And Bananas for All - Part Six

And Bananas for All is a story told in six episodes, posted serially by me, your lunatic host, Cheeseburger Brown.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6

Related reading: Night Flight Mike, The Reaper's Coleslaw, Simon of Space, Plight of the Transformer, The Long Man

Coming up next: Stay tuned for this year's science-fiction Christmas story beginning the week of December 3rd!

And now, our adventure concludes:


6/6

The preparations for the exodus were, in a word, grim.

An exodus was required: that much was plain to Mike. Each day the gaily coloured, mud-dripping dinosaurs tore deeper into the forest with their lockstep march of slash, burn, churn and level. A constant pall of dust hung over the treeline, making visible the slanted rays of the sun. Birds fled in swirling clouds, squawking.

The fight to defend their Eden was childish, Mike knew, and ultimately doomed. He could not continue to risk the lives of his troglodyte brethren to buy another hour or an afternoon. The slow life had a deadline, and its far side promised misery for them all.

They would have to leave. That there might be nowhere to go was somewhat beside the point -- Mike wasn't even sure where they were in the first place. In philosophical desperation, he decided that meeting their fate on their feet was better than waiting for it to come and take them. Mad flight was preferable to despondent suicide, futile action better than sad stagnance.

There's hope in activity. There's optimism when the plan has yet to fail.

They worked furiously. Each chimpanzee in the troupe was fitted with a rope-woven knapsack for the females to ferry the young and for the males to ferry supplies: dried berries, roots, nuts, and plastic canteens of water stolen from the construction zone; also pelts to stave off the elements, also stone-tipped spears, also triple-wrapped boxes of matches and faggots of prepared kindling. Lastly, each was fitted with a matching hat and cloak of bundled grasses as camouflage.

When the time came, they looked not so much like a gang of chimps but a parade of hunch-backed shrubberies.

Their initial route was perilous. Mike's forays to the adjoining hilltops showed that they were hemmed in by a wide, yellow-brown river's convolutions on three sides. He did not have confidence in his abilities to engineer a raft sufficiently safe to cut across the swift, silty flow. That meant the only viable vector of escape involved crossing the construction zone to whatever lay beyond.

On the day before their planned exeunt he encouraged the chimps to eat fit to burst. On this account they were not difficult to persuade. He wanted them to start off on the right foot -- well fed, feeling strong, feeling able. That night around their beloved fire-pit they chanted in rhythm and drummed rocks against rocks.

When the moon rose they paused to gaze at it. It was no longer a crescent but a nearly full face; never the less, the chimps knew the crescent was there, hiding on one sharp edge of the silver celestial coin. They reverently mimed the peeling of their index fingers. "Banana," they said. "Banana sky banana."

Mike lay back in his hammock, staring into nothing. He shivered.

He would miss this view of the dark branches crossing over his head in a way he had never fathomed he could miss anything -- even his former life, even his new wife, even the smirk and froth and tumble of days among men. Everything had an aura of finality to it, from the chirping of the evening insects to the wet smell of the forest's fragrant dusk.

He sat up. All eyes were upon him. "Okay," said Mike quietly. "Let's go."

He didn't look back. He couldn't.

The procession wound its way down the face of the hill and then gathered into a clot at the edge of the clear-cut field of dirt where the dinosaurs slept and the lanky guards patrolled. "Stay together," he reminded them. "Go slowly. And if something happens, freeze. If they start to shoot, hug the ground. If I tell you to run, run without looking back."

The chimps grunted their assent. Mike could hear their fingers whisper against each other, but in the dark he could not see their signs.

"Okay," he said again, then swallowed.

They waited for the first guard to saunter past their position, then felled him with a tranquilizer dart. Mike carefully stripped off his skins and ragged pants and then dressed himself with some difficulty in the skinny guard's tight uniform. He hitched up the black leather belt and then used the attached flashlight to take careful inventory of the equipment he'd acquired: a radio, a whistle, a rifle, a wallet containing a few crumpled bills and a magnetic-strip card that was otherwise featureless. He unloaded the rifle and discarded it.

The chimps covered the sleeping guard in leaves, and then the party pushed on across the open dirt. Mike's radio muttered but he couldn't understand the language. The chatter was casual and intermittent.

They all looked up as they passed beneath the sleeping construction machines, their long necks casting stripes of shadow in the moonlight, their metal bodies matte with clods of mud. The chimps sniffed, detecting a lingering perfume of petroleum and men.

They were closing on the far line of utility poles that held up the flood-lights, now unilluminated. A loosely-slung electrical cable swayed between the poles, caught in a gentle breeze. The chimps hesitated. The sinewy motion of the cable disturbed them.

"Snakes," signed Tattler, taking Mike's hands to put the words into them.

"No," whispered Mike. "It's like a rope. Nothing to be afraid of." He paused, reconsidering this. "Just don't touch them, okay?"

The apes regarded him dubiously, then suddenly went stock still. Mike blinked, then turned around. His breath caught in his throat as he spotted a security guard jogging over to him, his expression lost in the dark. Mike's hand went the air rifle slung over his shoulder, his senses opening and quickening with the familiar terrified tickle of engagement.

"Hey!"

Mike unslung the rifle.

The guard slowed to an amble and said something very African. Mike looked at him blankly. The guard chuckled and batted aside Mike's rifle. "You speak English?" he asked.

"Some," said Mike.

"You got a light? A match?" the guard asked. He had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his thick lips. He patted down his own pockets to emphasize his point.

Mike gave him a box of matches. The guard struck one, momentarily revealing his features to Mike. "They bringing in all sorts of guys, huh?" he mumbled around the cigarette as he puffed it alive. "I'm all the way from Sierra Leone. The name's Barry."

"John. From Madagascar."

Barry scratched his head and made a face as he stared at the line of shrubberies lined up behind Mike. "They're doing landscaping here already? Man, these guys are all about the fast. You hear me? All about it."

"Yeah."

"And you're guarding these bushes, man?"

Mike cleared his throat. "Yeah," he said again. "Until dawn."

Barry shook his head. "These guys are some crazy guys, man. All hush-hush and fast-fast. Up to some crazy business I have no doubts. None, John!"

"Me neither, Barry."

"I got to keep on my walking, man. You take it easy."

"See you."

Slightly shaking with disbelief Mike panned his head to watch the guard saunter away along the row of utility poles. One of the juveniles squeaked. Mike hissed, "Is everybody okay?"

The bushes nodded. Mike gave a quiet whistle and started onward again.

The landscape changed around them. The mounds of dirt gave way to silhouettes with rectilinear features, and the sound of their footfalls sharpened and started to echo off surrounding faces. There were many construction machines parked here too, but they were smaller and more nimble. There were cars, as well, parked on the sides of a rudely paved tongue of road. Arrayed on either side were groups of trailers on cinderblocks, many of them with lighted windows, some of them leaking tinny music.

Mike called a halt and waited for the slowest of the shrubberies to catch up. "The workers are still awake. We must go very quietly. Stay low. If you hear any sound, freeze."

The party crawled between the trailers, choosing corridors of darkness where possible. Inside some of the dark trailers they could hear snoring. They froze when someone ducked into an alley they were crossing to urinate, letting go their collective breath only once he'd shaken it off and stumbled back to bed.

They were nearly at the last row of trailers. Mike slowed to let everyone regroup behind. He cocked his head. There was something in the low blur of intermingling noise from the trailers that caught his attention, but he could not define it.

The chimps could. They heard Climber.

"Are you sure?" asked Mike worriedly.

They collectively pant-hooted an enthusiastic affirmative.

"Shut up! Shut up!"

It did not take them long to hone in on Climber's location. On the corner of the very last row were two long trailers connected together, slightly removed from the mass of other accommodations. It squatted in the shadow of a tall plywood wall, and from a slightly open window came the murmur of human voices cut occasionally by a troglodyte whimper.

"Stay here. I'll scout."

Mike crawled across the dirt on his belly until he was beneath the window, tucked in beyond the reach of the rectangle of yellow light shining out. The trailer swayed slightly as a man paced across its floor. "I knew you were fond of the animals, so when I heard the men had captured one I thought you'd want to see it. Pity it's such a slouch, though."

