The Tome of Bill Series: Books 1-4 (Bill The Vampire, Scary Dead Things, The Mourning Woods, Holier Than Thou) Read online

  THE TOME OF BILL SERIES

  Volume 1

  Rick Gualtieri

  Books 1-4 of The Tome of Bill series

  Bill The Vampire

  Scary Dead Things

  The Mourning Woods

  Holier Than Thou

  Bonus Material

  Copyright © 2013 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 author’s 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.

  Visit the author’s website at:

  www.rickgualtieri.com

  Edited by Megan Harris at

  www.mharriseditor.com

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  Published by Westmarch Publishing

  www.westmarchpub.com

  Bill The Vampire

  The Tome of Bill

  Part 1

  Prologue: The Day I Died

  Thud, thud!

  Ugh! Somebody needs to turn off their goddamn stereo before I put my foot up their ass. God forbid a guy be allowed to sleep off a major bender without some dickhead blasting their bass to eleven. At least, I think it was a major bender. I know I’m asleep, but the room is still spinning. Yeah, I’ve gotta be drunk off my ass.

  The funny thing is, I don’t remember getting shitfaced, although that doesn’t mean anything. The best parties are sometimes the ones you don’t remember. Still, I’m not even sure I went to a party last night. It is morning, right? I can’t see anything. Well, duh, my eyes are closed.

  Okay, so my eyes aren’t opening. I guess I must be pretty trashed.

  Thud, thud!

  There it is again. For fuck’s sake! Some days I hate living here. There’s always some little white bread, teenaged douche pumping out Tupac from his daddy’s Beemer because he thinks he can relate to life on the streets. But why is it so loud? Maybe the window’s open. I should get up and close it.

  Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m out cold. I can’t really check the window in my current state. Oh, well, maybe I’ll get lucky and some real gangstas will come cruising down the block and pop a few caps in homey’s upper middle class ass.

  Thud, thud!

  ARGH! It’s really starting to piss me off now.

  Huh? What the hell was that? Holy shit, are those voices? Maybe I'm not at home after all. If that's the case, I must still be at a party. Oh, crap. I hate passing out at someone else's place. I really hope they aren’t drawing dicks on my face. The last time that happened, the fuckers used a permanent Sharpie. Let me tell you how much fun that was to scrub off. Probably took off five layers of skin and you could still see it.

  Tom was an asshole about it, too. He kept pretending to be helpful just to get a laugh. “You want me to go to the store for you, dickface?” “I’ll get it. Hello? Oh, Bill? Sorry, he can’t come to the phone right now. He's too busy trying to wipe cock off his face. Can you call back later?” One of these days, I’ve really gotta get my own apartment.

  Thud, thud. Okay, it's getting a little lower now. The song must be ending. I still can’t make out what the voices are saying, but at least it doesn’t sound like laughter. That’s good. Hopefully it means they haven’t started using my face as an easel yet. Maybe I can force myself to wake up before that happens.

  Jeez, my body still isn’t responding. Man, what the hell was I drinking? Even passed out, I still feel seriously fucked up. Maybe I was doing a little more than drinking. I vaguely remember Ed saying something about scoring a few joints. Shit! I hope they weren’t laced with Drāno or something – although that might explain why I’m lying here, having an internal soliloquy.

  Hold on a second – didn't that happen last week?

  Thud, thud.

  Why does that sound so familiar? I don’t usually listen to any shit rap music, but damn if that doesn’t ring a bell. It’s right on the tip of my tongue...

  UGH! Speaking of my tongue, what the hell is that taste in my mouth? Oh, shit. Please don’t let that be puke. There’s nothing worse than puking at a party and waking up in it. Nobody ever gets laid after that. Well, okay, puke or not, it’s been a while since I scored, but it could still happen ... maybe. Although not if I’m lying in a swimming pool of my own spew.

  Crap! I hope someone turned me on my side. The last thing I want to do is pull a Hendrix. Okay, okay, relax. No one is that big of an asshole. If I can hear them talking, then that probably means I’m all right.

  Thud, thud.

  It’s weird tasting puke, anyway; kind of coppery. Oh, okay, maybe I didn’t puke. I probably bit the inside of my mouth instead. That makes sense. Hopefully that’s the case and it isn’t anything more serious.

  Damn! What if this is some kind of seizure? I could have bitten off my own damn tongue, and these assholes are standing around debating the artistic merits of penises on my face. Maybe that’s why I can’t wake up. I popped a blood vessel in my brain and am spiraling into a coma.

