The Tome of Bill (Book 7): The Wicked Dead (47 page)

As Gan’s forces kept the Jahabich at bay, Sally ripped swatches of cloth from the outfit Gan had given her to wear and wrapped them around her hands. Thus protected, she tore off the bandolier of blessed toys and tossed it to the side. I wrinkled my nose as she did so. The combination of holy fire and Jahabich juice left an odor in the air reminiscent of burning tires.

Without further ado, she bit into Tom’s neck – his head still turned at an unnatural angle.

Christy closed her eyes and put her hands to her ears. I couldn’t blame her. This wasn’t something she wanted to either see or hear. If it worked, though, it would be worth it. We might have to corral him a bit, wait for the bloodlust to abate, but it could be done. I just had to hope he wouldn’t turn out to be like my gaming group.

Speaking of which, I looked around and didn’t see any sign of either Adam or Dave. A part of me was sure they’d perished in battle, easily the weakest links in this fight. Oddly enough, though, that thought brought with it only a cold numbness. Seeing my best friend in the world laid low had drained me. My broken heart seemingly had no more room left in it.

That was unfair to them and I made myself a promise to make good on things.

For now, though, I could only wait expectantly.

After what seemed an eternity, but in reality was just a few seconds, Sally raised her head. She wiped some of Tom’s blood from her lips and looked me in the eye.

“Well?” I asked.

“He’s gone.”

“What?”

“I don’t understand it either. It only happened a few minutes ago. I should be able to bring him back.”

“How do you know?”

She just shook her head. “It’s hard to explain. Once you ... practice ... enough, you just do.”

“It’s my fault,” Christy said.

“Huh?” I turned to her. “How is this your fault?”

“The magic. It must have backfired. Ruined him for ... your kind.”

“Don’t be so hard on him, babe. Bill might be a dick, but he’s not a total cockmeat sandwich.”

The voice caught my attention and I immediately glanced around at our little circle. “What was that?”

“Wasn’t me,” Sally said, the confusion on her face echoing mine.

I knew it wasn’t Christy. She’d just been speaking. Besides, that had been a male voice. It had been ... Tom’s?!

* * *

“You heard that, right?”

Both of them nodded, and we all simultaneously looked down at my roommate. It was all for naught, though. Nothing had changed with him – no smiling face, no movement. Hell, not even a mouthful of fangs. His eyes were still glazed over, lifeless.

“Um, guys, could I get a hand?”

Again his voice. What the fuck?

Sally raised her hands and shook her head.

Even Christy looked perplexed.

“Um, is his ghost haunting us?”

“It will be if you don’t fucking help me,” the voice replied. “My face is stuck in the dirt – oh God, let this be dirt – and I can’t fucking move.”

Sally pointed off to my left. “It’s coming from over there.”

“There isn’t anything over there except those toys you yanked off of him. What the fuck?”

I quickly scampered over there anyway, not waiting for the others to catch up. There was no time to waste. Gan’s people were still holding back the Jahabich, but more had climbed out of their sinkhole. It was rapidly becoming not an issue of if but
when
they’d overrun us.

Remembering what I was about to touch, I pulled my hands into the sleeves of the fur-lined jacket I wore and used them as makeshift gloves. I quickly sorted through the pile of discarded action figures – dirty and broken Star Wars toys, He-Man, and even a Transformer or two. “There’s nothing here,” I said.

I picked up the last piece, Tom’s Max Adventure doll. It had been lying face down. I was about to toss it to the side too, when out of nowhere, Tom’s voice asked, “Jesus Christ, Bill, when did you get so fucking big?”

Needless to say, it was at that point that I promptly freaked the fuck out.

“Holy fucking shit!” I dropped the doll like it was covered in spiders. It hit the ground, where it bounced once and landed face up.

For a moment, there was nothing to hear save the battle raging around us. I began to wonder if maybe I’d imagined it. Hell, for all I knew, Dr. Death was fucking around inside my brain – rewiring everything for shits and giggles. Of course, then Christy started screaming, which may have clued me in ever so slightly that if this was some sort of illusion then it had graduated to mass hysteria.