A woman's voice replied, her tone cool and bored. "I imagine he's depressed at being put up in a cage. Wouldn't you be?"

"Oh well. Do you want to keep it, or shall we have it set free?"

"Why did they catch it in the first place?"

"It was mucking with the machines, apparently. Precocious, perhaps. Look at the way it looks at me. It's almost as if there's a man in there."

"That's precisely what crosses my mind looking into your eyes, Bahram."

They both chuckled. Mike used the covering sound to masque his own motion as he extended from his squat to bring his eyes level with the sill. In his quick peek he observed two men and a woman in fine European clothes, and Climber squeezed into a dog-sized cage on his hands and knees. Mike ducked down again, and a split second later the third person, an old man who had not yet spoken, shifted his weight in the trailer.

"Prince, we are being observed," he announced crisply.

"What makes you say that?"

"Instinct. Step away from the windows, sir."

"Honestly -- you're paranoid, Tenny."

"Quiet, please." A radio squelched. "We have a guard down on the eastern perimeter, sir. That's quite enough: we leave immediately."

"A drunk guard and a funny feeling? That's hardly enough to worry over. I object, Mr. Smith."

"With all respect, your father has asked me to refer any objections with regard to security directly to the princely rectum, sir. Now, if you and Miss Seventy-Seven will kindly stay close I'll take the lead out the door." A gun was cocked. "Field: spin up the ornithop."

The trailer door squeaked open, and the party of three slipped out and moved away briskly, disappearing into the gloom. Climber let out a mournful whine and shook his cage.

He dropped his head dispiritedly, then looked up again as Mike slid across the trailer and crouched down in front of the cage. "Shhh!" he warned, fiddling with the latch. It sprang open.

Climber wormed his way out and then buried Mike in a hug that was as wonderful as it was brutally tight and malodourous. Mike grabbed Climber's long, leathery hand and tugged urgently. "Let's go!"

Climber and Mike rejoined the others outside just as klaxons began to ring shrilly from every quarter. The flood-lamps on the utility poles glared to life and loud-speakers parked beside them buzzed: "Attention all personnel: there is a security situation in progress. Trespassers are in the zone -- repeat -- trespassers are in the zone. Lethal authorization is granted: shoot to kill!"

"Crap," said Mike.

Lights came on in many more of the trailers. The workers called to each other in their native tongues, wanting to know what was going on. "Is drill?" somebody kept yelling. "Is drill, okay?" Boots pounded on wooden steps as legions of workers poured out into the night, checking their weapons and looking around for something to point them at.

Climber pulled on his elbow. Mike looked back. The chimps were hauling themselves up and over the plywood fence in panicked flight. Mike went after them, but couldn't jump high enough to get a grip on the top edge. He looked around desperately as someone shouted, pointing at him splayed against the fence. "Help!" Mike cried.

Climber poked back over the fence and dangled his arm down, hand open. Mike took it and winced as he was yanked savagely upward. He managed to catch the fence against his side, then drop over into the bushes beyond. "Oof!"

He fought to catch his breath. The chimps clustered around him, moaning in fear. Mike looked where they were looking and his breath failed him again.

In the middle of the jungle was an airport.

There was an octagonal terminal and a modest tower with a slowly turning radar receiver on top. There were runways outlined by rows of tiny, dim red lamps. Near the terminal, where the tarmac was illuminated, it seemed that every horizontal surface had been painted with camouflage patterns. The roof of the terminal itself was planted thick with bushes. The wide hangar from which projected the noses of a handful of sleek aircraft was netted by camouflage veils, as were the fuel tanks and other assorted bric-a-brac Mike couldn't identify. The whole establishment would be virtually invisible from above.

"It's a secret airport," marvelled Mike. The chimps hooted anxiously.

He got to his feet, then waved the chimps over with him into the shadow cast by bales of chainlink fencing awaiting installation. On the ground beside them were neat bundles of barbed-wire. The chimps touched Mike to gain his attention, but he was elsewhere, his eyes unfocused as he stared over the secret, camouflaged airport. A new plan was coalescing -- one risky, but in many ways more certain than a coordinated but blind flight into the countryside.

"We're gonna fly out of here," announced Mike. "We're gonna be stowaways."

He paused to explain the concept of stowing away, and then was forced to take another moment to more fully elucidate the concept of being transported in a heavier-than-air flying machine. The chimps seemed in equal measure dubious and awed.

Together, Mike and his line of walking shrubberies stalked along the shadow of the plywood fence and then sprinted across a short strip of grass to hunker at the side of the aircraft hangar. It was only at this point that Mike was able to discern the duos of armed guards -- healthier, taller, more serious-looking men than those patrolling the construction zone -- marching in strict formations around the perimeter of the tarmack. Mike swallowed a gasp: had he seen them earlier he would have made a less daring approach to the hangar. Now that they were here, however, the guards seemed oblivious to them.

One of the duos walked along the side of the hangar, talking quietly. "Did he say what's going on?" asked one, speaking with an American accent.

"All he said was that the VIPs just bugged out."

"Control says we're still on, though, right?"

"He says we're so far behind schedule there ain't nothing that can stop those birds going up tonight, come Hell or high water. Until Control says different, that's what I'm reckoning on."

"So why did the VIPs go?"

"VIPs spook easily. This one time we were opening up an invisible railway through Germany and all kinds of brass showed up for the dedication, and then at the last minute they all took off. Rumour was they didn't like the look of an ice cream truck parked across the street."

The guards continued on their way. Mike frowned. This operation, whatever it was, was seeming weirder and weirder by the moment. Secret airports? Invisible railways? Who were these people?

By standing on Climber's shoulders Mike was able to peek inside one of the hangar windows. The hangar was a busy place. There were six black aircraft parked inside, and three of them had men in fluorescent jumpsuits swarming over them -- checking the engines, disconnecting fuel lines, inspecting the flaps. The aircraft were being loaded with cargo through ramp openings in the rear, fed by a steady stream of workers dollying large crates from a line of black, canvas-back trucks.

Neither the trucks nor the aircraft bore emblems, logos or visible registration numbers of any kind, but a row of tall, white lettering had been painted on the hangar's rear wall: UNLIMITED SHIPPING, LIMITED.

Mike's eyes widened. He had never dreamed the busy world could hold a smuggling operation so complex or well-funded. He had been led to believe there was no concerted action possible out of the sight of a thousand tireless satellite eyes, no movement that could manage to stay beneath the ever-present radar of a wartime globe. He could only guess what markets might be black enough and rich enough to necessitate such an enterprise: drugs, guns, slaves?

Climber grunted as Mike jumped down. "I've got an idea," he said.

A quarter hour later Mike and his troupe sauntered carelessly across the tarmac. Mike waved in a friendly way to the guards on the periphery. They had abandoned their grass-clump cloaks in favour of fluorescent yellow safety vests with reflective Xs on the chest and back. Each chimp carried an aircraft-signalling lantern, lit dimly red but -- according to the embossed lettering on the hilt -- glowing brightly in the infrared.

One of the aircraft was being ushered out onto the tarmac behind them. Mike encouraged his brood to wave their lanterns purposefully, as if conducting the craft into the clear. As they drew too close to another runway worker driving in a golf-cart he squinted at Mike, then at the band of short, bandy-legged assistants trailing in his wake.

"Who are you?" he asked, so Mike shot him with a tranquilizer dart.

Mike looked around quickly. The black aircraft was catching up to them as it motored steadily toward the runway, engines whirring. He pushed the limp worker into the back of the golf-cart, then gestured to the chimps to climb aboard. They squeezed in, sitting on the worker and squishing Mike against the little steering wheel. Gourmand and Tattler climbed up on the canvas roof, causing it to bow dangerously. "Nobody fall out, okay?" he called as he floored the pedal. The cart zoomed forward with an electric whine.

Mike's radio burped static. "Is it just me, or is there a still cart on the field?"

"That's just Powell. He's supervising the signallers; over."

"Well tell him to get the hell clear of our run! Is he an idiot?"

"Come in, Powell. Are you an idiot? Over."

Mike pulled the radio off his belt and toggled the contact. He muttered in what he hoped was an appropriately nondescript growl: "Lay off, you assholes. I'm just doing my goddamn job."

"Tou-chy, Powell."

