The Great Zoo of China Read online

  The station’s platform kinked at a ninety-degree angle. It was here that the cable cars made their turn. The overhead steel cable disappeared down two concrete tunnels: it came in from the south and exited to the east. A chill wind whistled eerily as it swept through the long tunnels.

  There was no movement.

  No dragons.

  ‘That’s the maintenance office.’ Go-Go pointed at a two-storey glass-walled structure in the corner of the station. Its upper storey had slanted windows and nearly all of them had been smashed.

  CJ hurried toward it.

  The three of them raced through the maintenance office’s lower door and hustled up some internal stairs before bursting through an open doorway.

  The maintenance office had been ripped to shreds. Two dead Chinese technicians lay on the floor, their throats ripped out, their stomachs torn open. The main console had been wrenched apart. Naked wires sparked. Blood dripped off every surface.

  And every computer screen was smashed.

  Johnson tapped on some keys. ‘All these computers are useless.’

  CJ found a phone on the console. It had been cracked in two, broken beyond repair.

  ‘We try the restaurant,’ she said.

  A clunking noise from above made them all look up.

  A ceiling panel came free and CJ tensed . . . only to see a fearful young face appear from behind the panel, the face of the young Chinese electrician from before, the man named Li.

  ‘Hello . . . ?’ he said softly.

  ‘Li?’ CJ helped him down. ‘Are you okay?’

  He nodded quickly.

  ‘The dragons attacked your team?’

  He nodded again. ‘Some red-bellied black princes and a king,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘They had no ears. We were working under the cable car here, relying on its sonic shield, so none of us was wearing our watches. But the cable car’s shield was useless against them.’

  CJ glanced around nervously. She didn’t like this place at all. There weren’t enough exits. It was too easy to get trapped.

  ‘We shouldn’t linger here.’ She began to move. ‘We make for the restaurant—’

  She cut herself off, glimpsing movement in her peripheral vision: she could have sworn one of the dragon statues outside had moved. No. It was just a trick of the flickering light. It was only a statue.

  Then the statue really did move.

  It turned its head to face the maintenance office and looked CJ right in the eye.

  It was a purple royal, king-sized, with high pointed ears.

  With a roar it bounded forward, lunging at the maintenance office’s upper windows.

  ‘Look out!’ Johnson pushed CJ sideways as the big dragon’s foreclaws came rushing in through the shattered windows.

  CJ fell one way, while Go-Go and Li dived the other way, but Johnson’s reaction had put him in the middle and two of the dragon’s razor-sharp talons slashed across the front of his body, drawing twin sprays of blood across his chest up near the left shoulder.

  Johnson slumped instantly, dropped to the floor.

  The dragon roared, its bellow shaking the little room.

  CJ crab-crawled over to Johnson, ducking beneath the dragon’s slavering jaws, threw his good arm over her own shoulder and hauled him away.

  ‘Can you run?’ she asked.

  ‘Just,’ Johnson groaned.

  With Johnson looped over her shoulder, CJ raced to the door leading downstairs, reaching it just in time to see two purple princes arrive at the base of the stairs below, spot her and roar.

  ‘Shit . . .’ she said.

  ‘What the fuck do we do!’ Go-Go yelled.

  CJ slammed the door, locked it and turned just as the king’s entire head came smashing into the maintenance office in a rain of glass.

  Ducking below it, CJ saw the upturned cable car just outside the windows: the roof of its raised nose-end was level with the windows. The cable car’s lower end lay over near the catwalk that led to the guest elevator.

  ‘Go-Go, Li, follow me. Johnson, I need you to give me everything you’ve got!’

  Without any further pause, she ran across the maintenance office, staying out of the reach of the king dragon. She skipped up on a chair and with Johnson beside her, leapt up onto the control console and then out the shattered window, past the dragon and onto the roof of the upturned cable car, where she slid down its length, dragging Johnson with her.

  They slid wildly, past the king dragon, its head still thrust inside the maintenance office.

  After they’d slid for about ninety feet, CJ threw out her left leg and caught the edge of the grated catwalk leading to the double-decker guest elevator. She and Johnson came to an abrupt halt.

  Li and Go-Go slid to matching halts beside her.

  CJ looped Johnson’s arm over her shoulder again and made for the elevator. They got there with Go-Go and Li close behind them. CJ punched the call button.

  A deafening roar answered her.

  CJ turned.

  The purple royal king was glaring right at her from the other side of the cable car platform. Its two princes were at its side, also staring at them, snarling.

  Ping!

  The elevator doors opened. CJ slipped inside it with the others.

  The king growled, a deep resonating noise, and then it and the princes attacked.

  As the elevator doors began to close with frustrating slowness, the king bounded across the void, kicking the double-decker cable car out of the way as if it weighed nothing, while the two princes took to the air and flew across the void at incredible speed. CJ willed the doors to close, because right now they were all that stood between her and certain death.

  The doors joined, closed, just as—wham!—the whole elevator rocked as the king dragon rammed it from the outside.

  But the elevator was away.

  They were clear.

  CJ breathed a sigh of relief.

  Until a few moments later when the floor of the elevator began to get torn apart.

  ‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me!’ she said as she saw the claws of the two prince-sized purple royals appear through the floor of her double-decker elevator, tearing through the plush carpet, ripping it away with frenzied slashes.

  They must have got into the lower level of the elevator before the doors had closed and now they were trying to claw their way through the floor separating the two decks.

  ‘How long till we reach the restaurant?’ CJ asked Go-Go quickly.

  ‘Maybe thirty seconds, I don’t know,’ Go-Go said, staring at the frenzied clawing of the two dragons.

  The flooring of the elevator wasn’t exactly a complex feat of engineering. It was just carpet over aluminium sheeting and beams. The two dragons punched up through the sheeting, cracking it.

  ‘We’re not gonna make it . . .’ CJ said, looking upward, as if she could see the approaching restaurant.

  The two holes in the floor were growing larger by the second. Then one of the dragons managed to shove its head through the gap and snarled at CJ. She slid forward and kicked it square in the nose. The dragon squealed in pain and dropped back down to the lower level.

  Then the second dragon squeezed its shoulders and one arm up through its hole. It was ready for CJ’s kick: it batted her boot away with one of its foreclaws.

  The dragon rose up out of the hole in the floor, first its head, then its chest. It bared its teeth—

  Ping!

  The elevator doors opened.

  CJ lunged out of the elevator with Johnson on her shoulder and Li and Go-Go at her side. The dragon broke through the floor completely and bounded after them.

  CJ flung Johnson across a table and dived over it after him as the beast spread its wings to cover the last few feet and—

  Braaaaaack!

  The dragon was pummelled with a spray of automatic gunfire and it dropped out of the air on the spot, collapsing in a tangle of spasming wings. It squealed until a final round slammed into it
s head and it flopped to the floor, dead.

  CJ looked up to see a team of ten Chinese soldiers—dressed in black and brandishing better guns than any of the other Chinese soldiers she had seen—standing in a semicircle before her.

  A Chinook helicopter—the biggest chopper she had seen so far—patrolled the air behind them, its spotlight blazing, illuminating the mountaintop restaurant with blinding white light.

  The second dragon obviously didn’t know of its comrade’s fate, because it came screaming out of the elevator a second later, only to suffer a similar end. It was torn apart by a hail of gunfire from the waiting Chinese commandos.

  Then all was silent, save for the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter outside.

  CJ, Li and Go-Go stood and raised their hands. In CJ’s case, she threw down her pistol. Johnson remained on the floor.

  CJ glanced to her right and saw, behind the maître d’s counter, an open doorway leading to an office: the restaurant manager’s office. On a desk inside it, she saw a computer and a phone: the computer was on and the phone’s lights blinked.

  So near yet so far.

  The ring of Chinese commandos closed in on them. They had saved their lives, sure, but only in the act of saving themselves from the two oncoming dragons.

  That would be the last act of kindness they would show her, CJ thought, for as she looked at their hard faces, she realised that these commandos had been sent here to kill her.

  At exactly the same time as this was happening, over in the waste management facility the other Chinese special forces team was in the process of entering the cable subducting tunnel.

  They moved down it in single file, guns up. The concrete-walled tunnel was only a few feet wide, but it was well lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs.

  As he moved along the tunnel looking down the barrel of his gun, Recon Two’s point man glanced up at the many cables running along the roof and walls of the passageway. One extra-thick black cable ran directly down the centre of the ceiling, dominating it: the primary main.

  The point man rounded a bend and suddenly a monstrous apparition that was all claws and slashing teeth dropped from the ceiling above him and the man fell under the weight of a red-bellied black dragon.

  His comrades opened fire and the tight concrete tunnel echoed with gunfire. The frenzied dragon managed to take down two more men before it was shot in the head and it dropped to the floor, dead.

  The Chinese team stepped past its body, rounding the bend fully, their guns up, tensed for another attack. There was, after all, one more dragon down here.

  They saw it.

  The other earless red-bellied black prince was at the very end of the tunnel, but oddly, it had its back to them.

  It was at the spot where all the overhead cables came together and disappeared into a small conduit pipe that led southwest.

  The recon team’s leader frowned. The dragon was tearing away with all its might at all the cables. It used its claws and its teeth. Sparks flew. Wires fell every which way.

  ‘What the hell . . . ?’ the leader breathed.

  The dragon severed a final cable—the primary main—and immediately, one after the other, all the fluorescent lights in the ceiling went out and the tunnel was plunged into darkness.

  Then the dragon rounded on the commando team and launched itself at them.

  All across the Great Dragon Zoo of China, electrical power was extinguished.

  Every single light went out.

  All the lights inside the main entrance building, in the administration building, in the casino hotel.

  All the streetlights flanking the ring road.

  All the floodlights mounted on the rim of the crater and atop Dragon Mountain.

  And all the pilot lights on every single sonic shield–generating antenna on every wristwatch, car and building in the zoo.

  Inside the master control room in the main entrance building, all the monitors winked out and the room went dark.

  The head technician yelled, ‘What just happened!’

  ‘Sir! Power’s out across the zoo!’

  ‘Switch to back-up power.’