“What the fuck, guys?” Tom asked, his voice coming from the Max Adventure figure lying in the dirt. He didn’t sound overly pleased. “I get crippled and you all turn into assholes? Seriously, could someone please help me?”

Sally, easily the least nonplussed among our trio, stepped past me and gingerly reached down toward Max ... or Tom. She touched it with one outstretched finger, then, when nothing happened, she picked it up. She looked down upon it, glanced back at us quickly – one brow raised, and then said, “You’re not crippled. You’re a doll.”

“Thanks. You aren’t bad looking yourself.”

“Not like that, stupid!”

“Huh. I never noticed how wide your nostrils flare when you’re angry.”

She turned back and shoved the cursed toy into my hands. “Here. Because otherwise, I’m going to do what my sister used to do to all of my dolls.”

“Which was?”

“You probably don’t want to know.”

“Bill?” Tom asked.

“Yes?” I replied tentatively, being that I was totally creeped out.

“Is there a reason why I suddenly seem to be so small?”

“Well...”

“And can’t move?”

“Um...”

“And everyone keeps making doll jokes?”

“I did this,” Christy said from behind me. I turned and found her back on her feet, tears streaming freely from her eyes.

“You meant to do this?” I asked. Christ! What the hell had my friend done to piss her off that much?

“No!”

“Then how?”

“I don’t know!”

“Not really following here,” Tom added.

“This isn’t even remotely normal.”

“I think we can all agree on that,” Sally said.

“The only way for something like this to happen is through magic,” Christy explained, taking a moment to wipe her eyes. Though obviously still upset, the weirdness of the whole scenario was a bit too much to allow for the grief we should’ve been experiencing.

“Yeah, fine, magic,” Tom said, sounding a bit exasperated. “But can maybe someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”

Considering the circumstance we were in, I didn’t see much point in sugarcoating things. “You died.”

“Really? I find it hard to believe that...” I held him up and pointed him toward where his body lay. “Holy fuck! That’s me! How the fuck can I be over there?”

“You’re in one of the toys you stole from that house.”

“Which one? Anything good?”

“Max Adventure.”

“Oh Jesus Christ! I couldn’t be goddamned Darth Vader?”

“Hey, at least nobody’s going to throw your ass onto eBay and then stuff you into a glass cabinet somewhere.”

“True. I could see how ending up like the Prospector in
Toy Story 2
could drive someone crazy.”

It was only then that I realized the absurdity of the conversation I was having. Glancing back over at my other friends, I saw it wasn’t lost on them either.

“So, what happened to me?” he finally asked.

Before any of us could answer, though, a low muffled chuckling caught my ears. Sally and I both glanced over to Tom’s corpse. The laughter was coming from him. No, make that from
on
him. From the sound of things, his backpack, to be precise.

It was Harry Decker.

The three of us marched back over to Tom’s body. A part of me was tempted to kick it over and then tear open the pack to see what that asshole had done. However, giving in to my emotions might not be the best thing to do, especially since Christy might take offense to that. Instead, I gently turned him over and stripped the backpack off.

“Shouldn’t you say a few words?” Tom asked.

“Huh?”

“I thought it was customary. I mean, shit, you’re robbing my corpse. The least you can do is tell everyone what an awesome guy I was.”

“It’s not like I’m going through your pockets for spare change.”

“Yeah, well, I’m watching in case you do. Damn, why didn’t anyone tell me my bald spot was that wide?”

I held him out to Christy while I fumbled with the backpack. However, she shrank away as if it were a rattlesnake. Poor girl was probably holding on by the barest of threads. It didn’t help that she couldn’t even properly grieve without Tom making some asshole comment about it.

I handed him to Sally instead, who seemed to be taking this weirdness in stride – one of the benefits of having been around the supernatural longer than the rest of us, I suppose.

Once I unzipped the pack, I saw the sickly purplish light that continued to glow from within. I grabbed Decker’s skull and pulled it out.

“What did you do?” I demanded of it.

Me? I did nothing, fool. I simply gave a warning and it was ignored.

I couldn’t help but notice one difference between the two disembodied ... err ... entities. Decker sounded like a radio broadcast, almost distant, whereas Tom’s voice was pretty much normal – except maybe a bit more diminutive.

