Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

Ping!

The elevator doors opened.

CJ lunged out of the elevator with Johnson on her shoulder and Li and Go-Go at her side. The dragon broke through the floor completely and bounded after them.

CJ flung Johnson across a table and dived over it after him as the beast spread its wings to cover the last few feet and—

Braaaaaack!

The dragon was pummelled with a spray of automatic gunfire and it dropped out of the air on the spot, collapsing in a tangle of spasming wings. It squealed until a final round slammed into its head and it flopped to the floor, dead.

CJ looked up to see a team of ten Chinese soldiers—dressed in black and brandishing better guns than any of the other Chinese soldiers she had seen—standing in a semicircle before her.

A Chinook helicopter—the biggest chopper she had seen so far—patrolled the air behind them, its spotlight blazing, illuminating the mountaintop restaurant with blinding white light.

The second dragon obviously didn’t know of its comrade’s fate, because it came screaming out of the elevator a second later, only to suffer a similar end. It was torn apart by a hail of gunfire from the waiting Chinese commandos.

Then all was silent, save for the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter outside.

CJ, Li and Go-Go stood and raised their hands. In CJ’s case, she threw down her pistol. Johnson remained on the floor.

CJ glanced to her right and saw, behind the maître d’s counter, an open doorway leading to an office: the restaurant manager’s office. On a desk inside it, she saw a computer and a phone: the computer was on and the phone’s lights blinked.

So near yet so far .

The ring of Chinese commandos closed in on them. They had saved their lives, sure, but only in the act of saving themselves from the two oncoming dragons.

That would be the last act of kindness they would show her, CJ thought, for as she looked at their hard faces, she realised that these commandos had been sent here to kill her.

At exactly the same time as this was happening, over in the waste management facility the other Chinese special forces team was in the process of entering the cable subducting tunnel.

They moved down it in single file, guns up. The concrete-walled tunnel was only a few feet wide, but it was well lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs.

As he moved along the tunnel looking down the barrel of his gun, Recon Two’s point man glanced up at the many cables running along the roof and walls of the passageway. One extra-thick black cable ran directly down the centre of the ceiling, dominating it: the primary main.

The point man rounded a bend and suddenly a monstrous apparition that was all claws and slashing teeth dropped from the ceiling above him and the man fell under the weight of a red-bellied black dragon.

His comrades opened fire and the tight concrete tunnel echoed with gunfire. The frenzied dragon managed to take down two more men before it was shot in the head and it dropped to the floor, dead.

The Chinese team stepped past its body, rounding the bend fully, their guns up, tensed for another attack. There was, after all, one more dragon down here.

They saw it.

The other earless red-bellied black prince was at the very end of the tunnel, but oddly, it had its back to them.

It was at the spot where all the overhead cables came together and disappeared into a small conduit pipe that led southwest.

The recon team’s leader frowned. The dragon was tearing away with all its might at all the cables. It used its claws and its teeth. Sparks flew. Wires fell every which way.

‘What the hell…?’ the leader breathed.

The dragon severed a final cable—the primary main—and immediately, one after the other, all the fluorescent lights in the ceiling went out and the tunnel was plunged into darkness.

Then the dragon rounded on the commando team and launched itself at them.

All across the Great Dragon Zoo of China, electrical power was extinguished.

Every single light went out.

All the lights inside the main entrance building, in the administration building, in the casino hotel.

All the streetlights flanking the ring road.

All the floodlights mounted on the rim of the crater and atop Dragon Mountain.

And all the pilot lights on every single sonic shield–generating antenna on every wristwatch, car and building in the zoo.

Inside the master control room in the main entrance building, all the monitors winked out and the room went dark.

The head technician yelled, ‘What just happened!’

‘Sir! Power’s out across the zoo!’

‘Switch to back-up power.’

‘Generators are offline, sir. We do not have back-up power. Repeat, we do not have back-up power.’

‘What about the electromagnetic domes?’

‘The inner dome is on the same grid as we are, sir. It’s off…’

The head technician snatched up his desk phone but he got no tone: all the phones were dead, too.

‘Sir,’ one of his techs said. ‘The sonic antennas are all just receivers, as are all the watches. They have no power themselves. If the main power supply is gone, they’re useless. Every building, vehicle and person in this zoo just lost their protection from the dragons.’

The entire zoo was plunged into darkness.

In an instant, the Great Dragon Zoo of China was taken back to the Stone Age.

And with the coming of the darkness came the sound of beasts that had thrived in a more ancient time.

Dragon calls rang out across the valley, and with the calls came movement and suddenly the sky above the crater was filled with the gigantic creatures, all moving with purpose.

The two silver Range Rovers zoomed around the ring road with their two troop truck escorts.

They were speeding down the eastern side of the valley now, passing a high ravine cut into the eastern wall of the crater. The four vehicles shot through an awning-covered receiving area—it housed a turning bay which serviced an elevator that led up to the cliff-top monastery built in homage to the Purple Cloud Temple.

Sitting in the cab of the lead troop truck, Dr Benjamin Patrick peered out into the night, concerned. Beside him, a Chinese sergeant drove.

Then, just as their four-vehicle convoy emerged from the receiving area, all the streetlights on the ring road blinked out.

The road went dark.

‘We’ve lost power…’ Ben Patrick said.

The driver said, ‘The back-up generators will—’