The Hunt

by Chuck Wendig

  Brakes squeal.

  It’s Bee.

  She gets in the hatchback. The car lurches forward like a rabbit with a bottle rocket tied to its tail.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They drive around for the rest of the day. They park in the dingy lot of an old emptied-out Giant grocery store on the edge of town. Atlanta tells Bee everything—there came a moment when she thought to protect Bee from all this, but it’s Bee who got her into this. And she just can’t stomach keeping it to herself.

  And now Bee stares out over her steering wheel, watching the middle distance as if she’s not sure how to feel or what to think.

  “They saw you,” Bee says.

  “I think. Her mother definitely did. Her dad, I dunno.”

  “They’ll tell the police.”

  Atlanta swallows hard. “That’s just it. I don’t know that they will. Somethin’ real weird was going on there, Bee. They came in, already upset. Samantha’s mother went upstairs all mechanical-like and headed right to the bathroom. Right to it. That woman knew her daughter was dead in a tub before she walked through the front door. Father knew it, too.”

  “Maybe Samantha called them before she did it. Told them what she was going to do—”

  “Uh-uh, I don’t buy it. That happens, and the first thing you do as a parent is call the police. And even if they didn’t—let’s say they didn’t take her seriously—then still, you get home and you call Samantha’s name, you go upstairs to check on her. That’s not . . . not what these people did.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying somebody killed Samantha. And her parents were in on it.”

  “That’s . . . insane, Atlanta.”

  “You don’t know what this town is like. Heck, I don’t even know. But I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s hiding in the dirt. Lots of things squirming.” She turns toward Bee. “You might be a target.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t see why they’d have any reason to come after you, but just in case. You got a tie into this. Samantha hooked you up. I don’t know why anyone would wanna kill her—”

  “We don’t know that someone killed her!”

  “Just be careful. Okay?”

  “It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” Way that Bee says it, it’s like she’s trying real hard to believe it. Like she’s not a target. Or like Atlanta isn’t one, either. (Atlanta figured by now she’d be used to that, but turns out, you never really get used to being a target.) Just saying the words aloud is akin to casting a magic spell. The equivalent of knocking on wood to make sure the universe doesn’t spite you.

  When the school day should be over, Bee takes Atlanta back to her house. She pulls up, and she and Atlanta just sit for a while, quiet as a couple of sneaky, scared-ass mice. Atlanta’s about to speak when—

  Wham.

  Something slams into the car, makes the whole thing shake, makes her heart jump into her throat, makes a mad, panicked sound come out of Bee—

  A white shape appears at the passenger’s-side window.

  Whitey’s lumpy, misshapen head. His maw opens and he licks the glass like it’s candy. Tongue dragging across it, leaving smeary streaks.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bee says. “I may have legit peed.”

  “I better go,” Atlanta says.

  “You be careful, too.”

  “Sure,” she says. But what she thinks is: I’m about a hundred miles past careful, Bee, and there’s no turning around.

  She paces outside for a while. Shaking even still.

  Then she makes a call.

  Phone rings. And rings. And rings.

  Eventually, a voice answers. A familiar voice.

  Babycheeks. “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Atlanta says.

  “Who?”

  “The girl. From the party. You remember? The party.”

  Silence on the other end. “Oh.”

  “You never called the police.” An accusation. And on the other end: a small gasp and the sound of someone licking lips.

  “I . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Atlanta hisses. “Just call them already.” Babycheeks calls the cops, it’ll bring them to Samantha’s house—and maybe, just maybe, they’ll catch something. Atlanta sure can’t call them. She can’t tie herself to this. Might as well tie herself to a car’s bumper just as it’s driving off a cliff.

  “I can’t. I told my parents what happened—”

  “So?”

  “They said I shouldn’t call. That . . . that it wouldn’t do me any good. That I got away safe and sound—”

  “Yeah, thanks to me.”

  “I know. I know. But . . . I don’t want that kind of attention.”

