Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

It was a standard industrial kitchen: there were five long island benches with gas stoves and hotplates, while one wall featured ten ovens. Pots and pans and cooking utensils hung from hooks in the ceiling.

CJ threw Johnson’s arm over her shoulder and hurried away from the counter. She needed to find somewhere she could—

There!

She spied a dumb waiter off to her right. Like everything else in the zoo, the box-like miniature elevator was oversized; Johnson would fit inside it easily. It also had sturdy industrial doors. It would be a decent hiding place.

Johnson was weighing her down. She’d never outrun the dragons with him on her shoulder. If they were going to get out of this zoo alive, she was going to have to hide him somewhere safe and come back and get him later.

She hurled him into the open dumb waiter and said, ‘Stay in here. I have to find a way to contact the outside world. I’ll come back for you later, okay?’

‘Okay. Hey,’ Johnson groaned. ‘Thanks.’

CJ shrugged. ‘I’ll probably be dead in five minutes, so don’t get your hopes up. Mind you, given that we both might die soon…’ She leaned forward and, surprising herself a little, gave him a quick impulsive kiss on the cheek.

Then CJ pulled the dumb waiter’s doors closed over Johnson’s surprised face.

CJ stepped back into the kitchen proper to find Go-Go turning dials on all the ovens.

‘What are you doing?’ she called.

‘They may be smart,’ Go-Go said, ‘but we’re smarter. We unleash the gas, then we blow this place on our way out.’

CJ could already smell the gas from the ovens. It wasn’t the best plan ever but it wasn’t a bad one either.

Go-Go moved down the line of ovens, stepping close to the serving counter CJ had dived over to get into the kitchen.

‘Go-Go,’ she warned, ‘don’t get too close to the—’

It happened so fast, CJ hardly even saw it.

A skeletal black claw reached over the counter, grabbed Go-Go by the arm and yanked him bodily out over it.

CJ saw Go-Go’s face go slack as the dragon outside slammed him up against the counter. Life faded from his eyes as he slumped from CJ’s view. He would be dead before he hit the ground.

CJ’s eyes boggled. ‘Jesus…’

And then another prince pushed through the swinging door beside the counter.

Red Face.

Fresh blood dripped from his jaws. He glared at CJ.

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

CJ ran.

Red Face sprang after her.

CJ slid over a benchtop just as the dragon dived at her and slid over it, too, sending pots and pans clattering to the floor.

But it was on its feet in a second, charging at her with a roar. CJ rolled as the dragon leapt astride her and lunged at her face with its mighty jaws—just as CJ snatched up a nearby frying pan and hit Red Face with it right on the snout.

The dragon screeched and recoiled and CJ took the opportunity to bolt for the other exit from the kitchen: the IN door.

CJ burst through the doorway—and immediately tripped on something and went sprawling to the floor, where she found herself staring into the blank, lifeless eyes of a dead Chinese commando who had no lower half to his body. He still gripped an MP-7 in one hand.

CJ snatched up the submachine gun and stood—and realised that she had emerged in a war zone.

The previously tranquil restaurant was now being pelted by wind and rain. A dozen princes feasted on dead commandos while two emperors yanked and tugged on the ceiling, trying, it seemed, to tear the place apart.

Beside her, a maintenance closet had been ripped open by the dragons. Its contents lay strewn all over the floor: mops, brooms, dusters, even a couple of backpack-mounted vacuum cleaners.

A roar from behind her made her spin.

Red Face stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

In the blink of an eye, CJ took in the situation.

Kitchen: no good.

The elevators: no good either; that meant running past a dozen dragons.

She glanced to her right and saw the torn-open section that was once the southern side of the restaurant. Tables that had sat cosily beside the windows now teetered at the edge of a precipice, lashed by rain.

She saw one of the vacuum cleaners by her feet. It was designed to be worn on someone’s back and it had a long power cord, maybe ninety feet.

And she smelled the gas wafting out from the ovens in the kitchen.

Windows, precipice, power cord , she thought.

You’re gonna die anyway …

‘Screw it,’ CJ said to no-one as she grabbed the vacuum cleaner and bounded down the broad descending levels of the restaurant, dodging chairs and hurdling tables, heading for the open southern side of the structure.

Red Face gave chase, flinging tables out of its path.

CJ stopped at what had once been a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The world fell away before her: she was a thousand feet above the valley floor but about three hundred feet directly beneath her, a short way down the mountainside, she saw the cable car tunnel disappearing into the mountai—

Beep-beep… beep-beep.

She turned.

Red Face had her cornered. He crouched low, tensed, ready to leap.

Then the floor shook and CJ spun to see a gigantic emperor standing to her right, perched on the edge of the restaurant, grinning down at her. Girders moaned, straining under the weight of the beast.

CJ backed away, uncoiling the power cord of the vacuum cleaner as she did so.

The heels of her boots touched the edge of the precipice.

Nowhere else to go. It was now or never.

She had uncoiled the whole power cord by now, so she looped it around the splintered frame of a floor-to-ceiling window and knotted it. Then she slipped the vacuum cleaner onto her back.

She sniffed the gas again and looked up at the dragons.

‘You assholes can’t breathe fire, can you? Try breathing this.’

And she raised her MP-7 and fired it… not at the dragons, but at the doorway to the kitchen.

She only needed one round to spark off some metal, a spark that would—

One round sparked…

…and with an almighty whoosh , the gas-filled kitchen exploded.

A billowing cloud of flames burst forth from the kitchen, blowing the IN door off its hinges, sending tables and chairs and dragons flying.

And as all this happened, CJ jumped out the window.

CJ fell through the darkness.

She dropped away from the restaurant with the vacuum cleaner on her back, its long power cord trailing above her as a billowing fireball blasted out from every window of the circular restaurant.

If there was still glass in a window’s frame, it shattered. If there wasn’t, the fiery explosion just fanned out unimpeded.

Seen from afar, for a brief instant, Dragon Mountain looked like an ancient lighthouse, with a sudden flare of orange at its summit.

The dragons started crying out.

CJ kept falling.

And then her power cord went taut and her fall was arrested abruptly about ninety feet below the restaurant. CJ jolted to a halt. For a moment she just hung there, dead still, high above the world, about fifteen feet from the rocky flank of the mountain.

She rocked back and forth to build some momentum and swing in toward the mountain. The force of her fall, however, had almost dislodged the cord from its socket in the vacuum cleaner. It had almost been torn clean off it. Now, as CJ swung, she felt that the cord was only attached to the vacuum cleaner by the barest of threads. Her first swing didn’t bring her close enough to the mountainside. She swung back out again… and the cord stretched even more, almost to breaking point. CJ arced back toward the mountainside as— snap! —the cord broke and she fell—