Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(7)

“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