The mutant crashed headlong into a truck as Aldo’s bullets chewed up the ground around him. He fell to the ground and lay there without moving.
Then up from the barricades came Caesar and the other apes. They came running to join the fighting in the grove. Some of the mutants tried to return the apes’ fire from a stake-bed truck, but a hail of bullets ripped through it, splintering the wood and shredding the men.
Caesar led his apes onward into the thickest part of the battle, always after the fleeing humans. The mutants were starting to fall back, starting to retreat.
The mutant advance had slowed, then stopped; the inexorable approach of the black juggernaut had faltered, startled, stopped by Aldo’s warfare. Even now, the mutant Wehrmacht was trying to back up, trying to put itself into reverse. But, like a gigantic millipede whose nerve endings have suddenly become disconnected, the mutant army was confused, disintegrating into its individual segments. Those in the rear were still trying to advance while those in the front were trying to retreat. They piled up on each other and even fought among themselves.
The apes ran from tree to tree along their flanks, always keeping cover, yet always keeping up a steady hail of death. Other apes swung in the branches above, firing down on the hapless men.
The mutants were running now, openly running, back up the road. Running and sometimes falling and dying. Some had lost their goggles and were trying to find safety in the shadow of the trees. They stumbled and groped and found only death as ape snipers picked them off. Others, despite their sun-startled blindness, lurched after their comrades. Gorillas, chimps, and orangutans all came charging after the retreating mutant army.
The mutants were in full retreat now. It was a rout. The vehicles coughed and sputtered and smoked and died. And the mutants abandoned them and kept running. They abandoned their guns and kept running. Anything to get away from those apes and their deadly, hacking bullets.
Some of the trucks and jeeps were still running. They rolled haphazardly through their own troops, men clinging to them, grasping for handholds, others jumping out of the way, the blinded ones not quite making it and falling under the wheels. Their screams were atrocious. The sound of their retreat was agony, with cheers of ape victory riding closely after them.
The apes came running and riding. They came with guns and swords and death. They came with vengeance. They came with Caesar.
The hideously disfigured men fled before them, riding when they could, running when they couldn’t. The angry apes slaughtered them and left them where they fell, moving on to slaughter others.
And above it all, ahead of the other apes, rode Aldo. General Aldo! Proud and tall and waving his bloody sword! “Kill them!” he shouted. “Kill them all! Let no one get away!”
His gorillas echoed his cheer and charged after him, charged eagerly ahead, screaming and trampling the fleeing men, firing and killing. Cheering and laughing.
Caesar and the other apes stopped at the ridge, at the ruins of the old gorilla outpost. But Aldo and his horseback troops rode on, still raiding the mutant army from the rear. They would ride in and separate a small pack of men, surround them, circle them like Indians around a settler’s wagon, the circle always getting smaller and tighter, like a noose, the mutant army always getting smaller. The gorillas would circle and kill, firing their blazing hot guns, slashing with their heavy iron swords. Circling and killing until the last man was dead. Then, cheering at their victory, laughing with the joy of it, the gorillas would reload their guns, heft their swords anew, and go charging again into another pack of frightened, running men to repeat the performance.
Again and again they did this. They chased the mutants across the desert until there was no longer a pack, just a disorganized rabble, scattered men all running in the same direction.
The gorillas rode them down. They charged across the sand, their horses’ hooves pounding like thunder. They came like a very devil and ripped into the terror-stricken men where they found them. They trampled the men, beheaded them, shot them, sliced them, and hacked at them.
The men scattered like cockroaches, and the gorillas went galloping after, a pack of them howling after every one, hunting them down as men once hunted animals.
In the desert, the radiation-torn survivors of the last human war at last met their final destiny. Each man died alone. The gorillas laughed at the humans’ lonely, painful deaths. Then wheeled their horses about and went looking for more to kill.
They would be at it for hours, all the way across the desert. And of the vast human army not one man would survive.
NINE
There were three who survived the battle. But they would not survive the war.
Two were no longer soldiers, would never be soldiers again. They were just two frightened men, managing somehow to elude the marauding gorillas, managing somehow to make it back to their blasted city.
They were wounded, and they had lost a lot of blood. For the last few miles they had to hold each other up, and they made it on will power alone. But they got far enough to deliver their message. They made it to the tunnels, where they finally collapsed and died.
But that was message enough.
The message was that they had lost the war.
When Alma heard about it, she went to look at the bodies. She surveyed them without emotion. “I know what I have to do,” she said.
Beside her, Méndez was appalled. “He said to wait for his signal.”
She pointed at the bodies. “I’ve just received it.” She turned and strode purposefully down the hall.
The third man was Kolp.
Ragged and exhausted, he went stumbling headlong across the desert. Back to his own power—Ape City would be destroyed! He still had one weapon left.
He lurched across the sand, muttering orders to nonexistent troops. How he had escaped from the apes he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. He only remembered walking, running, fleeing. No, not fleeing! Kolp wouldn’t flee. Kolp must have walked out like a man.
That’s it. Kolp had walked out like a man. Dazed, battered, confused, shocked, bloody.
The apes had been too busy to notice him, preoccupied with their side of the slaughter. He had gotten up and walked out, startling those who had seen him but encountering no interference.
Somehow he had made it through the orange groves. Somehow he had made it over the ridge. And somehow he would make it across the desert. To his city. To where the Alpha-Omega bomb waited.
He staggered on, blind and deaf to the carnage around him, to the burning vehicles, abandoned where they had stopped, to the strewn bodies of his troops, their blood drying on the sand. He moved through them, not seeing them, refusing to see them. The sand was littered with death.
It wasn’t until he stumbled over a broken rifle that he began to realize. He held the weapon curiously, looking at it for a long time before he recognized it as a gun. He didn’t notice that it was broken, that it would never fire again.
“My army,” he said. “One of my troops has lost his gun.” He looked around him, still not seeing the scattered bodies. “One of my troops has lost his gun!” He shouted it loudly. “Where’s my army? Come on, there’s a war to fight! Pick up your guns! Let’s go!”
He began exhorting them. He waved the rifle weakly over his head, a shadow of his former fury. “Kill the apes! Get up, you sluggards! Kill the apes!” He stumbled, caught his footing, and went on. “My army is the best in the world! Let’s kill the animals! Kill the dumb animals!”