The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  At that moment, two sudden flares of flame caught CJ’s eye off to the right, at the extreme northern edge of the ghost city: two billowing extensions of fire that lit up the night.

  Her gaze fell on an industrial complex over that way: it looked like a power substation, with a transformer farm and high steel fences. On its outer side, it was ringed by a curving arc of fifteen evenly spaced black concrete emplacements that looked like a miniature Maginot Line.

  The small army of red-bellied black dragons from the Nesting Centre—their red-and-black bodies were clearly discernible in the firelight—was gathered just beyond the power station. There were perhaps forty of them and they were led by their two masters, the superking and the superemperor.

  The two bursts of fire that CJ had seen had been fire-blasts from the two master dragons.

  They were blowing fire at the concrete emplacements, in particular, the very middle one.

  ‘No wonder the grey dragons are upset,’ CJ said. ‘The red-bellies barged into their city and took over.’

  Soaring high above the scene, careful to avoid being spotted by the two packs of dragons, CJ peered at the emplacements: the laser-emitting base stations that supported the outer dome.

  Illuminated by the fires and the ghostly streetlights, they did indeed look like wartime pillboxes, solid, low and sturdy.

  CJ flipped down her helmet’s visor—stuck to which were her oversized UV glasses—and beheld the dazzling red grid of the outer electromagnetic dome. It slanted into the sky from the fifteen emplacements.

  She flipped up the visor and looked more closely at the middle emplacement that was the object of the red-bellies’ assault.

  Alone among the fifteen emplacements, it was accessed by a service road coming in from the north. That road ran alongside a ditch in which she could see a reinforced concrete pipe: the high-voltage main power cable.

  The dragons were going directly for the source of the dome’s power.

  ‘Li!’ she called above the wind. ‘Where is the cable repair truck kept?’

  Gripping CJ’s waist, Li replied, ‘In a loading shed inside that substation! What are you planning to do?’

  ‘Right now, nothing,’ CJ said.

  ‘Nothing? I don’t understand,’ Li said.

  ‘What I mean,’ CJ said, ‘is that in order for us to succeed in this battle, we first need to fail.’

  CJ brought Lucky into a landing on a small hill overlooking the emplacements and from there, she, Lucky and Li watched the red-bellied black dragons assault the middle one.

  The dragons worked together with almost frightening efficiency.

  The masters blew acid-fire at the emplacement—or more precisely, at the soil under it, liquefying the soil. Then some king dragons stepped in and raked out the melted soil with their huge claws. Princes positioned behind them cleared that soil even further. Then the masters would return and blow more fire, creating more melted soil, which would then be cleared away again. It was a digging operation.

  The dragons had got a good head-start. They had already created a substantial hole in front of the middle emplacement. It must have been four storeys, or forty feet, deep.

  After a little more digging, the emplacement’s foundations were exposed: a thick wall of grey concrete. The master dragons turned their fire on the foundations.

  The two masters blew matching tongues of fire at the concrete foundations, softening them, before four red-bellied emperors did their part by flying in and flinging some buses and trucks right at the exposed foundations.

  The vehicles slammed into the concrete foundations, chipping away at them, cracking them.

  Then the masters blew more fire and the circuit continued until, on the fourth go-around, with a screech of rending rebars and the crunch of cracking concrete, the foundations of the middle emplacement could resist no more.

  They crumpled.

  And like a slow-falling tree, the emplacement toppled into the huge hole the dragons had created in front of it, tearing itself free of its power source.

  Sparks flew. Electricity flared.

  And where the middle emplacement had been there was now a huge void with a thick high-voltage cable and some other minor wires sticking out from it.

  The damage was done.

  CJ flipped down her special glasses.

  The dome was still there, only now it was not nearly as dazzling as it had been earlier. Now it was only half as bright as it had appeared before, since it was now only being emitted by the emplacements over at the airfield.

  The two masters squealed in triumph and immediately took to the air.

