Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  It happens fast. John Elvis jabs Jonesy in the bread basket with the tip of a Louisville slugger. Mitchell steps up, too. Flanked by the Skank. Just the three of them. No fourth, which meant the last member of the bully crew that messed with Chris remains AWOL.

  Virgil moves into the breach. Says something just before shoving John Elvis.

  Here it is, Atlanta thinks. The title card. The sweet science. The big-ass beatdown.

  Way she imagines in her head, it’s a cartoony cloud of fists and feet and headbutts, everybody taking a licking and ending up in an exhausted bloody pile in the middle of the cemetery.

  Way she imagines it is wrong.

  It’s not a contest. No competition here. That requires two sides, each with a fighting chance.

  This is a massacre.

  Virgil takes a bat to the chops. The hit spins his head around. She already sees his mouth, rimmed with red. Something white sticking through his lower lip. A tooth, she thinks. A tooth.

  Jonesy cries out, tries to turn and run the other way but Mitchell pretends he’s on the pitcher’s mound and scoops up a hunk of broken headstone and pitches it smack into the center of Jonesy’s back.

  Jonesy falls face forward.

  John Elvis laughs wild and loud, a braying donkey, and he kneels down on Virgil’s back and with the bat-as-rolling-pin presses Virgil’s face into the dirt and weeds. Atlanta thinks, get up, get up you big ugly ape, because Virgil’s built like an upside-down triangle what with those steroids he’s obviously gobbling, and yet here he is getting thrown around like a slab of beef.

  Mitchell starts kicking Jonesy. In the side. Boot. Boot. Boot. Each time, Jonesy cries out, makes a sound like something inside of him is coming apart.

  John Elvis stands. Begins twirling the bat.

  “They’re going to kill them,” Chris says, horrified, face white like a bloodless knuckle. “Atlanta, seriously. C’mon.”

  “They hurt Shane,” she says, jaw set. “They deserve what’s coming.”

  She thinks, this is how it goes. This is how it has to be. You want bullying to stop, you gotta take it all the way. Can’t just make some threats. Can’t just hose ‘em down with bear mace. There’s a line, and they’re not afraid to cross it, so why should she? She didn’t have that bear mace that day what would’ve happened? They probably would’ve come at her. Hit her. Maybe raped her. The look on Jonesy’s face was plain as the pealing of a bell—he’s a predator like all the rest.

  John Elvis brings the bat down on the back of Virgil’s legs.

  Mitchell kicks Jonesy in the face.

  She hears Chris again, this time in her head: They’re going to kill them.

  The voice that answers is cold and unmerciful, a cutting and uncaring wind, and maybe it’s the Adderall talking, or maybe it’s really her true voice found after she’s been stripped down to the quivering nerve endings:

  So what?

  And then finally the Skank steps into the breach and her hand makes a motion and there’s a glint of something and it’s a knife—rather, a switchblade, bright and mean, and she’s advancing toward Virgil first with a look in her eyes that shows just how much she’s looking forward to what comes next.

  “Stop it!”

  The scream comes across the cemetery, a hoarse shriek that surprises the hell out of her, more surprising for the fact that it came from her own mouth.

  She stands up. Waves her hands.

  They all see her. Mitchell steps over Jonesy. John Elvis twirls the bat. Skank points the switchblade up in her direction as if to curse her, as if to say, Now I’m going to cut you.

  “Get up,” Atlanta says to Chris. “Get up. We have to go.”

  The three foes are already clambering up over the side of the cemetery toward the hill, toward their position. Leaving Virgil and Jonesy bleeding and moaning amongst the dead.

  And now we join the dead, Atlanta thinks.

  “Run!” she says to Chris, and they both take off up the hill.

  * * *

  Atlanta bursts through the treeline at the top of the hill. Thorns grab at her clothes. She knows that on the other side of these trees is a road—Hilltop Road, which will take her back down into town toward Chris’ minivan, which is hidden along the side of the road by the old half-collapsed covered bridge—and that’s her plan. Get to the road, she thinks.

  One minute she sees Chris running alongside her. Darting through beams of sunlight coming down through the unfurling canopy of springtime trees above. Whorls of dust and pollen in his wake.

  The boy can run.

  But so, it turns out, can John Elvis. He comes out of nowhere. Face a twisted rictus of meth-cranked rage. The Neo-Nazi prick shoulders hard into Chris. Slams him into a tree. Laughs.

  Atlanta skids to a stop—but there, coming up fast behind her, is Skank. Doing the sociopathic adult version of running with scissors: sprinting with switchblade. Look on her face says she wants to cut Atlanta open and eat her heart.

  It’s fight or flight. But Atlanta doesn’t have anything. No gun. No mace. No baton.

  Her body makes the choice for her. Stricken by a cold saline injection of fear, she turns, bolts through the trees, the Skank hot on her tail.

  One question remains unanswered:

  Where’s Mitchell?

  She crashes through the treeline on the other side. Sees the road ahead. Jumps a soggy ditch, trips on a drain pipe, lands hard on her knee—the asphalt tears through the jeans like they were tissue paper, and she feels the skin scrape hard against road.

