The Great Zoo of China Read online

  ‘It’s awesome,’ Hamish said.

  CJ had to admit that it did look pretty impressive. Indeed, it looked as if the fictitious inhabitants of the castle had done battle with invading dragons and lost badly. The brick battlements had crumbled. Whole towers lay askew on the ground. Some staircases ran nowhere, ending abruptly at ragged ends.

  The whole thing was covered in black char-marks, causing CJ to remark, ‘I thought you said there were no fire-breathing dragons here.’

  Zhang offered a bashful smile. ‘We took some liberties with the design of this castle, for the sake of theatricality.’

  ‘I like it,’ Hamish said.

  About a dozen dragons moved in and around the ruins, all yellowjackets.

  At the base of the castle, at the point where it sat at the same height as the waterfall, an elongated wooden platform stretched out from the front gate.

  It resembled a drawbridge, only it led nowhere. It just extended out over the curving waterfall directly in front of the castle, looking like a bridge that had been stopped halfway through its construction. It took CJ a moment to realise what it was.

  ‘It’s a landing platform for the dragons,’ she said.

  ‘And a cable car stop for us,’ Zhang said, smiling. It was only a hundred metres ahead of them.

  ‘I have another question,’ CJ said suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’ Deputy Director Zhang cast a worried glance at Hu, no doubt fearful of another awkward question from the National Geographic woman.

  ‘You said you found 88 eggs in that cavern,’ CJ said. ‘But then you said that you have 232 dragons in this zoo. How does that work? I would have thought one egg means one dragon, so 88 eggs means 88 dragons, unless they’ve laid more eggs.’

  Zhang visibly relaxed. This was apparently a question he could answer easily.

  He smiled. ‘You are correct, Dr Cameron. One egg equals one dragon. And no, they have not laid any more eggs since they emerged from their nest. But we have been working and studying these animals at this facility for nearly forty years now. In that time, we have introduced some augmented breeding methods to bolster our stock of—what is that?’

  He was looking out over CJ’s shoulder, peering northward, his smile fading.

  CJ turned, following his gaze.

  What she saw made the blood in her veins freeze.

  She saw a gang of five red-bellied black dragons of various sizes coming right for the cable car, led by the emperor that had checked them out only a few minutes earlier.

  And as she beheld the gang of dragons coming toward her, CJ realised what had been wrong with the emperor’s head.

  It had no ears.

  The scars and gashes on this dragon’s head weren’t injuries from battles with other dragons.

  This emperor dragon had scratched off its own ears—deeply, too, tearing out the entire auditory canal, leaving two foul bloody sockets—which meant that the sonic dome protecting the cable car would not have any effect on it at all.

  ‘Deputy Director, what is going on?’ Hu asked ominously.

  ‘Sir, I’ve never seen them do anything like this before,’ Zhang said.

  ‘Hang on to something,’ CJ said to Hamish. ‘Right now.’

  The dragons rushed at the cable car and when they reached it, they did not stop.

  The lead earless emperor smashed into the cable car with all its might, leading with its upraised claws. Glass exploded everywhere and the cable car rocked violently and in the space of a few terrible seconds CJ Cameron’s tour of the Great Dragon Zoo of China went to hell.

  At a zoo or conservation park, you do not confront a photograph or a video. You confront the living, breathing animal.

  —BILL CONWAY, PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JULY 1993

  The cable car swayed wildly, swinging through almost ninety degrees, such was the force of the emperor’s blow.

  CJ and Hamish grabbed hold of a railing as the world around them rocked crazily.

  Beside them, Greg Johnson managed to get a grip as well and he held on to Ambassador Syme.

  The others were less lucky.

  The CCTV reporter, Xin, screamed as she was hurled sideways. Her cameraman went flying across the car and slammed against a window—a split second before the window shattered under the weight of an incoming red-bellied black dragon, this one a prince.

