The Great Zoo of China (45 page)

Over in the waste management facility, Hamish swallowed hard.

‘Okay. What do you need me to do?’ he said.

‘
Can you get to the military airfield?
’

Hamish was standing near the huge barred external gates of the waste management facility. Through them he could see the many lights of the military airfield a few miles away across a flat plain.

He turned back to face the waste management hall, searching for a vehicle he could use . . . and he found one.

‘I think we can do that, yes,’ he said with a grin.

‘
I need you to get to that airfield and protect the emplacements there. There’ll be about fifteen of them and apparently they look like concrete pillboxes. You won’t be able to hold the dragons out forever, but I need you to hold that dome up for as long as you can.
’

‘What about you? What are you doing?’

‘
I’m going to the worker city
,’ CJ said. ‘
Oh, and Hamish?
’

‘Yeah?’

‘
There are two new dragons and they, well, breathe fire
,’ CJ said.

‘Of course they do,’ Hamish said wryly. ‘CJ, how do you know about this bigger nest and all that?’

‘
I’ve been talking to a dragon
,’ CJ said simply. ‘
Gotta fly now. Out.
’

CJ clicked off, thinking. ‘Sometimes you have to fail before you succeed . . .’ she said.

She pursed her lips in thought. Then she turned to Li. ‘You,’ she said.

‘Me?’

‘I need you and one of those cable repair trucks. And I need you to come with me to the worker city. You up for it?’

Li thought for a moment. ‘You really think the dragons will grow in number if they get out of here? That they will open other nests?’

‘Yes,’ CJ said. ‘And then the dragons
they
release will open more nests. The numbers will get very big, very fast.’

Li nodded. ‘Then I will come with you to the worker city.’

CJ turned to Minnie. ‘As for you, little one, we have to keep you out of harm’s way till this is over.’ She took the little girl’s hand and led her to a barred cage in the corner. ‘You’ll be safe here. Just do not leave this cell until I come back to get you, okay?’

‘Yes, CJ,’ Minnie said.

CJ grabbed another flashlight, some food and some water from a nearby office and gave it to Minnie before she closed the barred door over her face.

Then CJ returned to Lucky in the exam room.

The dragon was standing now, testing the staples and stretching its wings. When expanded, the great leathery things almost filled the room.

‘Lucky good?’ CJ asked.

Lucky mewed. ‘
Lucky strong . . . White Head good human
. . .’

‘Lucky . . . fight?’

The dragon turned to face CJ, a look of steely determination on her expressive face. ‘
Lucky . . . White Head . . . fight.
’

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

L
ucky soared high above the rectangular valley that contained the Great Dragon Zoo of China with CJ and Li on her back. It was almost five in the morning—an hour till dawn—and deprived of any kind of electrical power, the zoo was now just a shadowy collection of blackened landforms and buildings. The rain had stopped and the storm clouds had passed, leaving a beautiful star-filled sky and a glorious full moon above it all.

After about ten minutes of flying, CJ spotted a cluster of man-made structures a few miles beyond the northeastern corner of the zoo.

The worker city.

Seen from the air, it appeared to jut up from the plain: a few blocks of apartment buildings and office towers, warehouses and parks, and, snaking its way through them, a winding river. A couple of bridges spanned the river.

It was, to CJ, yet another example of China’s amazing ability to simply build whatever it needed. The Chinese needed a miniature city here, so they’d just built one.

Several buildings were still under construction. Hammerhead cranes towered above them while the exposed levels of unfinished towers lay open to the elements.

There was only one problem.

The city was on fire.

Fires blazed all over it: from the upper storeys of buildings, to the shops at street level and overturned cars and buses.

The master dragons had been through here.

Unlike the zoo, the worker city still had power thanks to its external main power line. Amid the many fires, building lights glimmered and the streetlights were on.

Staying high, CJ peered into the urban chasms.

It was strange to see city streets so deserted and empty. Car alarms wailed, calling for owners who would never return. There were no people in sight.

