Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,23
up into Grainger Hill and beyond to buy meth or hunt turkeys or whatever, is an old Episcopal church—the Church of St. Agnes. Way the church sits, it looks to her like a big stone middle finger which is appropriate given her feelings on religion and all. Behind that church is a narrow graveyard. New graves at the back, and up front are all the old plots: broken headstones, many tilting or tumbled, the whole thing overgrown with weeds since it no longer appears to have any kind of caretaker.
Atlanta lays up on the hill, looking down on the graveyard with a pair of binoculars she bought from the Army-Navy store a couple years back. Chris sidles up next to her, sitting there, and she fast grabs him by the shirt and pulls him down flat against the ground.
“Uh, ow,” he says.
“Stay flat. Don’t want them to see us, do you?”
“By them, do you mean the nobody that’s down there?”
“It’s not time yet. We’re early.” She looks around. “Where’s Shane?”
“He’s on his way. He wanted to bring snacks.”
“Snacks.”
“He gets hungry.”
“Sonofabitch, if he gets here late he’s going to spook the—“ But then she sees. Two figures moving up the side of the church and into the graveyard. It’s them. Jonesy and Virgil. “Shhh. Look.”
The two come into the graveyard. Poke around. Virgil mostly just stands there on his phone, texting someone. Jonesy is fidgety. Wanders around. Kicks rocks. Kicks gravestones. Takes a piss on one. Checks his watch. Atlanta looks at her own watch and sees that time is fast escaping. They’re not going to hang out forever. They think they’re here to break up a D&D game and maybe give Atlanta “what she deserves,” but they won’t hang around forever.
Virgil pockets the phone. He and Jonesy have words. Atlanta can’t hear them up here on the hill—from here it’s just murmuring.
Jonesy shakes his head. Moves back toward the front of the graveyard. Toward the exit. Virgil follows, still texting as he walks.
No, she thinks. No, no, no.
A new plan starts forming in her head—okay, she can’t have them leave so she’ll sneak down there, call out their names and then hide behind one of the big tombs, the ones with the stained glass in the door, the ones with the thistles growing all around, and she’s just about to dart down the hill—
When a car pulls into the church lot.
Oh god. Not Shane. Please, not Shane.
It’s a cherry-red Lexus. With a busted window.
Score.
* * *
The note that Chris dropped into that Lexus?
It read:
FIRST WE FUCKED UP YOUR GUITAR
NOW WE FUCKED UP YOUR CAR
MEET OUR BOYS AT THE ST AGNES CEMETERY
4:15PM
BECAUSE IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GET FUCKED UP
Boom.
* * *
It’s Jonesy that speaks first. Way his face looks tells Atlanta he’s mouthing off, probably because he can’t help it. That’s just the way he is. Mouth running like an out-of-control go-cart. Virgil, again, is the prudent one. Pulling Jonesy back. Shaking his head. He doesn’t want trouble, that Virgil. Which is too bad, because Jonesy’s got trouble in his eyes.
It happens fast. John Elvis jabs Jonesy in the bread basket with the tip of a Louisville slugger. Mitchell steps up, too. Flanked by the Skank. Just the three of them. No fourth, which meant the last member of the bully crew that messed with Chris remains AWOL.
Virgil moves into the breach. Says something just before shoving John Elvis.
Here it is, Atlanta thinks. The title card. The sweet science. The big-ass beatdown.
Way she imagines in her head, it’s a cartoony cloud of fists and feet and headbutts, everybody taking a licking and ending up in an exhausted bloody pile in the middle of the cemetery.
Way she imagines it is wrong.
It’s not a contest. No competition here. That requires two sides, each with a fighting chance.
This is a massacre.
Virgil takes a bat to the chops. The hit spins his head around. She already sees his mouth, rimmed with red. Something white sticking through his lower lip. A tooth, she thinks. A tooth.
Jonesy cries out, tries to turn and run the other way but Mitchell pretends he’s on the pitcher’s mound and scoops up a hunk of broken headstone and pitches it smack into the center of Jonesy’s back.
Jonesy falls face forward.
John Elvis laughs wild and loud, a braying donkey, and he kneels down on Virgil’s back and with the bat-as-rolling-pin presses Virgil’s face into the dirt and weeds. Atlanta thinks, get up, get up you big ugly ape, because Virgil’s built