The aircraft was passing them. Its engines began to thrum louder. Mike pushed the golf-cart to its maximum speed and steered in under the belly of the plane, watching anxiously as they brushed past a landing gear and then drifted out directly beneath the cargo ramp. "Climber!" called Mike. "Take the wheel!"

Climber looked at him as if he were crazy. "Now!" implored Mike. The ape scrambled over the seat-back and seized the wheel. "Keep it steady!" instructed Mike, then stood up on the seat.

He took a deep, solidifying breath -- then jumped.

Dangling from the underside of the plane, he rotated the lock and managed to lever the cargo door's release. The ramp yawned down at them. Mike screamed, the chimps screamed, and then Climber jolted the car to the left just in time to miss the dangling ramp. It struck the asphalt and began leaving a trail of hot orange sparks.

Mike found himself facing a very surprised looking fellow in a black jumpsuit. "What the Hell?" he cried in disbelief just before a cluster of hairy arms reached up and grabbed him bodily. A moment later he was bouncing painfully across the tarmac, dwindling behind the golf-cart.

"Okay, allez-oop!" ordered Mike, pointing inside.

The chimps did what they did best, flexing gymnastically as they threw themselves through the air and landed with a series of heavy thumps on the cargo deck. A shrill alarm sounded from inside but the aircraft was never the less accelerating, now drawing away from the golf-cart as its engines spun up to a terrifying pitch.

Mike scrambled up to stand on the hood of the cart, reaching up for the arms of his brethren within the belly of the plane. The cart veered out of control, sliding further and further back until it it threatened to carry Mike directly behind one of the screeching jets. "Crap!" he cried in a panic, then closed his eyes and vaulted for all he was worth.

The moment unsuspended in the blackness seemed eternal. He regretted nothing.

And then he was being hauled onto the cargo deck by many strong hands. A second later only his feet were dangling outside, whipping in the suddenly vicious wind. He pulled himself all the way in and then looked up, seeing his chimps clashing with a second man in a black jumpsuit who was staring wide-eyed at the stone-tips of three spears. Mike dodged just as he was tossed out through the open cargo door, tumbling awkwardly and then hitting the golf-cart. It keeled up on two wheels and then fell over, spilling the man and his unconscious colleague onto the camouflage runway.

"Sorry!" called Mike as he pumped the lever to close the door. When its edges were flush the shrill alarm stopped ringing.

An intercom crackled. "I've got an alarm on the rear hatch -- you guys see anything back there?"

Mike slapped the contact. "Hatch secured! Situation nominal! We're good to go!"

"I've got a green light now, thanks Montgomery. See you on the dark side!"

Mike and the chimps collectively slid to the back of the cargo deck in an unruly pile as the aircraft surged forward and then, a moment later, it began to tilt. The chimps were frightened but Mike kept shouting, "It's okay! It's okay!" until they consented to snuggle against him and merely whinny.

They lifted off with a tell-tale belly lurch. The chimps gasped.

A moment passed, and then another. No one burst into the cargo deck to apprehend them. The craft continued to climb. As the air outside thinned the scream of the engines faded to a less aggressive drone. They began to level off. Mike wiped a slick layer of perspiration from his brow. "Okay," he muttered to himself numbly. "Okay...okay..."

"Where go?" signed Tattler.

"I don't know," admitted Mike. "I hope to someplace better."

Mike worked to suppress his recall of his last flight. He tried to remind himself of all the times he'd flown without being shot down and crashing in the jungle. He knew he could not relax, however, until the pilot situation had been dealt with. "We can't hide back here for the whole trip," explained Mike. "We'll freeze. We have to talk to them up there, maybe reason with them." He hesitated, then loaded the last remaining dart into the air rifle. "And maybe not."

The chimps watched worriedly as Mike opened the metal companionway and left the cargo deck. They hooted with disquiet as the craft lurched through a patch of turbulent air, the fuselage creaking. A short time later Mike reappeared. "There aren't any pilots," he said dumbly, shaking his head. "The flight's controlled by computer. And...and I've never seen a cockpit like that before."

His concern was redoubled as the craft began once again to tilt its nose upward. Mike frowned. Could a vehicle so small have stratospheric capabilities?

Bowed by the pressure of acceleration, Mike and chimps were forced to cower in the back corner of the cargo deck, mashed against a strapped-down group of crates. The deck became colder. Their exhalations condensed into little clouds in front of their mouths.

The engines became quieter and quieter and then, though the craft continued to surge upward, they became altogether silent. When the vibration of their efforts also died away, Mike felt a certain lightness of being he couldn't explain until he turned his head and saw a juvenile chimp turning slowly head over heels through the air.

Mike paled. Freefall!

Either they were tumbling out of the sky to their certain deaths, or the craft had escaped the envelope of Earth's atmosphere and Mike and his gang were now in outer space. Despite the absence of violent pitching, Mike couldn't make up his mind which scenario was more likely.

Clumsily, he propelled himself to the companionway and wiggled his way through, clutching a series of convenient hand-holds on the nearby bulkhead. He turned toward a small, round window and his breath caught in his throat. Beneath an inky black sky was a vast expanse of pale blue clouds and mottled continents, curved slightly at the horizon.

"Holy crap!"

The chimps smashed into him from behind after flinging themselves with too much force across the cargo deck. They bumped into each other and complained with irritable growls as they fought to catch a glimpse of what Mike saw. "Ball?" they asked. "Marble?"

"No," said Mike slowly. "It's the world. The whole world. It's Planet Earth. And...we're leaving it."

"Where go? Where, M?"

Mike was forced to pause as unseen manoeuvring jets executed a short burn, turning the craft until all they could see was the blackness of space punctuated by the unholy bright eye of the naked moon. "I don't know...maybe there?"

"Sky banana?"

Mike shrugged helplessly. "Maybe, yeah."

There was no sense of depth in the view. It looked as if the crystal-clear moon hung just inches behind the glass, a highly-detailed soccer ball hanging in the void. It was unreal and unbelievable, and Mike wondered whether he'd been knocked out somewhere along the way and had fallen to making up his own reality.

He recognized that his plan to contact his wife upon landing would now involve more long-distance fees than he had previously considered. Of course, this thought was based on the premise that he and his troupe wouldn't be instantly killed upon being discovered by the smugglers on the receiving end -- a group coordinated enough and powerful enough to keep a lunar base secret. What chance would they have against such fearful odds?

Glutton tugged on his sleeve. "Hungry," he signed.

This brought Mike back to the present. Though he could not control their fate, he could at least make them comfortable. If these were to be the last days of their lives, they would at least feel full. "Let's unbundle some supplies -- but be careful: if you spill anything we'll be sitting in a cloud of dried berries..."

He trailed off, eyes glued to the front-most crate in the cargo deck behind them. With a pensive frown he kicked off the nearest bulkhead and sailed through the air into the hold, bumping into the crate. He pulled his way to the top and then pried back a corner of the lid. A wide grin split his face. He looked up.

"It's bananas," he said.

The chimps looked at him with cocked heads, confused.

"It's bananas!" he repeated triumphantly, bracing himself against the ceiling in order to pull the lid entirely free. He reached inside and hauled out two bunches of firm, greenish bananas. "They're shipping bananas to the moon -- and there's enough for everyone!"

Mike started ripping bananas free of the bunches and launching them to turn end over end into the legions of ready hands. The chimps grabbed them out of the air and tore them apart, biting with relish and then hooting for joy. Chunks of half-chewed banana flesh tumbled from their mouths as they happily shrieked. Mike, feeling like Santa Claus, threw out banana after banana until every ape held two, mashing them into their faces as quickly as they could.

"Bananas for all!" he cheered. "Bananas for all!"

The future was, in a word, uncertain, but Mike Zhang Cuthbertson and his loyal troupe of expressive chimpanzees were living in a moment of pure ambrosia: weightless, careless, warm and dry, kicking lazily through a field of floating banana peels with no guns pointed at them and no machines relentlessly consuming their world. There was no promise inherent in this strange excursion into space, but there was cause for hope: new and unimagined possibilities were spreading before them, splayed out like a golden peel.

"Come what may," he said to himself, "at least we won't face it hungry."

