The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  It roared as it flung the boat away.

  Then the rest of the pack of green dragons—river dragons, Hamish guessed—started attacking the other boats. Princes boarded them. Kings smashed them. The emperor rampaged among them, standing waist-deep in the lake.

  Hamish’s boat powered westward and as the force of the wave behind it diminished, Hamish turned off the underwater floodlights and hit the gas.

  The shore was only fifty metres away.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’ Wolfe urged.

  Hamish was peering forward when one of the decoy boats landed with a splash right in front of his boat, missing the bow by metres, thrown by the furious emperor.

  He banked around it.

  ‘Faster, man!’ Wolfe yelled.

  ‘We’re going as fast as we can!’ Hamish said. ‘This thing isn’t built for speed!’

  They were twenty metres from the shore when the boat simply stopped moving. Hamish pushed the throttle all the way forward. The boat revved loudly, but it didn’t respond.

  ‘Why aren’t we—?’ Syme shouted, turning.

  He cut himself off when he saw the answer: the emperor stood behind them, gripping their stern.

  ‘Jump!’ Hamish yelled, pushing open one of the forward windows and diving out through it.

  Syme and Wolfe did the same and they all leapt clear as the boat was pulled wholly out of the water. They landed with matching splashes as the emperor lifted the boat seventy feet into the air and shook it like a broken toy. It peered inside it, looking for them.

  Hamish swam for the shore. So did Syme.

  Wolfe swam for a jetty off to their right. He arrived at it, reached up and began hauling himself onto its wooden slats when something grabbed his leg and wrenched him downward. Wolfe was pulled so forcefully, his head smacked against the edge of the jetty.

  Hamish saw Wolfe’s neck snap as his head struck the jetty, the blow killing him instantly. It was a horrible way to die, but still better than being eaten alive by a dragon.

  Hamish swam harder. He wasn’t ashore yet.

  With every stroke, he waited for the talons of a dragon to clasp around one of his legs and yank him backwards, but then he hit the shore, scrambled to his feet and ran for the treeline beside the ruined castle. Syme also made it and joined him in the trees.

  They both looked back as a prince-sized green river dragon threw Wolfe’s lifeless body onto the jetty and began eating it with foul bone-cracking bites.

  Beyond that grisly image, the huge green emperor sank back into the lake, slowly sliding under the surface until all that remained were a few sets of ripples. Not one of the six boats they had launched from the café could be seen.

  Every one of them had been destroyed.

  CJ led Lucky, Li and Minnie through the tunnel that connected the Nesting Centre to the Birthing Centre.

  They emerged inside the Birthing Centre to find it empty—except of course for the crocs down in the pit and the olive swamp dragon. Having finished eating the red-bellied black prince it’d killed earlier, it had wrenched open one of the cages and was now halfway through devouring a crocodile.

  A digital clock on the wall read 3:30 a.m.

  Is it that late? CJ thought. She felt desperately tired but pure adrenalin was keeping her going.

  She found a medical examination room. It had a stainless steel exam table with gutters and a drain plus a few carts filled with surgical equipment. It reminded CJ of her veterinary clinic back at the San Francisco Zoo, only it was bigger in every respect, dragon-sized.

  She got Lucky to lie down on the exam table, left side up. In the light of her helmet flashlight’s beam, she peered at the wound on the dragon’s torso.

  It looked terrible: it was a hideous slash, ragged at the edges, at least two feet long. Blood and pus oozed over exposed flesh.

  CJ threw on a pair of rubber gloves and some anti-spray goggles and then grabbed a suture kit from one of the supply carts. She set about cleaning the wound. Li found a flashlight in a nearby cupboard, switched it on and held it over CJ’s shoulder, providing more much-needed light.

  Minnie watched. ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘I’m an animal doctor, yes,’ CJ said as she found an ampoule of local anaesthetic in one of the cupboards and injected it near the gaping wound.

  She frowned. She had to close the wound. But the gash was so wide and Lucky’s hide so thick, simple stitches wouldn’t be strong enough: she would have to use staples.