  Like the lead emperor before it, this prince had no ears, so it was unaffected by the sonic shields enveloping the cable car and the individuals inside it. The prince exploded through the window with its jaws bared and before anyone knew what was happening, it grabbed the cameraman with its claws and swept him out of the cable car with a stifled yell.

  ‘Holy fucking shit!’ Hamish shouted as wind rushed into the cable car.

  The whole car continued to rock dramatically on its cable, like a child’s swing out of control.

  Xin and Wolfe tumbled past CJ and Hamish, sliding toward the smashed-open window. CJ and Hamish reacted in exactly the same way: they both reached out, CJ snatching Xin’s outstretched wrist while Hamish caught Wolfe’s hand a moment before he fell out of the cable car.

  The New York Times columnist came to a sudden halt a few feet short of the open window and gasped with relief just as the gigantic head of the emperor appeared right below his feet.

  The dragon roared. It sounded like a jet engine, it was so loud.

  The animal tried to stick its snout inside the window but the opening was too small and only its flaring nostrils got inside.

  CJ’s eyes went wide.

  Then suddenly the emperor’s jaws chomped, biting off a whole section of the cable car, in doing so catching hold of Xin’s right leg! The giant creature yanked her out of CJ’s grip.

  Xin screamed as she was pulled into the creature’s gaping jaws.

  The dragon bit down on her stomach.

  Blood and organs shot out of Xin’s mouth, expelled by the sheer force of the bite. CJ felt sick at the sight of it. Then the dragon extracted its snout, taking the TV reporter with it.

  Hamish was speechless.

  CJ wasn’t.

  ‘Get away from the window!’ she yelled, scrambling over the bar. ‘Before it comes back!’

  It came back a few seconds later, jamming its huge teeth in through the shattered windows. But everyone had taken CJ’s advice and they were out of range. When it came up with nothing, the emperor roared and pulled its snout from the cable car.

  Silence.

  The cable car’s swinging slowed until it was almost still again.

  Everyone waited, tense, expectant, not daring to move.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ Ambassador Syme said, glaring at Hu.

  Hu made to reply, but he never got a word out, for at that moment the entire car was wrenched from its cable and thrown through the air.

  If CJ and the other occupants of the cable car could have seen their cable car from the outside, what they would have seen was the emperor dragon hovering above it, its vast wings outstretched, gripping the cable car with its massive talons, wrenching it from its cable and hurling it into the waters of the lake.

  The cable car rolled as it flew and it landed in the water roof-first.

  It now bobbed upside-down in the water, fifty metres from the waterfall in front of the ruined castle.

  And then it started to move, carried by the current toward the surging lip of the fall.

  Inside the cable car, the world had gone totally crazy.

  Everything was upside-down. The bar stools bolted to the floor now hung from the ceiling. Every bottle behind the bar had been smashed. Water was gushing in through the cable car’s smashed and cracked windows.

  CJ and the other occupants came down hard beside the ceiling lights.

  CJ was on her feet first. Crouched in the ankle-deep water, she took in the scene quickly.

  ‘We’re moving and we’re sinking,’ she sa
id.

  With a roar, an eighteen-foot-long crocodile suddenly burst through one of the windows in an explosion of glass and water.

  CJ dived away from it and the reptile’s slashing jaws missed her by centimetres. The croc hit the floor—or rather, the ceiling—of the cable car, landing on all fours, searching for the nearest prey. It found it in Hamish, lying flat on his chest in the water right in front of it.

  CJ saw the equation instantly and it didn’t look good.

  A memory flashed in her mind.

  Another place, another time.

  A swampy enclosure in the Everglades. Alligators in a pen. School children laughing and eating lunch, having just watched a presentation. CJ is eating her own lunch nearby. She has nothing to do with the school group. She is here doing research.

  The teachers know nothing about alligators. They do not know that alligators will always take an opportunity to snatch the young of another animal. They turn their backs . . .

  . . . as a little boy climbs up onto the fence of the alligator pen.

  CJ sees him too late.

  The boy is skylarking on top of the fence, showing off for the other kids. He never sees the bull alligator launch itself from the water.

