The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  Bizarre.

  The cable car was still tilting slowly away from the waterfall. CJ saw the landing platform only a short jump away, but then she caught sight of a shadow moving behind the curtain of water just a few feet from her.

  A second black prince, also earless.

  At first CJ couldn’t figure out what it was doing there. Its head was bent over something. Then she saw it wrench something off the roof of the cable car with its jaws and with horror CJ realised what that something was.

  It was the cable car’s snub antenna.

  The device that generated the cable car’s sonic shield.

  ‘CJ! Come on!’ Hamish yelled.

  Just then, the dragon pushed its head through the curtain of water.

  It took a step forward, moving like a tiger, emerging from the wall of water one claw at a time, its head bent low.

  The cable car groaned again. It was leaning ever further, about to topple off the ledge on which it was so precariously balanced.

  Zhang leapt away to safety.

  ‘Jump!’ Hamish yelled.

  And they jumped, together . . .

  . . . just as the second dragon lunged at them, but it missed, and as they dived off the cable car at the very last moment—grabbing onto the end of the landing platform with their fingertips, their legs flailing behind them—the cable car toppled off the face of the waterfall, taking the two black princes and the unfortunate bartender with it.

  The big double-decker car fell a full eighty feet down the face of the waterfall before it landed with a great splash in the roiling whitewater at the base and went under.

  CJ and Hamish dangled from the end of the landing platform, high above the dizzying drop.

  Greg . . . reached down and hauled CJ up.

  ‘We can’t stay here!’ he shouted over the din of the falls, showing more coolness under pressure than CJ would’ve given him credit for.

  Within moments, she and Hamish were on their feet and running with the group along the length of the landing platform as dragons wheeled and shrieked and shot by overhead. They dashed into the ruined castle just as the red-bellied black emperor that had started the whole thing rushed by in a hurricane of wind and fury.

  Hamish slammed the doors of the castle shut behind them.

  Silence, save for the muffled sound of the waterfall outside.

  Wolfe and Perry both fell to the floor, breathless. Hu and Zhang just looked shell-shocked. Greg . . . checked on the US Ambassador, who leaned against the wall, soaking wet.

  CJ peered up at the interior of the castle around them.

  They were in a high-ceilinged entry atrium. It was the size of an aeroplane hangar and it looked old and decrepit, with gaping holes in the ceiling and charred walls. Torn tapestries hung from crossbeams. Two sweeping staircases ran in matching semicircles on either side of the hall, leading to a chamber of some sort. But one of the staircases was useless: it had a ragged void in its middle, presumably created by an angry dragon.

  There were no dragons in sight.

  There was, however, one out-of-place feature: high up near the ceiling, a modern black catwalk ran around the wall.

  There was no ladder to it. It entered the hall from the north and exited to the south. At first CJ couldn’t figure out what it was. Then she realised: it was for guests to walk on and observe the dragons in their castle home.

  ‘Well, this isn’t going to look good in The New York Times,’ she said. ‘Okay, what do we do now? Where can we go?’

  No-one replied.

  She jerked her chin at Hu. ‘I said, what the hell do we do now and where the hell can we go!’

  Hu was still in shock. His jaw quivered. He couldn’t speak.

  ‘The administration building,’ Zhang said quietly. ‘It’s on the western wall, right behind this castle—’

  Boom!

  The big door behind them shook, struck from outside.

  Boom!

  Again.

  An enraged roar assaulted their ears.

  The emperor.

  ‘We gotta move, people,’ CJ said, running for the intact sweeping staircase. ‘We gotta move now . . .’

  More shrieks rang out from outside. Two shadows whipped by overhead, shooting past one of the holes in the ceiling: red-bellied black princes.

  The group hurried up the curving staircase.

  They were almost at the top of the stairs when the main doors to the atrium blasted inwards in an explosion of splinters.

