There was one job Benny already knew about: erosion artist. He’d seen erosion portraits tacked on every wall of the town’s fence outposts and on the walls of the buildings that lined the Red Zone, the stretch of open land that separated the town from the fence.
This job had some promise, because Benny was a pretty fair artist. People wanted to know what their relatives might look like if they were zoms, so erosion artists took family photos and zombified them. Benny had seen dozens of these portraits in Tom’s office. A couple of times he wondered if he should take the picture of his parents to an artist and have them redrawn. He’d never actually done it, though. Thinking about his parents as zoms made him sick and angry.
But Sacchetto, the supervising artist, told him to try a picture of a relative first. He said it provided better insight into what the clients would be feeling. So, as part of his audition, Benny took the picture of his folks out of his wallet and tried it.
Sacchetto frowned and shook his head. “You’re making them look too mean and scary.”
He tried it again with several photos of strangers the artist had on file.
“Still mean and scary,” said Sacchetto with pursed lips and a disapproving shake of his head.
“They are mean and scary,” Benny insisted.
“Not to customers they’re not,” said Sacchetto.
Benny almost argued with him about it, saying that if he could accept that his own folks were flesh-eating zombies—and that there was nothing warm and fuzzy about it—then why can’t everyone else get it through their heads?
“How old were you when your parents passed?” Sacchetto asked.
“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 about them. I know that they’re zoms. Or maybe they’re dead now, but, I mean—zoms are zoms. Right?”
“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 damned thing.”
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 with him rather than at the actual joke, because Charlie had a seventy-inch chest and twenty-four-inch biceps, and his sweat was a soup of testosterone, anabolic steroids, and Jack Daniels. You don’t laugh, he gets mad and starts to think you’re messing with him. Something ugly usually followed Charlie becoming offended.
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 anywhere near Charlie’s tally. Tom never had extra ration dollars to spare, and Charlie was always buying beer, pop, and fried chicken wings for the crowd who gathered around to listen to his stories.
“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 critters is way too easy. Am I right or am I right?”
A few people chuckled or nodded vaguely, but nobody said anything specific. It was one of those times when it wasn’t clear what the right answer would be.
Charlie plowed ahead. “So me and the Hammer decide to make this a bit more fair.”
“Fair,” agreed the Hammer.
“We laid down our weapons.”
“All of ’em?” Chong gasped.
“Every last one. Guns, knives, the Hammer’s favorite pipe, numchucks, even them ninja throwing stars that the Hammer took off that dead zom who used to run that karate school on the other side of the valley. We stripped down to our jeans and beaters and just went in, mano a mano.”
“Went in whut?” asked Morgie.
“It means ‘hand to hand,’” Chong said.
“It means ‘man to man,’” Charlie snapped.
Even Benny knew Charlie was wrong, but he didn’t say so. Not right to Charlie’s face, anyway. No one was that dumb.
Charlie threw Chong a quick, ugly look and plunged back into his story. “Anyways, we came up on them with just our knuckles and nerves, and we fair beat them zoms so bad, they died surprised, woke up, and died of shame all over again.”
Everyone burst out laughing.
Someone cleared his throat, and they all looked up to see Randy Kirsch, the town mayor, standing there, his arms folded, bald head cocked to one side as he looked from Benny to Chong to Morgie. “I thought you boys were supposed to be out job hunting.”
“I got a job,” Chong said quickly.
“I’m fourteen,” said Morgie.
“We just stopped in for a cold bottle of pop,” Benny said.
“And you’ve had it, Benjamin Imura,” said Mayor Kirsch. “Now you three run along.”
Benny thought Charlie was going to object, but the bounty hunter simply shrugged. “Yeah … you boys got to earn your rations just like grown folks. Skedaddle.”
Benny and the others got up and slouched past the mayor. Before they even reached the door Charlie was in full stride again, telling another of his stories, and everyone was laughing. The mayor followed the boys outside.
“Benny,” he said quietly, the hot sun glinting off the polished crown of his shaved head. “Does Tom know you’ve been hanging out here?”
“I don’t know,” Benny said evasively. He knew darn well that Tom had no idea that he spent a part of every afternoon listening to Charlie and the Hammer tell their stories.
“I don’t think he’d like it,” said Mayor Kirsch.
Benny met his stare. “I guess I really don’t care much what Tom likes and doesn’t like,” he said, then added “sir” to the end of it, as if that word could somehow improve the tone of voice he’d just used.
Mayor Kirsch scratched at his thick black beard. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again. Whatever he wanted to say, he kept to himself. That was fine with Benny, who wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.
“You boys run along now,” Kirsch said eventually. He stood on the porch of the general store for a while, but when Benny was all the way down the street and looked back, he saw the mayor go back into the store.
The mayor and his family lived next door to Benny, and he and Tom were friends. Mayor Kirsch was always talking about how tough Tom was and what a good hunter Tom was and what a fine example Tom set for all bounty hunters. Blah, blah, blah. It made Benny want to hurl. If Tom set such a fine example as a bounty hunter, then why didn’t the other bounty hunters ever tell stories about him? None of them bragged about how they’d seen Tom single-handedly kick the butts of four zombies at once. Even Tom didn’t talk about it. Not once had he ever told Benny about what he did out there in the Ruin. How boring was that? Benny thought the Mayor had a screw loose. Tom was no kind of role model to anyone.