The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  In answer to the unasked question, he clenched his teeth and raised his 9mm pistol, aiming it squarely at CJ’s head—

  —just as the entire wall of windows behind him shattered and an eight-ton Chinese Army troop truck came flying in through it.

  CJ dived left, pulling the wounded Johnson with her as the troop truck smashed through the windows on the eastern side of the restaurant and bounced up its broad levels.

  CJ glimpsed the red-bellied black emperor that had hurled the truck at the restaurant. It banked away before pulling up, its wings spread wide, and landing on the roof of the restaurant with a loud, floor-shaking thump.

  The troop truck ploughed through tables and chairs, sliding on its side right through the circle of commandos that had been threatening CJ. It ran right over the lead trooper and two other commandos before crushing two more when its side-turned grille smashed them against the wall.

  While CJ had dived left, Li had dived right, only to have a section of the restaurant’s ceiling come crashing down on top of him. The young electrician’s shout was cut off as he was buried beneath the rubble.

  The truck came to a halt and it was only when the noise of its spectacular entry had subsided that CJ heard the groans of the men inside it.

  The dragon must have picked the truck up somewhere—with the troops inside it—and flung it at the restaurant.

  Wind and rain whipped in through the gaping thirty-foot-wide hole in the eastern side of the restaurant. The open sky loomed beyond the opening. The valley floor yawned a thousand feet below it.

  CJ lay on her belly beside Johnson inside the darkened restaurant, staring in disbelief at the side-turned troop truck.

  There was a truck inside the restaurant. The mountaintop restaurant.

  And then the other dragons came.

  They came screaming in through the truck-sized opening in the side of the restaurant.

  Red-bellied black princes, purple royal princes, even a couple of eastern grey princes: there must have been twenty of them.

  CJ’s eyes went wide.

  It was a veritable invasion of dragons.

  They launched themselves at the Chinese commandos, leaping astride them, ripping out their throats. A couple of the Chinese commandos managed to get off a few shots, only for the dragons to overwhelm them and throw them to the floor and start eating them alive. Screams filled the air.

  And just when CJ didn’t think it could get any crazier, the whole southeastern section of the restaurant was wrenched away.

  The sound of rending steel drowned out the screams of the commandos and where only moments before there had been neatly laid tables and chairs and soft lamplight, now there was a gaping hole of loose wires and shredded floorboards and a hundred-foot-wide stretch of emptiness!

  CJ saw an emperor dragon flying away with an entire section of the restaurant gripped in its claws. It dropped it, circled back and proceeded to stick its massive head in through the great hole it had created. Its roar sent wineglasses toppling and plates smashing to the floor.

  Amid all this pandemonium, CJ shoved Johnson over a serving counter and into the kitchen. She dived over the counter after him just as a black prince snapped at her heels. Go-Go threw himself through the swinging kitchen door, the OUT door used by waiters and waitresses.

  It was a standard industrial kitchen: there were five long island benches with gas stoves and hotplates, while one wall featured ten ovens. Pots and pans and cooking utensils hung from hooks in the ceiling.

  CJ threw Johnson’s arm over her shoulder and hurried away from the counter. She needed to find somewhere she could—

  There!

  She spied a dumb waiter off to her right. Like everything else in the zoo, the box-like miniature elevator was oversized; Johnson would fit inside it easily. It also had sturdy industrial doors. It would be a decent hiding place.

  Johnson was weighing her down. She’d never outrun the dragons with him on her shoulder. If they were going to get out of this zoo alive, she was going to have to hide him somewhere safe and come back and get him later.

  She hurled him into the open dumb waiter and said, ‘Stay in here. I have to find a way to contact the outside world. I’ll come back for you later, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Hey,’ Johnson groaned. ‘Thanks.’

  CJ shrugged. ‘I’ll probably be dead in five minutes, so don’t get your hopes up. Mind you, given that we both might die soon . . .’ She leaned forward and, surprising herself a little, gave him a quick impulsive kiss on the cheek.

