Of The Apes — War For The Planet

Caesar had cut him down with his own hands. He had not wept. Ape leaders do not weep where others can see. But when he looked up at the stars through the canopy, he made a vow that silenced the wind.

Caesar turned away from the smoke. His face, half-scarred, half-noble, was a mask of stone.

The War for the Planet of the Apes had not begun with a battle. It began with a father walking into the rain, carrying a spear he had sharpened on the grave of his son.

The rain fell harder. The world held its breath. War for the Planet of the Apes

For two years, since the fall of San Francisco, the Colonel had hunted them. Not with the clumsy, panicked raids of the first human survivors, but with a surgeon’s precision. His soldiers wore the skulls of apes on their armor. They burned the old growth to flush out the hidden. They called him a patriot. The apes called him a ghost—a thing that killed without face or mercy.

The rain did not wash away the sins. It only made them colder.

“Tomorrow, we finish the dirty work. No prisoners. Not even the young.” Caesar had cut him down with his own hands

“The children are starving,” Maurice signed. “The horses are dead. We cannot run again.”

And on the human side of the river, the Colonel lit a cigar, looked at the dark forest, and whispered to his radioman:

Caesar moved through the skeletal remains of the redwood forest, his broad shoulders hunched against the downpour. The wound in his side—a ragged gift from a traitor’s bullet—throbbed with a dull, persistent fury. Behind him, his colony marched in silence. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of the hunted. But when he looked up at the stars

Maurice, the wise orangutan, placed a heavy hand on Caesar’s shoulder.

He raised his hand, the signal to move. Two hundred apes—warriors, mothers, the elderly, the infant—rose from the mud. They had no artillery. No air support. No supply lines. They had fists like iron, teeth like daggers, and a leader who had already died inside.

“Then I will give him war,” he said. “But not his war. Mine.”