Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,2
but that ain’t necessarily true, either. A bear will take a round to the head and keep coming. And a scatter gun mostly just pisses them off. What you need is a can of bear mace.”
“Bear what?”
“Bear mace.” She shows him. From her purse she pulls a tall, lean canister with a pull-tab and a black nozzle. Atlanta points the pull-tab at the three assholes and rips that tab off.
Bear mace isn’t like other pepper spray. A can of dog deterrent maybe sprays five, ten feet. More a cloud than anything. But bear mace is a concerted blast—a geyser of pepper spray that shoots forth in a 30-foot jet. Powerful enough so that it doesn’t blow-back unless the wind’s bad, and today, the air is still as a chair in an empty room.
The can empties in about five seconds.
For those five seconds, Atlanta can’t see much. She knows that the Mexic--er, Venezuelan kid hit the deck inside the dumpster. Heard the thump of his body. The other three, well, she can see their shapes thrashing around—first standing up, then down on the ground—but that’s all they are. Shapes.
When the can is done, Atlanta wings it past the margins of the lot into the bushes.
The smoke clears, revealing the trio of assholes writhing on the ground. Faces red. Crying. Even from here she can see the blood vessels standing bright in the whites of their eyes. Jonesy’s clawing at his face like he’s got a rat chewing on him from the inside. He’s got dog shit on his arm. Virgil is blubbering. Pounding the ground with a fist. Like that’ll help. The mute toothy third, Chomp-Chomp, lays curled up like a baby rat. He’s got his eyes clutched so tight she thinks they might never open again.
She lets out a long breath.
A little voice inside her asks: is this who you are, now?
She doesn’t want to find the answer.
So she turns and runs. Bag flopping at her hip.
* * *
Back at the house she tries to cry but it just isn’t coming. It’s like, she wants to. It’s in there somewhere. But like a stubborn sneeze she just can’t make it happen, and that’s somehow all the worse.
Up the long driveway, shoes crunching on driveway gravel.
Past the fallow fields on either side. Green starting to poke up with spring trying to get sprung.
A dead brown Buick—might as well be a boat, not a car—sits off to the side, the car draped in the choking vines and soon-to-be purple clusters of wisteria.
Atlanta takes a moment. Her right hand is shaking. Her index finger in particular.
Then she goes in through the garage.
Mom’s in there. Setting up the cot, pulling sheets over it, fluffing up some pillow that looks about as soft and comfortable as a sack of grain. A long lean cigarette is pinched between her lips.
Seeing Atlanta, she quick puts it out. I’m quitting, she told her daughter a few days ago. Like that somehow mattered. Like fixing a sucking chest wound with a single stitch.
“You want dinner?” Mom asks, finally.
“I do not,” Atlanta says. “I got it covered.” Which means, some generic frozen entrée from the Amish store where they sell grocery goods that are either off-brand, out-of-date, or both. Froot Loops from two years ago, or Fruit Scoops only a month old.
Probably best her mother isn’t cooking dinner, she tells herself. Funny thing. Mom can make a hell of a breakfast, but her dinners are at the end of the culinary spectrum reserved for roofing shingles.
Just to be a bitch, Atlanta walks over near to where her mother is setting up the cot, opens the garage fridge, and pulls out a beer. Coors Light. Tastes like the watered-down piss from a diabetic cat, the girl thinks, but it’s one of her mother’s and part of her just wants to see how far she gets to push.
Mom sees but pretends not to see and that’s all Atlanta needs to know.
The girl goes inside while the mother sets up her new bedroom on the oil-stained concrete.
* * *
Knock knock knock.
He about scares the tits off her. Standing by the kitchen window like that. Atlanta goes and opens the back door and pokes her head out. The Venezuelan kid about jumps out of his skin.
“What?” she barks.
He steeples his hands in front of him, a nervous gesture.