  ‘Generators are offline, sir. We do not have back-up power. Repeat, we do not have back-up power.’

  ‘What about the electromagnetic domes?’

  ‘The inner dome is on the same grid as we are, sir. It’s off . . .’

  The head technician snatched up his desk phone but he got no tone: all the phones were dead, too.

  ‘Sir,’ one of his techs said. ‘The sonic antennas are all just receivers, as are all the watches. They have no power themselves. If the main power supply is gone, they’re useless. Every building, vehicle and person in this zoo just lost their protection from the dragons.’

  The entire zoo was plunged into darkness.

  In an instant, the Great Dragon Zoo of China was taken back to the Stone Age.

  And with the coming of the darkness came the sound of beasts that had thrived in a more ancient time.

  Dragon calls rang out across the valley, and with the calls came movement and suddenly the sky above the crater was filled with the gigantic creatures, all moving with purpose.

  It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

  —J.R.R. TOLKIEN, THE HOBBIT

  (GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD, LONDON, 1937)

  The two silver Range Rovers zoomed around the ring road with their two troop truck escorts.

  They were speeding down the eastern side of the valley now, passing a high ravine cut into the eastern wall of the crater. The four vehicles shot through an awning-covered receiving area—it housed a turning bay which serviced an elevator that led up to the cliff-top monastery built in homage to the Purple Cloud Temple.

  Sitting in the cab of the lead troop truck, Dr Benjamin Patrick peered out into the night, concerned. Beside him, a Chinese sergeant drove.

  Then, just as their four-vehicle convoy emerged from the receiving area, all the streetlights on the ring road blinked out.

  The road went dark.

  ‘We’ve lost power . . .’ Ben Patrick said.

  The driver said, ‘The back-up generators will—’

  ‘The generators were destroyed in the initial attack,’ Patrick said, looking quickly from the roadway to his own shield-generating watch.

  The pilot light on it winked out.

  ‘We have no protection anymore,’ he said ominously. ‘We’re all exposed.’

  As he said this, something large and black swept past his truck. The rush of air that followed the flying beast was so great it made the eight-ton troop truck wobble.

  ‘We’re in trouble,’ Patrick said a split second before his truck was hit with incredible violence and his world flipped over and went black.

  While CJ had been battling dragons inside the cable car station and fleeing to the revolving restaurant, Hamish, Syme and Seymour Wolfe had also been fleeing: in their case, to the small building they had spotted at the base of the waterfall.

  They dived inside the little building and slammed the door. No sooner was the door shut than there was a loud bang from the other side, followed by furious screeches from the two earless red-bellied black princes that had been pursuing them.

  Hamish took in the space around him.

  They were in a very tastefully decorated café, with picture windows looking out at the curving waterfall and the ruined castle on the opposite shore of the lake. Six glass-roofed Great Dragon Zoo tour boats sat tied to the dock outside.

  The café was dark. The only light came from the red glow of a Coca-Cola refrigerator and a cake display.

  The dragons banged on the door for a time and then stalked around the side of the one-storey building, peering in through its windows.

  Foiled for the moment, they retreated to the muddy treeline not far from the building—although Hamish had a feeling that they weren’t far away. They might be watching the café, waiting for their prey to emerge again.<
br />
  That had been fifteen minutes ago. He, Syme and Wolfe had stayed very still, below the windows, watching, waiting.

  And then the twin glows of the refrigerator and the cake display went out and the café was plunged into total darkness.

  Inside the revolving restaurant atop Dragon Mountain, CJ, Li and Go-Go stood with their hands raised before the ten Chinese commandos arrayed around them. Johnson still lay on the floor.

  CJ glanced at the restaurant around her. It had clearly not seen any fighting or attacks from the dragons: there was no wreckage or blood pools. The commandos, she guessed, must have landed on the roof and come in through a ceiling hatch or something.

  The small lamps on each table glowed. The soft halogen bulbs in the ceiling gave off a dim light.

  Then, abruptly, all the lamps and all the overhead lights winked out and the whole restaurant went dark.

  CJ saw the computer screen in the adjoining office shrink to black.

  And then she saw every source of illumination outside the restaurant—the floodlights encircling the valley, the streetlights on the ring road—extinguish.

  The power was out across the zoo. The only light was that coming from the spotlight on the Chinook helicopter hovering outside.

  The Chinese commandos aiming their guns at CJ instantly became a cluster of shadows.

  It was then that CJ heard the shrieks. At first there were just a few of them, but then there came a chorus of replies.

  Dragon calls.

  The dragons were communicating.

  The Chinese commandos looked about themselves, nervous, unsure.

  With a loud whoosh, a large shape swept past the windows and CJ saw the underbelly of an emperor dragon rush by and, in a shockingly powerful move, collect the hovering Chinook helicopter as it did.

  It simply snatched the helicopter out of the air—one second it was there, the next it wasn’t. CJ didn’t see the chopper hit the side of the mountain, but she heard the explosion and saw the sudden fiery glow.

  She spun and, for the briefest of moments, locked eyes with the Chinese trooper in charge of the commandos. Hunter and prey, caught in the unfolding plan of an even more dangerous creature. Would he still execute her?