He opened a banana for himself and bit into it with gusto, then closed his eyes and savoured the clean, unfettered flavour. This victory, this present moment, suddenly seemed worth every inch of trouble they had endured.

If chimpanzee astronauts could gorge themselves all the way to the moon, anything was possible. Of this Mike was sure, and it was all he needed to know in order to go on.

"What next?" asked Climber, blinking seriously at Mike.

Mike shrugged, and tossed away his peel. "Who knows?" he said. "The impossible begets the impossible. It's not for monkeys like us to understand what lies ahead. But if we stick together and hold fast, it can't be all bad. We're going to the sky banana, Climber, where no chimp has gone before."

Climber didn't seem to comprehend a word of it, so Mike threw him another banana.

"Eat up," he advised. "Tomorrow may be even weirder."

And Bananas for All - Part Five

And Bananas for All is a story told in six episodes, posted serially by me, your guerrilla host, Cheeseburger Brown.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6

Related reading: Night Flight Mike, The Reaper's Coleslaw, Simon of Space

Our adventure continues:


5/6

The subterfuge was, in a word, hilarious.

Mike watched from a safe distance through his recently purloined field glasses, witnessing a pantomime in which two chimps brazenly approached the camp of four researchers from the National Geographic Society and began performing various antics. One chimp climbed aboard the shoulders of his companion and then the tottering, living totem wobbled around stiffly, the upper chimp offering his hand to shake and pretending to doff an invisible hat.

The researchers were shocked and instantly engaged. They fell over themselves to grab their cameras from their cases, to dangle microphones by the chimps, to jot hurried notes into their books. Mike grinned, knowing what was coming next.

In an homage to a classic episode of Star Trek, the chimps hopped apart and then dragged from the bushes a piece of limestone into which Mike had laboriously carved the words: NO KILL I. The chimps stood on either side of the limestone and slowly, clearly signed over and over again, "Life precious, life precious."

Despite the distance Mike distinctly heard one of the researchers cry out, "Oh my God!"

Mike turned from the field glasses to give Climber a curt nod. "Take your team in."

While the National Geographic researchers were entirely hypnotized by the chimps' apparent plea for interspecies clemency, Climber and his team slunk through the grass with clods of weeds strapped to their heads. Climber slipped inside the equipment tent. A moment later he reappeared and began handing out items one by one to be ferried back by his teammates: four air-rifles and eight boxes of tranquilizer darts.

Climber whistled like a Zuma songbird, then scooted quietly after the team. At this signal the performing chimps seemed to suddenly become bored with the researchers; they simply dropped their hands, turned around, and scampered off into the bush. The researchers looked at each other in surprise and disappointment, then fell to examining the limestone.

The chimps regrouped with Mike by the stream. "Good work," smiled Mike. "Let's have lunch."

Chimpanzees are always enthusiastic about lunch. They pant-hooted in delight and made a headlong dash for the hilltop.

"That was awesome," said Mike to Climber. "Keep it up, and I'll promote you to man."

Climber saluted and then scrambled off after the others.

Mike took a moment to lolligag by the scarecrows. Upon close inspection they wouldn't fool a one-eyed man with cataracts, but from a reasonable distance they were sufficient to give a roving band of rival apes pause. The scarecrows were made of stolen sandbags stuffed with leaves, dressed in fluorescent yellow safety vests; each stood at guard with a long stick in place of a gun. They were connected to the beaters' rope network, and thus could be caused from a remote distance to shimmy and quiver in an aggressive if faintly epileptic fashion.

With Mike's focus diverted to the dinosaurs, they had been forced to resort to semi-automatic defenses such as these to keep the territory clear. There wasn't enough attention to go around.

The days were busy.

Mike hiked up the hill. Preparations were well under way for tonight's daring sortie. For weeks Mike and his troglodyte kin had been waging an unrelenting campaign against the clear-cutting and construction efforts, and as of last night their opponents had upped the ante by dispatching round the clock patrols of security guards armed with guns and machetes, dour-faced skinny black men who smoked Chinese cigarettes and muttered to each other in a guttural, choppy-sounding language Mike couldn't fathom in the least.

He had reasoned that attacking the machines themselves would be a poor strategy. If the men could not work, they would have nothing to do all day but beat the bushes in search of the vandals. Instead, Mike had directed the campaign toward the supplies: by constantly interfering with the flow of food, drink and tobacco, the workers became disgruntled at their employer's failure to contain the situation and their insistence that work continue uninterrupted. So the men worked, and as the days went by they hated their employers more than the unseen saboteurs.

Mike had seen the fat airplanes come in. He knew the men had recently been resupplied. Thus, it was his plan to disrupt their sense of hope at its zenith, to foul the water and steal the food and burn the cigarettes just when the men were about to feel bolstered and relieved. He was optimistic this sudden reversal in fortune would persuade them to rebel against their employers, to initiate a work stoppage.

The only trick would be to incapacitate the armed guards before they could act. Hence, the tranquilizer rifles.

Mike checked on the chimps, overseeing their work. They no longer jingled as they moved, for Mike had long ago figured out how to break their collars. Their identification tags now hung over their hammocks. He took a few moments to roll around in the dirt with the juveniles, then made sure poor Glutton was comfortable, lying in a hammock with a splint on his fractured leg. "Looks like it's healing up nicely," said Mike.

"Itchy," signed Glutton gloomily. "Hungry."

"You're always hungry."

"Itchy," the chimp repeated sullenly.

Mike found a twig and carefully fed it into the dressing, then scratched at Glutton's leg. "Better?"

Glutton closed his eyes and sighed with contentment. "Love M," he gestured vaguely, yawning.

"I love you too, Glutton."

The afternoon aged. The sun began to sink. The voice of the forest slowly changed from daytime sounds to twilight sounds. The suppertime flowers exuded their stink as the dinosaurs' growls quieted one by one. The men laughed and swore and smoked as they parked their vehicles and ambled back toward their camp in the river valley. The new security guards passed them in the dirt-clod fields, but they did not exchange greetings. The two kinds of men were as alien to one another as chimpanzees and monkeys.

The sky was still pink, but the land was in shadow. Mike gave a nod to his troupe. "Let's move."

A tall, lanky security guard with a shaved head leaned on his rifle as he smoked, watching birds flock over the trees. Every few moments he spat in the dirt and shifted his pose. Mike hunkered low in the grass in order to silhouette the man against the sky for a clear shot, then squeezed the trigger: the air rifle barked. The guard grunted, slapped at his thigh, found the dart, then whimpered quietly and folded into an unruly pile.

"Wow," whispered Mike. "That was fast. This stuff must be dosed for rhinos or something."

He slunk along to the next sighting spot while a trio of chimps scampered over the sleeping guard and headed for the nearest supply trailer. The next guard took a little longer to succumb than the first, but within five minutes he had ceased crawling along in the dirt and had rolled over onto his side with his thumb jammed in his mouth, snoring loudly.

The next team headed for the water locker. When a third guard fell, the final team made for the shed where the daytime rations of cigarettes were stored along with the odd bottle of liquor for the foremen. The chimps had already learned to use the liquor to spread the fire, though they often went through four or five boxes of matches before getting a good strike. They tended to break the matches.

Mike was wiggling up to the fourth and final guard when the water locker erupted in a riot of noise: tumbling plastic vats, smashing bottles, hollering chimps. The guard's head snapped over. "Eh!" he called, unslinging his rifle.

Mike fired his own rifle but missed. The guard was running now, bearing down on the locker. Mike scrambled to his feet and beat the ground after him, propelled by worry.

The guard reached the locker and threw open the doors. Mike accelerated. The guard disappeared inside.

Heart hammering in his chest, Mike slid in the mud in front of the locker and sprawled awkwardly to the ground. He flipped himself over and then pawed through the darkness for his air rifle. He looked up just in time to see the guard ejected bodily from the locker, flying over his head in a high arc, then crashing down to the ground with a loud crack of breaking bone.

Two chimps burst out of the locker, roaring.

"Holy crap you guys are strong," breathed Mike with relief.

Suddenly the field was illuminated by rows of floodlights on wooden poles. Grimacing and howling, the chimps threw their hands over their eyes. Mike tried to blink away the throbbing afterimages as a distant klaxon began to ring. The tossed guard was talking quickly into a radio, his repeated cries urgent.

