The Great Zoo of China (44 page)

C
J led Lucky, Li and Minnie through the tunnel that connected the Nesting Centre to the Birthing Centre.

They emerged inside the Birthing Centre to find it empty—except of course for the crocs down in the pit and the olive swamp dragon. Having finished eating the red-bellied black prince it’d killed earlier, it had wrenched open one of the cages and was now halfway through devouring a crocodile.

A digital clock on the wall read 3:30 a.m.

Is it that late?
CJ thought. She felt desperately tired but pure adrenalin was keeping her going.

She found a medical examination room. It had a stainless steel exam table with gutters and a drain plus a few carts filled with surgical equipment. It reminded CJ of her veterinary clinic back at the San Francisco Zoo, only it was bigger in every respect, dragon-sized.

She got Lucky to lie down on the exam table, left side up. In the light of her helmet flashlight’s beam, she peered at the wound on the dragon’s torso.

It looked terrible: it was a hideous slash, ragged at the edges, at least two feet long. Blood and pus oozed over exposed flesh.

CJ threw on a pair of rubber gloves and some anti-spray goggles and then grabbed a suture kit from one of the supply carts. She set about cleaning the wound. Li found a flashlight in a nearby cupboard, switched it on and held it over CJ’s shoulder, providing more much-needed light.

Minnie watched. ‘Are you a doctor?’

‘I’m an animal doctor, yes,’ CJ said as she found an ampoule of local anaesthetic in one of the cupboards and injected it near the gaping wound.

She frowned. She had to close the wound. But the gash was so wide and Lucky’s hide so thick, simple stitches wouldn’t be strong enough: she would have to use staples.

Which would hurt, despite the anaesthetic.

‘Lucky. White Head sorry . . . big big pain . . .’ she said before,
shwack
, she punched in the first staple.

Lucky howled.

Twenty-four staples later, the wound was secure and Lucky lay with her head pressed on its side against the steel table, panting, exhausted.

CJ stroked the dragon’s brow. Lucky looked up at her plaintively.

‘This’ll make you feel a little better.’ CJ gave her a jab of Xylazine, a muscle relaxant, and the dragon sighed and visibly relaxed.

CJ ran her fingers over the small box attached to the left side of Lucky’s skull. She gazed at the wires that ran from it into her brain.

It got her thinking.

Lucky’s implant was special. It allowed for communication between her and humans.

But like all the other dragons, when she’d been an infant, Lucky would have had the other standard chip inserted into her brain, the one that sent an electric charge into the pain centre when she touched the domes and which also contained a small wad of plastic explosive. CJ recalled the x-ray images of a dragon skull she had seen during the tour, showing the chip behind the dragon’s left eye.

She leaned close to Lucky’s side-turned head, peered at her left eye.

Lucky’s eye was the size of a softball, a huge aqueous orb with a splotchy iris and a slit pupil.

CJ’s gaze moved from the dragon’s eye to its yellow-and-black skull. With her spiky crest and osteoderms, Lucky’s head was heavily armoured even before you got to the skull. Getting a chip inside it would’ve been difficult.

‘Unless they went through the eye socket . . .’ CJ said aloud.

She snatched up another ampoule of local anaesthetic and jabbed it near Lucky’s eyebrow. Then she grabbed a pair of scissor-like reverse-pincers and a curved silver surgical instrument.

Lucky saw it and grunted in panic. ‘
White Head . . . hurt Lucky?
’

‘White Head like Lucky. White Head help Lucky. Lucky trust White Head,’ she said.

The dragon didn’t reply. CJ wasn’t sure the word ‘trust’ was in its vocabulary. But Lucky did relax, gruffly exhaling as she tilted her head slightly lower, allowing CJ to work.

Trusting her.

CJ used the pincers to hold open Lucky’s eyelid, before she reached in with the curved instrument and . . .

. . . gently popped Lucky’s eyeball out of its socket!

Li gasped.

Minnie clutched her mouth to stop herself from throwing up.

The eyeball dangled from the optic nerve, still connected. CJ laid the huge eyeball carefully on Lucky’s snout and not even noticing the indescribable grossness of what she had just done, grabbed a penlight and peered in through the exposed eye socket
into Lucky’s skull
.

‘There you are . . .’ she said.

She could see it on the front of Lucky’s brain, directly behind the eye socket: a small metal chip the size of a quarter. It looked like a spider, with eight wires stretching out from it, latching onto the brain.