  Which would hurt, despite the anaesthetic.

  ‘Lucky. White Head sorry . . . big big pain . . .’ she said before, shwack, she punched in the first staple.

  Lucky howled.

  Twenty-four staples later, the wound was secure and Lucky lay with her head pressed on its side against the steel table, panting, exhausted.

  CJ stroked the dragon’s brow. Lucky looked up at her plaintively.

  ‘This’ll make you feel a little better.’ CJ gave her a jab of Xylazine, a muscle relaxant, and the dragon sighed and visibly relaxed.

  CJ ran her fingers over the small box attached to the left side of Lucky’s skull. She gazed at the wires that ran from it into her brain.

  It got her thinking.

  Lucky’s implant was special. It allowed for communication between her and humans.

  But like all the other dragons, when she’d been an infant, Lucky would have had the other standard chip inserted into her brain, the one that sent an electric charge into the pain centre when she touched the domes and which also contained a small wad of plastic explosive. CJ recalled the x-ray images of a dragon skull she had seen during the tour, showing the chip behind the dragon’s left eye.

  She leaned close to Lucky’s side-turned head, peered at her left eye.

  Lucky’s eye was the size of a softball, a huge aqueous orb with a splotchy iris and a slit pupil.

  CJ’s gaze moved from the dragon’s eye to its yellow-and-black skull. With her spiky crest and osteoderms, Lucky’s head was heavily armoured even before you got to the skull. Getting a chip inside it would’ve been difficult.

  ‘Unless they went through the eye socket . . .’ CJ said aloud.

  She snatched up another ampoule of local anaesthetic and jabbed it near Lucky’s eyebrow. Then she grabbed a pair of scissor-like reverse-pincers and a curved silver surgical instrument.

  Lucky saw it and grunted in panic. ‘White Head . . . hurt Lucky?’

  ‘White Head like Lucky. White Head help Lucky. Lucky trust White Head,’ she said.

  The dragon didn’t reply. CJ wasn’t sure the word ‘trust’ was in its vocabulary. But Lucky did relax, gruffly exhaling as she tilted her head slightly lower, allowing CJ to work.

  Trusting her.

  CJ used the pincers to hold open Lucky’s eyelid, before she reached in with the curved instrument and . . .

  . . . gently popped Lucky’s eyeball out of its socket!

  Li gasped.

  Minnie clutched her mouth to stop herself from throwing up.

  The eyeball dangled from the optic nerve, still connected. CJ laid the huge eyeball carefully on Lucky’s snout and not even noticing the indescribable grossness of what she had just done, grabbed a penlight and peered in through the exposed eye socket into Lucky’s skull.

  ‘There you are . . .’ she said.

  She could see it on the front of Lucky’s brain, directly behind the eye socket: a small metal chip the size of a quarter. It looked like a spider, with eight wires stretching out from it, latching onto the brain.

  Beyond that, it was quite crude. It had some circuitry on it plus a tiny silver cylinder that CJ guessed was the plastic explosive.

  CJ grabbed a pair of long-armed surgical scissors.

  ‘Stay still,’ she said to Lucky as, leading with the scissors, she reached inside the dragon’s eye socket.

  Her hand fitted easily, the socket was so wide, and with a few deft snips, she cut the eight wires. Then she reached in with some forceps and, looking
more like a bomb defuser than a vet, ever-so-gently removed the chip.

  It came out of the eye socket.

  CJ placed it gently on a bench top on the far side of the examination room.

  Then she returned to Lucky’s side and carefully reinserted the dragon’s eyeball, manoeuvring the optic nerve gently back into the skull first. The huge eyeball slotted back into place, rolling around in the socket before Lucky blinked a few times and it was back in place.

  ‘You, my yellow friend,’ CJ said, ‘are no longer susceptible to any electromagnetic domes. Nor can those Chinese bastards blow your head off anymore.’

  Lucky just exhaled loudly, braying like a weary horse.

  As she removed her rubber gloves, CJ turned to Li. ‘Now. Li. I need a lesson in main power lines.’

