Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

There were no dragons in sight.

There was, however, one out-of-place feature: high up near the ceiling, a modern black catwalk ran around the wall.

There was no ladder to it. It entered the hall from the north and exited to the south. At first CJ couldn’t figure out what it was. Then she realised: it was for guests to walk on and observe the dragons in their castle home.

‘Well, this isn’t going to look good in The New York Times ,’ she said. ‘Okay, what do we do now? Where can we go?’

No-one replied.

She jerked her chin at Hu. ‘I said, what the hell do we do now and where the hell can we go!’

Hu was still in shock. His jaw quivered. He couldn’t speak.

‘The administration building,’ Zhang said quietly. ‘It’s on the western wall, right behind this castle—’

Boom!

The big door behind them shook, struck from outside.

Boom!

Again.

An enraged roar assaulted their ears.

The emperor.

‘We gotta move, people,’ CJ said, running for the intact sweeping staircase. ‘We gotta move now…’

More shrieks rang out from outside. Two shadows whipped by overhead, shooting past one of the holes in the ceiling: red-bellied black princes.

The group hurried up the curving staircase.

They were almost at the top of the stairs when the main doors to the atrium blasted inwards in an explosion of splinters.

The red-bellied black emperor stood in the doorway, giant and menacing. It bellowed, its jet-engine roar shaking the walls of the castle.

‘Hurry!’ CJ called as the emperor thundered through the doorway, stomping into the atrium with great, whomping strides.

They dashed up the last few steps just as two red-bellied black princes smashed through a pair of stained-glass windows on the other side of the hall and landed at the top of the other, broken staircase.

‘This way! Into the throne room!’ Zhang called, leading them into the chamber directly behind the atrium.

They all hurried into it… only to stop dead in their tracks.

An absolutely gigantic yellowjacket emperor dragon lay before them, curled in a ball in the throne room of the castle.

Velvet curtains and torn tapestries hung around it. CJ saw some black steel spiral steps nearby that led up to another guest catwalk running around the ceiling of this room.

The massive yellowjacket was the picture of calm repose. Its colouring was magnificent, brighter than the colouring of the little female CJ had seen earlier, the one named Lucky. This one’s yellow stripes were the most vivid yellow; its black stripes, the deepest black.

It raised its gigantic head and stared at the group curiously. Its slit eyes were huge and unblinking. And it still had ears, CJ noticed immediately.

Then, suddenly, two yellowjacket princes popped up from within the emperor’s embrace. They had been sleeping inside its massive limbs and although they themselves were nine feet tall, they looked positively tiny beside the emperor.

Ever the loyal lieutenants, they leapt to their emperor’s defence, placing themselves between it and this group of intruders.

One of the princes hissed at CJ and approached—

—only to recoil with a piercing squeal.

It had struck the sonic shield emitted by her watch and CJ saw that the princes also still had their ears. The shield generated by her watch still worked.

And then the yellowjacket emperor growled.

It was a sound of the most intense malevolence and it came from deep within the giant creature. The ultimate animal warning. The walls of the throne room quivered, so great was the sound.

CJ held her breath.

They had stepped into its lair, its territory, and it wasn’t happy about it.

CJ found herself wondering: could their little sonic shields really withstand an emperor’s charge? It didn’t seem to her that they could.

Then, with surprising speed, the giant yellowjacket sprang from its position and leapt at them!

There was nothing CJ could do. Nothing any of them could do. It was too fast.

But the yellowjacket thundered over them and with a mighty thwack of flesh against flesh, it slammed into the red-bellied black emperor that had appeared in the doorway behind CJ’s group.

Territorial behaviour , CJ recalled. That some puny little humans might have encroached upon the yellowjacket’s territory was one thing. But another emperor dragon, well, that could not be tolerated.

The entire castle trembled as the two airliner-sized dragons went rolling back into the enormous entry atrium. For a few moments, the two beasts were a single entity, a mass of yellow-and-black limbs intertwined with red-and-black ones with two flailing tails added to the mix.

The ground rumbled as they fought, jaws snapping, claws tearing.

The two yellowjacket princes leapt to the aid of their emperor and joined the fight with the earless red-bellied black emperor—at the same time as the two red-bellied princes from the atrium charged in to defend their massive brother.

CJ didn’t need to be offered another chance. ‘Come on!’ she called. ‘Get up onto that catwalk and follow it out of this place!’

The group obeyed.

Within moments they were up on the catwalk, running south. Sure enough, it led out of the castle, to a long pedestrian bridge that stretched over to a vehicle turnaround attached to the ring road.

It was all designed, CJ figured, so that guests could be dropped off here, walk through the ruined castle on the elevated catwalks, and then be picked up later at another turnaround.

Right then, she didn’t care. She hoped by now that some kind of security force or rescue team had been dispatched to come and get them. If she couldn’t get her group to the administration building, then at least she had to get them out in the open where they could be spotted by a closed circuit camera or a rescue chopper.

Running out in front of the others, she dashed across the pedestrian bridge and arrived at the turnaround. About two hundred metres to the south, down the black bitumen ring road, was a tunnel that bored into a sloping section of the western crater wall. At the moment, the mouth of the tunnel was sealed by a thick-barred gate. Towering above the tunnel, built into the sloping hillside, was the administration building.

Zhang saw it, too. ‘There is an internal entrance to the admin building inside that tunnel! Go!’

The eight desperate humans—six Americans and two Chinese—bolted down the roadway, running as fast as they could toward the gated tunnel.

As he ran, Hu Tang’s mind swirled with a mix of incomprehension, fear and outright fury. He could hardly think. This was a disaster. A disaster . How had it happened? How had it been allowed to happen? Some of the dragons had ripped out their own ears from the roots to outwit the sonic shields. How had no-one seen this coming? When they regained control, he swore, heads would fucking roll.

He looked about himself. He was running alongside CJ and Zhang and the two New York Times men. Behind them, Greg Johnson ran with the ambassador.

They were about a hundred metres from the tunnel when the grilled gate sealing it began to open.

It slid upward and three armoured vehicles came speeding out of it: two Shorland four-by-four armoured personnel carriers and a white-painted six-wheeled Hotspur field ambulance.

The Shorlands were painted olive-green like army vehicles while the white Hotspur looked like the UN peacekeeping vehicle that it usually was.