeming throngs of apes. The city was an odd blend of new and old: huge piles of ancient gray stone draped with bright tapestries, looming over narrow streets filled with monkeys of every possible size and shape. He saw gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons, even what appeared to be a troop of howler monkeys. In some mad way it looked like any large human city, filled with people bustling along on their daily business, except the citizens were apes, not humans. There seemed to be thousands of them, and none of them paid much, if any attention at all, to the carts loaded with human misery passing through their midst.

  He saw several old apes seated around a stone table arguing over some sort of game of chance. These silver-backed graybeards reminded him of old men he’d seen sitting around chessboards set at the edge of sidewalks in big cities, except these apes were smoking what looked like a hookah instead of sipping from cans of beer or jugs of cheap wine.

  They passed a stall loaded down with the bright unfamiliar fruit he’d seen the humans carrying through the woods. A group of female apes laughed as they haggled loudly with the vendor, who seemed to be enjoying the argument as much as they were. A couple of the females looked up as the wagon train creaked past, but didn’t seem very interested and soon returned to their shopping.