Strange Days (Bill of the Dead Book 1)

by Rick Gualtieri

  I was tempted to tell him to put the fucking thing on speaker, but knowing Dave, he’d yell at us for interrupting his moment of triumph. It might also lead to some uncomfortable questions.

  There was something to be said about keeping our circle small for now. Though the world as a whole had mostly gotten back to normal, people hadn’t forgotten the Strange Days. I had little doubt the news would eventually spread to the general populace but I, for one, didn’t want to be responsible for any doomsday cults springing up. Society had dealt with enough of that shit in the days following the cancellation of the apocalypse.

  Mind you, word was already starting to spread in certain circles. The Magi community in particular had definitely taken notice.

  When last we’d spoke, Christy told me her Sunday evening support group had been abuzz with chatter. Some were ecstatic to be given a taste of their former power again. Others were fearful, partly by what it meant, but mostly because they were afraid it wouldn’t happen again.

  Much as I had my own problems to deal with, I still found that a bit worrying.

  A lot of ex-Magi were unstable. Many had been living broken lives for the last five years, unable to come to grips with the fact that they were no longer special snowflakes.

  While some were no doubt able to handle the magical pulses in stride, there were probably far more acting like addicts who’d been handed the keys to the crack house. It didn’t strike me as a good combo.

  Sadly, Christy had been too preoccupied to discuss it for long. She was still uncertain about bringing Tom back, but had dove into her research with both feet nevertheless. Even if she hadn’t been busy, though, it’s not like any of us were the designated babysitters of the Magi community.

  “You are? Seriously?” Ed replied into the phone, dragging me from my thoughts. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Okay, relax. I’m well aware you know what you’re doing. Just be careful. All right, we will. Do you want us to come over just in case?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, vaguely aware that the current pulse appeared to be a long one. Fortunately, my condition seemed to have stabilized a bit. At the very least I could breathe again, even if I still felt like hammered shit.

  Ed waved me off, then got back to the conversation. Fucker was eating up my battery. The least he could do was give me a play by play.

  “I still don’t like it,” he continued, holding up what was apparently the uninteresting half of the conversation.

  I was contemplating smacking the shit outta him with my toilet brush when he started to wrap things up. “Okay fine. Yes. I promise. Yes, I know there isn’t much we can do. All right. See you then. Oh, and Christy ... be careful.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Ed stared at the phone for several seconds, at least until I managed to swing my arm hard enough to whack him in the side.

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry to inconvenience you, oh lord of the undead, but care to clue me the fuck in?”

  “Oh, sorry, it’s just...” His stomach made an audible gurgle. “Oh crap. Listen, I don’t want to worry you, but I think we really need to go buy that raw chop meat.” He licked his lips as he spoke, staring at me as if I were the last slice of pizza.

  “Don’t get any bright ideas. This all you can eat buffet is currently closed.”

  He shook his head. When he turned to me again, his yellow eyes still twinkled in the fluorescent light, but that look of longing on his face was gone. “Trust me, biting you in the bathroom isn’t exactly my idea of fine dining.”

  “Food snob.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a pile of stepped in dog shit. I don’t know what’s going on, but I could barely breathe when that pulse first hit.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “Not really, but I’m holding it together.”

  “Any idea what’s causing it?”

  “If I did, I’d have told you. Now, care to fill me in on what Christy said, or should I just lie here polishing the floor with my...?”

  All at once, it was as if a fifty pound weight were lifted from my chest. Not only could I breathe freely again, but the rest of my body took the hint that it was still alive.

  I looked up at Ed. In the space of him blinking his eyes a few times, they were back to normal. Almost in the same instant, his stomach stopped growling. “Oh God, that’s so much better. For a minute there I thought I was going to start rooting through your garbage for used Band-Aids.”

  “If you do, hand me my phone first because I want a picture of that shit.”

  He flipped me off. “Seriously, though, we should probably find an all-night deli before that happens again.”

  I stood up, happy to find the last of the wooziness gone. “In a minute. First tell me what she said.”

  “For starters, she said to be ready for another pulse. If this weekend is any indication, they seem to hit in batches.”

  “Just great. Maybe you should go food shopping while I lie down in the bathtub and get comfortable.”

  He shrugged. “Might not be a bad idea...”

  “Hey,” Dave called to us from outside. “Stop blowing each other in there. You’re missing the show.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the door, then turned back to Ed. “Perhaps we should both head out for a while.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to eat him instead?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Despite his complaints, Dave was far too engrossed watching himself to give us any shit about going out, especially after we told him we were gonna grab a couple of six packs to celebrate his awesome triumph.

  “Cool,” he called after us. “Just don’t get any of that cheap shit you like. I have standards.”

  I was still commenting how his standards didn’t seem to preclude fleecing old people out of their Social Security checks when Ed and I stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Stay close,” he warned.

  “Relax. The only people out this late are probably too drunk to bother us.”