Mike stood up and whistled with his fingers. "Retreat!"

Together the troupe barrelled across the field, making for the far fringes ninety-degrees removed from the actual direction of their home hill -- this was a practiced piece of deception meant to confuse anyone bright enough to try to track their prints the next morning, to lead them astray. This path also took them dangerously close to the territory of their troglodyte rivals and they usually made their approach stealthily. Tonight, however, they dashed aside the leaves and fled in an adrenaline-powered panic.

There were consequences. They were heard.

Mike detected the growl of jeeps in the blazingly-bright field behind them just as the bush ahead shook. Eyes reflected in the dark, and then the night was cut by aggressive howls. One by one Mike's troupe fell from their flight, knocked aside by rival chimps. In the dark the various tussles were a scintillating blur. Mike felt helpless and terrified. He swung his air rifle in vicious arcs, smacking aside the attackers and then shouting to keep them at bay while his kin made their frenzied escapes deeper into the forest.

Mike found himself surrounded by a ring of belligerent chimpanzees, and he considered that he may have just traded his life to save his friends. He took a deep breath and steadied the rifle in his hands, wielding it in a defensive stance as if it were a quarterstaff.

Seconds later, he was alone.

Mike blinked, hearing his assailants rushing away in a froth of leaf-ripping, twig-snapping urgency. "What in the --"

Someone clubbed him across the back of the head with something heavy. Mike dropped to his knees, his vision turning grey. "Crap," he managed to mumble before he dropped on his face...

He came to under the harsh buzz of cheap fluorescents. His head hurt a lot, and the back of his neck was sticky. Mike groaned.

"Baas, he's waking up!"

Mike was sprawled in a plastic chair inside a cramped trailer alongside filing cabinets, two messy desks and a battery of overflowing ashtrays. Three white men and two skinny guards were arrayed around him, their faces hard. One of the white men pushed closer, rolling a toothpick from one side of his lined mouth to the other. "What are you supposed to be then, eh? Some kind of Tarzan?"

Mike blinked, his head ringing.

"Answer me!" the man shouted, then slapped Mike across the face.

Mike was not bound but he was badly outnumbered and feeling not at all well. He thought he might throw up, and decided he might have a fairly serious concussion. With an awful, heavy feeling he recognized that he was on the cusp of re-entering that state he had vowed he never find himself in again: helpless, hopeless, imprisoned at the mercy of men of meagre moral fibre.

He said the first thing that popped into his head: his name, rank, and serial number.

"He's some kind of a soldier, baas," said one of the men.

The one with the toothpick grunted noncommitally. "What the hell is a Chinese soldier doing out here?"

"I'm not Chinese," rasped Mike weakly. "I'm Canadian."

"He sure looks Chinese, baas."

"I'm with the Allies," managed Mike.

"The Allies sent you to sabotage us?" demanded the toothpick man. "What's your mission, Tarzan? You'd better start talking now or you'll find yourself looking down at your tongue on the floor. Got that, doos?"

"Not on an Allied mission..."

"Gunther: give me your knife. This chink gwar needs some persuading, man."

Mike's breathing became quick and shallow. Sweat beaded on his brow. One of the men unsnapped a leather holster at his hip and withdrew a shiny blade that sang as it was freed. Its keen edge winked in the light. Gunther passed the blade to his boss, who spat out his toothpick onto the floor and gave Mike a terrible, cruel grin.

Mike felt a thousand times more dread than he had in the hands of the Allied jackals, for then it was only his own health he feared for. Now, in this new moment, he knew his failure would cost the lives of all his friends. Without Mike's help, they didn't stand a chance against men.

The boss paused in his advance, then cocked his head. The others did, too. Mike heard it: the sound of engines starting up. Machines rumbled and metal clanked.

"...What the hell?"

The engines roared suddenly closer. The boss ducked aside to look out the window but before he got there the entire trailer shook on its cinderblock foundations, rocking dangerously and casting file folders from their shelves in a slurry of hissing paper. The men were knocked off their feet and Mike spilled from his chair.

The trailer was struck again, the long wall denting. The lights went out and the trailer continued to lean, then keeled over completely and crashed down on its side. Furniture and cigarette butts rained to the new floor, battering the guards and the white men who cried out in alarm.

Acting on instinct, Mike threw himself toward the dark corner where he remembered the door to be. He caught its edges and hauled himself up, pushing out to the top of the teetering trailer and getting to his feet.

The flood-lit field was in chaos. Heavy equipment rumbled in all directions, turning in place, swinging their implements nonsensically, changing speeds, stopping and starting seemingly at random. It all began to make sense when Mike spotted Climber hanging out of the cab of a massive backhoe, waving his arms and roaring.

Mike realized that he was being rescued.

In the cabs of the other vehicles chimps were attacking the controls, pulling and pushing levers, tugging on the steering wheels, stabbing buttons with reckless abandon. "Holy crap!" yelled Mike. He jammed his fingers into his mouth and whistled for retreat.

The chimps saw him. With hoots of delight they abandoned their vehicles, leaping off as they continued to move, then scampering across the dirt toward the trailer. Hearing signs of life inside of it Mike jumped down and met them halfway, then coordinated their flight toward the woods. The chimps paused near him, wanting to touch him and coo, but Mike cast off their hands. "Go, go, go!" he screamed.

They went. Mike was about to fling himself after them when he saw that Climber was still inside his vehicle, eyes wide as a fleet of workers ran toward him and began climbing the treads of the still rolling machine. Climber screeched in fright and climbed on top of the cab. He threw bits of gravel at the workers and beat his chest.

"Climber! Jump!" yelled Mike.

The workers turned to his voice. "Shoot him!" called someone, and a dozen rifles clicked as they were cocked. Mike dropped to the dirt a split second before the air resounded with the overlapping cracks of gunfire.

He wormed his way into a ditch and then risked a look back. Climber hadn't been hit: the shots were aimed at Mike. Instead, Climber was grabbed by the leg and pulled down from the cab. He hit the treads hard and was then struck with the butt-end of rifles, forcing him into a large sack which was cinched up tight once he was inside. The workers kicked at the sack until it stopped moving.

Mike felt as if his heart were being ripped from his chest. He was immobilized by pain and horror, but regained his senses as another group of guards starting running toward the ditch he was in with flashlights and guns.

There was no choice to be made except to survive. Mike ran. There were a few more shots fired in his direction, and he heard the leaves tear around him as he tumbled into the cover of the forest. He pushed himself to keep going, reminding himself how many other chimps were counting on his leadership tonight.

Soon the fracas was behind him. With great weariness he plodded up to the hilltop, tears welling in his eyes as he met the gazes of his troupe. "Climber's been captured," he signed with shaking hands. "They took him."

"What do?" the chimps wanted to know. "What do, M?"

Mike sighed. He sat down beside the fire-pit, his head in his hands. The chimps gathered around him, whimpering worriedly. Mike looked up after a long moment. "You guys risked your lives to save me," he said slowly. "So, really, there's only one thing we can do."

Bella nodded seriously. "Plan," she signed.

"Yes," Mike agreed. "You're right, Bella. If we're going to save Climber, we'll need a plan. A really smart one, too."

"M smart smart."

Mike closed his eyes. "I don't feel very smart tonight," he said forlornly.

The chimps closed around him, and lay their hands on his shoulders, on his back, on his legs. They shut their eyes and gently knocked their heads against him, snorting affectionately.

"But I'll think of something," promised Mike. "I swear."

And Bananas for All - Part Four

And Bananas for All is a story told in six episodes, posted serially by me, your leopard-skin loinclothed host, Cheeseburger Brown.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6

Related reading: Night Flight Mike, The Reaper's Coleslaw, Simon of Space

Our tale continues:


4/6

The slow life was, in a word, refreshing.

That is not to say it was always easy: Mike and his troglodyte brethren lived balanced on a knife's edge of survival, allowing them to forget for only the shortest, sweetest moments that almost every element of their surroundings would prefer them dead, and would conspire to arrange for it given the most humble opportunity. The plants, the bugs, the beasts, the spores: all of them were hungry, relentless, and untroubled by conscience.

