Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,66
dust, leaving a trail of red. His face looks like ground meat. She thinks: Go now. Get away. Stop watching. Or better still: Get the gun. Put these rabid animals down. And by rabid animals, she doesn’t mean the dogs.
But she stays. Transfixed. Held fast in the quicksand of her own horror.
She barely bears Guy tell her that being fanged means that the other animal’s tooth gets stuck in the other dog’s skin. Like the splinter in your hand.
She’s trembling now.
The dogs move back behind the scratch lines.
“Water test,” ref says.
Deshawn pulls a bottled water from the corner, uncaps it, pours a little into his own mouth. The ref gives him the thumbs up then looks to Karl, who waves off the opportunity. Deshawn pours the water over the dog’s face with shaking hands and then into the animal’s mouth. Omar leans in against his handler, whining in the back of his throat. Teeth marks still pumping fresh blood over his muzzle. Water and blood, water and blood. The earth below the brindle damp with both.
Guy leans in to her, “Handlers gotta test the water first. Make sure it’s not juiced.”
“That dog. He’s really hurt.”
Guy nods. Grim as the grave. “And it’s only going to get worse.”
It all unfolds again. Face the dogs. Let them go. Back to center. Atlanta wants to run in there. Turn the smaller dog away before he gets his throat ripped out.
The two dogs move toward one another. Orion is slow and methodical. And once more Omar waddles out there like he’s going to make best friends, like that whole muzzle-biting thing was just a casual misunderstanding between two old friends.
Orion aims to end it now. The big beast lunges again.
And his jaws snap closed on open air.
Omar snarls, moves fast. The smaller dog gets up under Orion, clamps down on the animal’s throat. The crowd gasps. The skinheads go nuts—banging and kicking the plywood, screaming every racial epithet they can muster (Atlanta’s from the South and even she hasn’t heard some of them before).
It’s over fast.
Orion rolls over, and Omar keeps biting. And shaking his head. Orion howls. A jet of blood squirts up like from a broken fountain. Speckling and spattering the ground.
The worst part is, a little voice inside Atlanta has chosen a side. She wanted to see Omar win. Which means she wants to see Orion lose—Orion the bully, Orion the beast, Orion who gets what’s coming to him. But he’s just a dog, a dog who didn’t want this, a dog who was made into this…
It’s then that everything goes nuts. Karl comes at Deshawn with fists out, the tendons in the skinhead’s neck popping out like bridge cables. Deshawn backpedals, laughing like a donkey, egging the Nazi on. The ref gets between them before the two human beasts clash, pushes each apart. Atlanta can’t watch anymore. She turns and flees the ring, trying hard to find her breath and failing.
* * *
“Rough and tumble stuff, isn’t it?”
She runs into a wall, and the wall speaks.
The man is huge. Six-six. Broad shoulders, long gray hair and a big snarly beard are just the top of the mountain, a mountain that grows as it reaches the prodigious flesh of his barrel chest and massive gut. The beard is the kind of beard birds might use for a nest, and the tangled salt-and-pepper carpet parts as he smiles.
“I…”
“First dog fight, then.”
Behind her, she hears the ref call a winner—“Orion is the cur. Omar is the champ!”—and the crowd surges forth on a tide of victory and hate, of adrenalin and dopamine. The human mountain laughs again.
“That fight was a quick one,” he says. “Sometimes they go for hours. Depends on the dogs and their handlers. I run some dogs now and again. Beautiful animals, these dogs. Really amazing creatures.”
“Yeah.” She’s in his shadow and she feels like even that has weight. She thinks, this guy could give Orly Erickson—who is himself a big sonofabitch—a run for his money. For a moment she’s lost in the mini-movie of those two fighting in the plywood ring, beating the piss out of each other like a couple of Kodiak bears.
“You from the high school?” he asks her.
She doesn’t know why she’s honest but she is. “Yeah.”
“Uh-huh. You place any bets yet?”
“No, I… no.”
He winks. “Shame. Seems if you had money on Omar you’d be rolling around in cash right about now.”
Money. Cash. Foreclosure. One bet on the right animal—