Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,1

and stupid.

She slides her hand into her tie-dye bag. Leaves it there.

Virgil finally breaks through. No more elbows. He blurts in what he thinks is a whisper but what is instead just a really loud hiss: “Dude. Don’t you know who that is?”

“What?” Jonesy asks. Then he takes a long look at her.

She knows what they see. On the surface, at least. Tangled red hair, a little too long, too frizzy, hasn’t been cut. A patch of freckles across the bridge of her nose in the shape of a small Band-Aid. Old ratty bomber jacket.

But they don’t all recognize her. Not yet. Virgil does. He’s got a wary look like he’s watching a rattlesnake at a distance. And the kid in the dumpster looks like someone’s been beating him up and trying to force-feed him a pile of dogshit. No telling if he’s figured her out, yet..

But then she sees the light come on behind Jonesy’s eyes.

Now he gets it.

“Right,” Jonesy finally says. “Riiiiight. Burns, yeah. Atlanta Burns. That’s a name.”

“Sure is,” she says. “So, listen. Why don’t you boys go home?”

“She got a Southern accent?” Jonesy asks Virgil. Virgil nods, but it’s not like anybody couldn’t know the answer. Up here, middle of Pennsylvania, her accent sticks out like a bent and broken toe. “I like that. My Dad’s got a rebel flag on his pick-up.”

“Then your Daddy’s a jackass.” She says it before she means to say it, but that’s how she is: it’s like the bouncers that are supposed to be guarding the door to her mouth are on a perpetual smoke break. Even still, she continues: “That flag’s not just the emblem of being a racist asshole, a club to which your Daddy probably belongs happily. But it’s also the Confederate flag. The one carried by Southerners to say to the Yankees—that’s your Daddy, a Yankee—don’t tread on me or I’ll pop a musket ball up your ass. Northerners driving around with the Dixie flag is like a Jew wearing a ‘Go Hitler!’ baseball cap.”

Jonesy’s smile has fallen off his face. He spits a slim squirt of saliva between the middle of his two front teeth, hands over the shovel to Chomp-Chomp, who takes it, shell-shocked. The ringleader then gives a look to Virgil, and nods toward her. It isn’t subtle.

They both take a step toward her.

“You sure you wanna do this?” she asks.

Virgil doesn’t retreat, but she sees him recoil. His body language is clear. He’s not sure. Jonesy, though, he doesn’t give a shit. He licks his lips, comes another step closer.

There it is again: the smell of gunsmoke. Damn near makes her sick. It’s not real, she thinks.

“Last chance,” she says. Her heartbeat is drumming in her neck. Every part of her brain is screaming for her to take those getaway-sticks she calls legs and run as far and fast as she can. But her body stays rooted. Her hand tightens in her bag. It’s got other plans. “We can all just play nice. Go our separate ways. You can leave that nice Mexican boy alone—“

“Venezuelan,” he peeps up from inside the dumpster.

“Sorry. You can leave that nice Venezuelan boy alone, and he won’t tell anybody and nobody will get hurt worse than he already has. Square?”

“I like her,” Jonesy says to Virgil. “She’s feisty. I bet the three of us could have a nice time together. Virgil at the front. Me at the back. Shaking hands in the middle.”

Her stomach roils. She goes elbow deep in her bag.

“I see you reaching in that hippie purse,” Jonesy says, pulling Virgil along next to him. “What’s in there? I don’t think you can fit a shotgun in there.”

Way he says ‘shotgun,’ he knows. And it doesn’t scare him. Which scares her. You’re going to get hurt, she thinks. Maybe there’s truth to what the worst of men say. Maybe you do this to yourself. Maybe you really are asking for it. You go fucking around with rattlesnakes, maybe you get bit.

But she bears down. Doesn’t move.

“Nope, no shotgun,” she says. “Hey, you ever been attacked by a bear?”

Jonesy pauses. “What?”

“A bear. Like, a grizzly. Thing is, you get attacked by a bear, not much you can do. They run faster than you. They got teeth and claws like knives, or so the TV tells me. You play dead, that might work, but not before the bear bats your body around like a cat with a dead mouse. You’d think a gun would do it