Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  Time is ticking down. Atlanta feels the candle wick burning and the flame guttering—and with it, any hope of coming out on top. Orly’s not here. Atlanta doesn’t have her phone—and, even if she did, it has all the cell signal of a broken toaster. The plan, so simple, so elegant, so impervious to harm, is now just sand in her hand sliding between the gaps in her fingers. All she needed was to place the call to Holger. Get her to show up with some cops and shut this place down. And lock up all the monsters big and small.

  Now? That won’t happen. Can’t happen.

  Worst of all, these people are going to hurt her.

  She has to get away. The only weapon she has is the baton. Waiting in her baggy pocket. If Skank looks away…

  “You and me, we’re not so different,” Skank says. Burning stare. Faint smile.

  “If you say so,” Atlanta says.

  “You really did it, huh.” A statement, not a question. “Blew your step-daddy’s yam-bag off, huh?”

  A weak nod. Atlanta clarifies in a throaty mumble: “Wasn’t my step-daddy, though. Everybody thinks that, but he wasn’t.”

  “Just a boyfriend, then. Whatever. Bet he got to you a bunch of times before it pushed you that far, huh? Yeah. Me too. I had an uncle. Married in, not blood. Lincoln was his name.” She laughs and snarls at the same time. “Lincoln, Lincoln, I-been-thinkin’, what the hell have you been drinking? Whiskey, that’s what. Cheap-ass hot-piss whiskey. He raped me three times and like they say, three times is the charm because the next time he came at me I stabbed him in the thigh—three times, actually, go fuckin’ figure—with a steak knife. Hit an artery. He bled out, almost died. The stains never really washed off the porch—that’s where he liked to do it, outside on the porch before my parents got home from work.” She shrugs. “I should’ve taken a lesson from you and cut his nuts. Like an apple from a tree. Monkey steals the plums.”

  “Sorry to hear all that.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re thinking just what everybody else does—this crazy bitch probably deserved it. I didn’t, but whatever. I don’t blame you for hating me. You should hate me. I hate you. I got enough hate to go around. And see, that’s where our paths go two different ways. I see you making friends with the faggots and the wetbacks and picking up every other downtrodden piece of garbage that goes floating by, cradling it to your breast like a teddy bear. You still feel like bad about what happened to you—you see yourself as a loser and so you hang out with losers. Bunch of turds bobbing in the same toilet bowl.” But here Skank stops. Eyes shimmering. She gestures with the gun, punctuating each word with a thrust of the barrel. “But I found power in what happened to me. Found out that I was strong and I don’t have to swim with garbage. I see trash I call it what it is and then I throw it away. Homos and niggers and spics.”

  Atlanta narrows her eyes. “Let me guess. Your not-blood uncle wasn’t white.”

  Skank clucks her tongue. “Cute. Fine. Yeah. He was a fuckin’ Jew. Rich-ass, big-nosed kike. Just like all of them.”

  “Man who touched me was white. That mean all white people are that way?”

  Skank’s jaw drops. “Whoa. Wait. You know, I… damn, I didn’t even think about that. I didn’t even imagine that white people could do bad things and that maybe I’ve been prejudging people based on…” But she can’t contain it anymore and she starts cracking up. “Whatever, like I’ve never heard that one before. White people can be shit, too. But they learned how to be an animal from the animals, you dummy.”

  She looks away for a half-second, shaking her head and laughing.

  That’s when Atlanta moves.

  Baton out with a button press—snick. She leaps up, baton raised.

  Skank’s elbow catches her across the bridge of her nose. Everything is white flashes and dark shadows swirling together, an orgy of ghosts haunting her vision. Skank grabs the baton, cracks it hard against the Morton building wall, breaking it into three pieces. Atlanta tries to run but her eyes are watering and her vision is smeared and by the time she starts to move, Skank’s got her by the hair again.

  Wham. Back against the wall. Atlanta crumbles. Wipes her eyes and holds her nose—her palms come away red.

  “You won’t surprise me,” Skank hisses. “I own you.”

  “Girls,” comes an admonishing voice. Atlanta looks—even through her bleary smeary vision she knows who it is.

  The Devil has arrived. The cop. The dark little man with the furrowed black brow. Again in his civvies: red polo, jeans. She doesn’t see a gun but she figures he has one on him somewhere. Ankle, maybe.

  “Petry,” Skank says with some deference, then steps back.

  Petry. That’s his name. Officer Petry.

  He sniffs. Looks Atlanta over. “You.”

  “Me,” she says. Then spits a little blood into the grass.

  “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”

  “What can I say? I like to pick scabs.”

  He nods. “And you like to bleed.”

  She shrugs.

  He says to Skank, “Panzer’s going to fight soon. Karl and Hiram are heading over there now. You head over there. I’ll handle this problem.”

  “I want in on this,” Skank says. “You can’t take this from me.”

  They start arguing but Atlanta’s head reels. Panzer. Jew-Biter.

