'Til Death Do Us Part

'Till Death Do Us Part - Chapter 7

“Amity!”  Jasper braced himself to jump into the vortex after the girl, but something was holding his hands behind his back like handcuffs.  He struggled against them, butJan took hold of his shoulders roughly and steered him away from the door.  As soon as they were out of the room, the vortex closed, the winds stopped, the light vanished along with the humming, and the door slammed shut behind them.  WhenJan released his shoulders, Jasper flung himself at him; whatever had been holding his hands back had disappeared.  He tried throwing punch after punch atJan, butEastern Europe had him pinned.

            “You idiot!”  Jasper screamed.  “We could have saved her!  I could have saved her!” Jan tightened his grip on the collar of Jasper’s shirt.

            “And you would have disappeared completely if you had,” he hissed.  “There’s a faster way to get to where the girl is headed, a safer way.”  He dropped Jasper’s collar, and the American Reaper slid to the floor, defeated.  He stood up, brushed himself off.

            “I’m listening,” he said, intrigued but still upset.

            “We have to go toMexico.”

            “You’re kidding me.”

            “Nein.”

            Jan blinked twice, and they were off toMexico.

Amity was falling, falling down through the vortex.  She’d expected it to be white and noisy, but instead it was dark and calm and completely silent; she couldn’t even hear the wind rushing around her as she fell.  She no longer knew where her sister was; the light had completely disappeared once she’d jumped into the vortex.

            She landed hard in a desk chair.  Standing up, carefully, she saw the vortex close above her, and she began to become frightened.  She looked around.  She was standing in a room with brick walls that had several arched alcoves set into them.  The floor was cold and slick and the whole place smelled of something sour, like rotten eggs or meat.  The desks from Cavanaugh’s room where strewn about.  She saw her red scarf amongst them; carefully, she retrieved it.  Standing up in the arched alcoves were strange, bulky figures.  She walked over to one of them and jumped back.  It was a human skeleton!  Some skin still clung to the skull in places, and its jaw hung open in a deathly grin.  Amity fell down and began to crawl backwards, eyes always watching the skeleton.  She turned over onto her hands and knees and retched.

            When she looked back up at the skeleton, it was gone.

            She stood back up quickly and panicked, sure that the skeleton could not have moved on its own but not knowing where it could have gone.  A sharp crack sounded behind her and she turned on her heel.

            The skeleton was standing at one of the other alcoves, knocking the dust off of the corpse standing in it.  The second skeleton coughed and wheezed, and the first patted its back.  Amity whimpered a bit too loudly, and the skeletons’ heads snapped towards her.  Their open jaws let out an awful moaning sound as they began to lurch after her.  She backed away from them and ran into another skeleton, which seemed to glare at her with empty eyes when it cracked its knuckles.  She turned around, looking for somewhere to run, but she was surrounded by the walking dead in a tight, angry circle.  They came closer, suffocating her.

            Amity fell to her knees and screamed.

The Mexican Reaper’s terracotta mansion was like none Jasper had ever seen; it sprawled across a large hill magnificently, and seemed to dare them to tread on its luscious green lawn, dotted with flowers.  Janwalked across it anyway.  Jasper tried to follow, but as soon as he set foot on the grass, he was dragged off of it by an extremely happy woman.  When he saw her, though, he corrected himself: A girl.  An extremely happy girl.