Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization by Alex Irvine

mouth and raising his other arm in an effort to calm people down. Malcolm watched from the edge of the crowd, with Alexander and Ellie right with him. Alexander clutched his satchel. Both of them looked scared, and they had every right to be. This crowd was a bomb, and the appearance of the ape army had lit its fuse.
    From the barrage of questions, a few were repeated enough that Dreyfus made an attempt to answer them first.
    “We’re all immune!” he shouted through the megaphone. “We’re all immune or we wouldn’t be here!” He cut his eyes at Ellie as he said this, and Ellie in turn looked to Malcolm. She had said this to Dreyfus the day before, and if it turned out not to be true… well, that didn’t bear thinking about.
    “Now please, try to— try to calm down ,” Dreyfus said. From somewhere in the crowd a man shouted.
    “How did they find us?” Several other voices took up the question. Dreyfus waved the megaphone, trying to settle them enough that they would be able to hear his response. There was a brief pause, or at least a slight lessening of the general pandemonium.
    “We, uh… we found them,” Dreyfus said. “Just yesterday. There was—”
    He didn’t get a chance to go on. The crowd exploded. From the uproar came a dozen variations on a single question, given full voice by another man, right in the front. He shoved forward, until he was up against the cordon of Dreyfus’s unofficial police guard.
    “You knew they were out there, and you didn’t tell us?” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
    Malcolm gathered Ellie and Alexander closer to him, trying to protect them from the sudden surge and crush of the crowd as people jammed forward, their furious panic abruptly redirected from the apes to Dreyfus’s failure. Dreyfus’s guards held their rifles across their bodies and forced the crowd back, but the circle of space around the Colony’s leader was getting smaller by the moment.
    This is going to turn violent , Malcolm thought. Any second now.
    Dreyfus seemed to be thinking the same thing. His voice pitched higher as he shouted into the megaphone.
    “I was only waiting to—”
    “What if they come back?” a woman shouted between two of his guards. They shoved her back, but the crowd was on the verge of clawing its way through the cordon. Malcolm started to look around for the best way to get the hell out of there if the situation really spiraled out of control.
    Dreyfus climbed part of the way up the scaffolding that supported the parapet. He waved for silence, but the crowd’s panic was a feedback loop. They were almost beyond any one person’s ability to keep them from rioting.
    “If they come back,” he began, and realized not enough of them could hear him. Malcolm saw him frightened—maybe for the first time ever—and he began again, louder this time. “ If they come back, they’re gonna be sorry they ever did! ”
    This got the crowd’s attention. They wanted a rallying point. They needed someone to focus their attention and their emotions, to give them a place to displace their anxiety about this new… threat?
    Were the apes a threat?
    Malcolm wasn’t sure.
    The crowd settled down somewhat. They were still rowdy, still shouting, but Dreyfus saw that he had a chance to make a point.
    “We may not have the manpower this city once did, but we have the firepower. Those stockpiles left behind by FEMA, the National Guard, we have it all.” He let that sink in, gauging the reaction of the crowd. They continued to be restive, still on edge, but for the moment most of them were listening.
    “Look, I know why you’re scared,” Dreyfus continued. “I’m scared, too, believe me. But I recognize the trust you all placed in me, I do. We’ve been through hell together. When we settled here, it was because we’d had enough of living in fear, living like animals. We spent four years fighting that virus, then another four fighting each other after the city came apart.
    “It