  “Who cares about that shit? I just don’t want you embarrassing me by taking a face plant on the concrete if another of those surges hits.”

  “My hero.”

  “Or I could just leave your ass.”

  I stepped closer to him. “Okay, Romeo. Care to finally clue me in on the rest of what Christy said?”

  He looked away. “You aren’t going to like it.”

  “Name me one thing there is to like about any of this.”

  “Tom’s back.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Oh, and I really dig being super strong again.”

  “That’s two. I said one.”

  He chuckled but it didn’t hold much mirth. “That’s okay, because this next one could count as a negative twelve if it goes badly. She’s trying to stabilize that Apollo’s thingee.”

  “What?”

  “She told me she’s conducting a ritual that might let Tom stick around longer.”

  Ed was about as well-versed in magic as me, but he tried his best to explain that the prism was a complex working of magic as far as miniature dimensional portals went. One didn’t fix it by slapping on some duct tape and calling it a day.

  “I get that part,” I replied. “But how’s she planning on getting Tom back without blowing us all up?”

  “By feeding it even more power,” he said, somehow keeping a straight face. “She called in some help and together they’re going to try widening the ... breach, I guess.

  “She wants to widen the breach? You did see Pacific Rim, right?”

  “Only about half a dozen times. But anyway, she said the idea is to force the prism to pull in extra energy during those pulses.”

  I stared at him. “So she wants to turn it into a hydrogen bomb because atom bombs aren’t scary enough.”

  “Will you shut up and let me finish? She thinks she can get it to act like a magical capacitor, holding a charge so that
Tom can manifest even when the power’s off.”

  “A ghost battery? Not a bad idea.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Minus the part about it being all explodey.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a perfect plan.”

  “We should get our asses over there.”

  “You think that didn’t occur to me?” he replied. “Hence why I asked, dim-bulb.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That we’d just get in the way.”

  I stopped and turned to face him. “I probably can’t argue with that. Still, I was kind of hoping she’d find a way to bring him back that didn’t involve overloading the warp core he’s attached to...”

  “Spare some change, buddy?”

  We both spun toward the voice, coming from a small alleyway near where we stood. Just inside, a skinny bearded man sat amidst a pile of rags and cardboard. The delectable aroma that drifted out spoke of garbage mixed with urine.

  “Help a fella out?” he asked in a raspy voice. “I ain’t been able to hold a job since the Strange Days.”

  Ed sighed and reached for his wallet. Then he paused, standing there with his hand in his pocket.

  Finally, I took the hint and reached for mine. “Hold on, cheapskate. I think I have a fiiiivvvv...”

  The word caught in my throat, dissolving into a thin gasp as my lungs abruptly decided to go on strike. Then, before I could grab Ed’s attention, the world upended itself as I collapsed face-first onto the sidewalk.

  I had just enough time to look up and see my former roommate still facing the alley.

  So much for catching me, I thought, as darkness closed in and I saw no more.

  MY BLOODY VALENTINE

  I wasn’t sure how long I was out. Couldn’t have been long because, when I woke up, my nose was still bleeding onto the sidewalk.

  Ouch.

  I still felt weak as a baby, but whatever had happened appeared to have cleared up enough for me to regain consciousness. Yep, those pulses were definitely getting worse. Pretty soon, I was going to need a jacket made of bubble wrap.

  For now, though, I managed to push myself up to my elbows. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to glance around and notice the street and sidewalk around me were both empty. Ed was nowhere in sight.

  “Where ... the fuck ... did...”

  That’s when I heard it – a noise halfway between a slurp and a suck, as if someone was polishing off a particularly good milkshake.

  I turned toward the sound, not entirely surprised to see that it was coming from the very alleyway we’d stopped in front of just ... however long ago.

  Likewise unsurprising, I spied a figure hunched down in the shadows. His back was to me, but I recognized the shirt – bearing the proud logo of San Diego ComicCon.

  “Ed?”

  The figure in the alleyway tensed as I spoke.

  “Please tell me ... you’re munching on some fried chicken you found in the garbage.”

  Mind you, that wasn’t much better than what I suspected was going on. Sue me. My brain was still in the process of booting up from my impromptu collision with the sidewalk.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  Yep, that was Ed’s voice, all right, and his tone suggested he was doing something far worse than dumpster diving.

  “What did I do?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, dickhead,” I called out, doing my best to crawl in his direction.

  Ed turned around and, for a moment, I thought everything was okay. But then I realized it was only because he was still draped in shadows. He took a step forward into the light cast from the closest street lamp.

  “Holy shit!”

  He was drenched in gore, as if he’d found a swimming pool full of blood and had decided to dive right in. Nasty as that was, he knelt down before me, panic in his eyes, and grabbed hold of my shoulders with hands still dripping with blood.

  “Oh man. I liked this shirt,” I weakly protested as he hauled me to my feet like I weighed nothing. I looked him on and realized the only part of him that wasn’t covered in red were his eyes – still that strange golden hue.

