“Eighteen months.”
“So, you never really knew them.”
Benny hesitated, and that old image flashed in his head once more. Mom screaming. The pale and inhuman face that should have been Dad’s smiling face. And then the darkness as Tom carried him away.
“No,” he said bitterly. “But I know what they look like. I know
“Are they?” the artist asked.
“Yes!” Benny snapped, answering his own question. “And they should all rot.”
The artist folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a paint-spattered wall, head cocked as he assessed Benny. “Tell me something, kid,” he said. “Everyone lost family and friends to the zoms. Everyone’s pretty torn up about it. You didn’t even really know the people you lost-you were too young-but you got this red-hot hate going on. I’ve only known you half an hour, and I can see it coming out of your pores. What’s that all about? We’re safe here in town. Have a life and let go of the stuff you can’t change.”
“Maybe I’m too smart to just forgive and forget.”
“No,” said Sacchetto, “that ain’t it.”
After the audition, he hadn’t been offered the job.
3
“IT WAS A 1967 PONTIAC LEMANS RAGTOP. BLOODRED AND SO souped-up that she’d outrun any damn thing on the road. And I do mean
That’s how Charlie Matthias always described his car. Then he’d give a big braying horselaugh, because no matter how many times he said it, he thought it was the funniest joke ever. People tended to laugh
Benny always laughed. Not because he was afraid of what Charlie would do to him if he didn’t, but because Benny thought Charlie was hilarious. And cool. He thought there was no one cooler on planet Earth.
It didn’t matter to Benny that the car Charlie always talked about had run out of gas thirteen years ago and was a rusted piece of scrap metal somewhere out in the Rot and Ruin. Nor did it matter that the fact the car could even drive was at odds with history; not after the EMPs. In Charlie’s stories, that car had lived through the bombs and the ghouls and a thousand adventures, and could never be forgotten. Charlie said he’d been a real road warrior in the LeMans, cruising the blacktop and bashing zoms.
Everyone else at Lafferty’s General Store laughed too, though Benny was sure a couple of them might have been faking it. About the only person who didn’t laugh at the joke was Marion Hammer, known to everyone as the Motor City Hammer. He wasn’t as big as Charlie, but he was bulldog ugly and had pistol butts sticking out of every pocket, as well as a length of black pipe that hung like a club from his belt. The Hammer didn’t laugh much, but when he was in a mood, his eyes would twinkle like a merry pig, and one corner of his mouth would turn up in what could have been a smile but probably wasn’t.
Benny thought the Hammer was insanely cool too… Just not as insanely cool as Charlie. Of course, no one was as cool as Charlie Matthias. Charlie was a six-foot, six-inch albino with one blue eye and one pink one that was milky and blind. There was a rumor that when Charlie closed his blue eye, he could see into the realm of ghosts with his dead eye. Benny thought that was wicked, too… even if he privately wasn’t so sure it was true.
The pair of them-Charlie and the Hammer-were the toughest bounty hunters in the entire Rot and Ruin. Everyone said so. Except for a few weirdoes, like Mayor Kirsch, who said that Tom Imura was tougher. Benny thought that was a load of crap, because Charlie said Tom was “a bit too easy on zoms,” and he said it in a way that suggested Tom was either shy of a real fight or didn’t have the raw nerve necessary to be a first-class zombie-hunting, badlands badass. Besides, Tom wasn’t half as big as Charlie or as mean-looking as the Hammer. No, Tom was a coward. Benny knew that firsthand.
Working as a bounty hunter was a tough and dangerous business. None tougher, as far as Benny knew. Most of the hunters were paid by the town to clear zoms out of the areas around the trade route that linked Mountainside to the handful of other towns strung out along the mountain range. Others worked in packs as mercenary armies to clear out towns, old shopping malls, warehouses, and even a few small cities, so that the traders could raid them for supplies. According to Charlie the life expectancy of a typical bounty hunter was six months. Most of the young men who tried that job gave it a month or two and then quit, discovering that actually killing zoms was a lot different from what they learned from family members who had survived First Night, and a whole lot different from the stuff they were taught in school or the Scouts. Charlie and the Hammer had been the first of the hunters-again, according to Charlie-and they’d been at it since the beginning, making their first paid kills eight months after First Night.
“We kilt more zoms than the whole army, navy, air force, and marines put together,” the Hammer bragged at least once a month. “And that includes the pansy-ass National Guard.”
For all their bluster and bad odors and violent tendencies, Charlie and the Hammer were popular all around town, partly because they looked too tough and ugly to be scared of anything. Maybe even too ugly to kill. If even half of their reputation was to be believed, then they’d been in more close-combat tussles with the living dead than anyone, and certainly more than any of the other bounty hunters working this part of the Ruin. They were even tougher than legendary hunters, like Houston John, Wild Bill Fairchild, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, or the Mekong brothers. Then again, Benny had to measure reputation against reality with only guesswork to go on, and in the end it probably didn’t matter who’d done the most killing or taken the most heads. According to Don Lafferty, owner of the general store, Charlie and the Hammer had bagged and tagged one hundred and sixty-three named heads and maybe two thousand nameless dead. Every single kill had been a paid job, too.
Charlie and the Hammer also did closure jobs-locating a zombified family member or friend for a client and putting them to final rest. Mayor Kirsch said they had as high a closure rate as Tom did, though Benny doubted it. No way Tom’s rate could be
“When you gonna retire?” asked Wrigley Sputters, the mail carrier, as he poured Charlie another cup of iced tea. “You boys have to be rich as Midas by now.”
“Midas?” asked the Hammer. “Who’s he?”
“I think he sold mufflers,” offered Norbert, one of the traders who used armored horses to pull wagons of scavenged goods from town to town, “and then bought a kingdom.”
“Yeah,” said Charlie, nodding as if he knew that to be the truth. “King Midas. Definitely from Detroit. Made a fortune outta car parts and such.”
And everyone agreed with him, because that was the smart thing to do. Benny nodded, even though he had no clue what a muffler was. Lou Chong and Morgie Mitchell nodded too.
“Well, boys,” said Charlie with a wink. “I ain’t saying I’m as rich as a king, but me and the Hammer got us a whole pot of gold. The Ruin’s been good to us.”
“Yeah, it has,” agreed the Hammer, his purple lips pursed knowingly. “We kilt us a mess o’ zoms.”
“My uncle Nick said you killed the four Mengler brothers last month,” said Morgie from the back of the crowd.
Charlie and the Hammer burst out laughing. “Hell yes! We killed them deader’n dead. The Hammer snucked up on their place, half-past sunrise, and tossed a Molotov onto the roof. All four of them dead suckers come staggering out into the morning light. Streaked with old blood and horse crap and who knows what. Skinny and rotten, smelled worse than sweaty pigs, and we were fifty feet away.”
“Whatcha do?” asked Benny, his eyes ablaze.
The Hammer snorted. “We played some.”
Charlie snickered at that. “Yeah. We wanted to have some fun. This business is getting so’s killing these
