Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,100
a museum display, preserved and plasticky, waxy like a McIntosh apple. Dead eyes and too much blush and his mouth forcibly arranged in a slight smile that wasn’t his smile at all. A portrait the artist got wrong.
As she lays there across Whitey, she feels it here, too—that sense of lifelessness, that something very important to who the dog was had vacated the premises.
A spirit, a ghost, a soul: gone.
Hands try to pull her away but she won’t—can’t—leave him behind. She wants to curl up and lay in the blood and hold the dog tight until she starves and herself leaves behind an Atlanta-shaped mannequin. Voices call her name—Holger, maybe—but she can’t hear them and doesn’t care about what they have to say because all that’s good in this world has failed her. The police are corrupt. They can’t protect her. They can’t protect an innocent dog. She doesn’t know why Whitey bit Petry—did Petry egg the dog on? Slap him? Kick him? Or did Whitey just know to sink his teeth into the neck of a mean weasel?
It doesn’t matter because it happened and now Whitey is dead.
She bends down and presses her face against his face and kisses his muzzle.
She hears it—her own heartbeat, thump, thump, thump—but then she thinks, that’s not her heartbeat, not at all, it’s not even a heartbeat. It’s a tail. Thudding dully against the floor.
Whitey’s tail.
Wagging. Weak. Barely there. But wagging.
She says, “He’s alive,” certain that her own words are a lie, that this is just a false flag and one last articulation of life before Whitey wanders into the eternal fields of canine Elysium—but the tail thumps again. And his tongue snakes out over his jowls and lays there like a tired slug.
This time she doesn’t just say it but screams it, letting the world know that her dog is alive.
* * *
The siren wails. The single blue light atop the old Crown Vic spins. Holger floors it.
Atlanta sits in the back, Whitey’s head cradled in her lap. His eyes are glassy and unfocused. His breathing, fast and shallow, like he can’t get enough air. One paw twitching. The cratered hole in his skull isn’t bleeding anymore—just a few black rivulets of drying blood stark against his white fur. She feels his neck, his ribs; his pulse is there, but only barely. The tail no longer wags.
It’s then the dog’s body seizes, stiffening in her hands. Whitey’s eyes roll back into his head and he takes one big gulp of air—holding it, holding it, no more breath, frame tight and legs sticking out like broomsticks—
And then the eyes roll back and the dog’s breathing returns—fast, shallow, pant-pant-pant-pant.
“Drive,” Atlanta cries from the back. She can barely see through the tears. She kicks the backseat. As if it does something, anything, at all.
* * *
Time dilates, then expands, then falls back in on itself until it’s meaningless mush. Atlanta sits in the waiting room of the veterinarian’s office, waiting to hear something—anything—from Doctor Chennapragada. Holger came and went. Told Atlanta that she’s sure Petry had good reason but she’d look into it and if she needed her to call Atlanta’s mother she would—but Atlanta didn’t say anything, just sat there quaking and hoping that if she sat real still time might be kind enough to fast forward itself on her behalf.
Eventually the vet comes out. The fabric of her white coat red along the sleeves. Chennapragada is a small woman, but round, hippy—her face the shape of many lush plums strung together.
She sits next to Atlanta and holds her hand. Tight. Atlanta feels her jaw tighten and the tears start to well up but she growls—literally growls, a sound she does not expect to make but makes it anyway—and bites them back.
“I’m going to say something to you now you may not want to hear,” Chennapragada says.
“No,” Atlanta says, firm. “Don’t you tell me he didn’t make it.”
“Your dog is stable.” The words, a lift—her expectations countered. “The bullet lodged above his eye. He will have to lose that eye. There will be some… other reconstruction necessary.” The doctor pauses. “He has a very hard head, this dog.”
Atlanta almost laughs. “Me too. I have a hard head, too.” She doesn’t understand why the vet doesn’t want her to hear any of this—it’s good news. It’s not the best news, the best news would be, your dog didn’t get shot in the head, but considering the circumstances…