  Still, I don’t think I’d be quite as lucid in a coma. Then again, I haven’t been in enough comas to know what it'd be like.

  All right, calm down. I'd probably feel it if my tongue was bitten off. That would probably be a wee bit on the painful side.

  C’mon concentrate. Let's see ... I can still taste that crap in my mouth, but I can sorta feel my tongue, too. At least I think I can.

  I tried moving it around a bit inside my mouth. Yeah, I still had a tongue...

  OW! What the hell was that? I had a tongue a second ago, but I’m not so sure now. What the hell? Did someone stick a razor blade in my freaking mouth?

  Thud, thud.

  Thank God. The music’s barely a whisper now. I swear, some of those stupid dance mixes seem like they go on for hours. It’s funny that I can hear the bass, but nothing else, though. It still sounds so familiar. Almost like a...

  Oh, no.

  That can’t be right.

  Thud, thud.

  It can’t be.

  Please don’t let that be my heart that I’m hearing.

  Thud.

  Oh, shit!

  I am choking on my own puke.

  Or having a seizure.

  Thud.

  Or a goddamned brain aneurysm.

  Thu...

  Ohcrapohcrapohcrap!

  Okay, I shouldn't worry. I’m sure someone will start CPR on me.

  Any second now.

  ...Any minute now.

  Come on, people. I only have a few minutes here before that whole brain death thing.

  FUCK!

  Please start beating again.

  Pretty please.

  It’s not fair. I still have so many reasons to live. I was going to go out with Sheila. Well, okay, maybe. One of these days, certainly. Hell, I would have gotten to it eventually. You don’t just walk up to an insanely hot chick like that and ask her out, especially when you look like me. You have to work your way up to it. Sure, it’s been two years, but I was almost there, dammit. Now it’s all gone.

  Or it will be all gone.

 
Any minute now ... it’ll be all gone.

  Jeez, this death thing isn’t quite like I thought it would be. I can still taste whatever is in my mouth. Yep, can still move my tongue, too. Can dead people move their tongues? I don’t know. I haven’t Frenched too many corpses.

  Okay, this is starting to get a bit odd. Shouldn’t I be seeing a tunnel with a light at the end? Maybe I’ll see Grandma and Grandpa – hell, maybe even Elvis is waiting for me at the end of it. Not sure why he’d be, but whatever.

  Nope, nothing.

  No, that’s not quite true. Is that ... yes. I can feel my left arm now. Do dead people start getting sensation back? Hmm, I can’t move it much, but it feels like I’m lying on something soft. No, I’m not in my bed. It feels like carpet. Yep, definitely on a floor somewhere. It feels thick ... kinda like a ... oh, no ... a shag carpet. Either I’m stuck in a bad seventies’ flashback, or I’m at that...

  Loft!

  Oh, fuck! And with that, the fog suddenly clears from my head. I can remember where I am and how I got here. If I’m right about what’s going on, then a face full of dicks isn’t going to sound all that bad in comparison.

  Before I Became the Dearly Departed

  Okay, let’s back up a little bit. I’m probably getting ahead of myself. Before I bore you with little things like, say, my death, I should probably fill you in on the basics first. How’s that sound? Good? Then let’s start over, shall we?

  My name’s Bill, Bill Ryder. William Anderson Ryder, if you want to be formal, although I’m not sure why you’d want to be formal with a dead guy. It’s a pretty cool name, if you ask me, although it did get a little annoying a few years ago when The Matrix came out. For a couple of months, I had to deal with every single person I know ending everything they said to me with, “Mr. Anderson” in a deadpan voice. It was funny the first time, much less so the five-thousandth time.

  Anyway, I’ve always liked how my initials spelled out WAR, kind of like W. Axl Rose, if a bit less cool, maybe. Although, since I go by “Bill” my friends have always pointed out that BAR might be a better acronym. I can’t really complain about that one either, since I might admit to spending a decent amount of time pounding back cold ones on the weekends.

  Now, I’d love to tell you that I’m a private detective, maybe a boy wizard in training, or even a normal Joe by day/superhero by night, but that would be stretching the truth just a bit. As with all things, reality tends to be less exciting than what we would hope it would be.

  Here are the basics: I’m twenty-four, currently single, and with no real potential hopefuls in sight. Well, there is Sheila, but we’ll get back to her later, especially since I’m not one hundred percent certain she’d be able to pick me out of a police lineup. Not that she has any reason to. It’s not like I’ve been stalking her these past few years. Sure, I know where she lives, what time she gets to work, what her favorite perfume is, but I assure you I’m definitely not stalking her. Really.

