Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

23

CJ didn’t bother waiting for the elevator. It wouldn’t get there in time.

Instead, she just threw open a heavy door beside the elevators labelled FIRE STAIRS in both Mandarin and English.

Closely followed by the five other American guests plus Zhang, she bolted down the stairs three at a time, swinging round the corners.

Loud booms echoed out above her: the dragons were ramming the fire door.

Then there came a sharp cracking noise and suddenly a furious roar rang out in the stairwell.

‘They’re in!’ CJ called.

She came to the base of the stairwell, hurled open the door there, and found herself once again inside the vast waste management hall.

She glanced to her right and saw the massive external garage doors—and she realised why the dragons had stormed this building: those huge doors led outside .

Her group really had taken refuge in the wrong place.

This was what the dragons had wanted all along. They hadn’t been after the people inside her cable car. They had just wanted the cable car.

For this.

For this assault on the administration building: one of the few places in the Great Dragon Zoo of China with an exit.

In an academic corner of her mind, CJ found herself marvelling at the ingenuity of the dragons. This wasn’t just problem-solving behaviour. This was complex combination planning.

Misguided though their plan was—even if they somehow got past the inner dome via the loading dock, there was still the second electromagnetic dome outside the first one, and how could they possibly bring that down?—it was still a plan.

These creatures, CJ realised, were more intelligent than any animal she’d ever encountered.

‘They’re coming!’ Johnson called from the rear of the group.

‘Hamish, block the door!’ CJ yelled.

Hamish climbed up into the cab of a nearby garbage truck, started it up, jammed it into reverse and backed it up against the stairwell door—

—just as the first prince arrived there with a shrill squeal and poked its head through.

Hamish rammed the big garbage truck against the door, slamming it, and the dragon’s head, sticking out from between the door and its frame, was sliced off, guillotined. Then the door slammed shut, held closed by the weight of the garbage truck.

There came a series of loud bangs from the other side as more dragons arrived there and started ramming it. But they couldn’t get it open—yet.

Bang!

The garbage truck jolted slightly.

Bang!

Again.

As the banging continued, CJ spun to check her options.

The waste facility was just as she had left it: the wide refuse pit, the external doors leading outside, the inner doors leading back to the ring road tunnel, a couple of dozen garbage trucks and the pick-up truck with the yellowjacket dragon inside its trailer.

At that moment, one of the elevators arrived with a ping and fifteen Chinese office workers in shirtsleeves and slacks hurried out of it, panic-stricken.

A dozen Chinese workmen in blue waste facility coveralls raced to a locked steel cabinet on the northern wall of the hall. Their leader fumbled with a set of keys before managing to open the cabinet’s padlock and fling its thick doors wide.

It was a gun cabinet.

CJ saw guns on racks inside it—handguns and a few assault rifles that looked like AK-47s. The Chinese workmen started handing them out.

CJ turned again and saw the external doors. ‘Seems to me that the safest place to be right now is outside those doors and outside this valley. How do we open them?’

‘That control panel over by the elevators,’ Zhang said, pointing. ‘But immediately outside those doors are heavy safety gates. We’d have to open them, too.’

Two of the Chinese workmen evidently had a similar idea about the external doors. They were already running for the control panel beside the elevators that Zhang had indicated.

They were ten steps short of the panel when CJ realised.

It was quiet.

The banging had stopped.

The dragons weren’t trying to get through the stairwell door anymore.

She turned slowly.

‘Where will they—?’ she said as it happened.

The two elevator doors suddenly burst open from within and red-bellied black dragons poured out of them!

They’d come down the elevator shaft .

First there were two dragons, then eight, then twelve. They fanned out rapidly. Some were earless though most still had their ears—but then CJ recalled that most of the Chinese workers in the admin building weren’t wearing their protective watches. There was plenty of prey for all of the dragons, earless or not.

The two workmen who had been running toward the control panel beside the elevators were attacked first.

Two earless dragons tackled them, hurling the men to the ground before leaping on top of them and tearing out their windpipes, almost ripping off their heads in the process.

CJ’s face fell.

‘We’re not going that way now,’ Hamish said.

‘Got any other ideas?’ Perry asked.

It was at that moment that the Chinese workmen opened fire with their guns.

Within seconds, there was mayhem all over the waste management hall.

Dragons shrieked. Gunfire clattered. Sparks bounced off the walls.

The Chinese workmen took cover and fired their guns at the oncoming dragons, but just as a man hid behind a garbage truck and opened fire, a dragon would fly over the truck and fall on him from above and it ended in screams and blood.

CJ saw one dragon ruthlessly slash one of its foreclaws across the front of a workman’s body. Four lines of blood exploded from his chest and the man fell.

She saw another dragon rip a man in two with its foreclaws. Blood and intestines poured out from the corpse.

A third dragon flew past and bit the head off another man. His headless body kept standing for a few seconds—the gun in its hand still firing—before the decapitated body finally collapsed to the ground.

The Chinese workers’ gunfire seemed to have little effect on the dragons. Sparks pinged off their armoured hides and foreheads. Occasionally, CJ saw a gout of blood spray out from an un armoured section of one of the dragons’ bodies and the animal would shriek, more in annoyance than pain. Then it would just continue its forward charge.

The Chinese office workers were jumping into any kind of car or truck they could find.

CJ saw three office workers dive into a Great Zoo of China hatchback, only for two dragons to grab the car from either side and fling it against the wall. The little car slammed into the wall roof-first, crumpling instantly, its occupants crushed.

‘Get into the garbage trucks!’ CJ called. ‘They’re heavier! They’ll give better protection!’

The group split up, hurrying for the nearest garbage trucks.

Zhang climbed into one truck, while CJ clambered into the cabin of another with Hamish and Ambassador Syme. Johnson joined them but not before risking a dash to grab a pistol that had been dropped by one of the Chinese workmen. CJ glimpsed Wolfe and Perry disappearing inside the thick-doored gun cabinet and slamming the door shut behind them.

‘You know, we’re lucky it’s just the little ones,’ Syme gasped. ‘The princes.’

There came an almighty muffled roar and suddenly the brickwork above the elevators broke out into a spider web of cracks. A moment later, the entire wall above the elevators was smashed open from within and an enormous— earless —red-bellied king dragon burst out from it, bellowing furiously.

‘Mother of God…’ Hamish said.

The bus-sized animal reared up on its hind legs. It absolutely dominated the space. It bounded forward, sweeping garbage trucks out of its path with its forelimbs.