Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

‘Grab a gun!’ Johnson called and CJ snatched up a pistol that had landed near her. Johnson grabbed something bigger, a long rectangular case.

‘Up the stairs!’ CJ yelled, leading the way. Go-Go ran behind her, then Johnson, Hamish, Wolfe and Syme.

CJ bounded up the stairs two at a time, rising above the smashed helicopter just as one of the earless red-bellied black kings landed like a gigantic eagle right next to her and roared at her face! It was classic apex predator behaviour, designed to frighten its prey into a petrified, frozen stance.

But CJ Cameron was no ordinary prey.

She whipped up her pistol and pumped two rounds right into the beast’s left eye.

The dragon screamed and, losing its balance, fell from its perch, dropping away from the stairs and— squelch! —its long neck landed astride the spinning rotor blades of the chopper and the dragon was instantly beheaded, its head falling from its neck in a disgusting spray of blood.

Another shriek made CJ spin around.

The second earless king had seen the first one’s demise and now it was zooming in toward CJ and her group.

‘Oh, man…’ Go-Go gasped.

This time the sight of the flying king dragon coming straight for them with its talons raised, its jaws bared and squealing its hideous attack-scream made even CJ pause. It was coming in fast, way too fast to evade or avoid. Even her pistol would be useless. This was a sight no animal lived to remember.

Then CJ heard a deep whump from her left and suddenly a finger of smoke lanced out toward the incoming dragon, a finger of smoke that had come from the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher that Greg Johnson had extracted from his newly-acquired case.

The rocket hit the dragon and an explosion flared out in the rainy night. One of the dragon’s wings fell away from its body and the big creature’s head lolled lifelessly, but due to its considerable inertia, it continued travelling straight for them.

‘Move!’ Johnson shouted. ‘It’s going to hit!’

CJ took four bounding strides up the stone stairway, closely followed by Go-Go and Johnson.

Hamish, Syme and Wolfe all leapt down the stairs a bare second before the incoming dragon smashed against the stairway at phenomenal speed, turning a whole section of the steps to dust before it dropped to the platform below, broken and dead.

When the dust settled, CJ found they had a new problem.

A twenty-foot-wide void now existed in the middle of the stone stairway, separating her group.

She, Johnson and Go-Go were on its upper side while Hamish, Syme and Wolfe were cut off below.

CJ locked eyes with Hamish as the rain came tumbling down.

‘Get out of here, Cass!’ he called. ‘We’ll find another way up the mountain!’

She knew he was right—they had to go and they had to go now—but she didn’t want to leave her brother.

‘Hamish!’ she yelled. ‘If we can’t find each other, find a radio and do the call we did as kids: 20 at 20.’

‘20 at 20, got it!’ he shouted back. ‘Now go—’

‘Wait!’ She tore off her watch and held it up. ‘Take off your watches! They’re tracking us with them.’ She threw the watch down into the remains of the helicopter.

‘But won’t we lose our shields?’ Syme called. ‘Then the dragons will be able to get us!’

‘We trade one set of predators for another,’ CJ shouted. ‘And those dragons don’t have tracking devices or guns.’

Hamish unstrapped his watch and threw it away. ‘All right, now, go!’

‘Be careful,’ CJ called.

‘You, too,’ Hamish said seriously.

And so CJ ran up the stone stairs, followed by Johnson and Go-Go, drenched by the rain, separated from her brother and without the protective sonic shield of her watch. And without that, she was now exposed to attack from all the dragons in the Great Dragon Zoo of China.

Ashort way up the mountainside, CJ, Johnson and Go-Go came to a shallow cave. Inside it, artfully concealed from outside view, was a red-painted door embedded in a concrete wall. Emblazoned across the door was a sign in Mandarin and English: FIRE EXIT.

‘This is the emergency exit from the mountain,’ Go-Go said. ‘If there’s a fire in the restaurant or the cable car station, the fire stairs lead you here.’

CJ cracked open the door to see a long corridor lit by dim lights. It stretched away for at least eighty metres.

‘There are stairs at the other end of this tunnel?’ Johnson asked.

‘Yuh-huh.’

‘And they’ll take us up the mountain?’ Johnson said.

‘Hope you’re fit, Secret Agent Man.’

‘Let’s hustle,’ CJ said.

They hurried down the concrete tunnel.

Back outside, Hamish Cameron was running hard through the rain, with Wolfe and Ambassador Syme close behind him.

They ran around the base of Dragon Mountain, following a muddy bush-lined trail, their eyes scanning the sky, searching for dragons.

‘Hey,’ Syme said to Hamish as they ran. ‘What did your sister mean by 20 at 20?’

‘It was something we did as kids,’ Hamish said. ‘Our dad was always taking us camping in national parks. If we ever got separated, dad told us to find a ranger shack and get on the CB radio. We were to set the radio to channel 20 and send out a call at twenty minutes past the hour, every hour, until he answered. He would’ve set his own CB radio to channel 20 by then and be waiting for our call. Ergo, 20 at 20.’

‘Nice,’ Syme said. ‘Ever use it?’

‘A couple of times.’

‘Looks like it’s also handy when you’re in a zoo filled with dragons that’s gone to shit,’ Syme said.

‘Yeah.’ Hamish looked behind them as they ran.

As they’d dashed from the site of the side-turned helicopter, he’d seen one of the red-bellied black princes spot them and now he could hear the braying of the dragon somewhere on the path behind them—

Whump!

A second prince landed right in front of him, claws and jaws bared!

Hamish dived right, off the trail, and suddenly he found himself sliding down a steep muddy slope. Wolfe and Syme must have done the same, because he heard them yelling behind him.

They were lucky they did. They slid much faster than they could have run and it gave them a lead on the two dragons. Hamish must have slid for about a hundred metres before he dropped off a ledge and slammed to a halt in a shallow muddy pool. Wolfe and Syme landed with twin splashes and a similar lack of grace behind him.

Hamish leapt to his feet and saw a high curving waterfall to his right, a lake in front of him and the ruined castle on the other side of the lake, all veiled in rain and lit by floodlights.

He knew where they were: they were on the western side of the valley, near the waterfall that their cable car had gone over earlier.

‘Great, we’re back where we started,’ he muttered.

‘Not quite,’ Wolfe said, pointing to their right.

A small building stood on the near shore of the waterfall, with a dock extending out from it and a handful of riverboats tied to the dock.

A shriek from overhead made Hamish look up and he saw the two red-bellied princes fly across the rain-streaked sky.

‘Get to that building!’ he said, breaking into a run.

CJ panted as she bounded up the fire stairs inside Dragon Mountain. Johnson and Go-Go ascended the seemingly endless concrete stairwell behind her.