  While Lucky recovered in the infirmary, CJ and Li sat down in a nearby office.

  It was 4:15 a.m.

  Working by the light of their two flashlights, Li grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a quick sketch of the zoo and its surrounds . . . to which he added some prominent dotted lines.

  ‘Here is the zoo,’ he said in Mandarin, ‘with the military airfield at the bottom left and the worker city at the top right. The two dotted lines entering the map from the corners are the main power lines.’

  ‘Got it,’ CJ said, also in Mandarin. ‘What I want to know is: if the dragons cut a main power cable, can it be repaired?’

  Li said, ‘In theory, yes, if you have some replacement high-voltage cable and an insulation-repair kit. You see, it’s not really the cable that is difficult to fix, it’s the insulation layer around it.’

  ‘How so?’ CJ asked.

  ‘Main power cables are not regular cables; you don’t just solder them back together. They’re heavy-gauge HVDC—high-voltage direct-current—cables with a thick insulating layer of cross-linked polyethylene. Because of the voltage flowing through them, they get very hot, which is why you need an insulation layer around them.

  ‘It’s the insulation layer that must be repaired correctly, without any air pockets or impurities. That’s why you need the insulation-repair kit: it lays down a new insulation layer around the HVDC cable without any imperfections. If you don’t get that right, you get no power.’

  ‘Do you guys keep any high-voltage cable and insulation-repair kits here at the zoo?’

  ‘Not inside the zoo, no,’ Li said. ‘As you can imagine, cuts in the main are rare, almost unheard of. But we have fully-equipped cable repair trucks at both outer power junctions, at the worker city and at the airfield. Those trucks have spools of HVDC cable and insulation-repair kits.’

  ‘Okay, right.’ CJ thought for a moment. ‘Damn it, I need more people . . .’

  As if on cue, there came a crackling sound from a nearby battery-operated CB radio, hanging from a hook.

  ‘Chipmunk, this is Bear. Do you read me? This is the 20 at 20 call. I tried at 3:20 but got no answer. Do you copy?’

  It was Hamish.

  CJ snatched up the radio. ‘Bear, I’m here!’

  The voice at the other end lit up. ‘Chipmunk! You’re alive!’

  ‘Only just. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the waste management facility. Syme is still with me but we lost Wolfe. We had a couple of close calls and our escapes weren’t exactly works of art, but you know what Dad used to say, you’ve got to fail a few times before you succeed.’

  CJ blinked suddenly at his words.

  ‘You’ve got to fail before you succeed . . .’ she said absently.

  An idea began to form in her mind.

  She snapped out of it. ‘You called at just the right time, Bear. The dragons are about to bring down the outer dome and we have to stop them.’

  ‘How about we just leave this clusterfuck of a zoo to the punks who built it and get the hell out of here? I don’t particularly like the idea of saving their asses while they’re trying to kill me.’

  ‘There’s another nest, Hamish. A bigger one,’ CJ said.

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  CJ added, ‘The Chinese only found a small nest. If the dragons get out, they’ll go and wake the other nest and then there’ll be a whole lot more dragons. The entire populations of any towns or cities near here will be slaughtered. Then the dragons will fly away and open more nests and it’ll be an exponential expansion, a plague of dragons. We can’t let that happen.’

  Over in the waste management facility, Hamish swallowed hard.

  ‘Okay. What do you need me to do?’ he said.

  ‘Can you get to the military airfield?’

  Hamish was standing near the huge barred external gates of the waste management facility. Through them he could see the many lights of the military airfield a few miles away across a flat plain.

  He turned back to face the waste management hall, searching for a vehicle he could use . . . and he found one.

  ‘I think we can do that, yes,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘I need you to get to that airfield and protect the emplacements there. There’ll be about fifteen of them and apparently they look like concrete pillboxes. You won’t be able to hold the dragons out forever, but I need you to hold that dome up for as long as you can.’

  ‘What about you? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to the worker city,’ CJ said. ‘Oh, and Hamish?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘There are two new dragons and they, well, breathe fire,’ CJ said.