  Then CJ pulled the dumb waiter’s doors closed over Johnson’s surprised face.

  CJ stepped back into the kitchen proper to find Go-Go turning dials on all the ovens.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she called.

  ‘They may be smart,’ Go-Go said, ‘but we’re smarter. We unleash the gas, then we blow this place on our way out.’

  CJ could already smell the gas from the ovens. It wasn’t the best plan ever but it wasn’t a bad one either.

  Go-Go moved down the line of ovens, stepping close to the serving counter CJ had dived over to get into the kitchen.

  ‘Go-Go,’ she warned, ‘don’t get too close to the—’

  It happened so fast, CJ hardly even saw it.

  A skeletal black claw reached over the counter, grabbed Go-Go by the arm and yanked him bodily out over it.

  CJ saw Go-Go’s face go slack as the dragon outside slammed him up against the counter. Life faded from his eyes as he slumped from CJ’s view. He would be dead before he hit the ground.

  CJ’s eyes boggled. ‘Jesus . . .’

  And then another prince pushed through the swinging door beside the counter.

  Red Face.

  Fresh blood dripped from his jaws. He glared at CJ.

  Beep-beep . . . beep-beep.

  CJ ran.

  Red Face sprang after her.

  CJ slid over a benchtop just as the dragon dived at her and slid over it, too, sending pots and pans clattering to the floor.

  But it was on its feet in a second, charging at her with a roar. CJ rolled as the dragon leapt astride her and lunged at her face with its mighty jaws—just as CJ snatched up a nearby frying pan and hit Red Face with it right on the snout.

  The dragon screeched and recoiled and CJ took the opportunity to bolt for the other exit from the kitchen: the IN door.

  CJ burst through the doorway—and immediately tripped on something and went sprawling to the floor, where she found herself staring into the blank, lifeless eyes of a dead Chinese commando who had no lower half to his body. He still gripped an MP-7 in one hand.

  CJ snatched up the submachine gun and stood—and realised that she had emerged in a war zone.

  The previously tranquil restaurant was now being pelted by wind and rain. A dozen princes feasted on dead commandos while two emperors yanked and tugged on the ceiling, trying, it seemed, to tear the place apart.

  Beside her, a maintenance closet had been ripped open by the dragons. Its contents lay strewn all over the floor: mops, brooms, dusters, even a couple of backpack-mounted vacuum cleaners.

  A roar from behind her made her spin.

  Red Face stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

  In the blink of an eye, CJ took in the situation.

  Kitchen: no good.

  The elevators: no good either; that meant running past a dozen dragons.

  She glanced to her right and saw the torn-open section that was once the southern side of the restaurant. Tables that had sat cosily beside the windows now teetered at the edge of a precipice, lashed by rain.

  She saw one of the vacuum cleaners by her feet. It was designed to be worn on someone’s back and it had a long power cord, maybe ninety feet.

  And she smelled the gas wafting out from the ovens in the kitchen.

  Windows, precipice, power cord, she thought.

  You’re gonna die anyway . . .

  ‘Screw it,’ CJ said to no-one as she grabbed the vacuum cl
eaner and bounded down the broad descending levels of the restaurant, dodging chairs and hurdling tables, heading for the open southern side of the structure.

  Red Face gave chase, flinging tables out of its path.

  CJ stopped at what had once been a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The world fell away before her: she was a thousand feet above the valley floor but about three hundred feet directly beneath her, a short way down the mountainside, she saw the cable car tunnel disappearing into the mountai—

  Beep-beep . . . beep-beep.

  She turned.

  Red Face had her cornered. He crouched low, tensed, ready to leap.

  Then the floor shook and CJ spun to see a gigantic emperor standing to her right, perched on the edge of the restaurant, grinning down at her. Girders moaned, straining under the weight of the beast.

  CJ backed away, uncoiling the power cord of the vacuum cleaner as she did so.

  The heels of her boots touched the edge of the precipice.

  Nowhere else to go. It was now or never.

