Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,25
grinds sideways, blocking the road and her path.
Atlanta turns to go the other way—up the hill instead of down—but here comes Skank. Grin cruel and sharp, like a boomerang made of razor blades.
Back into the woods, she thinks, and she goes to leap over the ditch once more but she doesn’t make it, and again she falls—hands forward into the ditch, into the muck, and then Skank has her feet and is pulling her out, fingers searching for purchase, nails breaking on macadam.
Skank turns her over, presses the knife against her throat. Atlanta feels warmth and wetness creep down her neck and along her collarbone: blood.
“Wait!” Mitchell says, and for a moment Atlanta thinks, he knows this is going too far and he’s offering me a reprieve, maybe I should start believing in God after all because I sure do need to thank somebody for this, but that’s not what’s happening, not at all.
Instead he throws Skank a black backpack. “Put that over her head.”
Atlanta resists. Thrashes. Tries to throw a punch for Skank’s head.
Skank turns to let her shoulder take the hit, then she returns with one of her own. A sharp pop against Atlanta’s nose does her a world of hurt: she sees a bright firework flash of stars and feels her head snap hard against the road. Tears well up and make her vision a curtain of colors and shapes blurring.
The backpack goes over her head. The zipper to her neck, where it bites and pinches the skin.
Hands twisted behind her back. Wrists bound up with duct tape. Mouth, too.
She hears Chris nearby, crying.
The sound of a trunk popping.
And then she’s pitched into darkness. Chris, too, as he’s thrown against her.
Last thing she hears is John Elvis panting, Skank cursing under her breath, and Mitchell Erickson saying, “We’ll take ‘em to the gun club. They’ll know what to do with them.”
* * *
It’s tough to breathe inside that bag. All she has is her nose. Nostrils flaring to bring in air. Mouth stuck shut with duct tape. She imagines the tape is a hand. A hand that smells like gasoline and cigarettes. Atlanta almost cries at that, but then she thinks: If I cry, my nose will fill with snot, and if my nose gets blocked, I’m dead. And so she stops, she tries to relax, tries to breathe slowly and surely and not feel like the entire world is collapsing down upon her, swallowing her in a crushing fist.
When she breathes, she once again smells the ephemeral scent of gunsmoke.
But for the first time, it brings her solace.
* * *
A tangle of smells has a gang-bang in her nose. She’s carried, blind and mute, and dropped onto a chair so hard her butt-bone pulsates, but she can’t help but notice the new smells: dust, must, stale cigarette smoke, a hint of cologne like the old Old Spice, a tang of beer and sweat, and beneath it all, that greasy-yet-clean smell of gun oil. The gun club, she thinks.
She knows where the gun club is. Hard not to; it has its own road. Gun Club Road. Simple enough.
It sits south of town. Just up in the hills—not far from where Atlanta got thrown into the trunk of a Lexus. She’s been by the place once or twice. When she first moved here to Maker’s Bell from North Carolina, she took to wandering to get a lay of the land. Eventually she became friends with Bee, and then Bee would drive her around instead of letting her walk, and they’d maybe sip beer or smoke a little weed as they drove Bee’s certified POS, a Suzuki Samurai, around.
The gun club itself isn’t much to look at. Blocky concrete building. Looks like a drain embankment you could live in for a while. American flag out front. A few boxwood shrubs. Bars on the windows.
And when they finally take the hood—sorry, the backpack repurposed as a hood—off her head, she sees what the inside looks like, too. Nearly as austere as the outside. Wood paneling on the walls. Couple doors on the far wall. Tin tile on the ceiling. Folding chairs stacked against the corner and a podium at the far end. In the corner sit boxes of blaze orange clay pigeons and an old hand-thrower. On the wall: guns, framed pictures of members, war memorabilia, a handful of deer heads, a ram’s head, a bear’s paw upturned so it looks like it’s giving the room a furry black middle