In the wet season it rained, and then even the water itself seemed determined to wipe out the little troop -- floods, monsoons, quicksand, the bacteria of something rotten spreading down the stream to poison whosoever should want a drink. The wind was wicked; the sun cruel; the air a cloud of disease-laden mosquitos.

But, in time, the wet season passed. Only one chimp was lost.

The hilltop had changed considerably in the wake of Mike. Now, instead of nests on the ground, they slept in hammocks slung between the trees with tough, twisted-fibre ropes Mike manufactured from dried vines sealed with oil boiled from the fat of bushbabies, vervets and blue monkeys. Some of the chimps had become quite adept at the rope-making process, and had even introduced innovations to Mike's clumsy weave. Two of the taller, straighter trees had been stripped of most of their branches in order to serve as crow's nests for sighting predators before they approached too close. Raised between them was a bundle of food stores, their supports coated with sap to dissuade insect thieves; it was a constant arms race against the ants.

At the heart of this simple village was a fire-pit ringed with stones, in and of itself Mike's single greatest contribution to improving daily life for himself and his friends. Over it they cooked their meat and softened edible roots, boiled their drinking water, cured hides, disinfected wounds, and huddled around against the weather's most unsympathetic fits.

"You've got to love fire," Mike would opine.

"Fire hot good," agreed the chimps. "Dance fire, nice fire."

Though Mike had many times attempted to explain the purely mechanical nature of flame, the chimpanzees could not or would not resist the urge to personify it. While Mike patiently demonstrated the methods of firecraft, the chimps insisted on appealing to and deconstructing apparent instances of fire's emotional life, its preferences and grudges, its desires and appetites, its sometimes curiously disconnected way of meting out justice...

"Fire burn! Fire angry!"

"The fire isn't angry -- you just shouldn't muck with it when you've got grease on your hands. Grease is flammable."

"Fire bite punish fire."

"No, the fire is not punishing you. You've just got to wash your hands."

Mike would then shake his head as the chastized chimp would skip washing and instead proceed to feed the fire something they believed it found delicious, like strips of fast-burning bark or dried-out bricks of mulch. Appeasing the fire's feelings of retribution was, to the chimp mind, vastly more important than following Mike's instructions.

"Good nice," the chimp would coo soothingly. "Nice fire good."

Mike had named the chimps, either arbitrarily or in connection to some physical or behavioural characteristic. For their part, the chimps quickly developed gestural short-hand for each name -- a sort of abstracted flick loosely connected to the sound or the action representing the individual. Mike's name, for instance, was simply the sign for the letter M. The young male Mike had designated as Climber identified himself with the sign for "pull."

It was Climber now who hooted from his perch in one of the watch trees. Mike looked up. Climber signed broadly due to the distance between them: "Bad coming."

Mike whistled. The chimps around him stopped whatever they were doing and looked to him. "The baddies are coming," he said in a carrying voice, his hands jogging to echo the words. "I want a bragging party out front, and pincer platoons to the flanks. Slingers to your stations. Go, go, go!"

The apes hurried into position. Mike strolled around the fire-pit, keeping an eye on their well-rehearsed preparations. His clothes were a mash-up of shreds of uniform bound with hides and furs, his lengthening hair kept out of his eyes with a bandana of tough leather. His boots were Canadian Forces standard issue, black as pitch and tough as kevlar. He glanced back up the watch tree to Climber, his brow raised in inquiry.

Climber pointed to his own eyes, then indicated a direction. He squinted at his fingers for a long moment and then carefully raised six. He pointed finally to his genitals.

Mike understood: a war party of six males approaching from the south. Rival chimpanzees, piercing their territory.

"They must be new to the neighbourhood," chuckled Mike. "Slingers: look south! Beaters: to your marks!"

The hilltop fell silent. Mike squatted low by the pit. At the edge of audibility he detected the twig-snap, mulch-crunching approach of the six alien chimpanzees up the south face of the hill. When the footfalls and quiet grunts came close enough Mike nodded to the beaters. The beaters, in turn, yanked and sawed on long ropes attached to a series of young, flexible treetops extending around the hill: the net effect was that the brush all around the invaders began to shimmy and shake, surrounding them in a wash of white noise and petty distractions.

He heard the invaders holler in confusion. From experience Mike knew this would be enough to send most of them fleeing back the way they had come, but there was always a couple stalwart or foolish enough to make a charge uphill. Indeed, seconds later a large, black-faced male burst out of the bush on the periphery of the village, his arms waving in rage and panic.

He came face to face with the bragging party, a line of three females who launched into a furious campaign to intimidate him with flailing arms and shouts. The invader was not impressed; he made little rushes at them, smacking the dirt. The bragging party retreated a few steps at a time, drawing him into the clear. Then the invader caught sight of Mike behind the bragging party and froze, eyes wide. He reared up on its hind legs and roared, sharp yellow teeth casting off strings of saliva.

Mike made a quick gesture. "Fire!" he called.

The bragging party fell back, dropped to the ground, and pulled squares of hard bark over their heads. The invader was pelted by stones launched from leather slings swung by invisible attackers hidden behind leaf-stuffed screens in the foliage surrounding the village. The ordnance came from several directions at once and, while most of the stones missed their mark (the chimps had really terrible aim), the bewildering volley was sufficient to convince the foreign ape to beat a hasty retreat.

"Beaters stop!" yelled Mike. The bushes stopped shaking, providing the fleeing invader with a clear course to safety away from the hill, the sides of his escape route reinforced with two pincer platoons of hollering chimps. As he passed them they gave chase, screaming at the top of their lungs.

A few moments later all parties returned to the hilltop. Mike did a quick head count, then nodded to himself with satisfaction. "Stand down," he said. "We're all clear, guys. Good work!"

The chimps pant-hooted happily and congratulated each other. The babies were pulled out of hiding and Gourmand resumed tearing the carcasses of the morning's prey into strips suitable for easy cooking. Young Edgar and Bella watched intently, fascinated by the work of Gourmand's chipped-stone blade.

After supper everyone gathered for their favourite pastime: taking turns posing inside the window-frame of the piece of charred aircraft fuselage they'd retrieved from the crash site. Mike sat on the ground and laughed along with the gang as Flirt and Glutton did a well-loved slapstick routine in which they kept smacking into one another. The chimps howled, making the distinctive staccato grunts Mike had come to know as the voice of their comedic appreciation.

He did a routine, too, re-enacting moments of physical hilarity from The Simpsons television show -- a show to which the chimps had obviously had much exposure in their prior life. "D'oh!" cried Mike. The chimps fell on their sides, gasping for air.

Later, Mike swung lazily in his hammock as the chimps pursued one another in a fresh battery of mating games. When the courtships started Mike knew it was best to keep clear, as strong emotions were sometimes roused and jealous chimps had a fierce and sometimes blind temper. Any of these gentle creatures could snap Mike's bones without significant effort, given the wrong combination of circumstances.

Mike's throat felt raw on account of using it to say eight or nine things in a single day. When they weren't concerned about rival gangs encroaching on their territory the times when speaking was called for were few and far between; among close friends, the most meaningful kinds of communication were accomplished by eye, body and smell. So rarified were the situations that actually necessitated speech that Mike began to wonder whether warfare -- whether the need to have precise orders understood by groups -- was the impetus that propelled speech into man's daily habit. Almost no other part of life required it, when one stripped away the extraneum.

Twilight came and the moon rose, a crisp crescent of silver between bands of scalloped cloud. The chimps left off from their pursuits to look up at it in wonder. "Sky banana," they signed reverently. "Banana sky."

Bananas were a sore spot for the chimps. They missed them terribly. Any analogue of a banana's shape, like the crescent moon, and any analogue of its colour, including dozens of varities of flower, earned their instant and deepest regard. In the resemblance to their cherished fruit they saw a connection to the original prototype, a byway for worship and a way to touch what wasn't there.

Solemnly they mimed the peeling their index fingers, eyes locked on the above.

Mike sighed. He, too, would like a nice banana.

The next morning was quiet, dry and warm. The sky banana had long since set. There was, however, an uneasy feeling in the air and the chimps eyed the forest around their hill nervously. Mike knuckled his eyes and slipped out of his hammock, raising an inquiring brow at the closest chimp.