That’s when it hit me.

Crap! We’d been so caught up in the part of his prophecy about Vehron that we’d ignored the rest. “Tears will fall for those who die...” I repeated.

Just as I proclaimed.

“Wait,” Christy snapped. “You knew? You knew it was talking about Tom?”

Again, Decker’s skull did nothing but chuckle – a fucking douche to the very end.

“Why?”

Because, my child, he was your undoing. You were always such a good pupil, such a devout witch. You were meant to follow in my footsteps, but then you met him. He was only supposed to be a tool, a means for us to get to the Freewill, but instead, he swayed you. He confounded you, turned you away from your path – from me. Because of him, I died. Because of him, your sisters died. And because of him, you have doomed all Magi to die!

Decker might have had more to say, but in that moment, Gan’s forces faltered.

What had happened to Tom had so consumed us that we’d neither helped nor noticed that the Jahabich continued to reinforce their ranks while continuing to thin ours.

We’d been so distracted by Decker’s grinning skull, that we didn’t notice the soulless orange eyes surrounding us until it was too late.

The Jahabich were like fire ants. Tough enough for a younger vampire, but individually, not much of a challenge to either an older vamp or me after I’d gotten a power boost. Their real strength lay in a hive mentality that dictated overall victory trumped any individual needs.

Strategically, I could see how that could be their downfall given sufficient resistance. Against a small group with no hope of reinforcements, though, it was a pretty damn effective shock and awe tactic.

Had Gan’s people been at full strength, they might have held off our attackers indefinitely. However, she was coming off a brutal campaign against the Feet, followed by tracking our asses through the forest, and then having Vehron playing compulsion-pong with their brains.

I half expected her to order her troops to fight to the death for her glory, which I would have done my best to ixnay. Surprisingly, though, once it became painfully obvious this fight was unwinnable, she told her troops to lay down their arms. Even she, nutty as a fruitcake, understood the logic of surviving to fight another day.

The Jahabich, thankfully, had been ordered to bring us in, as opposed to pounding our skulls to mush. We were forced to leave our weapons; no surprise there. I was afraid they’d make us abandon the talking skull and possessed toy that happened to be in our possession too. However, curios such as those were apparently rare, even for monstrosities from a hellish cavern deep beneath the Earth, so in the end, they confiscated both and brought them with us.

Well, okay, after hearing Decker’s bullshit, we really just wanted to make sure Tom didn’t get left behind, but it seemed to be all or nothing. Alas, Tom’s body wasn’t a part of the deal. It was left where it lay, along with the other discarded treasures he’d brought with him. I could only hope we’d have a chance to retrieve it later and put him to proper rest.

Thankfully, we weren’t sent back the same way Vehron had gone, as the sun was still shining. No idea how that dude did it, but none of the vamps in our current group would have made it twelve paces, much less all the way back to the Boston complex. The Jahabich solved that problem, though, by forcing us to use the underground passage they’d dug to ambush us.

Once down below, they lined us up and marched us forward. Much like when Sally and I had been taken prisoner far below the streets of Vegas, the Jahabich showed little interest in us so long as we kept moving and didn’t try to escape. Thus we were able to at least converse.

Sadly, any additional info that we might have pried out of Decker went unanswered. He fell silent in the grasp of the Jahabich who carried him. It had assumed a human form so as to have fingers to hold our disembodied comrades.

Whereas Decker seemed content to let his words from earlier stand, Tom wasn’t nearly so inclined to the silent treatment. “So anyone have a clue why I can’t fucking move? I mean, I’m not looking to pull a Child’s Play or anything, but what if my nose gets itchy? What if I need to take a shit?”

“Off the top of my head,” I answered, continuing to march along, “I’d say it’s because dolls don’t have muscles.”

“Action figure, asshole.”

“Whatever the fuck. Oh, and since you don’t have an asshole either, chances are you’re safe when it comes to number two.”

“Yeah, thanks for explaining the mechanics of plastic, Bill. You’re forgetting something, though. My mouth is just a line of molded plastic, yet I can still talk. Oh, and I’m pretty sure these painted-on eyes don’t really have retinas, yet I can see your ass trudging along in front of me just fine.”