The Rabid Brigadier (3 page)

Opening a long rectangular box in the lower part of the rack system, Stone extracted the stock of a .30 caliber marksman’s
rifle. He took the various broken-down pieces from their hard foam beds and fitted the entire long range rifle system together
in a couple of minutes. Then the sighting system—infrared—was screwed onto the top of the weapon’s ring system. It had been
designed originally to kill Russians, but it would kill everything else just as well.

“Come on, dog,” Stone said, pulling the flap aside. “Those who work, eat; those who don’t, starve. Or haven’t you read your
Karl Marx today?” The fighting animal followed right along at his heels, knowing instinctively that nutrition was involved.
Stone walked about fifteen yards to a rock overhang that looked out across the mountain plateau and onto groves of trees growing
up from the slopes that surrounded it. He rested himself on his stomach and elbows, got the dog quieted down and still beside
him, and sighted
up through the telescopic view on top. He flicked a small black switch and the power unit of the infrared detector hummed
on. The whole world came to life in a bizarre pattern of red and orange dancing waves of light. He saw things by their heat
patterns now, the birds breathing hard in the trees, owls, and rodents along the ground. With the cool air around them, the
heat of living matter seemed to burn like little red suns against the cold blue background.

There—movement. A jackrabbit. Stone followed it as it hopped madly across an open space and he eased his finger down on the
trigger. The autosilencer built into the muzzle released a harsh hiss as the .30 caliber slug spun free and through the night
air. In a fraction of a second it tore into the rabbit, sending it flying in a heap of spinning fur up into the sky like something
aiming for space flight. Then it came down again hard in a reddish-looking heap and didn’t move.

“Go!” Stone commanded, pointing at the downed prey. He stared over at the pitbull, which stared back. “Fetch, get that fucking
rabbit—that’s dinner! Go! Go!” Stone commanded it in his most stern tones, but the pitbull just looked at him as if he was
crazy. Then it sniffed the air coming from the dead animal and came up on all fours. The ninety-pound satchel of steel grace
leapt six feet from the ledge they were on and began running at full speed across the open field. Stone Watched the heat blur
of the dog as it moved like a panther toward the fading orange glow of the rabbit. Excaliber picked up the cottontail and
set it carefully beneath his canines, hardly pressing down at all, and took off again back toward Stone. He came to a skidding
halt before the rock and, resting on his haunches, the bull terrier launched itself back up onto the rock ledge. Its front
paws made it but its back ones didn’t and they clawed frantically against the rock with a horrible kind of scratching sound
that a fingernail
makes when scraped on a blackboard. Stone reached down and grabbed hold of the flailing animal around the chest and pulled
it up with a heave.

“Good boy,” Stone said when the dog was at last planted on terra firma again. The pitbull dropped the prey at his feet. It
was a monster of a rabbit, as big as he’d ever seen—what was left of it. For the .30 caliber slug had taken its head clean
off. But what was left was plenty. Even for the two of them.

CHAPTER
Three

W
HEN STONE stepped outside the tarp the next morning the sky was still black as night and churning with a malevolent fury.
He wouldn’t have known it was daytime but for the dim ashen face of the sun straight off on the horizon, barely able to burn
its shape through the ceiling of clouds. Something was in the offing, something bad. The bull terrier trotted out next to
him, took one look, turned and walked back inside.

“Yeah, you got the right idea,” Stone muttered as he spat a thick gob of sleep-collected phlegm onto the snow-speckled ground.
“Unfortunately, we got promises to keep.” He pulled the tarp down and folded it up, stowing it in back of the Harley. Excaliber,
lying contentedly next to the front wheel of the bike, was suddenly exposed to the cold biting wind that seemed to sweep across
the slope as if bidding them good morning. He stood up, looked at Stone with nasty eyes and then shook his whole body, sending
a wave of
warm blood coursing through his veins. The pitbull stretched forward and back, pulling his legs as far as they would go in
each direction in some canine 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 among
one 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 a
threat 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 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 and
sputtering 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 glanced around to see the fighting dog leaping onto the seat, coated
with the white chalky dust of another age. He started up.

If it was possible, the sky seemed to be growing ever darker as if the entire heavens were falling onto the earth, ready to
bury them all. And as if the sky was reading his thoughts Stone heard a deep rumble from above that seemed to pass across
the entire horizon with such a powerful subsonic vibration that its echo was felt through his bones.

Then the first drop fell, landing square on his nose. Then another. And within seconds the deluge began. Rain poured from
the skies like it had never rained before. Sheets and torrents of liquid ripping down with such velocity that it stung his
face like little darts slapping against his skin. He had never seen so much water fall so suddenly. It was more like a waterfall
had opened up over them than a rain storm. It was as if the clouds wanted to destroy what lay below them, and the curtains
of silver liquid slammed down, punching a million little craters into the hard ground.

Stone kept the bike going but had to slow to about twenty mph since he could only see about ten yards ahead. The dog let out
a howl of unhappiness and Stone looked around to see a waterlogged mop of a creature staring at him with consternation.

“Hang on, pal,” he yelled back from the corner of his
mouth, almost gagging as the falling rain rushed into his mouth. “Can’t get any worse, right?” But he was wrong about that
too; the storm was just starting to feel its oats.

The sky just ignited with streaks of yellow and white, spider webs of jagged million-volt fire spreading out across the sky
and down to the earth. The landscape all around him seemed to take a hundred hits, as if bombs were being dropped by a hidden
armada. Cacti, trees, boulders—all took jolts of the electric bombardment and were no more. Stone could hardly hear the drone
of the bike as the thunder was constant now, like a hydrogen bomb going off forever, and the striking lightning sent out its
own deafening roars as it decimated everything that it touched.