  Atlanta leaps forward, can’t care about her knee—and she turns and starts to run down the hill, the pines and oaks rising up on each side of her.

  It’s then that she hears the gunning of an engine.

  It’s then that she finds out just where Mitchell Erickson’s been.

  He went back to his car. The Lexus comes barreling up the hill, a blood-red flash of luxury steel, and it cuts hard on the brakes—the car grinds sideways, blocking the road and her path.

  Atlanta turns to go the other way—up the hill instead of down—but here comes Skank. Grin cruel and sharp, like a boomerang made of razor blades.

  Back into the woods, she thinks, and she goes to leap over the ditch once more but she doesn’t make it, and again she falls—hands forward into the ditch, into the muck, and then Skank has her feet and is pulling her out, fingers searching for purchase, nails breaking on macadam.

  Skank turns her over, presses the knife against her throat. Atlanta feels warmth and wetness creep down her neck and along her collarbone: blood.

  “Wait!” Mitchell says, and for a moment Atlanta thinks, he knows this is going too far and he’s offering me a reprieve, maybe I should start believing in God after all because I sure do need to thank somebody for this, but that’s not what’s happening, not at all.

  Instead he throws Skank a black backpack. “Put that over her head.”

  Atlanta resists. Thrashes. Tries to throw a punch for Skank’s head.

  Skank turns to let her shoulder take the hit, then she returns with one of her own. A sharp pop against Atlanta’s nose does her a world of hurt: she sees a bright firework flash of stars and feels her head snap hard against the road. Tears well up and make her vision a curtain of colors and shapes blurring.

  The backpack goes over her head. The zipper to her neck, where it bites and pinches the skin.

  Hands twisted behind her back. Wrists bound up with duct tape. Mouth, too.

  She hears Chris nearby, crying.

  The sound of a trunk popping.

  And then she’s pitched into darkness. Chris, too, as he’s thrown against her.

  Last thing she hears is John Elvis panting, Skank cursing under her breath, and Mitchell Erickson saying, “We’ll take ‘em to the gun club. They’ll know what to do with them.”

  * * *

  It’s tough to breathe inside that bag. All she has is her nose. Nostrils flaring to bring in air. Mouth stuck shut with duct ta
pe. She imagines the tape is a hand. A hand that smells like gasoline and cigarettes. Atlanta almost cries at that, but then she thinks: If I cry, my nose will fill with snot, and if my nose gets blocked, I’m dead. And so she stops, she tries to relax, tries to breathe slowly and surely and not feel like the entire world is collapsing down upon her, swallowing her in a crushing fist.

  When she breathes, she once again smells the ephemeral scent of gunsmoke.

  But for the first time, it brings her solace.

  * * *

  A tangle of smells has a gang-bang in her nose. She’s carried, blind and mute, and dropped onto a chair so hard her butt-bone pulsates, but she can’t help but notice the new smells: dust, must, stale cigarette smoke, a hint of cologne like the old Old Spice, a tang of beer and sweat, and beneath it all, that greasy-yet-clean smell of gun oil. The gun club, she thinks.

  She knows where the gun club is. Hard not to; it has its own road. Gun Club Road. Simple enough.

  It sits south of town. Just up in the hills—not far from where Atlanta got thrown into the trunk of a Lexus. She’s been by the place once or twice. When she first moved here to Maker’s Bell from North Carolina, she took to wandering to get a lay of the land. Eventually she became friends with Bee, and then Bee would drive her around instead of letting her walk, and they’d maybe sip beer or smoke a little weed as they drove Bee’s certified POS, a Suzuki Samurai, around.

  The gun club itself isn’t much to look at. Blocky concrete building. Looks like a drain embankment you could live in for a while. American flag out front. A few boxwood shrubs. Bars on the windows.

  And when they finally take the hood—sorry, the backpack repurposed as a hood—off her head, she sees what the inside looks like, too. Nearly as austere as the outside. Wood paneling on the walls. Couple doors on the far wall. Tin tile on the ceiling. Folding chairs stacked against the corner and a podium at the far end. In the corner sit boxes of blaze orange clay pigeons and an old hand-thrower. On the wall: guns, framed pictures of members, war memorabilia, a handful of deer heads, a ram’s head, a bear’s paw upturned so it looks like it’s giving the room a furry black middle finger.

  And of course, in the corner, a jackalope head. Always a jackalope head.

  Skank stands in front of her. Arms crossed. Smoking a cigarette. Smiling like she just took a real satisfying dump sometime in the last 15 minutes.

  John Elvis paces. Itchy. Twitchy. Like he’s either on fresh meth or needs to be soon.

  And Chris sits next to her. The capillaries have burst around his left eye, and when he turns toward Atlanta she sees the white of that eye is pink and veiny, too. John Elvis must’ve popped him one.

  No sign of Mitchell.

  “We’re gonna fuck you up,” Skank says.

  “Mel—” John Elvis says, speaking what’s apparently the Skank’s name.

