Strange Days (Bill of the Dead Book 1) Read online

  STRANGE DAYS

  BILL OF THE DEAD

  Book 1

  Rick Gualtieri

  Copyright © 2019 Rick Gualtieri

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author. Your support of authors’ rights is greatly appreciated.

  All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

  Edited by Megan Harris:

  www.mharriseditor.com

  Cover by Mallory Rock at

  www.rocksolidbookdesign.com

  Published by Freewill Press

  Freewill-press.com

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  JUST WHEN I THINK I’M OUT...

  FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES

  THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

  BLAST FROM THE PAST

  OLD FACES, NEW PROBLEMS

  WITCH WAY IS UP?

  A VAMP BY ANY OTHER NAME

  THE SPIRIT IS WILLING

  A GHOST OF A CHANCE

  SHOWTIME AT THE APOLLO

  INFODUMPMERCIAL

  PRIVATE SCREENING

  IN MY TIME OF DYING

  MY BLOODY VALENTINE

  THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

  THE GANG’S ALL HERE

  BITTER REUNION

  BEATING OFF THE ENEMY

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  WORLD BUKAKKE CHAMPIONSHIP

  GAN-T CHART

  BEATING THE AMBUSHES

  LAST OF A DEAD SPECIES

  AND A CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

  INSURANCE CLAIM

  TUNNEL OF BLIND LOVE

  LEY LINES IN THE SAND

  THE ASS-CRACK OF DOOM

  MINER SIXTY-NINER

  INTO THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

  PARLAYING IT ON THICK

  CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND

  TEST OF FAITH

  GREEN-EYED MONSTER

  SEGUEING TO THE FINALE

  SPLIT THE PARTY

  THE ROOM OF DOOM

  FREE WIL-LY

  FROM HERO TO ETERNITY

  TONGUE TIED

  GRAND REOPENING

  VICTORY DANCE

  LITTLE PIGS, LITTLE PIGS...

  THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY

  BODY OF EVIDENCE

  TIT FOR TAT

  ESCAPE FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

  HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS

  THE HELL IN A HAND BASKET EPILOGUE

  BONUS CHAPTER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STRANGE DAYS

  AT THE EDGE OF CHAOS, ONE GEEK STANDS TALL.

  Five years ago, dateless dork Bill Ryder somehow saved the world, banishing magic and monsters to the shadows. He thought it was over, that he was finished with that life. Too bad for him, shit’s about to get surreal again.

  Now the impossible has happened. His goddaughter is conjuring fireballs from thin air and two vampires have shown up at his doorstep looking to kick his ass.

  A crazed group of ex-wizards are hell-bent on forcing the door between worlds open, intent on letting the nightmares back in, and only Bill and his friends stand in their way.

  Join him in this hilarious tale of a world teetering on the brink of anarchy and the unlikely hero who’s not afraid to look the madness in the eye and flip it both fingers.

  For Alissa, Joey, Connor, and Rai. You guys make every day both wonderful and a little bit strange.

  Special thanks to my badass beta crew: Don, Walter, Faith, Kristi, Chris, Ebony, Simon, Reeban, Chris again, and Jana. Your feedback helped put the bite back into this book.

  JUST WHEN I THINK I’M OUT...

  “Look at what I can do, Uncle Bill!”

  An unexpected shiver ran down my spine at my goddaughter’s words, as if someone had driven a dump truck over my proverbial grave.

  There’d been no alarm in her voice, nothing to give me cause to shit a brick. For all I knew she was doing nothing more than playing with her dolls, yet that sudden feeling of barely contained panic only grew worse.

  The hell?

  I was watching Tina for the weekend while her mother was away on business, and though I couldn’t exactly claim to be an expert when it came to babysitting, this wasn’t the first time I’d done so.

  It’s not like anything weird had happened to cause such an intense feeling of dread, and trust me, I know weird. Hell, I’d once had a front row seat to the apocalypse and lived to tell the tale.

  At first glance, I wouldn’t blame anyone for not believing that. Fuck it. I barely did. I’m a near-sighted, thirty-one year old programmer of average height and ... slightly below average build. One might not think from looking at me that I’m anything special like, say, a former vampire who’d once saved the world – and no, I’m not being metaphorical. I may not be that old, but I’ve seen some shit.

  Since those days, my threshold for what I considered to be disastrous had been upped ever so slightly.

  But that was the past – dead and buried, so to speak.

  It had been five years – right before Tina’s birth, as a matter of fact – since anything seriously out of the ordinary had happened to me. Yeah, there had been one minor incident about two years ago, something I really didn’t like to think about, but I’d long since chalked that up to the universe throwing out one last fuck you before letting me get back to my regularly scheduled life.

  Maybe that was it. The anniversary of the barely averted end of the world had recently passed. I had company flying in for a reunion of sorts, but otherwise there’d been no fanfare to mark the date. It was possible that survivor guilt was worming its way through my subconscious, causing the knot of unease in my gut.

