Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,13

picture. “There.”

Mitchell Erickson. A real pretty-boy. Firm jaw like the swing on a swing-set. Blonde hair, well-coiffed. Big smile with white veneer teeth. Atlanta knows him, too. Or of him. He’s on student council. And on the morning announcements. And a pitcher on the baseball team.

He’s one of them. One of the popular kids.

“No, no, no,” she says. “You’re just dicking around. You mean to tell me that John ‘Fourth Reich’ Elvis and Pretty-Boy Mitchell there attacked you together?”

Coyne’s face is as somber and sober as a lost puppy. “Them and two others. One of them a girl.”

The skinhead and the student council member.

Buddies in hatred.

Ain’t that just a peach.

* * *

She’s not sleeping when she hears her mother’s scream. The Adderall makes sure of that. It’s another night awake, this time cleaning her room for the first time in what may be years. The drug is like a clean, warm finger thrust into the moist, dewy folds of her mind. Once in a while, the finger wriggles, keeps her awake, keeps her focused. Until the scream.

When she hears the scream it’s like the finger turns to a fist. Her blood pressure goes up: she can feel the tightness in her neck, wrists, temples.

Atlanta almost falls heading down the steps—her feet are moving faster than her head. But it’s like she doesn’t care, and before she knows it she’s through the kitchen, slamming her hip into the counter, and throwing open the door to the garage, where her mother’s been sleeping.

Lights on. Mother in the middle of the room, crying.

Not far from her feet: broken glass.

In the middle of the glass: a cement block with a dead cat wound around it with barbed wire.

Atlanta’s first thought is that this is the handiwork of John Elvis Baumgartner and Mitchell Erickson, the Odd Couple of teenage homophobia, but that doesn’t make a spit-bubble of sense. Unless the two of them have honed their homophobia to such an edge that it grants them psychic powers, she shouldn’t even be on their radar.

No, suddenly she has a pretty good idea. That chin-lift. Those dark eyes. Jonesy and Virgil and maybe that other one with the big teeth.

Mom backs up, feels the cot at the back of her calves and sits down on it hard and heavy. She’s struggling to light a cigarette but her lighter isn’t catching a spark.

“Someone threw a dead cat through our garage window,” she says, blubbering.

“Yes,” Atlanta says, her voice sharp with sarcasm: “Thanks for figuring that out, detective.”

“Detective,” mother says, as if it pings something inside her thought process. “We should call the police. Is this about what happened? Oh, Atlanta, this might be about—“

“Shut up, Mom!” Atlanta barks. “Jesus Christ on a cruise ship.”

Her mother gasps. Nothing like a little blasphemy with which to slap her Mama around. At least it quiets her down.

Atlanta cannot quiet her own heart, though. It’s like an itchy jackrabbit thumping its back legs. She can hear her own blood. A tremulous rush in the deep of her ear. It’s like a song. A really unpleasant, utterly without harmony, song. Sung by a choir of demons.

“Poor kitty,” she hears her mother say, just a peeping whimper, and she thinks, poor kitty, indeed. Atlanta’s not a cat person, not at all, in and fact she’d much rather have a dog, thanks. If only Mama weren’t allergic. Even still, those two killing a cat like this—well, that means they’re a lot more serious than she thought. She figured their antics the other day were pretty much amateur hour karaoke: slap a kid around, make him eat dog shit? Ain’t nice, but it also isn’t the calculated bullying of, say, kidnapping a gay boy, burning him with cigarettes, then sticking Thai chiles up his ass until his anus bleeds.

Killing a cat, though, takes it to a whole other—

Oh. Oh.

That’s when Atlanta sees. The cat’s a black cat, black as crow-feather, black as a midnight specter, but even still she can see the smashed flat tail and the tire tread on the back half of the animal. The guts are poking out, too: or, rather, squished out, like from the tire that ran over it.

It’s then she knows she’s seen this cat: she saw it on the road a couple days before, hit by a car. Probably one of the cat lady neighbor’s kitties—that woman is running a whole feral colony next door, accepting any and all felines regardless of demeanor or disease, and this one’s probably