Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Hu nodded in reply and began walking off with his people. ‘Stay here. I’ll take care of everything.’

While all this was happening, CJ sat down on a bench on the broad balcony and opened the first-aid kit. She slipped off her jacket and hiked up the sleeve of her T-shirt. Her shoulder was a bloody mess. She was reaching for an antiseptic swab in the kit when Greg Johnson sat down beside her.

‘Here, let me help you with that,’ he said, taking the swab from her.

CJ eyed him closely. ‘You have experience field-dressing wounds, Mr Johnson?’

‘Maybe.’ He dabbed the gash on her shoulder, cleaning away the blood.

‘Bullet wounds?’ Hamish asked.

‘Maybe.’ Johnson tossed away the swab and picked up a needle and thread. ‘You might want to bite down on something. This is gonna hurt.’

CJ grabbed her leather jacket and bit down on its collar. She grunted sharply as Johnson pierced her skin with the needle and started sewing up the wound.

While Johnson worked, CJ gazed out over the valley.

The dragons, she saw, were flying with extra speed now. It wasn’t the lazy gliding she’d seen before. It had purpose . Gangs of red-bellied black dragons flew in coordinated packs, while the other types of dragons clustered together defensively.

After a couple of minutes, Johnson tied off the last stitch. ‘You’re done. All patched up.’

‘Thanks,’ CJ said. The needlework was good. The scar would be small.

‘What are you thinking?’ Johnson asked.

CJ nodded at the red-bellied black dragons flying around the valley in their groups. ‘I’m wondering what they’re thinking. I’m wondering why they attacked our cable car? Why today? Why now? Wait a second…’

She pulled her oversized UV glasses from her fanny pack. Amazingly, they were unbroken. She put them on. The electromagnetic dome still glowed green above the crater, lancing up from its emplacements on the rim. Beyond it, much higher up, the second red dome remained in place, while a pale-blue sonic shield pulsed around the admin building.

‘Patterns,’ she said to no-one. ‘What pattern were they exploiting?’

‘Huh?’ Hamish said. ‘What do you mean?’

CJ turned to face Hamish and Johnson, still wearing the glasses. Their sky-blue sonic shields pulsed around them. Gazing around her, CJ noticed that many of the Chinese workers inside the admin building bore no such spherical shields. Given that the building had its own shield, they probably saw no need to wear individual ones.

She took off the glasses and chewed on one of the earframes, thinking.

Then she blinked.

‘The two o’clock fuel run,’ she said.

‘The what?’ Johnson said.

CJ’s head snapped left, scanning the valley and the sky above it.

‘Reptilian predators like crocodiles and alligators love patterns, repetition. If you do something every day at the same time, they’ll notice it. And if it helps them hunt you, they’ll use that pattern against you. Just before the attack on our cable car occurred, I saw some fuel tankers doing a standard refuelling run at two o’clock. The dragons were waiting for those tankers to appear at the usual time—’

CJ cut herself off and turned to Hamish. ‘This isn’t over yet.’

Almost in response, a terrifyingly loud shriek could be heard from across the valley.

All three of them turned.

And their mouths opened.

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

Three red-bellied black emperors were flying through the air, banking toward the administration building. Each dragon carried something large in its massive claws.

Hamish said, ‘Are those—?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said.

‘Holy shit…’ Johnson said.

The two lead dragons carried fuel tankers in their clutches. The long silver tanks of the semitrailer rigs glistened in the sun while the cabs dangled limply from them.

The third emperor dragon carried a different cargo.

It held a dripping-wet cable car that was covered with reeds. It was their old cable car, resurrected from the base of the waterfall. All its windows were smashed, and inside it CJ could make out shapes, moving shapes, lots of them.

Red-bellied black princes.

‘We took refuge in the wrong building,’ she said flatly. ‘Brace yourself.’

But by the time she said it, it was too late.

The two lead emperor dragons swooped in toward the administration building—with its airport-like control tower at its summit—and like dive-bombers in World War II, released the tankers.

The first fuel-filled tanker slammed into the control tower with tremendous force. Something must have sparked because then the fuel inside the tanker ignited and the whole tower exploded in a gigantic billowing fireball.

Then it fell.

CJ looked up in horror as the great tower toppled like a slow-falling tree off the summit of the admin building and fell down the face of the structure!

For a moment she thought it was going to fall right on top of their glass-domed balcony, but it tumbled and bounced southward. Parts of it broke off as the flaming tower crashed down the slope until, with a colossal noise, it slammed down onto the ring road to the south of the admin building, right in front of the tunnel there.

‘Fuck a duck…’ Hamish said.

The second tanker was hurled into the top floor of the administration building, right underneath an array of antennas situated on the corner of the roof.

That tanker exploded, too, and the whole top corner of the building simply fell away in one massive chunk. It freefell down the face of the building, heading right for the glass-domed balcony on which CJ and the others stood.

‘Run!’ CJ called, the quickest to react.

They dashed inside, followed by the others, running for all they were worth, as behind them the corner chunk of the building smashed down onto the glass dome. The dome shattered as the chunk of building blasted down through it and the balcony was suddenly open to the elements.

CJ dived to the floor as shards of glass landed all around her. They’d got clear, just.

She rolled, facing upward, held her UV glasses to her eyes…

…and saw that the blue sonic shield around the admin building was no longer there.

By destroying the antenna array, the dragons had knocked it out.

She was on her feet in seconds.

‘Move! Move!’ She raced for the elevator.

‘What? Why!’ Wolfe called, still taking cover on the floor.

CJ kept running. ‘They just brought down the sonic shield protecting this building! Now they’re bringing in the attack troops!’

Wolfe turned and saw what CJ had foreseen.

For right then, in came the third red-bellied emperor dragon, carrying in its claws the wrecked cable car filled with princes.

The emperor swooped in low and released the cable car directly at the smashed-open dome of the admin building’s balcony.

With a deafening crash, the huge double-decker cable car came flying in through the broken dome and slid for a full thirty metres before it ground to a halt inside the building, right near the spot where CJ and the others had been standing only moments before.

Dragons burst out from it.

There were maybe fifteen of them, all prince-sized red-bellied blacks. The five leading dragons had no ears while the rest did.

They sprang out of the cable car like a rampaging army, heads low, tails high, foreclaws spread wide, searching for prey.