  Skank ignores him. “That’s a promise. Faggot and the fag-hag. Sharing a single grave.”

  “Mel.”

  “Or maybe your bodies in a ditch somewhere.”

  “Melanie, shit!”

  She wheels on him and screeches: “What? What, you fucking asshole, what? Can’t you see I’m having a conversation here?”

  It’s then that everybody gets quiet, hearing raised voices coming from behind the one door. Male voices. Atlanta can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but the one voice sure as shit-fire sounds like Mitchell Erickson. The other voice is a booming rumble of thunder. And the thunder god sounds pissed.

  Then the voices stop and Atlanta hears a sound like a dog yelping behind that door.

  The door flings open.

  The man that stands there is too big for the doorway. Got a chest like two beer-kegs lashed together with fat and muscle. Square jaw. Beard not so much trimmed as it is sculpted onto his face.

  Blue polo. Dark jeans. The signs of wealth: a ruby ring, a gold watch, a hand-cannon revolver hanging at his hip in an oiled brown leather holster.

  With thick fingers the man turns the ruby ring from palm back to knuckle.

  He scowls. “Melanie. Show the girl into my office, please. And cut her damn hands free.”

  “Sir—“ Melanie the Skank protests.

  “Just do it, girl. She’s smart enough not to cause any more trouble.”

  Skank hisses something under her breath, then turns her mean cur’s smile to a sweetness both saccharine and syrupy. The girl comes up behind Atlanta, flicks out her switchblade, and cuts through the band of duct tape—

  Soon as Atlanta feels her hands free, she leaps up out of the chair and throws a wild, clumsy roundhouse punch—she doesn’t know how to fight, doesn’t know that this is one of the worst ways to hit someone, but frankly, it doesn’t matter. Because Skanky Mel isn’t expecting it. Skank’s eyes are still cast floorward, and just as she’s looking up this long-traveled around-the-world fist connects with her mouth.

  Splits her lip. Rocks her head back. The knife clatters against the ground.

  Atlanta goes for it but she hears yelling behind her and the scuff of boot on the concrete floor and before she knows it, John Elvis has wrapped his gangly arms around her and is pulling her back.

  He’s strong.

  She snaps her head backward.

  Feels it connect with his nose. Feels the nose give way, like squishing a coffee creamer.

  His arms open. She steps out, reaches again for the knife on the floor—

  And again she’s stopped. The big man’s hand grabs her around the scruff of her neck the way you might carry a puppy or a kitten and it’s like being thrown around inside a tornado. He heaves Atlanta hard toward the door, never letting go—it doesn’t hurt, but he’s strong and she can’t do anything about the momentum and her mind races what’s he going to do to me once he gets me in that room he’s big and he’s strong and he’ll be able to take what he wants from me, scream, scream you stupid girl, scream—

  But then she’s through the door and she sees she’s not alone. Sitting in front of a desk is a chastened Mitchell Erickson, licking at a drying line of blood creeping from a small cut on his cheek. Leaning up against the corner in a folding chair is a smaller man, dark eyes sitting like hot coals beneath a unibrow that looks like the bristles on a shop broom.

  “Get out,” the big man says to Mitchell.

  “Dad, listen, this girl—“

  “You disrespect me by opening your mouth one more time and you and I will have another talk, Mitch.” Atlanta doesn’t miss the not-so-subtle cue: the man, Mitchell’s father, taps the ruby ring with the side of his thumb. Explains the cut on the boy’s cheek. So that’s how father-and-son “talk.” Same way that Virgil talked to Shane behind that garage.

  Mitchell turns his face away, then slinks out of the room like a whipped hound.

  The other man, Mr. Unibrow—who looks about as bored with all this as a cat given a Rubik’s Cube to play with—doesn’t get up.

  Atlanta’s seen him before. She’s sure of it. Can’t place him, though.

  The door closes.

  She feels trapped. A cornered rat.

  “Sit,” the elder Erickson says, pointing to the chair just vacated by Mitchell. “Please.”

  The word is warmer, friendlier than she expects. She’s sure it contains a secret vein of threat, a subtle promise to break open her cheek with that ruby ring, but it’s so subtle she can’t hear it. The man sounds like he’s talking to a business cohort or the target of a sales pitch.

  Atlanta doesn’t see much choice. She eases into the chair. Legs shaking.

  The big man sits behind his desk, framed by a massive elk-head on the wall behind him. It’s then she realizes: he looks the part of big-game hunter. She can picture him in a pith helmet and khakis, blasting blunderbuss rounds off at escaping elephants just to get at their tusks.

  “I’m Orly Erickson. Mitchell’s father.”

  Atlanta nods toward the man in the corner. “And him? Who’s Unibrow?”

  But Orly just ignores the q
uestion.

  “You made a lot of trouble, little girl,” Orly says. His big voice calls to mind the distant Doppler rumble of a tractor trailer on the highway. Before she can protest, he adds: “My son and his friends have made trouble, too. They responded poorly. Nobody would disagree with that.”