Damage & Decay

Chapter 3

Part One: Family Business

"I don't know what's waiting for us when we die– something better, something worse. I only know that I'm not ready to find out yet."
- Charles De Lint, The Onion Girl

———

"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.

Eren always laughed. Not because he was afraid of what Charlie would do to him if he didn't, but because Eren thought Charlie was hilarious. And cool. He thought there was no one cooler on planet Earth.

It didn't matter to Eren 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 Ruins. Nor did it matter that the fact the car would 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 Eren 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 a 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.

Eren 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 in to the realm of ghosts with his dead eye. Eren 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 zombie-filled land. Everyone said so. Except for a few weirdoes, like Mayor Kirsch, who said Armin Jaeger was tougher. Eren thought that was a load of crap, because Charlie said Armin was "a bit too easy on zoms," and he said it in a way that suggested Armin 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, Armin wasn't half as big as Charlie or as mean-looking as the Hammer. No, Armin was a coward. Eren knew that firsthand.

Working as a bounty hunter was a tough and dangerous business. None tougher, as far as Eren 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 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 the 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.