Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,75
head thunking against the window. Atlanta hurries outside, opens the back door.
The dog—the very special dog breed, the Dogo Argentino—stares at her.
“Go!” she says. “You’re free. Look. Out there it’s… trees and farmhouses and a bunch of walking hamburgers.” The dog just stares. “Liberty! Freedom! This here is your Emancipation Proclamation. Go!”
The dog’s massive body fails to move.
She reaches in with ginger hands, grabs the dog in a tricky stealth hug, uses the fake affection to try to drag his white ass off the seat. But he’s heavy. Like he’s a statue fixed to a concrete slab. There’s that age-old question, could God create an object that He Himself could not move? The answer: yes. This dog.
The dog licks her ear. The tongue is wet and dry at the same time. Like drooly sandpaper.
“C’mon,” Guy says, snapping his fingers. “They could be on us soon. We gotta roll, Atlanta.”
“Dangit,” she says, getting back in the car.
* * *
They manage to get Shane out of the car, carrying him over to one of the white plastic patio chairs in front of her house before dumping his butt into it.
The dog hops out of the car and plods after.
Guy doesn’t say much. She’s not sure if he’s mad or scared or something else, but he’s stewing and simmering and she knows to leave well enough alone. He doesn’t even say goodbye—she thinks he’s just going over to turn off the car engine, but instead he gets in and peels out. The Scion rockets down her driveway toward the road.
The dog sits in front of her, panting and licking his chops. Creepy, because he is in effect licking the blood that stains his muzzle. Bodie’s blood. From Bodie’s ruined hand.
“I have got to wipe you off,” she tells the dog.
She heads inside, hoping that while she’s in there he decides to wander off into the corn or the weeds. Instead, he follows her inside. Her own white shadow. At the sink she runs the faucet over a wad of paper towels. When she’s got them good and wet she squats next to him, hesitant.
“You’re not gonna bite my hand off, are you?”
He thumps his nose into her forehead.
“I hope that isn’t secret dog language for ‘yes.’” She sighs. “Let’s get you cleaned off.”
She wipes his muzzle, the paper towels turning pink her hands. A shudder grapples up her arms, to her spine, and then to the rest of her body. Don’t think about that. Soon she has the creature’s face clean.
Back outside. The dog at her six every step.
Shane is awake. Wide-eyed and staring down the driveway, hands gripping the sides of the patio chair in a mortified grip. He hears her coming, starts to say, “I remember a dog. Like, this monster from Hell. Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards—“
Then he tilts his head and finally sees that the dog is hot on her heels and he squeal-yelps and pulls his arms and legs up tight like he’s floating on a buoy in shark-infested waters.
“Yeah, the dog is real,” she says. “Sorry about that.”
“What happened?”
And she tells him. About the fight, about seeing John Elvis and the Skank and the cop, about Bodie and Bird and how the Cooch tranquilized her, and then him. About the dog crunching the bones in Bodie’s hand. Rending the flesh. Turning it to a glove filled with ground meat.
“That dog’s evil,” Shane says.
The dog pants and whines in response.
“He seems all right,” she says. “I think he saved my life, actually.”
She clumsily pets him. Meaning, she taps him on the head with her open palm. Clumsy or no, the dog seems to like it, and leans into her ministration, eyes closed, a sincere moment of canine bliss.
“So he belongs to who now?”
“Ellis Wayman,” she says. “Big sumbitch. They call him the Mountain Man, though whether that’s because he’s from the mountains or big like one, I dunno. Maybe both.”
“You have to give the dog back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What?”
“This dog saved my life, Shane. What, I’m supposed to repay that by sending him back to that place? I saw just one fight and it was the most miserable thing I ever did see. All the blood in the dirt. Both animals in pain. I can’t do it. Won’t do it. He’s not my dog but he’s not gonna be theirs, either.”
“He’s gonna want that dog back.”
“I know.” Worry fills her up—gallons of spoiled milk in all her empty spaces. “I don’t know what to do.”