The Great Zoo of China (46 page)

The vehicles slammed into the concrete foundations, chipping away at them, cracking them.

Then the masters blew more fire and the circuit continued until, on the fourth go-around, with a screech of rending rebars and the crunch of cracking concrete, the foundations of the middle emplacement could resist no more.

They crumpled.

And like a slow-falling tree, the emplacement toppled into the huge hole the dragons had created in front of it, tearing itself free of its power source.

Sparks flew. Electricity flared.

And where the middle emplacement had been there was now a huge void with a thick high-voltage cable and some other minor wires sticking out from it.

The damage was done.

CJ flipped down her special glasses.

The dome was still there, only now it was not nearly as dazzling as it had been earlier. Now it was only half as bright as it had appeared before, since it was now only being emitted by the emplacements over at the airfield.

The two masters squealed in triumph and immediately took to the air.

They swept away to the southwest. Their army of red-bellied black dragons launched into the sky after them, heading in the direction of the airfield on the far side of the zoo: now the only thing standing between them and freedom.

From her vantage point on the hill, CJ watched them fly off.

She pulled out her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. The dragons are coming to you. I need you to hold them out for as long as you can.’

‘
Copy that, Chipmunk
,’ Hamish’s voice replied. ‘
We’re almost at the airfield
.’

‘Try to stay alive, little brother.’ CJ clicked off and turned to Li. ‘Okay. Time for us to go in.’

They leapt onto Lucky’s back and zoomed down toward the worker city.

H
amish Cameron was driving like a maniac down the road that connected the waste management facility to the military airfield, at the wheel of an absolute beast of a vehicle.

Amid all the wreckage and debris inside the waste management facility, one truck had remained largely unscathed by the mayhem that had occurred there.

A fire truck.

It was one of the two superlong ladder trucks that had been parked in the cavernous hall when Hamish had first arrived there.

Now, driven by Hamish with Kirk Syme beside him, the huge semitrailer-sized rig thundered across the plain between the zoo’s crater and the airfield. The extendable ladder on its roof bounced with every bump as the big truck boomed through the night.

The airfield loomed before it.

It was lit up like a Christmas tree: eighty floodlights blazed with white artificial light, illuminating cargo planes and fighter jets, storage hangars, an air traffic control tower, some support buildings and . . .

. . . about thirty Chinese Army jeeps and trucks arrayed in a defensive line in front of the airfield, with over a hundred Chinese soldiers manning them, their rifles and RPGs pointed at the very road Hamish was now racing along. There were even four Type-99 tanks in the defensive line.

‘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.