The worker city was now a ghost city.

And then she saw the first dragon.

A huge grey emperor lumbered up onto the tallest building of the worker city and perched itself on the summit. There in the orange firelight, it raised its snout to the heavens and roared.

Twenty other grey dragons—kings and princes—swarmed up the other buildings, clambering up their sides, and joined their emperor roaring into the night.

‘
Grey dragons smell Lucky . . . smell White Head . . .
’ Lucky’s electronic voice said in CJ’s ear. ‘
Grey dragons . . . mean dragons
. . .’

‘They’re warning us off, but also . . .’ CJ cut herself off.

They were not
all
looking in CJ’s direction. Some of the greys were facing away from her, looking to the northeast.

CJ listened more closely, and with her trained ears, she detected something extra in their bellowing. There was a plaintive tone to it, a kind of keening. The keening of a dragon population that had laid claim to a territory . . . only to be pushed out by a bigger fish.

At that moment, two sudden flares of flame caught CJ’s eye off to the right, at the extreme northern edge of the ghost city: two billowing extensions of fire that lit up the night.

Her gaze fell on an industrial complex over that way: it looked like a power substation, with a transformer farm and high steel fences. On its outer side, it was ringed by a curving arc of fifteen evenly spaced black concrete emplacements that looked like a miniature Maginot Line.

The small army of red-bellied black dragons from the Nesting Centre—their red-and-black bodies were clearly discernible in the firelight—was gathered just beyond the power station. There were perhaps forty of them and they were led by their two masters, the superking and the superemperor.

The two bursts of fire that CJ had seen had been fire-blasts from the two master dragons.

They were blowing fire at the concrete emplacements, in particular, the very middle one.

‘No wonder the grey dragons are upset,’ CJ said. ‘The red-bellies barged into their city and took over.’

Soaring high above the scene, careful to avoid being spotted by the two packs of dragons, CJ peered at the emplacements: the laser-emitting base stations that supported the outer dome.

Illuminated by the fires and the ghostly streetlights, they did indeed look like wartime pillboxes, solid, low and sturdy.

CJ flipped down her helmet’s visor—stuck to which were her oversized UV glasses—and beheld the dazzling red grid of the outer electromagnetic dome. It slanted into the sky from the fifteen emplacements.

She flipped up the visor and looked more closely at the middle emplacement that was the object of the red-bellies’ assault.

Alone among the fifteen emplacements, it was accessed by a service road coming in from the north. That road ran alongside a ditch in which she could see a reinforced concrete pipe: the high-voltage main power cable.

The dragons were going directly for the source of the dome’s power.

‘Li!’ she called above the wind. ‘Where is the cable repair truck kept?’

Gripping CJ’s waist, Li replied, ‘In a loading shed inside that substation! What are you planning to do?’

‘Right now, nothing,’ CJ said.

‘Nothing? I don’t understand,’ Li said.

‘What I mean,’ CJ said, ‘is that in order for us to succeed in this battle, we first need to fail.’

CJ brought Lucky into a landing on a small hill overlooking the emplacements and from there, she, Lucky and Li watched the red-bellied black dragons assault the middle one.

The dragons worked together with almost frightening efficiency.

The masters blew acid-fire at the emplacement—or more precisely, at the soil under it, liquefying the soil. Then some king dragons stepped in and raked out the melted soil with their huge claws. Princes positioned behind them cleared that soil even further. Then the masters would return and blow more fire, creating more melted soil, which would then be cleared away again. It was a digging operation.

The dragons had got a good head-start. They had already created a substantial hole in front of the middle emplacement. It must have been four storeys, or forty feet, deep.

After a little more digging, the emplacement’s foundations were exposed: a thick wall of grey concrete. The master dragons turned their fire on the foundations.

The two masters blew matching tongues of fire at the concrete foundations, softening them, before four red-bellied emperors did their part by flying in and flinging some buses and trucks
right at
the exposed foundations.