  Oh, yeah, and she has this super cute ass that shakes so nicely when she walks...

  Sorry about that. Sometimes I get caught up in the moment. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the basics ... I’m twenty-four; I think I might have mentioned that already. I have short brown hair, brown eyes, glasses, am maybe an inch or two above average height, and about twenty ... well, okay, maybe thirty pounds overweight. I’m not quite a hideous mutant, but the ladies aren’t exactly swarming all over me like pigs in shit, either. That might have something to do with the fact that I probably look like someone who’d be right at home sitting around a D&D game (which I might admit to doing occasionally ... or every Sunday, whichever comes first).

  I have a degree in Computer Science from NJIT, graduated with honors, et cetera. I like to think I’m a pretty smart guy. Maybe not MIT material (fucking elitist cocksuckers!), but I can hold my own in front of a dual monitor setup.

  Speaking of which, I work as a game programmer for Hopskotchgames.com. You’ve probably heard of them. You know Jewel Smash? Yep, that was me, baby. That little gem (no pun intended) alone has made the company millions in online revenue. I dare say I got a nice little bonus on that one ... emphasis on little. Cheap bastards. But still, I can’t complain, at least not too much. I make more than enough to support my “lavish” lifestyle, I get full benefits, and can work from home pretty much whenever I feel like it. Overall, there are far worse places to be employed. Don't get me wrong, though. The second I win the lottery, those guys can go fuck themselves sideways.

  Anyway, my said lavish lifestyle consists of the top floor apartment of a building in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. I share it with my two aforementioned roomies, Ed and Tom. Ed is my partner in crime over at Hopskotchgames. He does graphic design for them, and we’ve partnered on more than a few of their top downloads. We met in college, and he's the one who got me the interview over there. Ed’s a good guy, if a little odd. He’s got a lot of talent, but is absolutely the least passionate artist I have ever met. Life is one big “Meh!” to him. Some days I’m pretty certain you’d need to set him on fire and cut his balls off with a dull hacksaw to get a reaction out of him, not that I fantasize much about setting him on fire ... or his balls, for that matter. But you get the idea.

  As for Tom, he’s my main bud. We’ve been friends for almost twenty years. Of everyone I know, I’d vote him the most likely, in the next decade or so, to wind up in a twenty-room mansion with a hot trophy wife by his side. Tom’s all about the money. He works over in the Manhattan financial district. Currently, he’s little more than a toady to the higher-ups, but he assures me that’s the way things work there. You latch onto some upwardly mobile VP like a remora (in this case, attaching your lips firmly to their ass) and let them drag you up the ranks.

  He rounds that part out by also being an obsessive collector. His dad got him into it when he was young, and then Tom’s OCD took over and kept it going in overdrive ever since. He’s got a storage bin back in Jersey, where we grew up, filled to the brim with comic books and action figures. That doesn’t even count the stuff he keeps locked in his bedroom. Most of it is worth shit now, and will probably be forever, but he’s got a few nice pieces. Just don’t let him catch you playing with any of them. Dude is a little psycho about it. I once repositioned his He-Man figure so it was giving it to Princess Leia doggy-style and you'd have thought I had poisoned his family. Shit, if I ever did poison his family, he'd probably get over it quicker.

  So, that’s me. Not exactly Bruce Wayne, but then again, not a basket case still living at home with Mom and Dad either. My life is steady if a little dull: get up, get some work done, eat some food, then go back to sleep. Rinse and repeat until the weekend, when it’s more or less collect my paycheck, hang out with my friends, and bitch about the rest of the week.

  Someday I hope to get married, have a few kids, and then I’ll probably settle into the same routine again. Except then I’ll spend my weekends with my wife, bitching about the rest of the week. You know how it is. My plan is a lot like anyone else's: maximize my good times, minimize my bad, and leave the larger stuff to people who give more of a shit than I do.

  Or at least that was the plan, but then I had to go and fuck it all up by dying.

  The Day Before the Day I Died

  Let me start by saying, fuck SoHo! Yeah, that’s what I said. I have never, ever had a good experience there. Every person I know who lives there is a douchebag. Every job interview I’ve ever had there has been conducted by assholes. Every restaurant I’ve ever eaten at there has sucked – and even when the food didn’t suck, the service sure as hell did. It is a place where the tragically hip go to die, and people with more fashion sense than brain cells gather like moths to a flame. So, I should have known better than to wind up at a party there. Even more so, I should’ve known the sweet piece of ass that invited me was far too good to be true.