  She had uncoiled the whole power cord by now, so she looped it around the splintered frame of a floor-to-ceiling window and knotted it. Then she slipped the vacuum cleaner onto her back.

  She sniffed the gas again and looked up at the dragons.

  ‘You assholes can’t breathe fire, can you? Try breathing this.’

  And she raised her MP-7 and fired it . . . not at the dragons, but at the doorway to the kitchen.

  She only needed one round to spark off some metal, a spark that would—

  One round sparked . . .

  . . . and with an almighty whoosh, the gas-filled kitchen exploded.

  A billowing cloud of flames burst forth from the kitchen, blowing the IN door off its hinges, sending tables and chairs and dragons flying.

  And as all this happened, CJ jumped out the window.

  CJ fell through the darkness.

  She dropped away from the restaurant with the vacuum cleaner on her back, its long power cord trailing above her as a billowing fireball blasted out from every window of the circular restaurant.

  If there was still glass in a window’s frame, it shattered. If there wasn’t, the fiery explosion just fanned out unimpeded.

  Seen from afar, for a brief instant, Dragon Mountain looked like an ancient lighthouse, with a sudden flare of orange at its summit.

  The dragons started crying out.

  CJ kept falling.

  And then her power cord went taut and her fall was arrested abruptly about ninety feet below the restaurant. CJ jolted to a halt. For a moment she just hung there, dead still, high above the world, about fifteen feet from the rocky flank of the mountain.

  She rocked back and forth to build some momentum and swing in toward the mountain. The force of her fall, however, had almost dislodged the cord from its socket in the vacuum cleaner. It had almost been torn clean off it. Now, as CJ swung, she felt that the cord was only attached to the vacuum cleaner by the barest of threads. Her first swing didn’t bring her close enough to the mountainside. She swung back out again . . . and the cord stretched even more, almost to breaking point. CJ arced back toward the mountainside as—snap!—the cord broke and she fell—

  —safely onto the rocky flank of Dragon Mountain. She’d made it, just.

  ‘Sheesh,’ she breathed. ‘Talk about out of the frying pan.’

  She wriggled out of the vacuum cleaner’s shoulder straps, discarded it and looked up to see flaming dragons flying out of the blazing restaurant, squealing. They burst out of the disc-shaped structure and made for the nearest lake.

  CJ didn’t have time to stop and watch. She started hurrying down the mountainside, heading for the cable car tunnel directly beneath her.

  Rain pelted her as she stumbled and slid down the side of the mountain until at last she arrived at the opening to the concrete tunnel and dropped into it.

  She landed on flat, clean cement. It was dry here. She was out of the rain.

  CJ peered outside. She was still high above the world—the now-darkened world of the Great Dragon Zoo. Looking south, she could see the dark outline of the main entrance building and the high encircling wall of the crater.

  She wondered where she could possibly go now and how she could possibly get there.

  She couldn’t steal a chopper. The dragons had been going after the choppers, presumably because they knew that the choppers were their jailers’ best weapon against them.

  She would have to get out of the zoo on f—

  Something struck her. A sharp blow across the face sent CJ flying backwards as a dragon landed inside the tunnel in front of her.

  Beep-beep . . . beep-beep.

  Red Face.

  A second and then a third red-bellied black prince joined him in the mouth of the tunnel: Melted Face and the fourth member of Red Face’s gang.

  CJ crawled desperately away from them, spittle and blood dripping from her mouth. She felt dizzy from the blow and her vision was blurred. The tunnel around her was maybe eighty metres long. She could never outrun them, even if she could have got to her feet.

  Spreadeagled on the floor, struggling to see, CJ slumped. She was officially fucked.

  Red Face crept forward.

  Beep-beep . . . beep-beep.

  CJ shut her eyes and waited for the end.

  Nothing happened.

  It was only then that CJ heard a long, deep-throated growl.

  She opened her eyes.

  Red Face had stopped a few paces short of her and was standing frozen on the spot, staring daggers at CJ.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. Red Face was staring past her—

  The growl had come from behind CJ.