  “Please. Listen to me—”

  “I have to go.”

  “Wait!”

  But the girl hangs up. When Atlanta tries her back, the phone just rings and rings and rings.

  Inside the house, the sound of sniffling, snuffling, nose-blowing.

  A bright fear jumps inside Atlanta’s chest like an ember leaping off a crackling campfire—she thinks: Samantha’s mother is here.

  How? How did she get here that fast? No car in the driveway.

  Atlanta winces, not sure what to do. Go back outside to hide? Creep through the house? No. Creeping and hiding isn’t her way. Not today. Not ever.

  She puffs out her chest, sticks up her chin, walks into the living room where she hears the sound—

  It’s not Samantha’s mother crying.

  It’s her own.

  There sits Arlene, a tissue box in her lap. A battlefield of used tissues cast across the coffee table like dead enemy soldiers.

  Atlanta’s first thought is: Paul left her.

  And she says as much, too. “Paul, huh?”

  Arlene’s face knots up like a twist tie—her brow darkens and her mouth scowls. “No, Atlanta. Not Paul.” And here tears threaten to spill again. “Not Paul.”

  “Then what’s going on?”

  “That’s no way to speak to your crying mother.”

  “Well—you know what? You cry a lot. And I don’t know how to deal with it so why don’t you just cut to the chase?”

  “I got the mail today,” Mama says. That’s when Atlanta spies something next to Arlene on the couch, something she dismissed as unused tissues:

  Two envelopes. Each torn open.

  “I see that.” Atlanta’s chest tightens. “Quit with the suspense.”

  “First envelope? You got suspended from school.”

  Uh-oh.

  Atlanta plays it tough: “Yeah, so?”

  “You got suspended from school and you didn’t tell me.”

  “Is that what bothers you? That I didn’t tell you? Fine, sorry I didn’t say something but I didn’t want to have to deal with—” she gestures at her mother with waggling fingers “—this.”

  “It’s not that you didn’t tell me. It’s . . . it’s what you did. It says you assaulted another girl, Atlanta.”

  She rolls her eyes. “They put that in there because they like drama. They want it to seem like what I did matters when it really doesn’t matter one bit.”

  “What did you do? Tell me.” Another nose blow. “What was it?”

  “I . . .” Atlanta licks her lips and realizes it maybe sounds worse than it was, but here goes: “I hit a girl with a lunch tray.”

  Her mother gasps.

  “Atlanta. We do not do that. That’s . . . that’s prison behavior.”

  “School is prison, Mama. That’s how it goes.” She thinks: All of us just sitting there day in and day out, doing our time, trying to get to the end of our sentences. And part of that means surviving alongside the other inmates. Maybe that means a little prison yard justice happens from time to time.

  “Other kids, they don’t do these things.”

  Atlanta blasts out a laugh, but it’s not a happy sound. “No, they don’t, they just sit there and suffer in silence. They take thei
r whuppin’ from whatever sonofabitch wants to give it to them on that particular day.”

  “What made you so hard, Atlanta?”

  “You did.” The words don’t simply fall out of her—it’s like they’re launched forth, an arrow from a bow, a cannonball from a cannon’s mouth, a fusillade of bunker buster bombs dropped from a very great height with the sincerest desire to blow it all to hell. “It hasn’t even been a year since Emerald Lakes and what, you think I’m just fine? A-okay, okie-dokie, all squared away? Spoiler alert: I’m not fine.”

  And that launches Mama into a new wave of weeping.

  Atlanta stands there, waits for it to subside, waits for Mama to speak—which she does, eventually, when she says: “You’re right. This is my fault. Dangit, I was trying to do better. And Paul, he’s nice, he’s genuinely nice.”

  Well, hell. Sometimes it’s easier to attack than to back down, easier to kick and scream and bite than to say you were wrong. Easier to take the poison inside you and spit it into someone else’s mouth.

  But now, spitting up that poison has left an emptiness inside Atlanta.

  Guilt fills the void.