  ‘Of course they do,’ Hamish said wryly. ‘CJ, how do you know about this bigger nest and all that?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to a dragon,’ CJ said simply. ‘Gotta fly now. Out.’

  CJ clicked off, thinking. ‘Sometimes you have to fail before you succeed . . .’ she said.

  She pursed her lips in thought. Then she turned to Li. ‘You,’ she said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I need you and one of those cable repair trucks. And I need you to come with me to the worker city. You up for it?’

  Li thought for a moment. ‘You really think the dragons will grow in number if they get out of here? That they will open other nests?’

  ‘Yes,’ CJ said. ‘And then the dragons they release will open more nests. The numbers will get very big, very fast.’

  Li nodded. ‘Then I will come with you to the worker city.’

  CJ turned to Minnie. ‘As for you, little one, we have to keep you out of harm’s way till this is over.’ She took the little girl’s hand and led her to a barred cage in the corner. ‘You’ll be safe here. Just do not leave this cell until I come back to get you, okay?’

  ‘Yes, CJ,’ Minnie said.

  CJ grabbed another flashlight, some food and some water from a nearby office and gave it to Minnie before she closed the barred door over her face.

  Then CJ returned to Lucky in the exam room.

  The dragon was standing now, testing the staples and stretching its wings. When expanded, the great leathery things almost filled the room.

  ‘Lucky good?’ CJ asked.

  Lucky mewed. ‘Lucky strong . . . White Head good human . . .’

  ‘Lucky . . . fight?’

  The dragon turned to face CJ, a look of steely determination on her expressive face. ‘Lucky . . . White Head . . . fight.’

  Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

  Lucky soared high above the rectangular valley that contained the Great Dragon Zoo of China with CJ and Li on her back. It was almost five in the morning—an hour till dawn—and deprived of any kind of electrical power, the zoo was now just a shadowy collection of blackened landforms and buildings. The rain had stopped and the storm clouds had passed, leaving a beautiful star-filled sky and a glorious full moon above it all.

  After about ten minutes of flying, CJ spotted a cluster of man-made structures a few miles beyond the northeastern corner of the zoo.

  The worker city.

  Seen from the
air, it appeared to jut up from the plain: a few blocks of apartment buildings and office towers, warehouses and parks, and, snaking its way through them, a winding river. A couple of bridges spanned the river.

  It was, to CJ, yet another example of China’s amazing ability to simply build whatever it needed. The Chinese needed a miniature city here, so they’d just built one.

  Several buildings were still under construction. Hammerhead cranes towered above them while the exposed levels of unfinished towers lay open to the elements.

  There was only one problem.

  The city was on fire.

  Fires blazed all over it: from the upper storeys of buildings, to the shops at street level and overturned cars and buses.

  The master dragons had been through here.

  Unlike the zoo, the worker city still had power thanks to its external main power line. Amid the many fires, building lights glimmered and the streetlights were on.

  Staying high, CJ peered into the urban chasms.

  It was strange to see city streets so deserted and empty. Car alarms wailed, calling for owners who would never return. There were no people in sight.

  The worker city was now a ghost city.

  And then she saw the first dragon.

  A huge grey emperor lumbered up onto the tallest building of the worker city and perched itself on the summit. There in the orange firelight, it raised its snout to the heavens and roared.

  Twenty other grey dragons—kings and princes—swarmed up the other buildings, clambering up their sides, and joined their emperor roaring into the night.

  ‘Grey dragons smell Lucky . . . smell White Head . . . ’ Lucky’s electronic voice said in CJ’s ear. ‘Grey dragons . . . mean dragons . . .’

  ‘They’re warning us off, but also . . .’ CJ cut herself off.

  They were not all looking in CJ’s direction. Some of the greys were facing away from her, looking to the northeast.

  CJ listened more closely, and with her trained ears, she detected something extra in their bellowing. There was a plaintive tone to it, a kind of keening. The keening of a dragon population that had laid claim to a territory . . . only to be pushed out by a bigger fish.