  Whitey. That means her dog will fight. Wayman will want that fight whether she’s there or not. Won’t he? Whitey isn’t ready. Isn’t trained for this.

  Gotta get up, gotta move, gotta do something.

  “—can just shoot her in the woods nobody would know—“

  “—don’t need you for this, Melanie—“

  “—they’ll think I’m just shooting a dog—“

  Melanie gesticulates with the pistol. Petry tries to calm her.

  Atlanta reels. Her face pounds. Her nose bleeds.

  There.

  That’s it.

  What did she learn back in the hospital? Back at Emerald Lakes? Blood is power, just not in the way Skank thinks it is.

  They took her weapon and gave her a weapon.

  She holds her face to her hand. Bleeds into her mouth. Tastes the greasy salty red. Over her tongue. Under. Holds it there. Then she stands up.

  Skank sees, says, “Oh, hell, no, bitch, sit your ass down—“ And comes at her with the pistol.

  Atlanta spits a mouthful of blood into Skank’s face. Into the eyes. Into the mouth. It’s enough.

  I’m not gonna be surprised by you again.

  Oh, yes, you are.

  Skank staggers, wiping at her face, shrieking like she just caught AIDS—and it’s all Atlanta needs. She grabs the hand with the gun and twists the wrist and—

  She has the Luger. She hits Skank across the nose with it and the psycho goes down, rolling around on her side, moaning and sobbing and clawing at her face.

  Petry is already dropping to one knee and ripping the Velcro flap off his ankle holster—but before he can grab the stubby revolver tucked there, Atlanta has the gun leveled at his head.

  “Don’t,” she says, voice shaking. But her hand, steady.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  “I am doing this. Take the gun out. Throw it into the woods.”

  He stares with dark pinprick eyes. Like holes cut in a blanket. “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Then I’ll give you the worst haircut of your life.”

  “You shoot, they’ll hear.”

  “They’ll think I’m offing a dog.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “You’re not a cop. You’re a killer in a cop suit. A monster in man-skin. Now throw that gun away or I swear—“

  He gently pulls the gun out by the holster. Lets it dangle. She gestures to the forest with her head and he tosses it into the brush. She hears it crash through and thump.

  Atlanta stoops.

  Grabs her phone off Skank’s belt loop.

  “Come after me,” she says, “and
I’ll kill both of you.”

  She runs.

  * * *

  The first impulse is a fist reaching into her heart and pulling its strings—go get Whitey, stop the fight, do whatever you have to do—and it takes everything she has to do differently. She tucks the gun in her waistband and skirts the woods with the burner phone in her hand—no bars, no signal, no bars, no signal, c’mon c’mon c’mon.

  She’s ready to take the phone and pitch it into the woods, throw it to the ground, bite into it like the candy bar they say it is—but then she thinks, the barn, the barn, go back behind the barn. That’s where she had her limp-noodle signal, and that’s where’s she heads, tearing ass and watching over her shoulder to make sure nobody’s following her.

  Atlanta holds the phone up. Her arm, an antenna.

  Still nothing.

  She tries dialing Holger’s office.

  NO SIGNAL.

  “Shit!” she says, trying not to cry, keep it together, keep it together and she starts waving the phone around like she’s trying to catch butterflies in a net.

  She hears a twig snap—she spins, gun out and up and ready to shoot.

  A chipmunk darts into the treeline.

  She almost laughs.

  When she next looks at the phone: one meager bar.

  She has no interest in squandering whatever chipmunk magic that woodland varmint conjured up, and she quick fumbles with the phone, redialing Holger’s number.

  Ring, ring, ring.

  Ring, ring, ring.

  Please answer please answer please—

  “Holger here.”

  Atlanta laughs. Weeps. Utters a vanquished, strangled cry.

  And then she tells Holger all the details: dog fight, Farm, Ellis Wayman, guns, Nazis, drugs, prostitution, the whole nine yards, every bad thing under the sun. Come, she tells her. Come now. Hurry up.

  Bring everyone.

  * * *

  Her first urge is to crack up, to collapse and sob, or maybe to spin around like that girl in that the meadow in The Sound of Music. But then comes a sound that cuts to the quick: a dog’s yelp, a cry of pain, a cry she knows.

  Whitey.

  She’s too late.

  The fight’s on.

  Oh, God.

  Already it feels like she’s a scarecrow with the stuffing ripped out, tired and floppy and without anything left inside but that cry spurs her forward—and once again she runs, this time toward the fight, not away from it.

  Ahead, the crowd masses around the octagon. She can’t see in; she only sees the throng. Bodies and the backs of heads. She hits the crowd like a crashing wave, pushing through and throwing elbows—someone shoves her and she shoves back and keeps pushing. A hand yanks at her hair and she kicks out with her boot and catches someone in the knee—right person, wrong person, she doesn’t know, but the hand relinquishes its grip.

