Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

“I said, close it.” She hears her own voice and it’s too dark, too ragged. She adds: “Please.”

  The click of the gun snapping shut.

  “Let’s trade.” She hands Shane the cop’s pistol and gingerly he hands her the Winchester.

  The wind dies down. The humid air comes back—hot, damp, choking. The gun is lighter in her hands—the stock now broken off a couple inches past the trigger guard at its narrowest point. Now just the jagged teeth of splintered wood. She thumbs the hammer back. It makes a satisfying click.

  “This is how it’s going to work,” she tells Petry. “We’ve got you on record saying some very bad things. Things that would get you into some deep and awful shit. Maybe the way we did it wasn’t legal but you and I both know that doesn’t matter one whit. It’ll still put eyes on you. Eyes you don’t want. And when those eyes look at you they’ll start to look at Orly Erickson and then Hitler himself couldn’t save you from what’s coming.” She draws a deep breath, blows it out through flared nostrils. “So you’re going to leave. You’re going to pack up your stuff and disappear from this town, this world, this life. I don’t care where you go. I don’t care what you do. Long as you’re nowhere near here. Because that recording? It’s gonna get out. And you don’t want to be here when it does.”

  Petry lays there, face down against the dirt.

  “I’m gonna need you to acknowledge what I just told you,” she says.

  “Fine,” he mutters.

  “Come again?”

  “I said fuckin’ fine. Whatever you want.”

  “I want something else.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “Don’t push yours. You ever read the Bible, Officer Petry?”

  “I go to church.”

  “Ain’t the same thing. Most folks to go to service but never crack the Good Book. Devil can quote scripture and all that. Well, think of me as being the Devil on your shoulder, and let me quote a bit of scripture to you, something someone said to me recently. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It’s from one of the gospels though I’ll be honest, my memory is lapsing as to which one. Guess I’m not a very good Devil. Or angel. But I am a spectacular human being, and we human beings love our punishments.”

  Shane steps back. Watches, rapt, scared, arms folded over like he’s suddenly cold.

  “Get on with it,” Petry says, voice muffled by the earth.

  “Put out your hand,” she says. “Your right one. Same hand that held the gun that ushered Chris up onto that hill. Same hand that gave him the rope. Same hand that shot my dog in the head. A dog that lives, by the way. Hey, let me ask you something while you’re here. They found a note in Chris’ pocket. Where’d that come from?”

  “His journal. Open on his desk the night I took him from his house. I ripped it out. Seemed a good enough suicide note.”

  “Fine. Now put out that hand.”

  Petry hesitates.

  She jabs him between the shoulder blades with the barrel. “Either the hand or the back of the head. Your call.”

  “Please,” he says.

  “Pleading, now? That doesn’t seem like you.”

  “I have a wife and kids.”

  “How sad for them.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hand. Or head. I’ll count down to five.” She starts. “Five… four…”

  His arm moves. The right hand—already with a bleeding wrist from where the cheap katana lacerated the skin—creeps out like a pale spider, fingers walking it along.

  “Extend your arm all the way,” she says.

  He tenses, then does just that.

  “Chris was my friend. He was Shane’s friend. He was a lot of people’s friends. He lit up a room like a birthday cake stuck with Fourth-of-July sparklers. And you took that away from all of us.” She blinks back tears. “This doesn’t end for me. But it does for you.”

  She pulls the trigger.

  Gun’s loaded with half-ounce birdshot. Six BB’s in each crimped shell. The .410 is a squirrel gun. Doesn’t blow a squirrel apart, and it doesn’t blow apart Petry’s hand, either. That’s not to say it’s pretty, either; the range is close and the birdshot stays in a tight pattern. The back of his hand blooms red; the skin flays, opens up like a torn bag of chips. His hands curl inward. Blood spatters the earth, gleaming in the light from the moon-and-stars.

  The hand may not be ruined. But it’ll never again work the way a hand is supposed to.

  Petry screams. Rolls onto his side. Fetal position.

  She takes the second shell from Shane, ejects the first and replaces it.

  Hammer back.

  “Now you run,” she says. “You run or the next shot opens your neck.”

  Petry tries to stand—foolishly plants his hand, his shot hand, on the ground in a panic and wails again as he falls over. But somehow he manages to get his legs up under him and spring forward.

  Sure enough, he runs. Down the driveway. Toward the road. There’s no car here—must be parked somewhere else, somewhere on the road. Or maybe he walked. It doesn’t matter.

  Atlanta breathes in the warm air. Fireflies orbit one another.

  She collapses, crying. Shane wraps his arms around her and he cries, too.

  In the corn, she sees Chris standing there. Just for a second.

  He looks fabulous.

  And then he’s gone.

  Epilogue: The Message

  “Is this how I do this?” she asks. “I just point the—“

  Shane comes over, tilts the laptop up. With his finger he taps a tiny pinhole over the screen. “Look here when you talk.”

  “That’s a camera?”

