The Great Zoo of China (34 page)

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.

‘O
h,
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—

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.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.