Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Read Online Free PDF

were being pulled off, but he swung from it, again reaching into the night, trusting this place he loved, desperately hoping it would save him.
    More guns chattered in the darkness. He went desperately higher, knowing the helicopters were still there, hearing the dread beating of the wind they made, but knowing he had to get away from the men with the guns.
    They gathered together in the middle canopy in the shelter of a mass of twisted limbs.
    Caesar tapped Keling, one of the orangutans. He couldn’t see any better than Caesar, but orangs were better at finding their way through the branches, day or night. Keling understood, and allowed Caesar to climb on his back. The others followed his example, the chimps each climbing on to the orangs’ backs, and soon they were creeping slowly from tree to tree. There were a few more pop-hisses of gunfire, but it seemed random.
    The sound of the helicopters faded as they went, and Caesar reasoned that if the machines weren’t followingthem, the humans probably weren’t either. He signaled Keling to take him down. They couldn’t stay in the area, not with these humans who could see at night, and although it went against his instincts, they could travel much faster on the ground and lead any humans who might track them even farther afield.
    Caesar kept them going uphill until dawn, and then they collected together.
    In the light he realized Dallas was missing. Everyone else was tired and sore, but otherwise unscathed.
    Wearily, Caesar led them back into the trees, where they changed their direction, hoping to intercept the others from the troop. Hoping as well that the false path they had just made would keep the humans occupied for at least a day or so.
    * * *
    The next morning, after some decent coffee and a bagel, Talia rolled into work feeling pretty good, and reasonably hopeful. Mornings usually weren’t too bad, especially in the middle of the week.
    This morning, however, the waiting room was almost half full, and the triage nurses were getting a workout. Her first hit was a three-year-old boy whose index finger had been all but severed by having it inserted into the hinge side of a door somebody had slammed. The kid was fairly calm, all things considered, especially after they gave him something for the pain. But his parents were hysterical, especially when the boy was wheeled off to surgery.
    When Talia picked up the paperwork for her next patient, she saw right away that he had flu-like symptoms, and was bleeding from the nose.
    “Hold him in triage,” she said. “I want to check something out.”
    Randal wasn’t around, but she found the room assignment for his patients, and called that floor.
    Ravenna was staring at her as she put down the phone. Talia heard someone sneeze in the waiting room, followed almost instantly by a loud expression of disgust.
    “What is it?” Ravenna asked.
    “There were two women in here last night,” she said. “Both had a fever and some kind of sinus thing. One crumped last night, and the other is circling.”
    “What killed the one?”
    “Multiple systems failure, it looks like,” Talia replied. “But they haven’t done a post mortem yet.”
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “But I have a feeling we’re about to see a lot of it. How many have come through triage this morning with these symptoms?”
    “So far I think we’ve had six,” Ravenna said. “Not all of them are bleeding—some just have the fever.”
    “Okay,” Talia said, letting out a deep sigh of resignation. “This is out of my league. Who is the health coordinator?”
    * * *
    Herrin, the health coordinator, had a voice so smooth it was almost oily, and an attitude that “patronizing” wasn’t strong enough to describe.
    “Dr. Kosar,” he explained over the phone, “We haven’t been notified by the CDC or the World Health Organization of an outbreak or even of the
possibility
of an outbreak.”
    “Of course not,” Talia said.