Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Their dead bodies lay in pieces on the floor—heads, arms, torsos, legs. A huge double-decker cable car lay tilted at a crazy angle beside the platform, nose up, ass down. It looked like it had been savaged by dragons: all its windows were smashed and one of its walls was completely peeled away.

The station’s platform kinked at a ninety-degree angle. It was here that the cable cars made their turn. The overhead steel cable disappeared down two concrete tunnels: it came in from the south and exited to the east. A chill wind whistled eerily as it swept through the long tunnels.

There was no movement.

No dragons.

‘That’s the maintenance office.’ Go-Go pointed at a two-storey glass-walled structure in the corner of the station. Its upper storey had slanted windows and nearly all of them had been smashed.

CJ hurried toward it.

The three of them raced through the maintenance office’s lower door and hustled up some internal stairs before bursting through an open doorway.

The maintenance office had been ripped to shreds. Two dead Chinese technicians lay on the floor, their throats ripped out, their stomachs torn open. The main console had been wrenched apart. Naked wires sparked. Blood dripped off every surface.

And every computer screen was smashed.

Johnson tapped on some keys. ‘All these computers are useless.’

CJ found a phone on the console. It had been cracked in two, broken beyond repair.

‘We try the restaurant,’ she said.

A clunking noise from above made them all look up.

A ceiling panel came free and CJ tensed… only to see a fearful young face appear from behind the panel, the face of the young Chinese electrician from before, the man named Li.

‘Hello…?’ he said softly.

‘Li?’ CJ helped him down. ‘Are you okay?’

He nodded quickly.

‘The dragons attacked your team?’

He nodded again. ‘Some red-bellied black princes and a king,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘They had no ears. We were working under the cable car here, relying on its sonic shield, so none of us was wearing our watches. But the cable car’s shield was useless against them.’

CJ glanced around nervously. She didn’t like this place at all. There weren’t enough exits. It was too easy to get trapped.

‘We shouldn’t linger here.’ She began to move. ‘We make for the restaurant—’

She cut herself off, glimpsing movement in her peripheral vision: she could have sworn one of the dragon statues outside had moved. No. It was just a trick of the flickering light. It was only a statue.

Then the statue really did move .

It turned its head to face the maintenance office and looked CJ right in the eye.

It was a purple royal, king-sized, with high pointed ears.

With a roar it bounded forward, lunging at the maintenance office’s upper windows.

‘Look out!’ Johnson pushed CJ sideways as the big dragon’s foreclaws came rushing in through the shattered windows.

CJ fell one way, while Go-Go and Li dived the other way, but Johnson’s reaction had put him in the middle and two of the dragon’s razor-sharp talons slashed across the front of his body, drawing twin sprays of blood across his chest up near the left shoulder.

Johnson slumped instantly, dropped to the floor.

The dragon roared, its bellow shaking the little room.

CJ crab-crawled over to Johnson, ducking beneath the dragon’s slavering jaws, threw his good arm over her own shoulder and hauled him away.

‘Can you run?’ she asked.

‘Just,’ Johnson groaned.

With Johnson looped over her shoulder, CJ raced to the door leading downstairs, reaching it just in time to see two purple princes arrive at the base of the stairs below, spot her and roar.

‘Shit…’ she said.

‘What the fuck do we do!’ Go-Go yelled.

CJ slammed the door, locked it and turned just as the king’s entire head came smashing into the maintenance office in a rain of glass.

Ducking below it, CJ saw the upturned cable car just outside the windows: the roof of its raised nose-end was level with the windows. The cable car’s lower end lay over near the catwalk that led to the guest elevator.

‘Go-Go, Li, follow me. Johnson, I need you to give me everything you’ve got!’

Without any further pause, she ran across the maintenance office, staying out of the reach of the king dragon. She skipped up on a chair and with Johnson beside her, leapt up onto the control console and then out the shattered window , past the dragon and onto the roof of the upturned cable car, where she slid down its length, dragging Johnson with her.

They slid wildly, past the king dragon, its head still thrust inside the maintenance office.

After they’d slid for about ninety feet, CJ threw out her left leg and caught the edge of the grated catwalk leading to the double-decker guest elevator. She and Johnson came to an abrupt halt.

Li and Go-Go slid to matching halts beside her.

CJ looped Johnson’s arm over her shoulder again and made for the elevator. They got there with Go-Go and Li close behind them. CJ punched the call button.

A deafening roar answered her.

CJ turned.

The purple royal king was glaring right at her from the other side of the cable car platform. Its two princes were at its side, also staring at them, snarling.

Ping!

The elevator doors opened. CJ slipped inside it with the others.

The king growled, a deep resonating noise, and then it and the princes attacked.

As the elevator doors began to close with frustrating slowness, the king bounded across the void, kicking the double-decker cable car out of the way as if it weighed nothing, while the two princes took to the air and flew across the void at incredible speed. CJ willed the doors to close, because right now they were all that stood between her and certain death.

The doors joined, closed, just as— wham! —the whole elevator rocked as the king dragon rammed it from the outside.

But the elevator was away.

They were clear.

CJ breathed a sigh of relief.

Until a few moments later when the floor of the elevator began to get torn apart.

‘Oh,you have got to be kidding me!’ she said as she saw the claws of the two prince-sized purple royals appear through the floor of her double-decker elevator, tearing through the plush carpet, ripping it away with frenzied slashes.

They must have got into the lower level of the elevator before the doors had closed and now they were trying to claw their way through the floor separating the two decks.

‘How long till we reach the restaurant?’ CJ asked Go-Go quickly.

‘Maybe thirty seconds, I don’t know,’ Go-Go said, staring at the frenzied clawing of the two dragons.

The flooring of the elevator wasn’t exactly a complex feat of engineering. It was just carpet over aluminium sheeting and beams. The two dragons punched up through the sheeting, cracking it.

‘We’re not gonna make it…’ CJ said, looking upward, as if she could see the approaching restaurant.

The two holes in the floor were growing larger by the second. Then one of the dragons managed to shove its head through the gap and snarled at CJ. She slid forward and kicked it square in the nose. The dragon squealed in pain and dropped back down to the lower level.

Then the second dragon squeezed its shoulders and one arm up through its hole. It was ready for CJ’s kick: it batted her boot away with one of its foreclaws.

The dragon rose up out of the hole in the floor, first its head, then its chest. It bared its teeth—