  CJ turned . . .

  . . . and through blurred eyes, saw a yellowjacket prince standing in the concrete tunnel behind her.

  But not just any yellowjacket prince. It had a black-and-yellow saddle on its back.

  It was Lucky.

  Lucky growled again and CJ saw that the dragon was not addressing her: it was growling at Red Face and the other two red-bellied black dragons.

  She also noticed that Lucky’s growls were not simple animalistic grunts: they were a mix of deep-chested coos, throaty vibrations and sharp squawks. It was like a—

  With a startlingly quick swoop, Lucky took briefly to the air and landed in between CJ and the red-bellied blacks.

  It was claiming CJ from the red-bellies. Or . . .

  . . . CJ frowned . . .

  . . . defending her.

  Red Face snapped at Lucky with its jaws, only for the yellowjacket to lash out with a foreclaw and smack the red-bellied black prince on the snout.

  Lucky backed up, grunting softly.

  ‘What?’ CJ said aloud. Barely able to stand, bleeding and exhausted, her mind reeling, it seemed as if the dragon was grunting at her.

  Lucky grunted sharply again, but getting no response from CJ, the yellow dragon grabbed her with one foreclaw and shoved her backwards, thrusting her against the saddle on its back.

  CJ slammed up against the saddle. Did it really want her to—

  She dragged herself up into the saddle. Lucky wriggled slightly, assisting her, and suddenly CJ was sitting astride the dragon.

  The three red dragons fanned out, edging forward.

  There was a triple-point harness on the saddle’s pommel.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Cassandra?’ CJ said to herself as she fumbled with the harness, clipping it to her belt. She slid her feet into the stirrups.

  Lucky backed further away from the three black princes.

  Red Face and his buddies looked absolutely furious. They hissed and then . . .

  . . . leapt forward, foreclaws raised and jaws bared, but Lucky was quicker, and the yellowjacket spun and took to the air and suddenly CJ found herself zooming at phenomenal speed back down the horizontal concrete tunnel!

  The walls of the tunnel blurred with superfast motion as she shot through it on the back
of the dragon.

  Lucky flew like a missile. She pinned her ears back and streamlined her body for maximum speed. Her tail slithered behind her, long and sleek, guiding her like a rudder.

  CJ glanced behind her and saw the three red-bellied black dragons in hot pursuit, wings flapping, bodies also extended.

  Lucky shot through the darkened cable car station in the heart of the mountain where she banked right, swooping over the smashed cable car and blasting into the eastern tunnel with the three red-bellied blacks right on her tail.

  Again the tight walls of the tunnel became streaking blurs. Drawing on her experience riding horses, CJ leaned low and forward in the saddle, trying to diminish the drag effect she must have been having on Lucky’s flight.

  And then—shoom—they burst out into the night sky and rain slammed against her face and suddenly CJ found herself high above the world on the back of a dragon!

  A wave of vertigo struck her as she beheld the landscape far below: the smaller pinnacle was directly ahead of her, a river town lay to her right, while the rim of the crater loomed level with her.

  It was simply bizarre to be this high up and not be inside an aeroplane of some sort. CJ had paraglided once before but that was nothing compared to this.

  This was rocket fast.

  Lucky banked hard to the right and CJ felt her stomach lurch. The world tilted and she thought she was going to fall off, but the harness held her firmly in the saddle.

  The three black princes were still close behind them.

  Lucky dived, down and around the pinnacle, but they stayed close. Then Lucky cut left, banking in an outrageously tight arc and CJ felt the G-forces assailing her body and she knew she was about to black out.

  She did everything she could to keep her eyes open as Lucky brought them up toward the eastern wall of the crater and CJ suddenly saw the body of a yellowjacket emperor dragon rise up in front of her, filling her field of vision. It bellowed, and as CJ rushed under its bat-like wings she spun around in her saddle and saw the emperor swipe at the three pursuing red-bellied black princes.

  Red Face and his gang scattered at the sight of the much larger emperor and flew off into the rain-soaked night.