  “Come see, Uncle Bill. I can make fire!”

  Or maybe not.

  Please be playing with matches, I said to myself, racing toward the guest room.

  I looked in at the familiar contents: bookshelves lined with toys and action figures – a sort of shrine, if you will, to its former occupant, Tina’s father and my best friend, Tom. He hadn’t been quite as lucky as me when it came to surviving Armageddon, something I still occasionally struggled to let go of.

  Dwelling on the past could wait, though, as my eyes locked onto his daughter, the small girl with brunette pigtails sitting in the center of the room.

  I really should have been a lot more startled to see a ball of green flame floating above her outstretched hand. Shit like that wasn’t normal, at least not anymore. But again, there was that strange feeling in my gut. I could almost taste the weirdness in the air, making the sight before me unexpected but not entirely surprising.

  Mind you, that didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified out of my fucking skull.

  Tina giggled and flicked her hand, causing the ball of unnatural fire to bob up into the air before landing again an inch or so above her palm.

  So much for a nice boring day.

  “Um, hey, Cat,” I said carefully, using my nickname for her. “What’cha got there?”

  She turned to me and smiled, her eyes momentarily lighting up the same color as the fireball dancing above her fingertips. It was all I could do to keep from pissing myself.

  Memories from an earlier time raced through my mind – clashes with the Magi, the collective name for the warlocks and witches who’d once dwelled in the shadows of this world. If memory served me right, their spells
had a tendency to be color-coded according to purpose. Green, if I recalled correctly, wasn’t from the friendly side of the Crayola box. Not by a long shot.

  We closed the door, destroyed The Source. This shit doesn’t exist anymore.

  Except that, despite my brain’s insistence to the contrary, it apparently did.

  Tina, for her part, continued to smile the innocent grin of a child too young to understand she was playing with the magical equivalent of a cruise missile. “Isn’t it cool, Uncle Bill?”

  “Yeah, cool is ... one word for it.” Did I mention that talking to kids wasn’t one of my specialties?

  “I was thinking about the man in that movie we watched. The wizard ... Ganny.”

  My left eye twitched for a moment. “I think you mean Gandalf, sweetie. Trust me, there’s a difference.”

  She shrugged, unconcerned. “Yeah, that’s his name. I thought about him and then it just appeared.”

  I was tempted to ask how, but then remembered she was a preschooler, still at an age where shows about talking hamsters were considered high entertainment. Besides, I already knew at least part of the how. Tina’s mother was a former witch, after all.

  But she wasn’t anymore. No one was ... or at least that had been my assumption up until this moment.

  How is this even fucking possible?

  Sadly, any answers would have to wait as Tina got to her feet and faced me.

  “Wanna play catch?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A better person would have done ... something: called 9-1-1, grabbed the fire extinguisher, or maybe even tried to wrestle the magical death ball away from Tina. I, however, froze as every instinct in my body refused to process whatever the hell was happening.

  So this is how it ends. A five year old was going to do what a legion of monsters had failed at: kill me with extreme prejudice.

  But then, just as she was about to lob the orb of fiery doom toward me, it winked out of existence. It didn’t fade, or pop, or any dramatic shit like that. It was as if a light switch somewhere had simply been turned off.

  “Oh poop!” she cried before covering her mouth, as if she’d said something dirty. “Sorry.”

  Considering the litany of colorful words dancing on the tip of my tongue, I wasn’t about to call her kettle black. Besides, I was too busy counting how many years had been scared off my life.

  Oddly enough, though, freaked out as I was, I realized that strange feeling in the back of my head, the one that had struck when Tina first called out to me, seemed to fade away in the same instant her spell had. Of course, no longer being in the line of fire probably didn’t hurt matters either.

  I pushed all that aside, however, because of one simple fact: whatever the hell was going on, I was in way over my head.

  Fortunately, one upside to surviving the end days was knowing others who had, too – people who I could talk to about this stuff without sounding batshit crazy.

  My first instinct was to call Sally, my old partner in crime. Though she might not have been as spry as she’d been in those days, she had a sharp mind and an ability to cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter.

  But this wasn’t just about me. A little girl, barely old enough for kindergarten, had just conjured a ball of energy containing enough eldritch power to seriously fuck up my insurance premiums. Keeping this from her mother made me a piss-poor godparent. If she found out after the fact, I’d deserve whatever verbal ass-kicking came my way.

  She’d been called away at the last minute, filling in for a sick colleague at some trade convention. Busy as she was, though, I had a feeling this was worth the interruption.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed her.

  “Hey, Christy. It’s Bill. I think we have a bit of a problem.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “...um, so call me back when you get a chance.”

  Goddamned voicemail! There’d been a time when the whole point of cell phones was to actually reach someone. I probably should have sent her a Facebook message or maybe a Snapchat instead. Chances were she’d see that sooner.

