Free Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization by Alex Irvine

gate without anyone knowing? Malcolm had a bad feeling about whoever had been standing guard at the bridge.
    He fought down an urge to panic. If the apes had come to kill them, they would already be fighting… or so he hoped. The truth was, he was still thinking of them as apes, when they clearly were more. Rumors had flown in the months after the outbreak of Simian Flu—conspiracy theories about top-secret military projects to create ape super soldiers, and other ridiculous fever dreams. Some of the scientists from a biotech lab where apes had broken free hinted at experiments to increase their intelligence.
    But Malcolm hadn’t believed any of it. That was the stuff of pulp science fiction, not reality. He’d always figured that some enterprising microorganism had made the jump from ape to human, and biological incompatibility had done the rest. But now he had to face facts. He’d heard two of the apes speak. He’d seen them organize themselves. Now he was looking at an ape army.
    And unless he was mistaken, they hadn’t come for battle. From the look of things, they wanted to parley.
    “I’m going to talk to him,” Malcolm said.
    “Him?” Dreyfus said. “Who’s him?”
    Malcolm pointed at the chimp on horseback, front and center.
    “See the one with the red on his face? That’s the one who spoke before.”
    “Spoke, like said words out loud,” Dreyfus said.
    “That’s what I told you before,” Malcolm said.
    “I know you did, but I didn’t believe it.”
    “You believe it now?”
    Dreyfus, still looking out at the ape army, replied, “I don’t know what the hell to believe. You want to talk to him? You sure?”
    “I have a feeling that’s why they’re here,” Malcolm said.
    Behind them, one of the sentries said, “I got a feeling they’re here to kill us.”
    “If that’s what they wanted, you’d already have a spear in your gut,” Malcolm said. “Look at them. You think they couldn’t get in if they wanted to?”
    The sentry didn’t answer.
    Dreyfus leaned in close to Malcolm.
    “You think you can talk to them, go ahead,” he said. “I’ll even come with you. But they make one move, and we’re going to protect ourselves.”
    Malcolm looked the chimp leader in the eye. He was met with a steady gaze.
    “Don’t be in a rush to start a war,” he said to Dreyfus, quietly. “Let’s see what they have to say.”

21
    The Colony gate made an ear-splitting metallic screech as they swung it open. WD-40 was hard to come by these days. Malcolm took a step through the entryway, keenly aware that what he did in the next moments could make the difference between a conversation and a bloodbath.
    He walked forward with Dreyfus right behind him, and a dozen armed men with Dreyfus. The crowd massed in the doorway and on the parapets built above the arches, hundreds of people taking in the sight and telling those behind them what they saw. Malcolm heard people swearing, some angry shouts, isolated crying from children who had grown up hearing stories of the simian flu. Apes were their boogeymen, the monstrous villains of stories told to keep them from ranging too far into the city when the Colony gates were open.
    The ape army was a terrifying sight, even from the relative safety of the parapet. On the ground, out in the open, it was overwhelming. The sound of maybe a thousand apes shifting their weight, softly grunting to one another, was like nothing Malcolm had ever heard before, or imagined hearing. The thick smell of them hung in the morning air.
    Malcolm took ten steps out from under the arch and stopped, waiting to see what the apes would do. After surveying their lines, he kept his eyes on the leader, who made a sign to the apes on either side of him. One of them, Malcolm saw, was the other chimp who had spoken up in the mountains. The angry, scarred one missing an eye. The leader tapped his horse’s flanks and rode forward, followed by three others. One was an orangutan.
    The watching