"Dinosaur smell," signed Tattler.

Mike frowned. "Huh?"

"Dinosaurs," echoed Glutton seriously. "Dinosaurs again."

"There's no such thing as dinosaurs anymore."

The chimps regarded him sceptically.

"...Are there?"

A sound began to permeate the forest, and it caused all of the little hairs all over Mike's body to stand on end. The chimps hooted worriedly. In the distance, something giant growled. Mike could feel it through his boots.

His eyes narrowed. He shook his head, then whistled loudly. "Recon squad -- form up!"

The reconnaissance squad moved carefully through the bush with Mike at the head flanked by two roving-eyed young males carrying stone-tipped spears. As they proceeded westward the Earth-rumbling growl clarified into the rumble and chortle of machines at work: the noise grew steadily louder, and soon Mike could detect the acrid perfume of diesel, oil and exhaust.

They stopped at the riverbank. Beyond a thin line of scrub on the opposite side, a clearing was being razed. An occluding blanket of tan dust was swept aside by the breeze and then Mike saw them: massive vehicles in grime-speckled red, orange and yellow -- all the gay colours of the dirtiest, grandest machines of heavy industry. Those closest to the river flexed cavernous metal scoops on the end of long, articulated necks, carving gouges in the ground.

"Bad dinosaurs," signed Flirt somberly.

Mike didn't know how to feel. The tree-smashing, root-tearing work of the machines was terrifying, loud and violent -- yet on the other hand his heart skipped a beat when he saw the distant figures of human beings moving between them, waving and calling to each other, their aluminium coffee flasks flashing in the morning sun.

"Holy crap," whispered Mike. "People!"

Mike had sighted the workers, and the workers had sighted the chimps. There was a flash as someone's field glasses reflected, and then a few of the men jogged over to a giant dump-truck's cab and hopped down again with rifles. Mike signalled a hasty retreat. The chimps looked at him in confusion. "Guns!" said Mike, signing ferverently.

The chimps scratched their heads. Clearly, in their prior life there had been no call or desire for them to possess a firearms vocabulary.

Edgar, however, came to appreciate firearms in a visceral way as he was shot in the chest. He tumbled over backward without making a sound, and when Mike turned him over he found his face frozen in an attitude of surprise. Blood chugged steadily from the hole in his torso, pooling under the ape's armpit. The echoes of the firing had yet to fade completely from the air and Edgar was already well dead.

The workers cheered. Mike looked up. The chimps around him were fleeing, crashing headlong and carelessly into the bush behind him, howling in fear. In seconds they were gone.

The workers splashed across the river.

They were white men. They murmured to each other in South African English as they toed Edgar's corpse with their workboots. "Ag man, that was some shot," said one. "You pegged that monkey like it was right in front of you. Aweh!"

"It's not a monkey, it's a chimp."

"Same difference, baas. Is it any good to eat?"

"Naw. Kaffirs'll probably eat it anyway, though. Might as well drag it round. You lot: get this in the bakkie."

When Mike saw the rude way the men hefted Edgar like a sack of sticks it took every ounce of self-control to keep him from leaping down out of the tree branches above them to throttle someone. He flexed his hands ruefully, feeling the familiar ache in his right from the moist air. He knew any action would be regrettable: he was no match for four armed men alone.

Mike watched them go, teeth clenched. They slogged across the river and joshed with each other as they hauled the body up the opposite bank and then swung it on the count of three into the back of a truck.

"One, two, three." Boom!

Mike closed his eyes.

When he returned to the hilltop the chimps greeted him with anxious looks and worried pants. He told them Edgar was gone, and that the men who rode the dinosaurs had killing sticks that could take away any one of them. The chimps were scared. "What do?" asked Climber, grabbing Mike's shoulder. "Where hide?"

"We have nowhere to go," answered Mike slowly. "There is nowhere to hide. The dinosaurs are eating the forest. They may even want to eat our hill."

They chimps drew close to one another. Many of them reached out to touch Mike for comfort. "What do?" asked Climber again, shaking his head. A dozen sets of brown eyes rested on Mike, wide and pleading.

The ambient sounds of the forest were suddenly very loud. Mike's heart was pounding in his chest. He swallowed, then put his chin up.

"We fight," he declared crisply. "We make war. We stop the dinosaurs."

And Bananas for All - Part Three

And Bananas for All is a story told in six episodes, posted serially by me, your castaway host, Cheeseburger Brown.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6

Related reading: Night Flight Mike, The Reaper's Coleslaw, Simon of Space

Our tale continues:


3/6

The afterlife was, in a word, bewildering.

Mike believed his life was passing before his eyes, because he dreamed he was latched at the teat of a mother he had never remembered. The presentation did not progress, however, nor dwindle into a tunnel. There was neither a great light nor a chorus of angels, but there was something tickling his nose.

Mike sneezed.

As if this were not a sufficient clue, he next became aware that he ached. A resolute corner of his foggy mind decided that sneezing and aching were not consistent with death. If he suffered, he lived.

It was easy to be lulled away from such irksome thoughts: he was warm, he was reclined -- the world was dark and delicious, if slightly musky. He passed on into another valley of senselessness, a grey and timeless place where there were no realities to contend with beyond the rhythmic gulp of ambrosia...

Someone grunted. A body shifted against Mike, then farted.

Mike opened his eyes.

It was the still, quiet hour before dawn: half the sky was spangled by stars that looked close enough to touch while the other half glowed indigo with the threat of day. Between the stars a flurry of orbital machines coasted, gleaming faintly orange with tomorrow's morning reflecting on their armoured hides. The view was both girdled and sliced by the black webbing of foliage in silhouette, a faintly whispering foreground moving in the breeze.

It was the still, quiet hour before dawn, and Mike was being breast-fed by an ape.

He reeled backward and rocked on his haunches, spitting greasy hairs from his mouth. Then, overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness, he dropped to his hands and knees -- recalling viscerally his damaged right hand, he gasped and reflexively pulled the limb in close to his chest. This sudden motion caused a ripple of response in the shadows around him, a change in the collective draw of breath.

Mike froze. His eyes were wide, his skin prickling.

He was surrounded. A wall of gorilla-like figures formed a tight ring all around him. Mike could smell them. He could see their hair matted against the stars. He could hear them snort and sniff as they shifted, prodding one another and nodding.

They jingled as they moved.

The sky through the trees was slowly becoming rosier, its diffuse light reflecting as amber sparkles in dozens of sets of eyes. Mike looked back at them, fighting to slow his rapid, panicked breathing.

The sun was rising, mutually introducing the apes and Mike to one another's vision. To Mike they seemed huge, their cluster tight and ominous, their demeanor one of careful evaluation. He was worried about upsetting them, but at the same time he recognized that it was easy to be deferential when you're terrified. Among mammals emotions are broadcast in the clear.

Mike sat up slowly, aware of his every motion being tracked. He turned to the face of the ape whom had offered him her breast, and two brown eyes regarded him calmly from atop a wrinkled, hazel snout. A pink-faced infant sat on her shoulder, cocking its head at Mike.

Her eyes could have been human. For a moment Mike could almost believe it was an actor in costume. She held his eyes as people do.

Mike decided they were probably not gorillas. They looked more like bonobos, or chimpanzees. If he remembered correctly, a healthy young chimpanzee could easily overpower an adult human being. Any fight would be a quick contest. He gulped.

The chimp blinked at him, then jutted out her chin. Mike stared back. She sniffed, then raised her hand to her mouth in a vaguely claw-like shape and tilted it back against her lips as she raised her brow. When Mike didn't react, she did it again.

He looked around. Another chimp made the same gesture. Mike furrowed his brow, his thoughts coming together mushily. As the apes gestured again he dared to wonder whether it were pure coincidence or his subconscious colouring the interpretation that made the movement seem like the American Sign Language gesture-phrase for "drink?"

Mike blinked. He let out a little gasp as one of the apes shuffled forward proffering something in her long arms. Mike looked down at it, squinting in the feeble morning light. It was a gourd with a hole in it.

The ape signed: "Drink?"

