“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.