The Rabid Brigadier Read Online Free Page A

version of yoga and then jumped up to the back seat where he waited mouth open, drool slobbering
     down onto the leather.
    Stone started up the buffalo-sized Harley. He put the motorcycle in gear and headed across the plateau, then back out onto
     the mountain road, if it could be called that. It had been five years since America had for all intents and purposes stopped
     being a society and started falling toward the barbarism that was the new “civilization.” The roads were the first to go,
     cracked, asphalt bubbling up like stew cooked too long on the stove of the eternal sun. He was glad he had the Harley. Any
     kind of four-wheel vehicle would have found the going virtually impossible.
    With the thick mist gone on the lower slopes of the mountain Stone was able to open up full throttle once he felt fully awake.
     He still felt strange, though. The hand where he had been bitten was swollen with a huge boil now. But though he could feel
     it he wouldn’t look at it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it, so he chose to ignore it, hoping that whatever
     was going on in there would go away. But it hurt like the blazes, throbbing beneath the skin as if something was alive in
     there, something diseased and growing.
    They hit the bottom of the mountain after about an hour and a long plain spread out ahead flat as a pane of glass, and at
     the far end, perhaps twenty miles off, another range of mountains rose out of the brown earth like granite arms reaching for
     the sky. He stopped the Harley at the very edge of the flatlands and rested his feet on the ground, staring up hard at the
     heavens. It was getting worse up there, not better. The sky seemed to be alive, filled with churning clouds, like a pit of
     black serpents all writhing and sliding amongone another. The air was so thick with moisture he felt he could open his mouth and drink. Yet the rains didn’t fall. It was
     as if the clouds were holding it all back, wanting to fill the creatures below with fear and trembling, wanting to eke every
     ounce of apprehension from the life forms that inhabited the prairie before they actually released their torrents. Stone debated
     for several minutes whether to go on. If he got caught out there and it came, there could be flash floods, sheets of water
     driving across the plain like a tidal wave. But he couldn’t wait. In the new America, there was no waiting—for anything. The
     slow were lost, died, eaten, whatever. If nothing else, Stone knew that one fact beyond all else. The new world was not a
     place for the indecisive.
    He pulled back on the accelerator and tore onto the flat, fissured terrain without glancing back. Within minutes they were
     cruising along the hard-packed flats at a good 60mph. Excaliber tried to do his usual deep sleep routine but the bull terrier
     sensed the danger above and its eyes kept popping open to glance upward at the sky. At last the animal sat up, back legs still
     wrapped for dear life around the seat, front legs extended up so it was sort of half standing, leaning against Stone’s back,
     and stared dead ahead at the rushing landscape.
    For a wasteland the countryside was amazingly filled with life. Animals seemed to whiz by them, browsing among the snow-jeweled
     vegetation, trying to get what nourishment they could from the winter terrain. Bison, deer, moles, lizards all jerked and
     ran away from the roar of the bike, stopping some yards off when they saw it meant them no harm. Then they returned to their
     search with radar eyes for anything edible. Excaliber let out an occasional bark or two as he spotted some furry creature
     or other scampering off, but it was obviously more of a friendly morning greeting than athreat to leap from the bike and into the fray. It was other dogs that seemed to get his goat, as if he had to show them just
     who was boss. But for the moment anyway, there was nothing out there doglike enough to get the English pitbull’s juices