The Tome of Bill Compendium Vol. 1 (Books 1-4) (2 page)

*Thud, thud* It was 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, I just bit the inside of my mouth. Damn! What if this is some kind of seizure? I could have bitten off my own damn tongue, and these assholes are just 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 even now, I’m spiraling into a coma.

Still, I don’t think I’d be quite as lucid if I were 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. I think that would be a wee bit on the painful side. Okay, I need to try and 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? Had my 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 was barely a whisper now. That damn song just went on forever. 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 goddamn 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, I 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.

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? Hmmm, 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, I’m 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.

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? Okay, then let’s start over, shall we?

My name is 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 spell out
WAR
, kind of like W. Axl Rose, if a bit less cool, maybe. Not
that
much less cool, at least these days, but a bit. 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 under duress 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...

Okay, sorry. 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 I don’t exactly have the ladies 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 graphical 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 think 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. I’ve known him 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. Right now, 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 to be 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, I’m 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. Some day 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.

So, let’s get back to my untimely death, all right? 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 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 that the sweet piece of ass that invited me was far too good to be true.

Saturday had started off well enough. It was a nice day; clear and just cool enough for a light jacket. Tom headed out to spend the day with his parents and his cute little sister (
who, in just another two years, is going to be old enough to jerk off to legally...not that I would. Well, okay, talk to me in two years and we’ll see. Just don’t tell him I said that
). As for Ed, he was holed up in his bedroom/home office. He was a little behind on the level design of a new project, and wanted to burn off some weekend hours to get it done. The rest of my local friends were busy, so that left me, myself, and I.

I grabbed a couple of Egg McMuffins in the A.M. from the McDonalds
on 86
^th
street, and then jumped onto the R train to head into the city. I didn’t really have much of a plan. I figured I’d spend a few bucks, grab lunch, and then head back. Maybe I’d see if anyone was up for some bar hopping in the evening. I gotta admit, dying wasn’t on my to-do list. But hey, live and learn, I guess...or is that
don’t live
and learn?

Okay, so the first part of my day went pretty much as expected. I popped into the
Complete Strategist
to grab a few new D&D minis (
my current one just wasn’t doing justice to my High-Elf Battlemage
) as well as a few new rule supplements that had come out. I plunked down enough cash so that, thanks to me, some executive at Wizards of the Coast could now continue paying their child’s college education. I walked over to midtown and spent a little time at the Apple Store, where for about the hundredth time, I stood around debating the merits of buying myself an iPad, and for the hundredth time, decided that maybe I’d hold off for now. After that, I grabbed a few slices of pizza and then headed down to the subway again. In retrospect, I should have loitered for a while longer. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have met
her
, and, well...I’d still be alive.

But you’re not here to catch the story about Bill, the guy who went home, met up with some friends, and then spent the rest of his Saturday night drunkenly arguing over who the hottest chick on
Smallville
was, are you? No, you’re not. So, as I was saying, I went to grab the train back to Brooklyn. Not really wanting to mingle with the weekend crowd, I wandered to the end of the platform where there were only a few people waiting. That turned out to be a big mistake.

The train took its sweet time, and I was just starting to tire of the perpetual stench of hobo urine when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Being a city resident, I reacted naturally. That is, I spun around quickly, sure I was about to get mugged - hoping I looked intimidating enough (
doubtful
) to give my would-be attackers second thoughts.