  The gator snatches the boy’s leg, hauls him off the fence and takes him under.

  CJ is over the fence like lightning, diving into the water after the kid.

  Splashing and slashing.

  Her world is a blur of muddy water, flailing limbs, the boy’s cries and the alligator’s tooth-filled mouth. And then in a sudden shining instant, she is looking right into one of the alligator’s eyes.

  It is terrible and cold, unnerving. It is without mercy or remorse.

  CJ stabs the fucker in the eye with the fingernail of her thumb. It jerks and releases the boy and she throws the kid clear, onto the muddy shore, where a teacher grabs him. She clambers out after him on all fours, spent and exhausted, but clear of the—

  The bull explodes from the water and grabs her head in its mouth.

  CJ is yanked hideously backwards. The pain is excruciating. The gator’s teeth tear apart her left cheek. Her fingers leave claw marks in the mud of the shore as she is pulled back into the water, her head bent at a terrible angle.

  And no-one does a thing.

  She goes under with the bull.

  CJ blinked out of the memory, came back to the present.

  The croc had Hamish dead to rights. Her brother had nowhere to go and CJ was too far away to be of any help.

  The croc lunged—

  —just as a red-bellied black prince swooped in through the window behind the crocodile, grabbed the reptile in its foreclaws and bit down on its neck. The crunching sound that followed was sickening. The dragon had broken the crocodile’s neck with one bite. The croc went limp.

  CJ was gobsmacked.

  An eighteen-foot-long saltwater crocodile. The biggest croc in the world. An animal without predators. And the dragon had killed it in an instant.

  The dragon spat the remains of the crocodile onto the floor. CJ saw that this one also had no ears.

  The cable car around her continued to flood. The water was now up to her knees.

  ‘We have to get to the other level!’ she yelled to the others as she sloshed through the water toward one of the two stairwells that connected the cable car’s upper and lower levels.

  The others followed suit, racing for the stairwells.

  The prince roared, swinging its gaze back and forth, not sure which way to go. It eventually snapped at Hamish as he dived, last of all, into the small stairwell at the aft end of the cable car.

  Running on pure adrenalin, CJ arrived at the upper, formerly lower, level of the overturned cable car and peered forward.

  ‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me . . .’ she gasped.

  The waterfall dropped away mere metres before her, a surging cascade of water shooting out over the lip.

  She searched for options.

  Maybe there was a rock on the lip that they could jump over to: no, nothing.

  Maybe they could jump across to the landing platform jutting out from the ruined castle: she saw it off to the right, just outside the still-intact windows on that side of the cable car, but that wasn’t an option either because it was too late.

  The cable car was already at the edge of the waterfall, and with a sudden sickening tilt, it went over.

  CJ’s world tilted wildly yet again and for a moment everything went vertical . . .

  . . . and then the cable car fell.

  It plummeted through the air, nose-first.

  But then after only a short fall, it stopped with a loud crunching noise and everyone was thrown downwards.

  The forward windows of the car smashed inward, spraying glass.

  The cable car had slammed down into one of the rock ledges that jutted out from the face of the waterfall.

  From the outside, the cable car looked totally bizarre.

  It was perched vertically on the face of the curving waterfall, its forward end smashed against the wide rock ledge, its aft end pointing skyward with the gushing water of the falls pouring down over it while two red-bellied black prince dragons clung to its outer walls.

  Inside the vertical cable car, CJ was doing her best not to freak out. Too much was happening, too much to take in.

  Stay calm, she told herself. Gotta think clearly . . .

  She looked up and saw an escape route: the landing platform leading to the ruined castle. It was right above the upper end of the upturned cable car, only a few feet away from it. If they could climb up to the top end of the perched cable car, maybe they could—

  ‘Everyone!’ she called. ‘Climb! Get to the top and then jump across to that platform!’