  Either way, it left me back at square one – dealing with the little girl from Firestarter, still happily playing in her father’s old room as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  I glanced toward my own bedroom for a moment. Not too long ago there’d been someone else living here I could have turned to for guidance, but those days were likewise over. Pity, because she’d have had a much better shot of surviving Tina’s...

  The downstairs bell rang, pulling me from those unhappy thoughts. Someone wanted to be let in, although, I noted, it was way too early for any of my guests to arrive. “Oof!”

  In my haste to reach the door buzzer, I tripped over one of the dozen or so boxes cluttering my living room, each labeled with an illustration of a Morticia Addams lookalike and the words Immortalis – Age-Defying Cream.

  I managed to catch myself before I face-planted on the floor, but just barely. “Goddamnit!” Fucking Dave and his stupid get-rich-quick schemes.

  Almost like clockwork, Tina’s voice came floating out of the bedroom. “You said a bad word!”

  “I know.” That was another quarter in the swear jar ... definitely not my idea. “Sorry,” I called back, hitting the intercom. “Can I help you?”

  “Bill Ryder?” a male voice replied.

  “Yep, hold on.” I pushed the button to unlock the downstairs door. Then, almost as an afterthought, I pressed the intercom again. “What’s this for?”

  There came no reply save the hiss of static. Oh, well, it was probably UPS or maybe an Amazon driver dropping off a package ... not that I was expecting anything. But that didn’t mean much. I also hadn’t been expecting all these boxes from Dave, my former dungeon master. Yet here they were anyway.

  I swear to God, dude, if you sent me more of this shit...

  Alas, my friend’s dipshit proclivities were of minor importance compared to the issue at hand – magic, real magic, the kind that should have been impossible.

  And yet, Tina had summoned a ball of energy with seemingly as much effort as it took to lift her hand.

  Maybe it was possible this was nothing more than a freak occurrence. I’d once, about four years back, seen her mother conjure a few sparks when the pilot light on her stove blew out. A bit of residual energy, she’d called it. Even so, that had barely counted as a cheap parlor trick. What Tina had done was full-blown sorcery, the kind that suggested...

  There came a knock on the door, derailing that train of thought. Huh. That was strange. Usually the delivery guys just dropped their stuff in the downstairs hall and took off. It had taken me three freaking trips to carry all of Dave’s shit up last time.

  Guess I shouldn’t complain at being spared the effort.

  The knocking became heavier, more insistent.

  “Okay, hold on. I’m coming.” I reached out to grab the doorknob when, all at once, it felt like a great weight fell upon my shoulders – a heaviness in my bones that stopped me in my tracks.

  “I did it again, Uncle Bill!”

  I turned my head toward the sound of Tina’s voice just as something hit the door from the other side, hard enough to partially dislodge the frame from the wall.

  What the fu...

  Sadly, before I could finish that thought, the entire door exploded off its hinges, sending me flying across the room.

  FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES

  Once upon a time, during deader days, such a hit would have barely fazed me. Pity that was long past.

  I landed hard, the wind knocked out of me, and skidded across the wooden floor before stopping next to my love seat.

  In between the stars currently dancing before my eyes, I spied two men step through the now splintered remains of my apartment door. Had they been big no-neck gorillas, I maybe wouldn’t have been too surprised, but they were both of average size. Unless one of them was secretly the world’s greatest kung-fu master, something was definitely
not right here.

  The first of the intruders stepped over to me. He was about my height, with an athletic build and a blond crewcut. Before my vocal chords could stop shaking enough to form coherent words, he bent down, grabbed hold of my shirt, and dragged me to my feet as if I weighed nothing.

  “It’s been a long time, Freewill.”

  Freewill? That was most certainly not good. I didn’t recognize the guy holding me up, but that didn’t mean much. In times past, the entirety of the vampire race had known me by that title, stupid as it might be, acknowledging me as a rare breed of their kind. But most of them were gone, dusted. And any who were left were like me – normal, human – unable to kick down doors like they were made of balsa wood.

  Finally, the haze in my brain cleared enough for me to speak. “Sorry ... I don’t ... answer to that anymore.”

  I’m not really sure what I hoped to accomplish. Even in D&D you’d be hard pressed to get a monster to back off with such a lame response, no matter how good your dice roll. Oh well, I’d always been a glass half full kinda guy.

  “That matters little,” he replied. “The Last Coven requests your presence.”

  Last Coven? Was that supposed to be a joke? The ruling body of the vampire nation had once been known as the First Coven – the thirteen most powerful vamps on the planet. But again, they were gone, extinct, nothing more than dust in the wind.

  “Last Coven? Does that make you guys the ass-end of the gimp suit?”

  Rather than knock my head off, as I probably deserved, the man grinned at me, displaying grossly elongated canines.

  Fuck!

  It was impossible. Yet, at the same time, some small part of me still wasn’t surprised. Though it was hard to tell with my head still ringing, that strange feeling from before, like someone tap-dancing on my grave, seemed to not only be back, but worse than last time. What the hell was going on?