  Dangit.

  Dangit!

  She sighs, sits down, grabs her mother’s hand, and holds it in her own. “You have been doing better.” I’m the one who isn’t doing much better. “And Paul is . . .” Saying it is like performing rectal dentistry on a rabid wolf, but here it goes: “Paul is really actually maybe kinda nice. I’m sorry I hit that girl. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Sniff. Then Arlene says, “Did the little bitch deserve it?”

  “So deserved it.”

  Arlene pats her hand.

  Then she gets the second envelope.

  “Is this door number two?” Atlanta asks.

  “It is.”

  On the outside: the name of a bank. Never a good sign. Just seeing a bank’s name makes Atlanta’s blood go rancid. She pulls the letter out.

  One word stands out like the light of a freight train bearing down:

  Mortgage.

  It’s déjà vu. A flashback. Sitting with her mother not even six months ago, getting a letter about a potential foreclosure. That, the result of Atlanta’s meddling in the business of neo-Nazi moneyman, Orly Erickson: mean, bloodthirsty chickens come home to roost.

  Now: a different message, but no better.

  The bank that had the mortgage sold it. To another bank.

  And now that bank is invoking “balloon payments.” Which at first blush sound a lot nicer than they are: balloons are fun, festive, floaty. Atlanta would love to pay in balloons. Latex squeaking, balloons thumping together. But that’s not what it means. A quick read tells her that the payments are going up. Way, way up.

  “We can’t afford that,” Mama says.

  “It doesn’t say anything about foreclosure.” Though here Atlanta appends the unspoken words: Not yet, anyway.

  “We can’t afford it. Foreclosure is the end of this road.” Mama’s high-pitched voice tells Atlanta how hard she’s trying to keep it together. “I’m gonna have to get another job. We may need to move anyway. Goddamn. We were doing so good, baby. I don’t know what happened.”

  Atlanta’s not sure, either. She has, or had, a deal with Orly Erickson—in return for her not sharing certain information on his pet police officer, Officer Petry, he interfaced with the bank to make sure their payments were kept low, and foreclosure was last night’s bad dream.

  Now, though, something’s changed. The bank sold it.

  Which means she’ll need to make a call she doesn’t want to make.

  But that’s a problem for later. In the meantime:

  “Gimme a minute,” Atlanta says.

  And then she chokes back her pride, her selfishness, her future plans, and she heads upstairs to her room to fetch something.

  It’s gone.

  It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone.

  That’s not possible. That’s just. Not. Possible!

  The shoebox is there. The notebook is still inside it.

  But all the money?

  Poof. Like it never even existed. A ghost exorcised, gone to plasmic vapor.

  She searches under the bed. Under the pillow. Around the room. Underwear drawer. Sock drawer. Closet. She tries not to make a sound, but the frustrated roar that comes up from her lungs cannot and will not be contained.

  Atlanta kicks the shoe box back under the bed.

  “Fuck!”

  Downstairs, Arlene’s piling up all the used tissues and sliding them into a plastic Walmart bag. She sees Atlanta come down. “You okay, baby?”

  The tension in Atlanta’s neck is like bridge cable—feels like that’s the only thing stopping her head from going pop and hopping off her shoulders like a spooked frog. She wants to ask her mother about the money, wants to accuse her, but it doesn’t add up. Mama’s a lot of things, but duplicitous isn’t really one of them. She’s a bad liar. She’s shit when it comes to keeping secrets.

  So she doesn’t ask. She puts on a brave face even though inside, she’s a tornado ripping through barns and cow pastures and pretty houses.

  “I’m good,” she says.

  “You find what you need upstairs?”

  “Not yet,” she says. “But I’ll keep looking.”

  Paul isn’t there for dinner. He’s at work, so it’s just Mama and Atlanta. Mama tried to get an extra shift at the Karlton, but it didn’t happen. The two of them, mother and daughter, don’t speak much—it’s like the day’s events have left them both gutted. Blown tires on the side of some highway. They don’t even eat at the table, the two of them chowing down on canned spaghetti while sitting on the couch, watching bad TV. Some show about a bunch of doctors who are also detectives or something? Atlanta doesn’t really get it.