  No-one was in a state to argue: Seymour Wolfe was whipping his head this way and that in a panic; Aaron Perry was clinging desperately to a seat; Greg Johnson was holding up his boss, the ambassador. Hu Tang kept stammering, ‘Oh God, oh God’ in Mandarin while Deputy Director Zhang wore the blank despairing expression of a man who had just seen his entire future go up in flames. Hamish seemed okay, but then, he’d been in war zones before.

  They all followed CJ, using the bolted-down seats as a kind of ladder, and soon they were up at the sliding doors at the top end of the cable car.

  Hamish and Johnson yanked them open—and immediately a torrent of water came rushing in, slamming into their faces, almost knocking them back down the car. The waterfall was now gushing directly into the upturned cable car.

  ‘Go!’ CJ yelled. ‘Hurry!’

  Hamish went first, then Johnson. They stood on top of the car and began helping the others out.

  One by one, the group climbed through the column of water streaming down into the cable car, with Johnson and Hamish pulling them up from above: Wolfe, Perry, then Ambassador Syme, Hu Tang and Zhang. They all emerged from the cable car before jumping tentatively across to the landing platform.

  Only CJ, Na and the bartender remained inside the cable car. Water rushed into the car through the upper doorway in a thick unbroken gush. Smaller cascades tumbled over the seats.

  Climbing up beside CJ, Na was sobbing, shivering.

  Then CJ heard a groan.

  It wasn’t an animal or human groan, however, but the sound of rending metal.

  Filling with water, the cable car was literally bursting at the seams.

  Abruptly, a window exploded under the weight of the water and the whole car jolted . . . and began to tilt slowly away from the waterfall.

  ‘CJ! The car’s about to fall off the ledge!’ Hamish yelled through the pouring water. ‘Come on!’

  CJ hauled ass, clambering up the last few seatbacks, with Na and the bartender moving desperately beside her.

  ‘Move it, people!’ Hamish called from the doorway.

  CJ, Na and the bartender reached the doorway just as something large and black came rushing in through it, borne on the water, and collided full-on with the
poor bartender who was hurled down the length of the vertical cable car.

  The impact with the bartender had halted the dragon’s fall and suddenly there it was in his place, right in front of CJ and Na!

  It was a prince-sized red-bellied black dragon.

  It hissed at them, right in their faces, and CJ saw the deep bloody wounds where its ears should have been.

  It was a creature of another time, a terrible serpent-like thing. It was everything that human beings—soft and clawless—feared. Its fangs were long, its talons scythe-like, its hide armoured. No human could fight such a thing. And you couldn’t reason with it either.

  This red-bellied black prince, CJ saw, had an almost entirely red head and a small camouflaged box grafted to the left side of its skull . . . and suddenly she realised that she had seen it before: it was one of the dragons from the amphitheatre, the sullen prince that had reluctantly performed for the female trainer—

  The dragon moved before CJ could react. It snatched Na’s throat in one powerful claw and bit her head off with a shocking tearing bite. Blood sprayed all over CJ’s face.

  CJ was horrified—not just by the savageness of the act but by the speed of it. It had happened so fast!

  The red-faced dragon dropped Na’s headless body and turned its gaze on CJ.

  Others might have been stunned motionless in such circumstances but CJ had fought nasty things before. Instinct kicked in and she lashed out at the creature with her right boot.

  The kick connected and she caught the dragon square in the mouth.

  The dragon recoiled at the kick and in doing so fell back into the column of water gushing into the cable car and was swept away, down to where the bartender was.

  The red-bellied black prince landed with a splash at the base of the cable car. The dragon squealed and thrashed beside the hapless bartender.

  CJ looked down at them, at first too stunned to move.

  The red-faced dragon shrieked again, looking directly up at her.

  There came another metallic groan and suddenly someone—Hamish—was grabbing her by the collar, calling, ‘You can’t help him!’ and CJ was yanked up through the column of pouring water and all of a sudden she was standing in daylight beside her brother and Zhang on the top end of the upturned cable car, on the face of the curving waterfall, in front of the elongated landing platform that led to the ruined medieval castle.