Chapter 105: Caesar — The Last Twelve
The gasoline canister was empty.
David left it where it was, took his bike, and didn't look back at the square. The National Guard units were close enough now that the cleanup would happen through official channels. Carter's contact tracing team had the coordinates. What mattered was the next location on Eddie's list.
They worked through the afternoon in the specific rhythm of a city that is simultaneously shutting down and spinning up — civilians moving inward, toward homes and locked doors, while the apparatus of official response moved outward in biohazard suits and marked vehicles. The gap between those two movements was where David and Eddie operated, cycling between locations that Elias's network flagged before official units could reach them.
By the time the light changed, the count had dropped from twenty uncovered sightings to four.
Four animals. Unaccounted for. No confirmed visual in the last three hours.
The new base was an abandoned subway station two levels below a parking structure on the edge of downtown — Harold's selection, made before he'd gone dark, on the basis that Samaritan's surveillance architecture had gaps in underground infrastructure. The team reassembled there by early evening: David, Eddie, Root, Frank, and Harold working off a generator with a laptop and the last clean data feed he'd managed to pull before the blackout.
Harold looked at the map on the screen. Twelve confirmed animal locations had been resolved since the operation began. One remained in active ambiguity: four animals, last associated with the entry point, whose movement pattern had simply stopped generating data.
"Samaritan," Root said. It wasn't a question about the cause — it was a question about the extent.
"Possibly," Harold said. "But Samaritan's primary function is human surveillance. Animal movement tracking would be incidental. The more likely explanation is that these four animals found a location that the city's existing camera coverage doesn't adequately map."
"Or they never left," David said.
Everyone looked at him.
He pointed to the location marker on the map — the abandoned Wildlife Park truck, still cordoned off on the east side of the city where the interception had failed. "The container is the one place that every search pattern has treated as already resolved. It was the origin point. Once it was sampled and logged, official teams moved on." He looked at Frank. "You said you checked it."
"I checked it," Frank said. "It was empty. Cages open, one dead animal on the floor."
"One dead animal on the floor," David said.
Frank caught it a half-second before the others. His expression changed.
"An animal that wasn't moving," David said. "In a dark container. With everything else demanding attention."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Root said: "You're describing an animal that understood what a search pattern looked like and timed its stillness to match it."
"I'm describing the simplest explanation for why four animals haven't appeared on any feed in three hours in a locked-down city," David said. "They didn't leave. They're still in the container." He stood up. "And whatever's been coordinating the other three's movement is smart enough to have figured out that the container is the one place nobody was going to look twice."
Harold pulled up the primate manifest from the Illuminati Society's trafficking records — the documents Root had pulled from the organization's network before Samaritan came fully online. He scrolled for a moment.
"The shipment included four macaques and one chimpanzee," he said. He looked at David over the top of his glasses. "The chimpanzee isn't listed in the manifest under a standard designation. There's a project code in the margin." He read it. "ALZ-112."
The name landed in the room.
Root's expression shifted. "That's a Gen-Sys research compound. Cognitive enhancement. Viral delivery across the blood-brain barrier."
"Caesar," David said.
"That was the informal designation in the Gen-Sys files," Harold said carefully. "The chimpanzee who survived the ALZ-112 trial. There was a significant incident at the Golden Gate Bridge approximately—"
"I know the incident," David said.
Frank said: "Are we saying there is a chimpanzee in that container that can think?"
"I'm saying we approach it that way," David said. "And nobody shoots until I tell them to."
The container was exactly as Frank had described — cordoned with yellow tape, lit at the perimeter by portable work lights the response teams had left running, the truck sitting at an angle on the shoulder where the driver had abandoned it. The police stationed at the cordon were keeping a respectful distance from the vehicle itself, which made sense given what it represented.
David showed the CDC credentials Harold had prepared. They went through.
The container doors were still open from the sampling operation. Inside: dark, the smell of an enclosed space that had held frightened animals for an extended period, feces on the walls, the electronic cage doors standing open in a row along both sides. The dead animal that Frank had noted was still on the floor near the entrance.
Root stepped in first, scanning upward by reflex.
The dead animal moved.
It was fast — faster than something that had been feigning stillness for hours had any right to be, propelled by the compressed energy of waiting. It cleared the distance to Root in under a second, one hand catching her face mask, the other finding the breathing tube connector at the back of her suit and pulling.
Frank's arm came across the space before David could reach it — a palm strike to the animal's head, direct, carrying significant force. The animal hit the floor of the container.
It got up.
Not slowly. Not with the disorientation of something concussed. It got up with the specific purposefulness of something that had taken the hit, assessed the situation, and decided on a next action.
Then a sound came from above them — low, sustained, not loud, the kind of vocalization that communicated authority rather than aggression. One note of it, and the animal that had attacked Root stopped. Made a short sound in response. Climbed.
Everyone looked up.
At the top of the container, using the overhead rail system as a platform, were three macaques and one chimpanzee.
The chimpanzee was holding Frank's backup weapon — the one he kept in a thigh holster — which meant it had gotten close enough to Frank during the strike to lift it without him noticing, which was a level of manual dexterity and situational awareness that took a moment to fully process.
It was holding the weapon with a two-handed grip.
Its eyes were green.