Mike accepted the gourd with shaking fingers, his hand-cuffs clicking against each other. He watched the apes watching him as he lifted it to his lips and tilted it back. Cool, slightly tangy water dribbled out and into his mouth. Rationality was briefly put aside as his body made its demands paramount, forcing him to chug greedily until he'd sucked the last drops from the gourd. Involuntarily, he dropped it.

"Cup drop cup," observed one of the apes, leathery fingers whispering against each other as they formed crude, careless versions of the signs Mike had studied in high school.

Without thinking, Mike circled his hand on his chest: "Sorry."

Shafts of bright sunshine began to angle through the forest canopy. Cool moisture from the mulch floor rose in a mist. The birds had roused themselves to their full polyphonic effort to greet the day. Mike's head became clearer, forcing him to reassess his situation over and over until he became convinced these long, weird moments were real. He was, in fact, crouching on a hilltop surrounded by what looked to him to be chimpanzees who jingled when they moved, and they had brought him here and...nursed him back to health.

Each of them wore a collar, and from each collar dangled a metal tag. The tags were engraved with what looked to Mike to be letters or numbers or both, the shallow edges of the figures winking in the light.

Mike found himself lying down again, slightly dazed. His left leg was not in altogether good shape, and the wound still seemed to be oozing blood. He probed the area with his fingers, wincing. He pressed too close, and hissed.

"Hurts," signed the chimps in sympathetic concert.

Mike almost laughed. Instead, he coughed. It hurt to cough, and he guessed he might have a broken rib or two. Taking a deep breath was okay, so he figured he hadn't punctured a lung.

He took a more sober look around.

The chimps owned this clearing on top of the hill -- the plants had been beaten down flat by repeated traffic. They nested on the ground, gorilla-style, and a few of the nests had small tokens in them: a rotten teddy bear, a plastic doll head, a shredded piece of blanket, a cracked mug with faded hearts on it.

"Where are you guys from?" asked Mike hoarsely, surprised by the sound of his own voice. He followed this with an awkward attempt to sign his words. "Where before?"

"Home," signed several of the chimps simultaneously.

"That makes sense," admitted Mike. "I'm from home, too."

The chimps didn't understand that.

He became aware of a smell, a familiar but unpleasant sting that hung in the air. When he recognized it as burning kerosene he found himself flooded with memories from the previous days, including his arrest and incarceration, his ordeal at the hands of the jackals, and concluding with the recollection that the airplane he was being transported in had been hit by enemy fire.

Evidently, it had gone down. Evidently, Mike had survived. And, somehow, he had been rescued and adopted by a gang of chimps who knew ASL and at least one of whom was lactating and generous with her milk. They were tagged. They knew men, and did not fear them.

On the contrary, they seemed very pleased to have Mike among them. As the atmosphere of worry diffused they began to offer him food: handfuls of berries he couldn't identify, and stalks of chewy grass. They offered him sticks coated in sap holding together a congealed layer of dead termites, and when he hesitated they demonstrated how to saw the sticks across the molars to peel away the snack. Driven by a biological compulsion to feed, Mike emulated them and swallowed three sticks worth of sticky insect crust without retching. As they pressed around him with their offerings they made rapid, clumsy slurries of gestures that Mike was too slow to interpret. He wracked his brains to remember what he'd learned in school.

He carefully repeated his graceless signing over and over until the apes understood: "My name M-I-K-E."

"M-I-K talk!" they echoed back to him amid triumphant pant-hoots. They then proceeded to identify themselves with a series of abstracted gestures Mike strained to assign any meaning to. He caught that one of the younger males had a name based on the sign for run and that the lactating female had a name related to salute.

"You must have escaped from a lab or something..." said Mike thoughtfully. "Or did somebody dump you guys out here? Was it some kind of animal rescue gone wrong?"

The chimps had no coherent answer to that question either. It wasn't really clear how much they understood him. To feel each other out, to exchange words -- there certainly seemed to be somebody home when he looked in those eyes, but on the other hand he had to admit that sometimes it seemed like his dog back at home was following along, too. Mike's signing trailed off. One of the larger males appeared to be industriously picking his nose and then wiping the debris on the hair behind his left ear. The chimps blinked.

Mike sighed. They didn't know any better than Mike did what country they were in, or in which direction he should set off for help. These chimpanzees had somehow saved his life and sat vigil over him while he slept, but they couldn't rescue him.

Mike tried to stand again, but failed. He was sweating. It took him a moment to recover his breath.

"Where did I come from?" he asked. "Can you take me there?"

"Mess," signed the chimps. Some of them pointed.

"I need a crutch. I need a big stick or something. Big stick?"

They brought him one. Grimacing as he fought to favour his wounded leg, Mike hauled himself up to a standing position. The apes looked up at his new posture with a kind of awe. Mike grunted. He felt a trickle of fresh blood paint warm lines down his shin.

The crash site was not far away, but it took Mike a long time to reach it. The chimps were patient. A couple of adults hovered in his vicinity, pacing around him. Another trio roved further into the surrounding jungle, scanning the brush and hooting quietly to one another. They came to an artificial clearing where the trees were burned out husks and the forest floor a carpet of ash. These strips of still smoking desert were concentrated around the many piles of twisted debris in three widely spaced islands -- the nose, the tail, and the mid-section of the plane. The wings appeared to have been shredded into confetti.

One of the chimps tugged on Mike's elbow. "Hot," she warned.

"Stinks," signed another.

"Mess big mess," they all agreed.

"I'll say," said Mike. He hauled himself forward on his tree-branch crutch, headed for the remains of the nose cone and cockpit. He heard the chimps shuffle behind him. He turned, "You guys stay here, okay? It could be dangerous. Hot, right? It stinks."

"Stinks hot."

"Yeah. So just stay right here. I'll be back in a minute."

Gaping holes had been punched in the canopy when the plane went down. Mike passed through pools of bright sunshine as he limped and crunched his way across the black field. He slowed from his already slow pace as the cockpit drew near. A cloud of flies were buzzing around it.

Mike sniffed the air anxiously, which made him feel a lot like an ape.

The cockpit was a mess. Any hopes of getting the radio working were immediately dashed, as it appeared to have melted. There was only one body. The co-pilot must have ejected. The pilot, meanwhile, appeared to have been ventilated by a spray of machine gun fire that had punctured the fuselage in a dozen places. The body also appeared to have suffered some additional trauma in the crash itself, and Mike had a hard time looking at it. Never the less, there was something critical he sought...

Pawing through the largely pulped remains was one of the least palatable things Mike had ever done, but it was all worth it when he found the only slightly scorched manacle control fastened to a singed length of belt. Mike closed his eyes in silent prayer and held the test circuit.

The light winked on feebly.

Mike touched the actuator. His hand-cuffs buzzed, then clicked twice and dropped away from his sore wrists. They landed in the ashes between his feet with a soft thump, raising a small cloud. And then Mike, staring down at them, experienced a special moment.

He was free.

He took a deep breath, watching motes of ash drift through the bars of twinkling sunshine that slanted through the punctured jungle canopy. A million kinds of animal chirped and buzzed. Whether civilization was over the next hill or a hundred miles away Mike could not reckon, but he realized that, for the time being, it didn't matter: his leg wouldn't let him get far in any event.

He looked back at the chimpanzees. They had discovered a curve of fuselage with an oval window in it, and were taking turns peeking at each other through the frame and cavorting. Those on the other side hooted and clapped. After a moment it dawned on Mike what they were doing: the chimps were pretending they were on TV.

Someone, somewhere, had been very kind to these animals. That in itself made Mike feel more whole, a small reminder that not everyone in the world was hellbent on war, on hate, on control and on fear. Someone, somewhere had made a life for these funny little hairy men. Briefly, he wondered what tragedy had whisked the chimps from that care.

These weren't wild animals. Like Mike, they had been tossed.

And if they could manage to survive out here, so could Mike -- at least with their help, he reckoned; and at least until he healed.

After a last sweep through the mangled cockpit Mike was able to retrieve a slightly burnt blanket, a pocket-knife and a wholly intact first aid kit from the emergency compartment. Thus equipped he loped back toward the verdant bushes where the chimpanzees had collected, a cautious duo on their outskirts still scanning the woods for trouble, reminding Mike that he was in no toothless paradise -- like the chimps, he had best stay on his toes.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

Slowly the party wound back to the hilltop.