  They swept away to the southwest. Their army of red-bellied black dragons launched into the sky after them, heading in the direction of the airfield on the far side of the zoo: now the only thing standing between them and freedom.

  From her vantage point on the hill, CJ watched them fly off.

  She pulled out her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. The dragons are coming to you. I need you to hold them out for as long as you can.’

  ‘Copy that, Chipmunk,’ Hamish’s voice replied. ‘We’re almost at the airfield.’

  ‘Try to stay alive, little brother.’ CJ clicked off and turned to Li. ‘Okay. Time for us to go in.’

  They leapt onto Lucky’s back and zoomed down toward the worker city.

  Hamish Cameron was driving like a maniac down the road that connected the waste management facility to the military airfield, at the wheel of an absolute beast of a vehicle.

  Amid all the wreckage and debris inside the waste management facility, one truck had remained largely unscathed by the mayhem that had occurred there.

  A fire truck.

  It was one of the two superlong ladder trucks that had been parked in the cavernous hall when Hamish had first arrived there.

  Now, driven by Hamish with Kirk Syme beside him, the huge semitrailer-sized rig thundered across the plain between the zoo’s crater and the airfield. The extendable ladder on its roof bounced with every bump as the big truck boomed through the night.

  The airfield loomed before it.

  It was lit up like a Christmas tree: eighty floodlights blazed with white artificial light, illuminating cargo planes and fighter jets, storage hangars, an air traffic control tower, some support buildings and . . .

  . . . about thirty Chinese Army jeeps and trucks arrayed in a defensive line in front of the airfield, with over a hundred Chinese soldiers manning them, their rifles and RPGs pointed at the very road Hamish was now racing along. There were even four Type-99 tanks in the defensive line.

  ‘What are we driving into?’ Syme breathed.

  Hamish leaned out his window and looked up into the night sky behind him.

  A swarm of black shadows, perhaps forty of them, blotted out the stars, dark aerial wraiths.

  It was the flock of red-bellied black dragons and they were coming for the airfield.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re driving into,’ Hamish said. ‘The last stand.’

  With booming thruster-blasts, four small Chinese fighters took off from the airfield, screaming into the sky, shooting out over the plain toward the incoming dragons.

  They opened fire, sending tracer rounds lancing into the dragon pack.

  Three dragons dropped instantly, squealing. The rest of the pack scattered and the fighters shot through their midst.

  But then a few dragons, led by the superking, banked and gave chase and suddenly it was fighter jets versus dragons—while the rest of the dragon force, thirty-plus dragons led by the superemperor, descended upon the airfield.

  Hamish looked up at the incoming swarm of dragons. With their huge bat-like silhouettes, they looked positively fearsome.

  But then he spotted something else about them, something odd.

  All of the larger dragons—the kings and the emperors—were carrying objects in their claws.

  Hamish squinted to see what the objects were and when he finally saw them, he gaspe
d, ‘Oh, this is gonna be messy.’

  In their claws, the king dragons were holding Great Dragon Zoo cars and vans. The emperors, however, were carrying much larger objects: garbage trucks, whole pieces of the revolving restaurant, a section of the concrete ring road; one emperor even carried the smashed remains of the control tower that had once stood atop the administration building.

  The dragons swooped over Hamish’s fire truck—still half a mile from the airfield—and the battle began.

  The Chinese launched their defensive measures.

  RPGs shot into the sky. Gunfire rang out. The massive 125mm cannons on the four tanks boomed as they launched fragmentation rounds at the incoming creatures.

  In the face of this fire, the dragons squealed, roared, wheeled and exploded. But they kept on coming.

  Five dragons fell while the rest blasted through the wave of fire and, flying fast and low, the big ones released their improvised bombs.

  Suddenly it was raining cars, vans and garbage trucks. They sailed down out of the sky and slammed into the ranks of Chinese military vehicles, crushing soldiers in an instant, bowling their vehicles over. The heavier garbage trucks caused the most damage. They were simply lethal.

