The Ruins Part 2 (Sequel to The Ruins)

Chapter 14

"It was a 1967 Pontiac LeMans ragtop. Bloodied and so souped-up that she's outrun any damn thing on the road. And I do mean damned thing."

That's how Motor Hammer always described his car. Then he's give a big braying horse laugh, because no matter how many times he said it, he thought it was the funniest joke ever. People tended to laugh with him rather an at the actual joker because Hammer had a seventy-inch chest and twenty-four-inch biceps, and his sweat was a soup of testosterone anabolic steroids and Jake Daniels. Had a face of a bulldog and had pistol butts sticking out every pocket, as well as a length of black pipe that hung like a club from his belt. You don't laugh, he gets mad and starts to think you're messing with him. Something ugly usually followed Hammer becoming offended.

Sam's friends always laughed. Not because they were afraid of what Hammer would do to them if they didn't, but because they thought Hammer was hilarious. And cool. No one cooler on the planet. Sam was alright with him but didn't think he was cooler than another Bounty Hunter he knows very well.

It didn't strike him like his friends that the car of Hammers always talked about had run out of gas thirteen years ago and was a rusted piece of scrap metal somewhere out in the Ruins. Not did it matter that the fact the car could even drive was at odds with history; not after the EMPs. In Hammer's stories, that car had lived through the bombs and the ghouls and a thousand adventures, and could never be forgotten. Hammer said he'd been a real road warrior in the LeMans, cruising the blacktop and bashing Infected.

Everyone else at Safferty's General Store laughed too, a couple were faking it, Sam couldn't blame them. About the only person who didn't laugh at the joke was Sam as well. He would of thought Hammer was insanely cool... Just he doesn't have this trust on him, especially the stories on how he's such an important hero. As a kid he would of thought of him as this awesome cool guy, but he begged to differ.

Motor Hammer were the toughest bounty hunters in the entire Ruins. Everyone said so. Sometimes even to Tom or Negan, but Hammer said Tom was "a bit too easy on the infected," 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 infected-hunting, badlands badass. No, Tom wasn't a coward. Sam knew that firsthand.

Working as a bounty hunter was a thought and dangerous business. None tougher, as far as Sam knew. Most of the hunters were paid by the town to clear infected and runners out of the areas around the trade route that linked Eleven Towns to the handful of other communities strung out along the mountain ranges and cities. 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 Motor Hammer the life expectancy of a typical bounty hunter was six months. Most of the young men who tied that job have it a month or two and then quit, discovering that actually killing Infected and also people was a lot different from what they learned from family members who had survived the Black Night, and a whole lot different from the stuff they were taught in school or the Scouts. Hammer always says he and Charlie Marion- another bounty hunter that Sam never heard before- had been the first of the hunters and they'd been at it since the beginning, making their first paid kill eight months after the Black Night. Sam knew who Bounty Hunters who lived throughout the Black Night and became bounty hunters, and one created a secured place called Sanctuary. Tom and Negan.

He met Negan because Tom and him were best friends before this. Sam laughed at how a man like Tom is so opposite and friends with a foul-mouth, rash, too honest man like Negan. Sam definitely thought Negan was the coolest Bounty Hunter; he had the rugged handsome looks, the funniest jokes that could be so dirty yet hilarious, the leather jacket, and the badass bat named Ellie and others like the bat. He was probably tougher than legendary hunters, like Queen Arnica, Houston Bill Wildchild, or the Mekong brothers, hell he even build his own community, similar on jobs yet very focus on saving people, and working inside and outside the Ruins. Negan was amongst the coolest and influential hunter.