Matthew Reilly - The Great Zoo of China

‘What are we driving into?’ Syme breathed.

Hamish leaned out his window and looked up into the night sky behind him.

A swarm of black shadows, perhaps forty of them, blotted out the stars, dark aerial wraiths.

It was the flock of red-bellied black dragons and they were coming for the airfield.

‘I’ll tell you what we’re driving into,’ Hamish said. ‘The last stand.’

With booming thruster-blasts, four small Chinese fighters took off from the airfield, screaming into the sky, shooting out over the plain toward the incoming dragons.

They opened fire, sending tracer rounds lancing into the dragon pack.

Three dragons dropped instantly, squealing. The rest of the pack scattered and the fighters shot through their midst.

But then a few dragons, led by the superking, banked and gave chase and suddenly it was fighter jets versus dragons—while the rest of the dragon force, thirty-plus dragons led by the superemperor, descended upon the airfield.

Hamish looked up at the incoming swarm of dragons. With their huge bat-like silhouettes, they looked positively fearsome.

But then he spotted something else about them, something odd.

All of the larger dragons—the kings and the emperors—were carrying objects in their claws.

Hamish squinted to see what the objects were and when he finally saw them, he gasped, ‘Oh, this is gonna be messy.’

In their claws, the king dragons were holding Great Dragon Zoo cars and vans. The emperors, however, were carrying much larger objects: garbage trucks, whole pieces of the revolving restaurant, a section of the concrete ring road; one emperor even carried the smashed remains of the control tower that had once stood atop the administration building.

The dragons swooped over Hamish’s fire truck—still half a mile from the airfield—and the battle began.

The Chinese launched their defensive measures.

RPGs shot into the sky. Gunfire rang out. The massive 125mm cannons on the four tanks boomed as they launched fragmentation rounds at the incoming creatures.

In the face of this fire, the dragons squealed, roared, wheeled and exploded. But they kept on coming.

Five dragons fell while the rest blasted through the wave of fire and, flying fast and low, the big ones released their improvised bombs.

Suddenly it was raining cars, vans and garbage trucks. They sailed down out of the sky and slammed into the ranks of Chinese military vehicles, crushing soldiers in an instant, bowling their vehicles over. The heavier garbage trucks caused the most damage. They were simply lethal.

Then came the larger objects.

The piece of the revolving restaurant’s roof flattened a troop truck as it landed. The section of the ring road hit the ground with a colossal boom and tumble-rolled over two tanks and three troop trucks, crushing all of them. The control tower slammed into a hangar and took down all four of its walls before the roof caved in and the whole thing was levelled.

And then, having expended their aerial weapons, the dragons themselves entered the battle zone…

…and what followed was a bloodbath.

The lead superemperor landed on a tank, crushing it with its talons before the great beast let loose with a tremendous tongue of fire that incinerated three Chinese jeeps and two troop trucks.

Chinese soldiers fell to the ground, their skin melting before their eyes.

King dragons grabbed jeeps and hurled them away. Emperors picked up the tanks and flung them down the runway, tumbling end over end.

Up in the sky, the fighter jets returned, guns blazing, only this time three dragons—the superking, one emperor and one regular king—came streaking out of the air from the side, their bodies elongated, their wings pinned back.

They flew at phenomenal speed and on a perfect intercepting course.

As the three big dragons intersected with the fighters, the superking spewed fire at two of them, lashing their cockpits, melting the pilots in an instant. The two fighters exploded in mid-air.

The emperor lashed out with a claw and tore another fighter’s right wing clear off and that fighter went screaming into the ground, crashing at full speed in a billowing explosion.

The regular king simply collided with the last fighter and latched itself onto it, and to the pilot’s horror, the fighter lost all its aerodynamics and began spiralling toward the ground. A hundred feet off the ground, the king released it and the fighter crashed into the side of the zoo’s crater while the dragon just flew off, rejoining the other two as they headed for the battle at the airfield.

Watching all of this from the safety of a bunker just outside the electromagnetic dome were Hu Tang and Colonel Bao. They had arrived there by car only fifteen minutes earlier.

Their reinforced concrete bunker—a superstrong double-storey command post—sat just behind the line of fifteen emplacements that emitted the dome.

There was movement everywhere in the bunker: technicians at consoles, soldiers on radios, officers peering through binoculars at the disaster unfolding outside. Monitors and plasma screens showed various views of the dragons’ onslaught.

A technician turned to Bao. ‘Colonel! Telemetry is confirmed: the outer electromagnetic dome is operating at half-strength. The dragons somehow disabled the emplacements at the worker city. If they knock out the emplacements on this side, the outer dome will fall.’

Hu Tang stared incredulously at the scene in front of him. He hadn’t thought this could get any worse, but it had.

He turned to Bao, panicked. ‘Did you hear that? They disabled the emplacements on the other side! Do something!’

‘Be quiet, sir ,’ Bao said calmly. ‘We still have options.’ He turned to an officer behind him. ‘Major. Prepare the thermobaric bombs: airfield, worker city and at the Halfway Hut.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Hu Tang’s eyes went wide. ‘You’re going to destroy everything?’

Bao turned to face him, his eyes hard. ‘We have kept other eggs elsewhere, Minister. We have all the elements required to build another dragon zoo. What we cannot rebuild is our nation’s reputation.’

‘Will we be safe?’ Hu asked.

‘Of course we’ll be safe, you fool,’ Bao growled. ‘This command bunker stretches ten storeys below ground. It’s strong enough to withstand a thermobaric blast on its doorstep while everything outside it will suffocate in the ensuing vacuum. Minister, hear me well: the moment those dragons bring down that outer dome, I will detonate all three thermobaric devices and destroy every living thing in and around this zoo.’

The Chinese military airfield was crumbling under the dragons’ attack. It was mayhem, pandemonium; a maelstrom of fire, explosions, carnage and death.

And it was into this that Hamish Cameron drove his ladder truck.