  “That’s a camera.”

  “Ain’t technology grand?”

  He smiles. “Yep.”

  It’s her laptop. Her first computer. Bought with the extra money Jenny gave her. Was pretty cheap, all told, and she doesn’t really know how to use it.

  Poor Jenny. Girl still doesn’t have it all together. Atlanta reminds herself to try to hang out with her once school starts up again.

  Atlanta leans back. Steels herself.

  Goes over the speech in her head, nervous as she does so.

  Sun comes pouring in through the window, illuminating a plate of cookies on the bed. Cookies Mama made—meaning, cookies you don’t want to eat lest you plan on chipping a tooth. Mama’s been baking a lot recently. Nervous habit ever since she got home from Virginia. It’s late summer and they’re going to lose the house. A house that now has a few bullet holes hanging, plus two broken picture frames. That was a tough one to explain. Atlanta went with it, told it true—or, part of it. Said they were bullet holes from when a ‘coon got into the house. Arlene was either too dumb to figure differently or too smart to not look any deeper than that.

  She said it didn’t matter anyway, what with the foreclosure coming.

  But Atlanta has a recording from a couple months back that suggests the foreclosure might not come after all. Soon as Orly Erickson has a listen.

  Orly. Must be wondering where his beloved enforcer got to. Atlanta wonders, too. Thinks maybe she shouldn’t have let that sonofabitch go. Hoping against hope Petry doesn’t pop his head back up out of whatever hole he crawled into. And she’ll have to deal with Orly, still. Somehow.

  But that’s a problem for another day.

  Today is a different barrel of monkeys.

  Shane taps a key. The screen comes on. Atlanta’s on it. The camera’s already showing her own face—everything she does, her digital doppelganger does at the same time. She pulls her red hair back and pulls it through a blue rubber band. “I feel like I should be wearing lipstick.”

  “This isn’t a dating video.”

  She hrms. “I suppose you’re right.” Suddenly a part of her wishes Steven came. As a friend, at least. She called him—multiple times, actually—but he never called her back. She hopes that bridge didn’t burn beneath her feet. She still remembers the kiss. It thri
lls her and terrifies her in equal measure.

  “You sure you don’t need a script?”

  “I don’t need a script.”

  “Okay. Just hit the space bar when you’re ready.”

  Her tongue snakes out over her teeth. Then her lips to moisten them. She shifts nervously. The space bar looms—she almost hits it, then doesn’t, then finally stabs it with a finger.

  A red circle blinks on the screen. Next to it in white text: RECORDING.

  She takes a breath. Looks up. Then at the pinhole.

  She starts talking.

  “They say it gets better but that’s a load of horseshit. Like one day you wake up and things are just… taken care of, like they one day get easy. That bullies come and bullies go and eventually everything sorts itself out. It doesn’t. That’s not how the world works, and it won’t ever work that way. Whether you’re gay, black, Jewish, a girl, crippled, mentally handicapped, a foreigner, whatever, somebody’s always going to be there to try to hold your face against the ground and kick you while you’re down there. They make themselves feel better by making you feel like dirt.

  “It doesn’t get better.”

  Another deep breath.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Sounds like I’m saying there’s no hope. This girl’s a bummer, you’re saying, maybe I should put a gun in my mouth or a rope around my neck or take whatever pills I find in my Mama’s medicine chest. That’s one road you can take. But that’s the coward’s way. That wrecks the world for those you leave behind. Those who you think don’t care but really they do. Suicide is selfish. Doesn’t do squat but leave behind a lot of mess. Worst of all, it makes sure that the bullies win. Because now they live in a world with one less person they hate—in a world that looks suddenly a little more like them.”

  Now she leans closer. Narrows her eyes.

  “I’m saying it doesn’t get better on its own. But I am saying you can make it better. You can fight back. You can kick and scream and shove and make sure nobody gets the better of you. You can vote. You can punch. You can stand your ground and stick out your chin and take pride in who you are.

  “That’s how you really get ‘em. By being proud of yourself. By owning it and being awesome and giving them a big old middle finger that tells them that no matter what they do to you, it won’t change you one teensy tiny little bit. Let them be uncomfortable. Let them squirm. They don’t like who you are? Hell with ‘em. Because you know what?

  “You defeat them by being undefeatable.”

  Now she smiles. A mean, sharp-angled grin.

  “But I know it’s not easy. Standing tall. Fighting back. So I’m here to help. Sometimes you need a hand just being who you are and keepin’ the bad folks at bay. You do, you call me. You go to my school, you already know me. You live in this town, you already know me. You already know what I did. What I’m capable of. It won’t get better on its own but together… well, maybe we can make it better.”

  The smile drops off her face like a framed photo dropping off a wall.