  The red-bellied black emperor stood in the doorway, giant and menacing. It bellowed, its jet-engine roar shaking the walls of the castle.

  ‘Hurry!’ CJ called as the emperor thundered through the doorway, stomping into the atrium with great, whomping strides.

  They dashed up the last few steps just as two red-bellied black princes smashed through a pair of stained-glass windows on the other side of the hall and landed at the top of the other, broken staircase.

  ‘This way! Into the throne room!’ Zhang called, leading them into the chamber directly behind the atrium.

  They all hurried into it . . . only to stop dead in their tracks.

  An absolutely gigantic yellowjacket emperor dragon lay before them, curled in a ball in the throne room of the castle.

  Velvet curtains and torn tapestries hung around it. CJ saw some black steel spiral steps nearby that led up to another guest catwalk running around the ceiling of this room.

  The massive yellowjacket was the picture of calm repose. Its colouring was magnificent, brighter than the colouring of the little female CJ had seen earlier, the one named Lucky. This one’s yellow stripes were the most vivid yellow; its black stripes, the deepest black.

  It raised its gigantic head and stared at the group curiously. Its slit eyes were huge and unblinking. And it still had ears, CJ noticed immediately.

  Then, suddenly, two yellowjacket princes popped up from within the emperor’s embrace. They had been sleeping inside its massive limbs and although they themselves were nine feet tall, they looked positively tiny beside the emperor.

  Ever the loyal lieutenants, they leapt to their emperor’s defence, placing themselves between it and this group of intruders.

  One of the princes hissed at CJ and approached—

  —only to recoil with a piercing squeal.

  It had struck the sonic shield emitted by her watch and CJ saw that the princes also still had their ears. The shield generated by her watch still worked.

  And then the yellowjacket emperor growled.

  It was a sound of the most intense malevolence and it came from deep within the giant creature. The ultimate animal warning. The walls of the throne room quivered, so great was the sound.

  CJ held her breath.

  They had stepped into its lair, its territory, and it wasn’t happy about it.

  CJ found herself wondering: could their little sonic shields really withstand an emperor’s charge? It didn’t seem to her that they could.

  Then, with surprising speed, the giant yellowjacket sprang from its position and leapt at them!

  There was nothing CJ could do. Nothing any of them could do. It was too fast.

  But the yellowjacket thundered over them and with a mighty thwack of flesh against flesh, it slammed into the red-bellied black emperor that had appeared in the doorway behind CJ’s group.

  Territorial behaviour, CJ recalled. That some puny little humans might have encroached upon the yellowjacket’s territory was one thing. But another emperor dragon, well, that could not be tolerated.

  The entire castle trembled as the two airliner-sized dragons went rolling back into the enormous entry atrium. For a few moments, the two beasts were a single entity, a mass of yellow-and-black limbs intertwined with red-and-black ones with two flailing tails added to the mix.

  The ground rumbled as they fought, jaws snapping, claws tearing.

  The two yellowjacket princes leapt to the aid of their emperor and joined the fight with the earless red-
bellied black emperor—at the same time as the two red-bellied princes from the atrium charged in to defend their massive brother.

  CJ didn’t need to be offered another chance. ‘Come on!’ she called. ‘Get up onto that catwalk and follow it out of this place!’

  The group obeyed.

  Within moments they were up on the catwalk, running south. Sure enough, it led out of the castle, to a long pedestrian bridge that stretched over to a vehicle turnaround attached to the ring road.

  It was all designed, CJ figured, so that guests could be dropped off here, walk through the ruined castle on the elevated catwalks, and then be picked up later at another turnaround.

  Right then, she didn’t care. She hoped by now that some kind of security force or rescue team had been dispatched to come and get them. If she couldn’t get her group to the administration building, then at least she had to get them out in the open where they could be spotted by a closed circuit camera or a rescue chopper.