David knew about the ALZ-112 trials from the Machine's files — the Gen-Sys research program, the cognitive leap the compound produced, the animal that had survived when the trial was shut down and had been assumed dead or transferred. The Illuminati Society had apparently located and acquired him, presumably for the same reason they acquired everything: because his biology was useful to their research objectives.
He was looking at Caesar now.
And Caesar was looking back at him with eyes that were doing something recognizably similar to what the people in the room were doing — running an assessment.
David lowered his weapon. He turned to Frank and pressed his hand down on Frank's barrel.
"Give me the space," he said.
The team stepped back.
David looked up at Caesar.
"Can you understand me?"
The silence in the container was complete for three seconds.
Then: "Yes."
Root made a sound that was not quite a word. Frank's expression did the thing it did when he encountered something that didn't fit any existing category.
Harold, over the comms piece in David's ear, said very quietly: "Remarkable."
David kept his eyes on Caesar. "Do you have a name?"
"No."
"Caesar," David said. "That's what you are now."
A pause. Then, with the careful enunciation of someone building a word from component sounds: "Caesar." Another pause. "That is... a good name."
David nodded. He kept his voice even, the same register he used when talking to someone in a hospital who needed accurate information and had earned the right to have it delivered directly.
"You've seen what the sickness does," he said. "To the others."
Caesar's grip on the weapon tightened slightly. "We are not sick."
"Maybe not yet," David said. "The disease has a delay between exposure and symptoms. You know this — you watched it happen to the others. No symptoms, and then symptoms." He looked at Caesar steadily. "I can't promise you a cure. I can tell you that if you come with me, you have a chance. If you stay here, or if you go into official custody — a military lab, a CDC facility — you don't."
Caesar was quiet. He turned and made a series of sounds to the three macaques beside him — complex, patterned, the kind of communication that was clearly more than stress vocalization. The macaques responded. It went back and forth for approximately forty seconds.
David waited.
Harold, in his ear: "The ALZ-112 compound was designed to repair neurological damage. The cognitive enhancement was a side effect they didn't anticipate. In animal trials, social behavior became significantly more complex within—"
David touched the comms piece once to indicate he'd heard and didn't need more right now.
Caesar turned back.
"Put down your weapons," he said. "All of them."
David looked at the team. One nod.
Everyone holstered.
Caesar set Frank's weapon on the rail beside him. Then he descended — not quickly, but without hesitation, moving with the deliberate care of something that has decided to trust a situation and is watching for the moment that trust becomes a mistake.
The three macaques followed.
Harold had a portable carrier system in the second vehicle — the kind used for large primate transport, modified with air filtration given the circumstances. Getting all four animals into it without incident required about twelve minutes and a level of negotiation that David conducted mostly through tone and patience while Caesar explained the process to the macaques in whatever their shared language was.
When it was done, David zipped the carrier enclosure.
He stood in the empty container for a moment. The cordoned truck, the open cages, the dead animal near the entrance that had never been alive in the first place — the whole picture of what the Illuminati Society had engineered, and what it had cost.
In his ear, Harold said quietly: "The system logged completion. All four remaining carriers are accounted for."
"How many people?" David said.
A pause. "The isolation chain is still processing. Current estimate — approximately twenty thousand exposure events prevented by the containment timeline." Harold's voice had the particular quality it carried when he was looking at a number and understanding what it represented. "It could have been considerably worse."
David didn't say anything to that.
He walked out of the container, back through the cordon, to where the team was waiting with the vehicles.
The question of where to take four potentially Ebola-exposed primates — one of whom was capable of participating in his own medical evaluation — was not a question that any existing protocol had a good answer for.
A CDC facility was out: the moment Caesar's cognitive profile became apparent, the research interest would override the medical one, and they would never see him again. USAMRIID was out for the same reason, multiplied by the military dimension. A standard veterinary facility was out on the biosafety grounds.
David had been thinking about it since the container.
"House," he said.
Eddie, driving, glanced at him. "He's quarantined. He's not going to—"
"He's going to want to," David said. "Pull up his address."
The apartment building was quiet in the specific way buildings went quiet during city lockdowns — the particular absence of ordinary sound that made a place feel held rather than empty. David knocked.
The door opened to House's expression of someone who had been playing piano badly on purpose for approximately three hours and was mildly annoyed at the interruption. He looked at David. He looked at the covered transport carrier on the landing behind him.
"No," House said.
"You haven't heard the case," David said.
"The case involves bringing whatever is in that carrier into my apartment during an active Ebola lockdown. The answer is no."
"They may not be infected," David said. "They had contact with infected animals, but they've been symptomatic-free for longer than the standard window. Which means either they're pre-symptomatic or they're not infected." He paused. "And one of them is a diagnostic case that you will not encounter anywhere else in your career."
House looked at the carrier.
"One of them," he said.
"One chimpanzee," David said. "ALZ-112. Gen-Sys trial survivor." He looked at House. "He can tell you his symptoms himself."
House's expression did not change. But the door did not close.
"Caesar," David said to the carrier. "Say hello."
From inside the carrier, in careful, deliberate English: "Hello."
House looked at the carrier for a long moment. He looked at David.
"This is manipulative," he said.
"Yes," David said.
House stepped back from the door.
"If anything in that carrier has Ebola," he said, "I'm sending you a bill that will ruin you financially."
"Noted," David said, and brought the carrier inside.
End of Chapter 105
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)