  “To you bullies out there? To the haters, the monsters, the Nazis and criminals, the tyrants and tormentors? I’ve got a message for you, too—“

  Whitey jumps up in her lap. Almost knocks her off the chair. On the laptop screen she sees his big doofusy droopy face. One eye missing and one ear cocked away from the other in a permanent 45-degree angle. Little starburst scar above his gone eye. But he’s got a big sloppy grin on his face and a goopy strong of drool hanging from his jowls and he starts panting like the happiest dog on Planet Earth.

  “You bad guys got it real good right now. You have all the power. But that’s over. Done. For you, it doesn’t get better. In fact, from here on out?

  “It gets a whole lot worse.”

  Whitey licks her face.

  She nods at the camera, then hits the space bar again.

  The red light goes away. Recording, over.

  “We good?” she asks Shane.

  He comes, checks the laptop, gives her a thumbs-up. “We got it. You nailed it. I’ll get that on YouTube by the end of the week. Just in time for the new school year.”

  “Cool. Want a celebration cookie?” she asks, pointing to the plate on the bed.

  Shane makes a face like he just ate a lemon rubbed in dog dirt.

  They both laugh, and Whitey lays his head on Atlanta’s shoulder.

  Everything feels a little bit all right.

  For now.

  Author’s Notes

  This was a hard one to write.

  The difficulty is many-headed with a book like this; a hydra with a number of unanticipated (and decidedly bitey) heads.

  First, the subject matter. Dogs, I love. Dog fights, not so much. Dogs fighting mean dogs getting hurt. Dogs getting hurt is a helluva lot harder to write than people getting hurt. Maybe that’s because I possess the assumption that dogs are generally innocent and people are—what? As bad as they are good? I have no idea. But dogs and children, both very hard to hurt in fiction. And yet, therein lies the authorial truth—that which hurts us to write is, at least in theory, effective to read.

  Second, the format. The entire Atlanta Burns series offers a somewhat curious journey toward its birth. Atlanta Burns was a character name that lived inside my head, and so was the title Shotgun Gravy. And, for that matter, so was the title Bait Dog alongside the rough plot of this book (at one time I’d charted a novel with Bird as a protagonist). The first two elements (character and title) crashed together one day and that first novella sprung like a fully-formed creature from my shattered eggshell skull, and ended up as the novella you (hopefully) read. I then started to rethink the original Bait Dog story, seeing how it fit better in Atlanta’s world—Atlanta’s story is very much one about bullies and people exerting power over others, and dog fighting is that precisely. Pushing around a child or kicking a dog is an act of mistreatment no matter how you slice it.

  Bait Dog, though, created for me a problem. Originally the plan was to write a series of novellas and work ‘em like television episodes. Each independent from the other, but each also carrying forward a major central plotline which, for a while, plays the B-plot to the independent story’s A-plot. So, in this way it’s episodic first, but serialized second. (If you watch a show like Burn Notice or Leverage, you grok my lingo on this.)

  The first novella, Shotgun Gravy, sold well enough, and during a free promotion I gave away thousands of copies the book. But novellas don’t see a long life and, further, it’s not like they’re ever going to rake in fat stacks of sweet cash. Plus, I’d gone ahead and outlined three novellas and the next in line was Bait Dog. Even without addressing the Chris Coyne “murder” all that much, the outline was beyond what a novella should really be in terms of length. I was looking at bare minimum 40,000 words of story.

  I knew I didn’t want the Chris murder to be the initial “A-plot” of the book, but I wanted it in there more robustly than it already was (and of course now that we’re at the end of the book I can say that the dog fight plotline dovetails and becomes the Chris-murder plot by the end, both tangled together like two fornicating eagles as they drop toward the earth). So, I re-outlined the whole damn thing as a novel. And it worked, at least in my head (it’s up to you to tell me if it didn’t work in practice).

  Third difficulty was just trying to sort out what this book needed to be. Even before the Kickstarter there was some talk about maybe shopping this around, but that necessitated making some concessions I didn’t want to make in terms of “keeping it YA” (and more on that in a moment).

  Plus, was it a standalone novel? A first book? A second? It had to be a sequel to Shotgun Gravy, but was it also supposed to be able to live on its own as a separate story? It couldn’t, not really, not unless it either a) pulled out the entire Chris plotline or b) reintroduced a number of elements, which threatened redundancy. In the end, I decided that the people who backed this puppy on Kickstarter did so because they liked the novella, and because
they want a sequel to that. As such, I chose to clearly and without reticence make this a “second in the series,” connecting the novel directly to the novella (which is why for the electronic version both will exist in the same text, so you can, if you want, read SG and move straight into BD).

  Fourth difficulty was the fact that I didn’t—and still don’t—know where this book falls, exactly. It’s YA-esque. It’s got a YA-protagonist who deals with YA-like things (other kids, bullying, drugs, school). But it’s also a dark-edged crime-flavored detective-scented tale of a girl doing things she should not do in pursuit of revenge against the awful sumbitches present in this world of hers. As such, I’m still willing to call it YA, or “YA-with-a-twist-of-A,” but I don’t know that I’ll categorize it as such at, say, Amazon.