  Whitey just lies there on his back, farts a lot. Room killers, that gas. Smells like someone managed to get a rotten egg inside a balloon before setting the whole affair on fire. It’s equal parts devil stink, tire fire, and sour garbage.

  Eventually Atlanta heads up, leaving her mother behind.

  Been a long day, so she takes out the Ambien.

  Sure hope I don’t have any wacky fun-time adventures tonight, she thinks.

  She pops a pill, but even as she chases it with a glass of water, the thought strikes her like a bullet pinging off a bell—

  The money.

  From the shoe box.

  What if—?

  Could she have done something with it while on the damn pills?

  Oh, hell.

  She lies there, panicked, until sleep comes for her like a wolf.

  And, proof of concept: she wakes up on the couch downstairs. There’s the smell of sausage cooking. Eggs, too. Atlanta asks Mama how she got downstairs on the couch, and Mama laughs like it’s some kind of joke. Tells her that Atlanta came back downstairs about an hour after heading up. Seemed kinda dopey, but they talked a little, watched more TV, and then Atlanta passed out on the couch and Arlene headed to bed. Nothing more complicated than that.

  Even still: Atlanta doesn’t remember one second of it.

  Not coming down. Not talking or TV watching.

  The pills gotta go.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  For the next two days, she doesn’t do much. It’s not depression, at least she doesn’t think so, but it sure is something. Mostly she sits around. Her deepest desire is to just sit here and do nothing, and everything will get better. Maybe all her problems will sort themselves out. It’s easier than dealing with things. The loss of the money. The dead girl in the tub. The mortgage payments. She takes her temperature, but everything’s normal. Even though she feels clammy and weird, even though her skin crawls and she feels like a vase on a table wobbling back and forth.

  She’s fine. Everything’s fine.

  Nothing’s fine.

  Night before she has to go back to school, she makes the call she doesn’t want to make. Orly Erickson is in the phone book, so that’s who she rin
gs up.

  A woman answers. His wife. Mitchell’s mother.

  “May I speak to Orly, please?”

  The woman asks who’s calling.

  Atlanta answers: “It’s June, from the office.”

  The rasp of something against the phone. A fumbling sound.

  Then: “June from the office,” Orly says.

  “Hey there,” Atlanta says.

  “I know that guitar twang voice. Hello, June. How’s Atlanta this time of the year? Temperature still hot down there? Like it’s burning up, I bet.”

  “Ain’t you clever. I won’t keep you. I have a question for you.”

  “Hold on.” Then, to his wife: “Hon, I gotta take this in the other room.” Footsteps. A throat clearing. “I bet it’s about your mother’s mortgage.”

  She tenses up. “Bingo.”

  “Funny thing about that: I don’t control the banks. When my friend at First United told me what was happening, I said, well, that’s a shame that a whole different financial entity is scooping up these mortgages with a shovel, but I thought, my god, that’s a thing that’s just plain out of my hands. Act of God. Sorry, Atlanta. Adult business is strange sometimes.”

  “This is some kinda vendetta.”

  “Oh, but for what?”

  “For me kicking your son’s ass.”

  A bit of anger in his voice when he says: “Mitchell gets his ass kicked by you, he deserves it.”

  “What about when you kick his ass? He deserve it then?”

  “Have a nice night—”

  “Wait. I still got that tape.”

  “You do, but you want to know what I heard? I heard the police brought you in for something the other week. You’re on their radar, especially after your little Internet video stunt. So, let’s play this out. You release that tape, then what? You fire that gun, you won’t be able to handle the kickback. It might—might—dent my armor, but you? It’ll do more damage to you than me. So, you feel like your moral compass demands you let slip those dogs, by all means, do so.”

  “You asshole.”