Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,16

cymbal-smashing. Some kind of thrash metal.

“We go up the side,” she says, pointing along an irrigation gulley. “You sure you’re coming?”

“I would very much like to see their faces,” Chris says.

“I’m staying,” Shane announces as if this were news. It’s not. They told him he had to stay before they even got in the mini-van. Then he says, “This doesn’t seem like much of a plan. You’re just marching up there with a shotgun? Isn’t that illegal?”

Chris’s face paints a wicked grin. “I think it’s pretty bad-ass.”

“You know what’s also illegal?” Atlanta asks. “Burning someone with cigarettes. Worse, it’s downright wrong is what it is. I’d say it’s even a little bit evil.”

She thumbs a shell into the shotgun. Snaps the breach shut. That ends the conversation.

Together, she and Chris creep up the side, toward the barn. Toward the music.

* * *

Looks like John Elvis has a band. If the black spray-paint on the kick drum is any indication, that band is named Warshed. She’s not sure if that’s “war-shed,” or “wars-hed” or just a mispronunciation of “washed,” and she’s not really sure it matters.

The band—three members deep—plays loud, calamitous thrash music in the open back bay of the barn. The two doors are pulled back, and the earthen ramp up (where one would drive a tractor into the belly of the building, if the Baumgartners owned a tractor) is where she and Chris walk because they don’t see any other way.

The trio of Warshed doesn’t notice them at first, so absorbed are they at making intensely shitty music. The guy behind the five-piece drum-kit is another student from Mason High: a metal-head who Atlanta’s pretty sure is named Travis, but she can’t stop thinking of him as Manboob given the fatty peaks rising behind his sweat-stained t-shirt. On the bass is a skanky skinny chick in a torn white Swastika-emblazoned t-shirt and a pair of acid-wash jeans slung so low you could tuck a fistful of pencils in her well-exposed ass-crack. She faces away from them, thrashing her short bob of white-blonde hair, giving them a good look at the top of her moon-cheeks.

John Elvis, he’s on guitar. A cherry-red electric fresh out of a late-80’s hair-band video. It’s got all the angles found in a bolt of lightning. It’s pristine. He plays it with long, spidery fingers, but the grace of his playing doesn’t match the sound that’s coming out, which to Atlanta sounds more like someone is throwing their instruments into a wood chipper. RAR RAR RAR JUGGA JUG JUG.

His one arm is inked from wrist to shoulder. Even from here she can see that it looks like a giant tattoo of a Hitler youth rally. You stay classy, Neo-Nazi douche-nozzle. A cigarette hangs pinched between his lips.

Her heart’s in her throat.

They don’t stop playing. They don’t even see the two of them standing there fifteen feet away.

Fuck it, she thinks, and fires a shot toward the rafters of the barn. The gun barks. What’s probably a handful of asbestos dust comes raining down.

But the gun’s blast is lost to the music.

They don’t stop playing.

JUG JUG JUGGA GRRAOW GRRAOW RAAAAR

“Aw, what the heck?” she says, but her voice, too, is swallowed. In fact, her ears are starting to ring. Chris has his ears plugged up with his fingers.

She pops the breach. The shell pops out, hits the ground. The smell in the air crawls up her nose: expended gunpowder. It’s suddenly like she’s falling sideways toward a memory she hopes dearly to avoid right now (smell is the most potent conjurer of memory, she thinks, I bet you didn’t consider that little facty-fact), and so she pushes through it by popping another shell in the chamber, taking aim over the barrel, lining the bead just right—

And blasting one of the drummer’s cymbals right off its stand. The birdshot sends the cymbal spinning into the wall. The stand wobbles but doesn’t fall.

Manboob stops playing.

That gets their attention. Not noise but rather, the absence thereof.

They all look first at the cymbal as if it might’ve been possessed by a ghost or the Devil or the spirit of Adolf Eichmann.

Finally, they turn and see Atlanta and Chris standing there.

“Took you long enough,” she says, and then she realizes she’s yelling. Can’t help it. Ears are still ringing.

The skinny skank with the ass-crack is like a rattler ready to strike: she’s already got her bass guitar down on the ground and a baton in her hand that, with a whip of