  Running out in front of the others, she dashed across the pedestrian bridge and arrived at the turnaround. About two hundred metres to the south, down the black bitumen ring road, was a tunnel that bored into a sloping section of the western crater wall. At the moment, the mouth of the tunnel was sealed by a thick-barred gate. Towering above the tunnel, built into the sloping hillside, was the administration building.

  Zhang saw it, too. ‘There is an internal entrance to the admin building inside that tunnel! Go!’

  The eight desperate humans—six Americans and two Chinese—bolted down the roadway, running as fast as they could toward the gated tunnel.

  As he ran, Hu Tang’s mind swirled with a mix of incomprehension, fear and outright fury. He could hardly think. This was a disaster. A disaster. How had it happened? How had it been allowed to happen? Some of the dragons had ripped out their own ears from the roots to outwit the sonic shields. How had no-one seen this coming? When they regained control, he swore, heads would fucking roll.

  He looked about himself. He was running alongside CJ and Zhang and the two New York Times men. Behind them, Greg Johnson ran with the ambassador.

  They were about a hundred metres from the tunnel when the grilled gate sealing it began to open.

  It slid upward and three armoured vehicles came speeding out of it: two Shorland four-by-four armoured personnel carriers and a white-painted six-wheeled Hotspur field ambulance.

  The Shorlands were painted olive-green like army vehicles while the white Hotspur looked like the UN peacekeeping vehicle that it usually was.

  The thick-barred gate guarding the mouth of the tunnel slid closed behind the three vehicles.

  Relief flooded through Hu when he saw them. ‘An Emergency Response Team! They’re coming for us!’

  The three armoured vehicles boomed down the ring road, coming toward the group . . .

  . . . and sped right past them.

  Hu’s jaw dropped. ‘What the—?’

  The cars zoomed away down the ring road, racing off into the distance before entering another tunnel about a kilometre to the north. That was just a regular tunnel, with no gate sealing it.

  ‘We’re not the most important VIPs here today,’ CJ said wryly. ‘They’re going to save those other guys. We gotta do this ourselves, on foot.’

  Hu was beyond furious. ‘This is outrageous . . .’ he fumed.

  ‘Wait, look!’ Hamish yelled.

  He was pointing up the ring road in the direction the rescue team had gone.

  Two hardtop jeeps were coming back down the road, coming toward them at considerable speed.

  ‘That’s our ride!’ CJ called. ‘Wave them down!’

  The group stepped out into the middle of the road, waving at the jeeps.

  The oncoming jeeps showed no sign of stopping. They just kept speeding wildly down the road.

  Hu Tang could make out two men in each of the cars: workmen of some kind, no doubt fleeing the dragons. He stepped out in front of the others, raising one arm, palm outward. He knew with his distinctive patch of white hair, the workmen would recognise him and render assistance.

  The two jeeps didn’t stop. Like the rescue team before them, they just swerved wildly around the group and kept on going.

  Hu was stunned. ‘What—’

  ‘You cowardly motherfuc—’ Aaron Perry shouted, but he was cut off by a loud crash as two red-bellied black princes shot out of the sky and slammed into the two jeeps from the side.

  The two jeeps were lifted fully off the road by the stunning impacts, and they flipped and tumbled as their inertia carried them a further twenty metres down the ring road. One jeep ended up upside-down, on its roof, while the other landed with an awkward thump back on its wheels, seventy metres from the barred tunnel but now facing the wrong way.

  As the dust settled around them, Hu saw no movement within the two crumpled cars.

  But the two dragons weren’t done. They wrenched off the jeeps’ doors and reached in with their claws to extract the bloodied but live occupants: four Chinese zoo workers in overalls.

  These two princes, Hu noticed, were also earless, so the cars’ sonic shields were useless against them.

  ‘Quickly!’ CJ hissed, grabbing Hu by the sleeve. ‘Get off the road!’

  They hurdled the low guardrail at the edge of the ring road and dived in among the shrubs on the slope below it. The others hurriedly followed.

