Battle For The Planet Of The Apes by David Gerrold Read Free Book Online Page B

that they had missed. Not all of the skeletons were whole. Some of the bones were scattered about. And some of them looked gnawed .
    He raised his gun and moved closer to Caesar, without explaining why. Maybe there was nothing alive down here now, but there had been at one time.
    In the control center. Méndez switched to another camera to keep them in view.
    “There are only three of them,” he said.
    “There must be more,” said Alma. “I wonder how many?”
    Kolp rubbed his hands together slowly. “That’s a question we’ll get answered when we get them .”
    On the screen they saw that the three explorers had reached a narrow, short, dark tunnel. The two apes lit their torches and poked them carefully into the gloom. They moved cautiously forward, sniffing and listening. The air smelled of death, tasted of foulness and decay. Somewhere something was whirring softly.
    The passage was jammed with debris and rubble. There were places where it was piled so high that it brought them up close to the ceiling. They had to stoop to get through. As they moved through the tunnel, they could see that someone had once tried to live in one of its nooks. There were blankets, empty food tins, and a forlorn photo in a warped frame.
    Suddenly, startlingly, a figure leaped up before them, an ugly, misshapen silhouette. MacDonald tensed. He fumbled with his tommy gun, but before he could fire, the figure scurried off. He dropped his torch and grabbed the gun with both hands, but whoever or whatever it was had disappeared down a side corridor. Its footsteps echoed loudly and hung in the air for a long moment.
    The two apes and the man exchanged a startled glance. MacDonald forced himself to relax. He picked up his torch again and relit it from Virgil’s. He forced himself to take a deep breath, then another. And then he tensed again; he frowned and moved toward a wall, holding his torch close to it, his machine gun ready in his other hand.
    Written on the wall, dimmed by nine years of dust, dirt, and decay, were the words: “CONTROL CENTRAL—ARCHIVES SECTION.”
    “This is the place,” said MacDonald quietly. He gestured with the torch. “In there.” The light flickered to illuminate a twisted door and a crumbled room beyond. They began to clamber over the rubble and twisted metal, squeezing their way into the archives room.
    Kolp finally turned away from the monitor screens. He picked up a microphone and, obviously enjoying himself, announced: “All security forces alert! Check out all sections in areas M-5, R-7, and R-8. Apprehend three strangers—one human and two apes.” Below him, on the floor of the great vault, the workers hesitated; they turned toward him curiously and stared up at the control center. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, the crowd moaned with an odd wail of anticipation and foreboding, a long drawn out “Aaaah.” A mutter of fear.
    “But use caution!” urged Kolp. “I repeat, use caution! If they resist, you may shoot.”
    Beside him, Méndez winced.
    Kolp added, “But shoot only to maim. We want them alive for interrogation.”
    The crowd began to move then; it began to surge and flow in new directions. Like a great, amorphous, gray and white mass, the grotesque figures rolled restlessly through the cavern, sorting themselves into action, jerky and unsure. Section leaders began calling directions, but the movement was spastic.
    Gradually the routines and the drills took hold. The men began breaking out the savage tools of destruction. Hands reached for weapons, pulled them off racks on the wall. Other hands broke open cases, pulled out ammunition. The smell of excitement—and fear—rose in the air. The rifles were passed eagerly from hand to hand; the bolts were slid back and checked in their action. Cartridges were dropped into chambers. Bodies began to move toward the tunnels. They poured into the corridors, Kolp’s last speech still resounding through the cavern. Over and over, the