Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

The thick-barred gate guarding the mouth of the tunnel slid closed behind the three vehicles.

Relief flooded through Hu when he saw them. ‘An Emergency Response Team! They’re coming for us!’

The three armoured vehicles boomed down the ring road, coming toward the group…

…and sped right past them.

Hu’s jaw dropped. ‘What the—?’

The cars zoomed away down the ring road, racing off into the distance before entering another tunnel about a kilometre to the north. That was just a regular tunnel, with no gate sealing it.

‘We’re not the most important VIPs here today,’ CJ said wryly. ‘They’re going to save those other guys. We gotta do this ourselves, on foot.’

Hu was beyond furious. ‘This is outrageous…’ he fumed.

‘Wait, look!’ Hamish yelled.

He was pointing up the ring road in the direction the rescue team had gone.

Two hardtop jeeps were coming back down the road, coming toward them at considerable speed.

‘That’s our ride!’ CJ called. ‘Wave them down!’

The group stepped out into the middle of the road, waving at the jeeps.

The oncoming jeeps showed no sign of stopping. They just kept speeding wildly down the road.

Hu Tang could make out two men in each of the cars: workmen of some kind, no doubt fleeing the dragons. He stepped out in front of the others, raising one arm, palm outward. He knew with his distinctive patch of white hair, the workmen would recognise him and render assistance.

The two jeeps didn’t stop. Like the rescue team before them, they just swerved wildly around the group and kept on going.

Hu was stunned. ‘What—’

‘You cowardly motherfuc—’ Aaron Perry shouted, but he was cut off by a loud crash as two red-bellied black princes shot out of the sky and slammed into the two jeeps from the side.

The two jeeps were lifted fully off the road by the stunning impacts, and they flipped and tumbled as their inertia carried them a further twenty metres down the ring road. One jeep ended up upside-down, on its roof, while the other landed with an awkward thump back on its wheels, seventy metres from the barred tunnel but now facing the wrong way.

As the dust settled around them, Hu saw no movement within the two crumpled cars.

But the two dragons weren’t done. They wrenched off the jeeps’ doors and reached in with their claws to extract the bloodied but live occupants: four Chinese zoo workers in overalls.

These two princes, Hu noticed, were also earless, so the cars’ sonic shields were useless against them.

‘Quickly!’ CJ hissed, grabbing Hu by the sleeve. ‘Get off the road!’

They hurdled the low guardrail at the edge of the ring road and dived in among the shrubs on the slope below it. The others hurriedly followed.

From the cover of the bushes beside the roadway, CJ stared at the two crashed jeeps, the two prince dragons and the four Chinese workmen.

The princes were fearsome-looking things: nine feet tall, with high crests and blazing red bellies. With brutal efficiency, the first dragon pinned a workman under one of its forelimbs and proceeded to bite down on the man’s left arm, wrenching it off in a fountain of blood.

The man screamed in agony.

The second dragon promptly did the same to a second and then a third workman, while the first black prince ripped the left arm off the last worker. This last worker tried to flee but the dragon just knocked him to the ground casually and held him down with one of its hind legs.

‘What are they doing?’ Hamish whispered.

‘They’re biting off the workers’ watches…’ CJ said, ‘… to remove their shields. Quick, move,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t want to be here in the next few seconds—’

With a blood-curdling shriek, a much larger red-bellied black dragon arrived on the scene, landing on the ring road with a weighty whump .

If the princes looked fierce, and the emperor had been simply gigantic, the king looked absolutely terrifying. Terrifying, cruel and yet somehow regal . Its long neck was arched, rearing back before it curved forward, giving the creature a real sense of majesty.

It was as long as a city bus and each spike of its magnificent crest was taller than a man. Its tail appeared to have a mind of its own: it swept up behind the massive beast, slithering back and forth, a sinister barb at its tip.

Crucially, CJ noted, it had ears. Hence the need for the removal of the workmen’s watches.

‘The princes are giving the king a food offering,’ she said.

‘A what?’ Johnson said.

‘It’s a feeding ritual, a hierarchical feeding ritual. The lesser pack members catch the food and give it to the pack leader to eat first. They only eat after he does.’

One of the princes pushed two of the workers toward the king. The workers, clutching their recently amputated arms and screaming in terror, could hardly stand. One dropped to his knees, wailing.

The king dragon peered down at the workers imperiously.

Then it lunged forward and CJ heard a hideous crunch and then the dragon lifted its head again and suddenly one of the workmen was only half as tall as he had been.

CJ’s eyes widened in horror.

It had bitten the man in two with a single bite!

The dead workman’s legs toppled to the roadway.

The king then tilted its head sideways, scooped the legs up and gulped them down, too. Then it turned its gaze on the second, kneeling workman.

Its huge mouth opened at the edges as it glared down at the man, revealing its fearsome fangs. It looked like a smile, the cruel smile of the ultimate predator toying with its prey.

The kneeling workman held up his remaining hand pathetically, as if that would do him any good.

It didn’t.

He simply exploded in a spray of blood as the king’s jaws clamped down on him like a bear trap.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God…’ Syme breathed.

Hamish came up beside CJ. ‘Sis, excuse my language, but what the fuck do we do now?’

CJ was wondering the same thing.

She turned to look at the nearby tunnel, the one giving access to the administration building, currently resealed by the thick-barred gate.

‘Those workmen were trying to get to the admin building,’ she said. ‘Which means they could open that gate…’

Hamish said, ‘You think—’

‘Yep. There’s a remote control in one or both of those jeeps. A remote that opens the gate.’

Hu heard them. ‘You want one of us to go out there and get into one of those cars?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said, ‘while the rest of us run down to the tunnel, to be there when the gate opens.’

Wolfe said, ‘And how exactly are we going to choose who goes on this suicide mission?’

CJ ignored him, turned to Hamish. ‘We have to do this now , while they’re feeding. I was always quicker than you. Just be ready to close the gate behind me when I get there, okay?’

‘You got it,’ Hamish said.

CJ made to move, but then she remembered something. She tore off her Great Dragon Zoo watch and thrust it into Hamish’s hand. ‘Here, take this. I don’t want any of those dragons spotting me out of the corner of their eye with a big blue sphere of light around me.’

Hamish took the watch, frowning. ‘Then you won’t be protected—’

But CJ was already off, leaping over the low guardrail and crouch-running across the road while the three dragons looked the other way, consumed by their meal.

Hamish pushed the others through the scrub that ran along the edge of the road, heading for the tunnel, every now and then turning back to check on CJ.