Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Now finally free of dragons, the truck sped into the next tunnel.

A hundred metres inside this new tunnel, the garbage truck skidded to a halt in front of a barred gate buried in the outer wall.

This gate’s black iron bars were, if it were possible, thicker than the bars they had seen on any gate so far.

CJ leapt down from the roof and joined Hamish, Johnson, Syme and Zhang at the gateway.

Hamish looked CJ up and down. ‘Got all your fingers and toes?’

‘Haven’t had time to check,’ CJ said. ‘I think so.’

Zhang raced to the barred gate and spoke to two soldiers on the other side. They were dressed in Chinese Army attire, carried modern Steyr assault rifles and their faces were entirely blank.

‘Let us in!’ Zhang said in Mandarin.

The two soldiers said nothing—and did nothing—in reply.

‘I said, let us in!’ Zhang cried.

One of the soldiers said in an emotionless tone: ‘You know they can’t come in here, Deputy Director. The Nesting Centre is off-limits to all unauthorised personnel.’

‘Unauthorised personnel…’ Zhang repeated in astonishment. ‘Are you joking? We’re in the middle of an emergency here—’

‘Not even you can come in here, Deputy Director. You are not authorised.’ The soldier jerked his chin at CJ, Hamish, Syme and Johnson. ‘And we certainly will not allow them in. We have orders from Colonel Bao himself on this matter.’

‘Have you no decency!’ Zhang shouted. ‘We’re going to die out here—’

‘Forget it,’ CJ said, pulling Zhang by the arm and glancing back down the tunnel.

It stretched away, empty and bare.

The dragons hadn’t entered it yet.

She swapped a glance with Johnson before saying to Zhang: ‘If we can’t get in here, where else can we go?’

Zhang was shaking with fury, but he regathered himself. ‘The Birthing Centre, maybe.’ He threw the guards a withering look. ‘If it is not guarded by lowly dogs!’

‘Er, Cassandra…’ Hamish said flatly. He only ever called her that when it was serious.

CJ spun and saw what he was looking at.

The enormous shadow of a king-sized dragon stood in the tunnel entrance behind them, blocking out the light.

The dragon roared, the terrible noise echoing down the tunnel.

‘Come on!’ CJ called. ‘We try for the Birthing Centre.’

They all jumped back into the garbage truck and, once again driven by Hamish, it zoomed down the second tunnel. A few seconds later it burst out into daylight.

The road ahead bent to the right, following the curve of the crater wall. They were now at the northwestern corner of the valley. In fact, CJ realised, they were on the section of the ring road hidden behind the screen of cliffs near the casino. She wondered what was back here, what those artificial cliffs concealed.

She scanned the road ahead: there were no tunnels here; the freeway-like road was open to the sky. Two reinforced steel gates, however, bored into the outer wall.

The first of those gates was about three hundred yards ahead of them and it was open.

Zhang pointed at it. ‘That’s the entrance to the Birthing Centre!’

The garbage truck raced toward it.

As it did so, CJ leaned out the passenger-side window to look at the valley behind them, or at least the western half of it.

She saw a red-bellied black emperor perched atop the wreckage of the administration building, bellowing triumphantly. The building was almost completely destroyed: its tower was gone, its front windows were shattered and its domed balcony was in ruins.

Three kings circled the air in front of it, as if guarding the building.

They now consider it their territory , CJ thought.

Right then, however, four Z-10 attack helicopters shoomed over the top of the crater wall, blazing away with tracer fire at the emperor, causing it to take flight.

The Z-10 is the Chinese equivalent of the AH-64 Apache, a gunship with a stepped cockpit, a nose-mounted 30mm cannon, and stub-wings from which hang a variety of anti-tank and air-to-air missiles.

The three dragons surrounding the emperor sprang to his defence and zeroed in on the Z-10s. But the attack choppers unleashed their missiles and suddenly the dragons were exploding.

Two of the choppers hounded the emperor, chasing him across the zoo, their tracers sizzling across the valley like lasers, until one of the choppers loosed an air-to-air missile that banked and swerved after the fleeing emperor, hit it and detonated.

The airliner-sized dragon blew apart in a monumental spray of blood and pulp. Great chunks of flesh the size of boulders rained down from the sky.

‘The empire is striking back,’ Ambassador Syme observed, peering out the window beside CJ.

CJ nodded. ‘This is now a fight between two territorial animals: dragons and humans.’

And human technology, she thought, unleashed in brutal fashion by the Chinese, would ultimately win this battle.

At that moment, the garbage truck skidded to a stop in front of the open gates to the Birthing Centre.

‘Quick! Inside!’ Greg Johnson called, jumping out and ushering them all through the entrance.

They hurried inside. Johnson slid the thick barred gate shut behind them just as another red-bellied black dragon smacked against the bars, screeching wildly.

As the dragon raged at the gate, the group dashed down the darkened tunnel.

CJ ran out in front.

For some reason, the ceiling lights here were out. The tunnel was almost completely dark: the only illumination came from the daylight behind them and from some dim artificial light coming from the other end of the tunnel. The dragon at the gate behind them continued to fume.

About twenty metres down the tunnel, CJ saw a thick steel door sunk into the left-hand wall. It was open. A warning sign on it read DIESEL GENERATORS—NO NAKED FLAMES in English and Mandarin. Inky darkness lay beyond it.

‘I don’t think we’re going in there,’ CJ said. She preferred the dimly lit space at the far end of the tunnel. When it came to fleeing from creatures that could see in pitch darkness, even a small amount of light was better than total blackness.

They kept running and eventually came to a pair of wide security doors, also open.

They passed through them and emerged inside the Birthing Centre. They all stopped dead in their tracks.

CJ swallowed. ‘We shouldn’t have come here.’

CJ stared in horror at the Birthing Centre—at what it was and at what had clearly happened in it over the last hour or so.

The centre itself was a broad two-storey-high hall with glistening white-tiled walls and floors. The whole place had a feeling of antiseptic cleanliness.

But it wasn’t clean anymore.

The Birthing Centre was bathed in blood and gore. Dead bodies dressed in lab coats littered the floor; Chinese technicians who had been torn apart by rampaging dragons. Equipment had been smashed. Wires hung everywhere. Lights hung askew from the ceiling, giving off sparks.

The whole space—no doubt usually brightly lit—was cloaked in grim semidarkness.