Relic Read Free Page B

glances and I gestured to my leg. “I can’t climb over all that.”
    Lisa sighed and glanced down the hallway. Museum security must’ve been mostly outside because there weren’t any guards in sight. She sighed again and quickly stepped over the barrier, pushing aside the fake bushes to reveal a door. She disappeared through it and emerged a second later, pulling Colin by the wrist.
    â€œThat hurt,” Colin said, once he was back on the correct side of the display.
    â€œServes you right,” Lisa said. “You’re just lucky no one saw you.”
    â€œWhere did you disappear to?” I asked.
    â€œA garage or a loading bay of some kind,” Lisa said as we started walking again. “There was a door a truck could fit through, and the room had loads of boxes and crates.”
    Near the end of the corridor, the hall widened into a large circular atrium, where people on the second and third floors could look down at the exhibit below. A humongous skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex stood directly in front of us. It must’ve been nearly twenty feet tall and forty feet long. Its head—about the size of a small car—leaned out over half the atrium, and its mouth, filled with teeth that looked bigger than my leg, opened threateningly to the people on the second floor. The colossal beast stood on a large platform covered in dirt and thick plastic bushes and large ferns that I guess were supposed to resemble its natural habitat.
    The museum had had dinosaur exhibits in the past, but usually they were small, like the size of a truck. This was bigger than anything I’d ever seen. “Hard to believe they were so big,” I said.
    As if the skeleton were made out of some giant kid magnet, the three of us gravitated toward it until we were at the velvet rope barrier.
    â€œI have to touch it,” Colin said.
    Lisa shook her head. “No, you don’t. This isn’t like messing with mannequins dressed like cavemen. I’m sure there are real fossils in there. You could get in loads of trouble.”
    â€œOh, c’mon, Lisa. I could duck behind some of those bushes and they’d never see me. Besides, if they didn’t want people going across, they’d have put up something more threatening than velvet ropes.”
    â€œLike razor wire and a Rottweiler, perhaps?” The voice came from over our shoulders, and the three of us spun around. The security guard was a sinewy older man with graying hair. He had a name badge on his chest that said FISHER. He wore a tired expression and tapped the end of his oversized flashlight into his hand like it was a baton, seemingly prepared to bash us with it if we dared to inch too close to the dinosaur. “Just look,” he said. “Don’t touch.”
    â€œYeah,” I said, “we weren’t going to touch.”
    â€œSure you weren’t.”
    â€œWe weren’t,” Lisa said, backing me up.
    â€œFine.” The guard straightened up and looked at Colin. “You weren’t going to, either, I bet.”
    â€œNo, I was probably going to touch it.” Colin smiled and looked back at the dinosaur and then muttered under his breath, “I’ll have to wait ’til you leave, I guess.”
    â€œWhat was that?” the guard asked.
    Colin turned back. “Erm, nothing. How is this dinosaur standing up? I don’t see any wires.”
    â€œThey’re replica bones,” the guard said. “They’re fastened together and then balanced the way a real T. rex would have been balanced.”
    â€œSo I could just give it a shove and it would topple over?” Colin asked.
    â€œHardly,” the guard answered. “It’s bolted to the platform and there is metal running through most of the pieces, so unless you have a crowbar to smash the legs completely, I’d say you’re not going to have much luck.”
    Colin tapped his chin. “A crowbar,