Scary Dead Things - 02

• Introduction
  
• Just Another Brick in the Wall
  
• Time for a Recap
  
• Not Exactly a UN Summit
  
• Dating Habits of the Undead
  
• Here, Kitty Kitty
  
• A Sandwich with a Side of Chips
  
• A Test? I Didn’t Even Study!
  
• He Who Fights and Runs Away
  
• Green with Envy
  
• Fat Chicks versus Vampire Cake
  
• Attack of the Mighty Mongolian Monsters
  
• Gan and Billy Sitting in a Tree
  
• Slumber Party of the Damned
  
• Satan’s Shopping Mall
  
• The Scent of a Woman
  
• Heads Up
  
• Toked-up Television
  
• Magically Delicious
  
• Random Monster Encounter
  
• Lend Me a Hand
  
• Swords and Sorcerers
  
• Working Hard or Hardly Working
  
• A View to Die For
  
• What's a Little Murder Amongst Friends
  
• The Epic Epilogue
  
• About the Author
  
• Bonus Chapter
  

Wayman Publishing

waymanpublishing.com

P. O. Box
160693

Clearfield
, UT

84016

Scary Dead Things

Copyright© 2011 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 appreciated.

All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead, 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.

The views herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Wayman Publishing.

Edited by Apex Editing

Cover by Rick Gualtieri

Visit the author’s blog at:
http://www.poptartmanifesto.com

For Joey, Connor, and Raiden; the scariest things I know.

Special thanks to Alissa, Sheila, Jennifer, Sandra, Anne, and Marquel. Your encouragement helped make this book possible. I hope that one day I am able to help inspire you to reach for your dreams the way you have all inspired me to reach for mine.

Let’s face facts: sequels are scary business. And no, I don’t just mean horror sequels. I mean
any
sequel, and for many different reasons. The thing is; they’re scary for both the audience and the writer. For the audience, it’s always the same: will this live up to the expectations set in the previous chapter? Will I wind up with a
Godfather part 2,
or will I wind up with
Batman and Robin
? Even worse than that last example...and one of the cruelest things that one human can inflict upon another...is the sequel in name only (cue scary music!) because, let’s face facts, nobody wants to pay good money to see
Halloween: Season of the Witch
and find out that it has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Myers. As for others, well let’s just say that the less said about
Highlander: the Quickening
, the better.

So, too, can sequels be a nightmare for the creators. Can we capture that same magic again? Can we expand upon the world we’ve created? Can we remember to follow the rules we set? Have those rules written us into a corner? Can we stay true to the characters we’ve already created? This last one in particular can be difficult because are they truly our characters anymore? From a legal perspective, this one is easy to answer. There’s no doubt that Marvel is within their
legal
rights to undo Peter Parker’s marriage to Mary Jane with but a single issue; however, that doesn’t mean that millions of comic book fans won’t storm their offices with pitchforks and torches after they do so. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were well within their rights to present to us a Godzilla that didn’t breathe fire; however, as a diehard Godzilla fan, I know in my heart that there is a special place in Hell reserved for both of them in doing so.

Thus, therein lies the fear. As a writer, I’ve breathed life into these characters, loved them, nurtured them, and want to continue to do so; however, there’s a fine line because, in some ways, the second they were born they’ve already outgrown me. The returning characters in this book aren’t mine anymore; they’re ours. All I can hope is that I’ve done right by them again.

If not, you can find me sitting out on my backyard deck, patiently awaiting the tarring and feathering that I know will be coming for me someday.

However, until such time as the angry mobs descend to tear me limb from limb, please enjoy these further adventures of Bill Ryder and his friends. I had a hell of a time tagging along with them on this journey. I hope you do, too.

Rick G
.

*
CRUNCH
* Yep, no matter what way you put it, being hurled through a wall hurts. It's funny; just a few short months ago I would have argued that the dreaded atomic wedgie was the most common indignity I had suffered throughout my life. That’s not such a bad thing, especially when one considers that the proportion of ass-crack related incidents in one's life tends to decrease dramatically post high-school. After all, most people just won't give a wedgie to another grownup. Why? Well, my personal theory is that part of becoming an adult means that we start asking much deeper questions about life than when we were kids, one such question being: do I really want to put my hands where this person's dirty ass has been?

That being said, getting thrown through the air to crash into, and sometimes through, solid objects was becoming a disturbingly common occurrence in my life as of late. Considering the overall painfulness of such experiences, I was beginning to find myself oddly nostalgic about just having my underwear bunched up my ass by some prankster.

Just in case you’re taking notes, brick and concrete were easily the least fun barriers I had been smashed into; however, your basic wooden load-bearing wall, which oddly enough was what I found myself plowing into now, wasn't exactly a vacation in the Caribbean either. If this kept up, I might have to consider starting a blog about all the scenic walls in the Tri-State area and what it felt like to be flung through each and every one of them.

Although perhaps right now wasn't exactly an ideal time to think about blogging. I was just starting to pull myself back to my feet when a dark angry form emerged from the shadows. It was Samuel. He was the leader of a coven of vampires from Queens that called themselves the HBC. This was due to their home territory including the Howard Beach area. It was a stupid name, but considering my own group was known as Village Coven, due to being headquartered in fucking SoHo, I was probably in no position to be throwing stones.

Apparently, it was tradition to name covens after their territories. Sure, you wound up with some silly names. I had even heard there was a Scotrun Coven in Pennsylvania, which was bad for them because they would forever more be known in my mind as the
Scrotum Coven
. All things considered, though, it probably beat the alternative. If every coven were given free reign for names, I have little doubt we'd wind up with dopey crap like
The Blood Brotherhood
,
The Midnight Raiders
, or maybe
The Sons of Darkness
. In short, we'd all sound like retarded local chapters of the
Legion of Doom
. Trust me, I speak from experience here. My own coven had a rule not too long ago regarding taking new personal pseudonyms upon joining. As a result, we wound up with stupid shit like people calling themselves Rage Vector, Night Razor, and, of course, Dr. Death. So, all things considered, I could probably live with Village Coven.

Still, worrying about things like coven names is probably best left to times when you're not in danger of getting your head torn off. This was not such a time. Samuel leapt at me, no doubt going for the kill. Well, OK, maybe that's a bit obvious. After all, you typically don't fling yourself through the air at people you're having a polite conversation with. Fortunately for me, I was far from out of it. I may not be able to dish it out as well as some others, but I can definitely take it. See, I'm a vampire, too (
just in case you haven’t figured that out yet
). I also have a lot of aforementioned experience getting tossed around. You build up a tolerance to it after a while. Those two things combined allowed me to recover quickly enough to snatch a busted two-by-four from out of the rubble of the safe house wall I had just plowed through. Before Samuel could fully cover the distance, I swung the beam and connected with a solid *KAPOW*. Samuel went flying back into the shadows whence he just came. That gave me a breather, but I didn’t have any delusions that it would be nearly enough to finish him.

I had been told that Samuel was nearly two-hundred years old. As we vampires tend to get stronger as we get older, that made him both a lot more powerful as well as much more experienced than me. Neither one was a checkmark in my favor. Under different circumstances, I should have probably been counting my lucky stars that I was still alive. If this had been my first tussle with a vampire way out of my league, I'd probably be busy either begging for my life or kissing my ass goodbye; however, it wasn't.