Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

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 said.

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—