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.”