  From the cover of the bushes beside the roadway, CJ stared at the two crashed jeeps, the two prince dragons and the four Chinese workmen.

  The princes were fearsome-looking things: nine feet tall, with high crests and blazing red bellies. With brutal efficiency, the first dragon pinned a workman under one of its forelimbs and proceeded to bite down on the man’s left arm, wrenching it off in a fountain of blood.

  The man screamed in agony.

  The second dragon promptly did the same to a second and then a third workman, while the first black prince ripped the left arm off the last worker. This last worker tried to flee but the dragon just knocked him to the ground casually and held him down with one of its hind legs.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Hamish whispered.

  ‘They’re biting off the workers’ watches . . .’ CJ said, ‘ . . . to remove their shields. Quick, move,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t want to be here in the next few seconds—’

  With a blood-curdling shriek, a much larger red-bellied black dragon arrived on the scene, landing on the ring road with a weighty whump.

  If the princes looked fierce, and the emperor had been simply gigantic, the king looked absolutely terrifying. Terrifying, cruel and yet somehow regal. Its long neck was arched, rearing back before it curved forward, giving the creature a real sense of majesty.

  It was as long as a city bus and each spike of its magnificent crest was taller than a man. Its tail appeared to have a mind of its own: it swept up behind the massive beast, slithering back and forth, a sinister barb at its tip.

  Crucially, CJ noted, it had ears. Hence the need for the removal of the workmen’s watches.

  ‘The princes are giving the king a food offering,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’ Johnson said.

  ‘It’s a feeding ritual, a hierarchical feeding ritual. The lesser pack members catch the food and give it to the pack leader to eat first. They only eat after he does.’

  One of the princes pushed two of the workers toward the king. The workers, clutching their recently amputated arms and screaming in terror, could hardly stand. One dropped to his knees, wailing.

  The king dragon peered down at the workers imperiously.

  Then it lunged forward and CJ heard a hideous crunch and then the dragon lifted its head again and suddenly one of the workmen was only half as tall as he had been.

  CJ’s eyes widened in horror.

  It had bitten the man in two with a single bite!

  The dead workman’s legs toppled to the roadway.

  The king then tilted its head sideways, scooped the leg
s up and gulped them down, too. Then it turned its gaze on the second, kneeling workman.

  Its huge mouth opened at the edges as it glared down at the man, revealing its fearsome fangs. It looked like a smile, the cruel smile of the ultimate predator toying with its prey.

  The kneeling workman held up his remaining hand pathetically, as if that would do him any good.

  It didn’t.

  He simply exploded in a spray of blood as the king’s jaws clamped down on him like a bear trap.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .’ Syme breathed.

  Hamish came up beside CJ. ‘Sis, excuse my language, but what the fuck do we do now?’

  CJ was wondering the same thing.

  She turned to look at the nearby tunnel, the one giving access to the administration building, currently resealed by the thick-barred gate.

  ‘Those workmen were trying to get to the admin building,’ she said. ‘Which means they could open that gate . . .’

  Hamish said, ‘You think—’

  ‘Yep. There’s a remote control in one or both of those jeeps. A remote that opens the gate.’

  Hu heard them. ‘You want one of us to go out there and get into one of those cars?’

  ‘Yes,’ CJ said, ‘while the rest of us run down to the tunnel, to be there when the gate opens.’

  Wolfe said, ‘And how exactly are we going to choose who goes on this suicide mission?’

  CJ ignored him, turned to Hamish. ‘We have to do this now, while they’re feeding. I was always quicker than you. Just be ready to close the gate behind me when I get there, okay?’

  ‘You got it,’ Hamish said.

  CJ made to move, but then she remembered something. She tore off her Great Dragon Zoo watch and thrust it into Hamish’s hand. ‘Here, take this. I don’t want any of those dragons spotting me out of the corner of their eye with a big blue sphere of light around me.’