  She slams against the plywood side.

  She sees—

  Red blood on a white coat.

  Whitey’s blood. On Whitey’s fur.

  His shoulder’s bitten. And bleeding. Ellis stands behind him, spurring him forward with red cheeks and bulging eyes—gone is any semblance of cool, now it’s all rage and spit and the vigor of the fight. An erupting volcano instead of a calm and tireless mountain.

  From the other corner rushes an animal that might as well be the love child of a dump truck and a pit bull—cigarette burn eyes and trailing drool and hell burning in its heart. The beast’s handler is a middle-aged clean-cut Nazi with a tight, pock-marked face and fists jabbing at the air.

  The dog known as Panzer charges Whitey—but Whitey, unfazed, just lowers his head and tosses the Nazi dog aside. No bite, no blood, just derailing the freight train. Panzer rolls into the dirt, kicking up powder, but lands back on his feet. The bull bolts forward with renewed fury.

  This has to stop.

  Atlanta climbs up over the plywood. Worst idea ever. And the only one she has.

  Ellis sees, splits his attention between her and the two dogs.

  Holds his hands up—starts yelling for the ref, “Charlie! Charlie, goddamnit!”

  Again the two dogs clash. This time Whitey fails to turn aside the beast.

  They rise together, standing on their haunches—Panzer tries to bite, but Whitey holds the Nazi hellhound at bay with his paws: pushing, dancing, shoving. A gnashing canine waltz.

  Atlanta runs toward the dogs.

  Ellis moves to stand in her way—tectonic plates shifting, an earthen wall in the shape of a man pointing at her.

  “He’s not your dog!” he growls, as much a beast as the two dogs in the ring.

  Panzer’s jaws go wide, about to clamp down on Whitey’s muzzle—Whitey’s not cut out for this, not a fighter, that part of his bloodline is dammed up and pinched off—

  She can’t abide it. Can’t see her dog with a crushed muzzle. Bleeding into the dirt and whimpering. They’ll haul him to the Morton building. Vick him with a gun. Toss him in a tub and electrocute him. Hang him like they hung Sailor Moon the terrier.

  That can’t happen. Won’t happen.

  Atlanta points the Luger in the air and fires.

  One two three, bang bang bang.

  Panzer’s gun-shy. Whitey isn’t. The pit bull yelps, pulls away, and hightails it to the corner and between the legs of his trainer.

  Everyone shuts up. No cheers. No boos. They don’t run, they don’t scream.

  They just stare. At her.

  Ellis’ hands tighten to fists—two fleshy wrecking balls sitting at his side, waiting to knock down buildings.

  “You don’t wanna do this,” he snarls.

  “I already did,” she says. All eyes on her. She feels like an ant under a magnifying glass.

  “You’re bringing hell down on your head.”

  She nods. “I know.” I’m good at that. “Now open the ring. I want out.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “No,” she says, pointing the gun at Charlie, the pot-bellied ref. “But he can. Go on, Charlie.”

  Charlie hesitates. Ellis takes a step toward her—she jerks the gun in his direction, then back to Charlie, then to the Nazi trainer behind her, then back again. The gun shakes. Threats on all side of her, like water rushing in through doors and windows—she feels flooded, drowned, like she can’t swim. Worse, then she sees John Elvis pressed against the plywood wall, lip in a fishhook sneer. No Melanie. No Petry. Not yet.

  A dread thought crosses her mind: I’m going to have to shoot someone.

  Please, not again.

  But then finally Charlie mumbles, “Sorry, boss,” and jogs over to the ring gate and pops the latch. Ellis bellows at him but it’s too late: the path is open, the way is clear.

  Atlanta pats her leg and Whitey stands at attention. She moves briskly toward the gate, keeping the gun sights roving from target to target.

  As she gets closer to the gate, Ellis yells: “Do not let her leave this ring!”

  Ahead of her, the crowd fails to part. They instead tighten around the exit. The octagon ring wall is open, but the human wall remains closed.

  I have the key, she thinks.

  She raises the pistol at the crowd and fires off two shots.

  At least, it looks like she’s firing at the crowd. She’s really firing just over their heads but in all the sound and clamor and panic, nobody’s really figured that out yet. And like Moses parting the Red Sea, Atlanta parts the ocean of bodies as they start to scream and yell and run the other way.

  Chaos. She needs chaos.

  Atlanta runs into the crowd, firing off another two shots, a cowboy moving his herd. She darts into the throng, moves through it, away from it, lost within it. And soon as she can’t see the octagon anymore, she bolts for the woods with Whitey swiftly in tow.

  * * *

  The wound looks worse than it is, she thinks—a few teeth marks, still bleeding but the punctures are shallow, so she and Whitey hunker down in the woods not far from Wayma
n’s farmhouse so she can get a good look at it. But all she does instead is sit behind a stack of firewood and hold the dog close.

  He sniffs her ear and licks it.