The Rabid Brigadier Read Online Free Page B

flowing.
    They had gone for about an hour when Stone noticed a large shape ahead of them, about thirty yards to the right. It piqued
     his curiosity, since it seemed to be the skeleton of a quite immense animal, rib bones poking through a coating of sand and
     coarsely textured red stone. He stopped the Harley, stepped off and walked over to the object, the pitbull jumping around
     his heels as it took full advantage of the momentary stop to get some blood going through its cramped muscles. Stone whistled
     as he made a full circumference of the long dead creature. It was huge. No way it could be a bison, even a mutant one. The
     rib cage of the thing looked like it could have held a small car. The head, half submerged in the ground, was covered with
     several inches of coagulated mud, and Stone whipped out his foot, kicking the substance free. His eyes opened even wider—it
     was a dinosaur. A triceratops if his high school memories of biology class were accurate. That huge armored head and triple
     horns were unmistakable. This thing hadn’t been dead a few months—more like one hundred million years. Suddenly he realized
     that he must be in a section of the Dinosaur National Park, in eastern Utah—where archaeologists had been digging up dinosaur
     bones for decades.
    Stone felt a sense of awe fill his heart as he walked around the thing, examining it closely, trying to feel what it had been
     like to have lived back then. Excaliber grabbed a piece of rib that had fallen to the dirt and took a deep grinding chew on
     the thing. Then with an expression of unmistakable revulsion it spat the primeval meal out again, coughing andsputtering like it’d just eaten a mouthful of dust. Which it had. For the bones, although still maintaining their basic shape,
     were already starting to decompose upon exposure to the air. They had been buried for eons, uncovered just weeks before by
     a severe windstorm. And now they waited to disappear into the acidic oxygen atmosphere of the earth forever.
    Stone felt tears welling in his eyes, which was just about the most ridiculous thing he could imagine. Crying over something
     that had died before the first monkey was born. But it wasn’t the creature itself, it was… memories. Memories of going to
     the museum with his father, Major Clayton, when he was just a child. How he had loved the giant lizards, as all children do,
     feeling an inexplicable, almost mystical attraction to the impossible creatures. And now that was all gone—gone forever most
     likely. Museums, his father, children with wide excited eyes carrying balloons. All gone, as this thing was. Dead, buried,
     extinct. And perhaps the most frightening thought—which he would barely allow himself to think—that the human race was heading
     down the same road, the highway to non-existence. And soon all that would be left of the entire species would be little rises
     in the desert containing the ivory bones of the homo sapiens.
    Knowing the thing would completely vanish before the winter was over, Stone broke off a little fragment from the top of the
     horn in the center of the dinosaur’s head. He looked down into the empty eye sockets, behind which was just blackness, and
     issued an apology.
    “Sorry, pal, don’t mean to mutilate you or anything, but it’s done out of love, I swear. Besides, no doubt I’ll be joining
     you soon enough and you can give me a piece of your mind.” He tucked the three-inch fragment inside his camouflage jacket
     pocket and turned back to the bike.Excaliber, who had been poking his face around the rib cage—to see if there was anything worth chewing—nearly caught his head
     and had to pull frantically to get free. After about ten seconds of growling struggle he gave an extra hard pull and two of
     the six-foot-long curved rib bones snapped like wishbones as the pitbull fell backwards to the ground. Stone, who hadn’t even
     seen the little drama, just sat back on the bike and