Beyond that, it was quite crude. It had some circuitry on it plus a tiny silver cylinder that CJ guessed was the plastic explosive.

CJ grabbed a pair of long-armed surgical scissors.

‘Stay still,’ she said to Lucky as, leading with the scissors, she reached
inside
the dragon’s eye socket.

Her hand fitted easily, the socket was so wide, and with a few deft snips, she cut the eight wires. Then she reached in with some forceps and, looking more like a bomb defuser than a vet, ever-so-gently removed the chip.

It came out of the eye socket.

CJ placed it gently on a bench top on the far side of the examination room.

Then she returned to Lucky’s side and carefully reinserted the dragon’s eyeball, manoeuvring the optic nerve gently back into the skull first. The huge eyeball slotted back into place, rolling around in the socket before Lucky blinked a few times and it was back in place.

‘You, my yellow friend,’ CJ said, ‘are no longer susceptible to any electromagnetic domes. Nor can those Chinese bastards blow your head off anymore.’

Lucky just exhaled loudly, braying like a weary horse.

As she removed her rubber gloves, CJ turned to Li. ‘Now. Li. I need a lesson in main power lines.’

While Lucky recovered in the infirmary, CJ and Li sat down in a nearby office.

It was 4:15 a.m.

Working by the light of their two flashlights, Li grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a quick sketch of the zoo and its surrounds . . . to which he added some prominent dotted lines.

‘Here is the zoo,’ he said in Mandarin, ‘with the military airfield at the bottom left and the worker city at the top right. The two dotted lines entering the map from the corners are the main power lines.’

‘Got it,’ CJ said, also in Mandarin. ‘What I want to know is: if the dragons cut a main power cable,
can it be repaired?
’

Li said, ‘In theory, yes, if you have some replacement high-voltage cable
and
an insulation-repair kit. You see, it’s not really the cable that is difficult to fix, it’s the insulation layer around it.’

‘How so?’ CJ asked.

‘Main power cables are not regular cables; you don’t just solder them back together. They’re heavy-gauge HVDC—high-voltage direct-current—cables with a thick insulating layer of cross-linked polyethylene. Because of the voltage flowing through them, they get very hot, which is why you need an insulation layer around them.

‘It’s the insulation layer that must be repaired correctly, without any air pockets or impurities. That’s why you need the insulation-repair kit: it lays down a new insulation layer around the HVDC cable without any imperfections. If you don’t get that right, you get no power.’

‘Do you guys keep any high-voltage cable and insulation-repair kits here at the zoo?’

‘Not inside the zoo, no,’ Li said. ‘As you can imagine, cuts in the main are rare, almost unheard of. But we have fully-equipped cable repair trucks at both
outer
power junctions, at the worker city and at the airfield. Those trucks have spools of HVDC cable and insulation-repair kits.’

‘Okay, right.’ CJ thought for a moment. ‘Damn it, I need more people . . .’

As if on cue, there came a crackling sound from a nearby battery-operated CB radio, hanging from a hook.

‘
Chipmunk, this is Bear. Do you read me? This is the 20 at 20 call. I tried at 3:20 but got no answer. Do you copy?
’

It was Hamish.

C
J snatched up the radio. ‘Bear, I’m here!’

The voice at the other end lit up. ‘
Chipmunk! You’re alive!
’

‘Only just. Where are you?’

‘
I’m in the waste management facility. Syme is still with me but we lost Wolfe.
We had a couple of close calls and our escapes weren’t exactly works of art, but you know what Dad used to say, you’ve got to fail a few times before you succeed.
’

CJ blinked suddenly at his words.

‘You’ve got to fail before you succeed . . .’ she said absently.

An idea began to form in her mind.

She snapped out of it. ‘You called at just the right time, Bear. The dragons are about to bring down the outer dome and we have to stop them.’

‘
How about we just leave this clusterfuck of a zoo to the punks who built it and get the hell out of here? I don’t particularly like the idea of saving
their
asses while they’re trying to kill
me
.
’

‘There’s another nest, Hamish. A bigger one,’ CJ said.

There was silence at the other end of the line.

CJ added, ‘The Chinese only found a
small
nest. If the dragons get out, they’ll go and wake the other nest and then there’ll be a
whole
lot more dragons. The entire populations of any towns or cities near here will be slaughtered. Then the dragons will fly away and open
more
nests and it’ll be an exponential expansion, a plague of dragons. We can’t let that happen.’