Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,24
like an upside-down triangle what with those steroids he’s obviously gobbling, and yet here he is getting thrown around like a slab of beef.
Mitchell starts kicking Jonesy. In the side. Boot. Boot. Boot. Each time, Jonesy cries out, makes a sound like something inside of him is coming apart.
John Elvis stands. Begins twirling the bat.
“They’re going to kill them,” Chris says, horrified, face white like a bloodless knuckle. “Atlanta, seriously. C’mon.”
She thinks, this is how it goes. This is how it has to be. You want bullying to stop, you gotta take it all the way. Can’t just make some threats. Can’t just hose ‘em down with bear mace. There’s a line, and they’re not afraid to cross it, so why should she? She didn’t have that bear mace that day what would’ve happened? They probably would’ve come at her. Hit her. Maybe raped her. The look on Jonesy’s face was plain as the pealing of a bell—he’s a predator like all the rest.
John Elvis brings the bat down on the back of Virgil’s legs.
Mitchell kicks Jonesy in the face.
She hears Chris again, this time in her head: They’re going to kill them.
The voice that answers is cold and unmerciful, a cutting and uncaring wind, and maybe it’s the Adderall talking, or maybe it’s really her true voice found after she’s been stripped down to the quivering nerve endings:
So what?
And then finally the Skank steps into the breach and her hand makes a motion and there’s a glint of something and it’s a knife—rather, a switchblade, bright and mean, and she’s advancing toward Virgil first with a look in her eyes that shows just how much she’s looking forward to what comes next.
“Stop it!”
The scream comes across the cemetery, a hoarse shriek that surprises the hell out of her, more surprising for the fact that it came from her own mouth.
She stands up. Waves her hands.
They all see her. Mitchell steps over Jonesy. John Elvis twirls the bat. Skank points the switchblade up in her direction as if to curse her, as if to say, Now I’m going to cut you.
“Get up,” Atlanta says to Chris. “Get up. We have to go.”
The three foes are already clambering up over the side of the cemetery toward the hill, toward their position. Leaving Virgil and Jonesy bleeding and moaning amongst the dead.
And now we join the dead, Atlanta thinks.
“Run!” she says to Chris, and they both take off up the hill.
* * *
Atlanta bursts through the treeline at the top of the hill. Thorns grab at her clothes. She knows that on the other side of these trees is a road—Hilltop Road, which will take her back down into town toward Chris’ minivan, which is hidden along the side of the road by the old half-collapsed covered bridge—and that’s her plan. Get to the road, she thinks.
One minute she sees Chris running alongside her. Darting through beams of sunlight coming down through the unfurling canopy of springtime trees above. Whorls of dust and pollen in his wake.
The boy can run.
But so, it turns out, can John Elvis. He comes out of nowhere. Face a twisted rictus of meth-cranked rage. The Neo-Nazi prick shoulders hard into Chris. Slams him into a tree. Laughs.
Atlanta skids to a stop—but there, coming up fast behind her, is Skank. Doing the sociopathic adult version of running with scissors: sprinting with switchblade. Look on her face says she wants to cut Atlanta open and eat her heart.
It’s fight or flight. But Atlanta doesn’t have anything. No gun. No mace. No baton.
Her body makes the choice for her. Stricken by a cold saline injection of fear, she turns, bolts through the trees, the Skank hot on her tail.
One question remains unanswered:
Where’s Mitchell?
She crashes through the treeline on the other side. Sees the road ahead. Jumps a soggy ditch, trips on a drain pipe, lands hard on her knee—the asphalt tears through the jeans like they were tissue paper, and she feels the skin scrape hard against road.
Atlanta leaps forward, can’t care about her knee—and she turns and starts to run down the hill, the pines and oaks rising up on each side of her.
It’s then that she hears the gunning of an engine.
It’s then that she finds out just where Mitchell Erickson’s been.
He went back to his car. The Lexus comes barreling up the hill, a blood-red flash of luxury steel, and it cuts hard on the brakes—the car