  Then came the larger objects.

  The piece of the revolving restaurant’s roof flattened a troop truck as it landed. The section of the ring road hit the ground with a colossal boom and tumble-rolled over two tanks and three troop trucks, crushing all of them. The control tower slammed into a hangar and took down all four of its walls before the roof caved in and the whole thing was levelled.

  And then, having expended their aerial weapons, the dragons themselves entered the battle zone . . .

  . . . and what followed was a bloodbath.

  The lead superemperor landed on a tank, crushing it with its talons before the great beast let loose with a tremendous tongue of fire that incinerated three Chinese jeeps and two troop trucks.

  Chinese soldiers fell to the ground, their skin melting before their eyes.

  King dragons grabbed jeeps and hurled them away. Emperors picked up the tanks and flung them down the runway, tumbling end over end.

  Up in the sky, the fighter jets returned, guns blazing, only this time three dragons—the superking, one emperor and one regular king—came streaking out of the air from the side, their bodies elongated, their wings pinned back.

  They flew at phenomenal speed and on a perfect intercepting course.

  As the three big dragons intersected with the fighters, the superking spewed fire at two of them, lashing their cockpits, melting the pilots in an instant. The two fighters exploded in mid-air.

  The emperor lashed out with a claw and tore another fighter’s right wing clear off and that fighter went screaming into the ground, crashing at full speed in a billowing explosion.

  The regular king simply collided with the last fighter and latched itself onto it, and to the pilot’s horror, the fighter lost all its aerodynamics and began spiralling toward the ground. A hundred feet off the ground, the king released it and the fighter crashed into the side of the zoo’s crater while the dragon just flew off, rejoining the other two as they headed for the battle at the airfield.

  Watching all of this from the safety of a bunker just outside the electromagnetic dome were Hu Tang and Colonel Bao. They had arrived there by car only fifteen minutes earlier.

  Their reinforced concrete bunker—a superstrong double-storey command post—sat just behind the line of fifteen emplacements that emitted the dome.

  There was movement everywhere in the bunker: technicians at consoles, soldiers on radios, officers peering through binoculars at the disaster unfolding outside. Monitors and plasma screens showed various views of the dragons’ onslaught.

  A technician turned to Bao. ‘Colonel! Telemetry is confirmed: the outer electromagnetic dome is operating at half-strength. The dragons somehow disabled the emplacements at the worker city. If they knock out the emplacements on this side, the outer dome will fall.’

  Hu Tang stared incredulously at the scene in front of him. He hadn’t thought this could get any worse, but it had.

  He turned to Bao, panicked. ‘Did you hear that? They disabled the emplacements on the other side! Do something!’

  ‘Be quiet, sir,’ Bao said calmly. ‘We still have options.’ He turned to an officer behind him. ‘Major. Prepare the thermobaric bombs: airfield, worker city and at the Halfway Hut.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Hu Tang’s eyes went wide. ‘You’re going to destroy everything?’

  Bao turned to face him, his eyes hard. ‘We have kept other eggs elsewhere, Minister. We have all the elements required to build another dragon zoo. What we cannot rebuild is our nation’s reputation.’

  ‘Will we be safe?’ Hu asked.

  ‘Of course we’ll be safe, you fool,’ Bao growled. ‘This command bunker stretches ten storeys below ground. It’s strong enough to withstand a thermobaric blast on its doorstep while everything outside it will suffocate in the ensuing vacuum. Minister, hear me well: the moment those dragons bring down that outer dome, I will detonate all three thermobaric devices and destroy every living thing in and around this zoo.’

  The Chinese military airfield was crumbling under the dragons’ attack. It was mayhem, pandemonium; a maelstrom of fire, explosions, carnage and death.

  And it was into this that Hamish Cameron drove his ladder truck.