  “I ... couldn’t help myself.”

  “Say it, don’t spray it,” I replied, closing my mouth so as to not get any dead hobo in it.

  He walked us back over to the alleyway, getting enough blood on me so I looked like an accomplice, and pointed toward something on the ground. “What the fuck do we do?”

  “Hold on,” I said. Being upright had once again cleared my head a bit, but I was still unable to do much more than rely on him to hold me up. “Let my eyes adjust for a second and ... Jesus fuck burgers! Did you throw him in a fucking blender or something?”

  I wished I was exaggerating. Back in the day, I’d seen my share of vampire kills. Most weren’t pretty. Vamps had a tendency to ignore proper table etiquette. But the hungrier a vampire got, the more their self-control slipped. And, well, Ed must’ve been pretty damned hungry.

  The former homeless man was now a shredded pile of homeless meat. It looked like he’d been run over with a riding mower ... at least half a dozen times. “Goddamn, dude.”

  “I didn’t...” He lowered his voice. Now sated, I had a feeling common sense was returning, enough for him to remember we were out in public. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I’d hate to see what would happen if you did.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  In years past, stuff like this could’ve been handled with a single phone call. Problem was, it had been a long time since Village Coven had paid its dues to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Society.

  What Ed had done here was murder in ... pretty much every degree known to man, and probably a few new ones.

  There was only one option, so far as I could see. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Ed’s vampiric strength was more than enough to pry open a manhole cover for us to slip down.

  Thank goodness I’d had reason to tour the sewers with Tina a few days back. It had given my memory a nasty, but much needed, refresher course on the local tunnels and exits.

  Sadly, I still wasn’t much help for doing anything except pointing and then slumping onto the ground while Ed worked.

  After some trial and error, in which I ended up being dropped into a pile of something unpleasant, we made it down below, where I was treated to an underground piggyback ride back to my place, echoing the one I’d given Tina a few days prior. Quite the way to end the evening.

  If there was one upside, though, it was that, by the time we emerged in the subbasement beneath my building, the muck from the sewers had somewhat camouflaged the blood coating us.

  Now we simply looked like dirty scumbags instead of dirty scumbag murderers.

  Ed, for his part, was unusually quiet during all of this. Neither of us was innocent from our time living through the first apocalypse. But it had been years since we’d been forced to kill something. And, in all fairness, that homeless guy hadn’t exactly been a matter of life and death so much as a midnight snack.

  “Let’s head to the second floor. Apartment 2A,” I said.

  “Why? That’s not...”

  “I know where I live, numbnuts,” I replied. “That’s the Martinez’s apartment, but they’re down at Disneyworld for the week. We can use their shower to clean up before going back upstairs.”

  “It’s good to be the owner,” he remarked, dragging me up the stairs with him.

  “Not really.”

  “So then sell this place already.”

  “I...”

  “I’m serious,” Ed replied, sounding eager to talk about anything other than what he’d done. “Yes, there’s lots of memories here, but a good many of them are shitty ... literally. Hell, you remember when that Night Razor guy broke in and took a dump in our living room?”

  “Hard to forget... Whoa!”

  Ed’s grip on me slipped, but in that same i
nstant my muscles got a wake-up call. Thankfully, I was able to grab the bannister and steady myself before I went tumbling back the way we’d come.

  “You okay?” he asked after a moment, his eyes and teeth back to normal.

  “I’ll be a lot better when we finally figure out what the hell is going on. That was a long one.”

  He looked down at himself. “Too long. And now, to top it all off, I have a really bad taste in my mouth.”

  “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I let Ed hop in the shower first. He needed it more than I did. While he was cleaning up, I ransacked the Martinez’s linen closet for towels. Those were easy enough to replace. I was tempted to see if they had any clothes that would fit us, but that seemed a more serious crime. Besides, out of shape I might be, but Arturo Martinez still had at least fifty pounds on me.

  He also had one of those apartment-sized washing machines. It more than made up for being a shitty host to the two blood-drenched guys making themselves at home in his place.

  When Ed finally emerged, clad in a towel, he no longer looked like the sole survivor of a horror movie. “Our clothes done yet?”

  “Have a seat,” I replied. “It’s going to take a while.”

  He flopped down onto the couch, giving me more of an eyeful than I needed. “How about crossing your legs when you do that?”

  “Nobody told you to look.”

  Fucking cock. “Fine. While you air out your taint on the Martinez’s sofa, I’ll go clean up.”

  The shower was not only cleansing, but it gave me time to think. Unfortunately, what came to mind wasn’t entirely pleasant.

  By the time I was finished, Ed had transferred our clothes – now thoroughly ruined by about a gallon of bleach – to the dryer, leaving us to wait a bit longer.

  “That was a bad one,” he said as we settled down.

  “I’ll say.”

  “What I did to that guy...”

  “Trust me, I noticed.”

  “I don’t understand how I could lose control like that.”

  I nodded. “Been giving that some thought.”