Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

The crowd of dragons hissed and snarled. It was a child’s ultimate nightmare become real.

The superemperor lowered its mighty head. Minnie shook before its gigantic slavering jaws, quivering and crying.

It opened its jaws.

Strings of saliva extended from the upper fangs to the lower ones.

Then a stream of horizontal fire suddenly extended between the dragon and the girl, cutting across them, and the superemperor recoiled, startled.

Indeed, every dragon arrayed around the wide chamber reared in surprise as a human on the back of a yellowjacket prince appeared in the middle of the space and stood defiantly before the two red-bellied black masters.

CJ Cameron and Lucky.

CJ looked like a knight on a stallion, only instead of a lance she held a flamethrower, and instead of armour she wore an industrial-yellow heat suit with the hood flung back.

As soon as she’d seen Minnie, CJ had moved, abandoning her difficulties with the safe.

She wasn’t concerned for Director Chow or the Communist Party big shots. They had known the risks of this place when they’d come here.

But Minnie was different. She was innocent. She didn’t deserve to die this way: abandoned, alone and in total fear.

And so CJ had dashed out of the office, holding the yellow training remote and snatching a heat suit off a wall-hook.

She’d slid into it, then mounted Lucky and swooped down to the floor of the chamber and fired her flamethrower across the face of the superemperor.

Now, she sat astride Lucky, in front of the two enormous master dragons. The bulky heat suit made her look like the Michelin Man and with the hood flung back, her helmeted head was exposed.

The two master dragons glared down at her, their eyes furious.

CJ leapt off Lucky’s back and placed herself squarely between them and Minnie.

‘Get back!’ she yelled.

The masters growled.

The army of surrounding dragons began to hiss ominously… and slowly move in.

Maintaining eye contact with the superking, CJ loosed another spray from her flamethrower.

The masters arched back. CJ hoped they figured that any other fire-breathing animal was to be respected. The ring of dragons paused, wary of the flames.

She pushed Minnie toward Lucky.

‘Hi, Minnie,’ she said. ‘Get on.’

The little girl’s face was streaked with tears, but she nodded. She edged toward Lucky—

—when suddenly the superking raised its head to the heavens and sent a geyser of fire shooting up into the sky.

Then the big animal swung its head down so that it stared directly at CJ…

…and it opened its jaws…

…and CJ’s eyes boggled as she saw the dragon’s giant mouth yawn wide, saw its many teeth, its pink tongue and the depths of its throat—and rising from those depths, a surging ball of flames.

The next second, the dragon sent a horizontal pillar of fire spraying right at CJ and Minnie.

CJ flipped her hood over her helmet and pushed Minnie hard toward Lucky before she herself spun on the spot, turning her back to the dragon.

Superhot flames slammed into her, lashed around her. It was unbelievably hot, unbearably hot. The flames totally consumed her body.

Then the inferno stopped and in the smoke haze that followed it… CJ remained standing.

The master dragons reared back in surprise, stunned that CJ could possibly still be alive. Clearly, no animal had ever survived such a blast.

‘Still here, motherfuckers,’ CJ said.

As she said this, CJ saw the superking’s left thigh, saw the brand on it: R-02.

She quickly pulled the yellow training unit from her suit and punched its touchscreen display with a gloved hand: R-02 then SHOCK.

The superking immediately squealed in agony and clutched at its head, causing all the dragons ringing the confrontation to look at each other in confusion.

CJ dashed over to Minnie and threw her onto Lucky’s back. ‘We can’t stay here.’

No sooner was CJ in the saddle than Lucky sprang into the air—a nanosecond before a horizontal tongue of fire lanced out from the superking’s mouth and liquefied the floor where Lucky had been standing.

CJ didn’t care where Lucky went so long as it was somewhere else, but with dragons flanking them on every side, it turned out there was only one direction Lucky could go: down.

Lucky dived into the vertical tunnel and shot down it at rocket speed.

With Minnie seated between her thighs, CJ quickly clipped herself in. She also attached a clip to Minnie’s belt, but as she did so, she lost her grip on the training unit and it went tumbling away into the tunnel.

‘Shit!’ CJ reached after it, but it fell into the darkness, never to be seen again.

CJ spun in her saddle to see three red-bellied black princes sweep into the tunnel behind them in hot pursuit.

The two masters, she noted, didn’t follow.

The walls of the circular tunnel swept by at phenomenal speed. There were dim orange lights spaced along its length: ageing military-grade glow sticks.

At first the tunnel was dizzyingly vertical, then it bent at a forty-five-degree angle. CJ held on to Minnie while Lucky streamlined her body to get maximum speed.

CJ flung back the hood of her heat suit, revealing her commando helmet. She flicked on the flashlight mounted on its side.

Then, without warning, the walls of the tunnel simply disappeared and CJ found herself flying out in wide open space above a vast underground cavern.

Hundreds of glow sticks illuminated the cave in a faint orange glow. Mainly used by the military and by cave explorers, glow sticks were a clever choice of light source by the Chinese: powered by a mild chemical reaction, they required no external power or cabling and, importantly, they made no noise, so they would never have disturbed the dragon eggs. These glow sticks, however, were at the end of their chemical lives and many had gone out. The ones that still worked gave off a sickly orange glow.

The cavern itself was shaped like a gigantic funnel, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. Sweeping down its flanks in a wide spiral was an irregular shelf-like path on which sat dozens and dozens of oversized leathery eggs. At the very base of the funnel CJ saw a small steaming pool of water, a natural spring of some sort that had kept the cavern moist for millennia.

The dragons’ original nest , CJ thought.

The eggs, she noticed even in her haste, were of different sizes: the larger ones, she assumed, were for the emperors and kings, the smaller ones for the princes.

All were hatched, open.

A small demountable booth had been erected at the top of the cavern beside the exit tunnel, but it looked long abandoned, covered in dust and dirt. Once all the dragons had hatched, it had lost its usefulness and, like the glow sticks, the Chinese must have simply left it here.

With three whoosh es, the three pursuing red-bellied black princes sped into the cave. Two covered the exit tunnel, while the third hovered in the air and bellowed a roar of the utmost fury at CJ, Lucky and Minnie.

CJ recognised the dragon instantly.

It was Red Face.

‘Not you again,’ she said.

Lucky landed on the spiralling path on the side of the cave and said, ‘ White Head… off …’