  Hamish gripped the wide steering wheel with white knuckles. Syme sat by his side holding a pistol he’d found in the waste management facility. Given the circumstances, it seemed pretty puny and useless but he clutched it grimly anyway.

  The entire airstrip in front of them was bathed in fire. The charred remains of Chinese Army vehicles lay alongside sections of the revolving restaurant’s roof, the concrete ring road and the smashed control tower. All the Chinese jeeps, trucks and tanks were either overturned or smashed.

  In the flickering orange light of the many infernos, the dragons looked like monsters from the underworld: with their fierce red bellies, black skeletal hides, slavering jaws and howling cries, they were the embodiment of the word terrifying.

  ‘Feels like we’re driving into Mordor,’ Hamish muttered.

  ‘What’s Mordor?’ Syme asked.

  ‘Never mind.’

  Hamish floored it.

  The big red truck reached the edge of the runway and banked wildly as it sped around a crushed tank and, with its immense weight, smashed right through the remains of a burning troop truck.

  Hamish pointed forward. ‘They’re going for the emplacements supporting the dome!’

  Indeed they were. Having dealt with the defensive human force, the dragons were gathering at the line of emplacements behind the airstrip and its hangars.

  Hamish saw the flare of the superking’s fire-breath.

  ‘Whoa, baby!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here, take the wheel!’ he called to Syme.

  The US Ambassador slid into the driver’s seat as Hamish kicked open the door and leaned out.

  ‘Where are you going?!’ Syme yelled above the inrushing wind.

  ‘CJ told me to hold off those dragons for as long as I could, so that’s what I’m going to do,’ Hamish said. ‘I’ll be on the back. Get us to those emplacements, Mr Syme!’

  With those words, Hamish swept out of the truck’s cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.

  The fire truck wended its way through the fiery airfield. It sped past the wreckage of troop trucks, jeeps and cargo planes.

  As the long-bodied truck swept through the battlefield, the small figure of Hamish Cameron could be seen on its back, slowly making his way along its length before he arrived at the hose station at the very rear of the superlong truck.

  The hose station looked like a gun turret: an open-air revolving cannon, only instead of firing bullets, this cannon fired water.

  Hamish dropped into the revolving chair of the hose station, found a switch marked INITIATE PUMP and look
ed up just as two prince-sized red-bellies landed on his truck right in front of him and roared angrily.

  Hamish swung the water cannon around and jammed down on the trigger and a powerful column of compressed water came blasting forth, slamming into both dragons, knocking them off the fire truck!

  ‘Take that, you reptile motherfuckers!’ Hamish yelled.

  But then, with a great whump, an emperor dragon landed right in the path of the fire truck.

  In the driver’s cabin, Syme yanked on the steering wheel and the truck swung right, disappearing inside a hangar.

  The fire truck whipped past the shattered remains of a couple of planes and Syme ducked as the truck blasted through the rear wall of the hangar.

  Syme raised his head again to see the line of emplacements now right in front of him.

  ‘Not exactly the route I meant to take, but we got here,’ he said to himself.

  The dragons were already there.

  The two masters were blowing fire at the ground in front of the middle emplacement while other dragons dug.

  Syme saw them and had an idea. He searched the switches on the console above him and found the one he was looking for.

  The fire truck’s lights lit up the area with strobing red rays while its siren wailed.

  Blaring away with light and sound, the fire truck swept in among the gathered dragons and they all turned, surprised at the arrival of this loud, large beast.

  The truck swept in front of the superemperor just as the huge animal reared back, readying itself to blow liquid fire—at the exact instant that Hamish appeared in front of it and let fly with a blast from his water cannon!

  The superemperor’s fire was extinguished in its throat. It whimpered, confused, as Hamish brought his cannon around and blasted the superking in the face as well.

  Then Syme was speeding away again and at a squeal from the masters, the red-bellied black princes leapt into the air and chased the troublesome fire truck.