The Corpse scuttled on top of him, while maintaining i grip on Henry's right arm. Henry thrashed on the ground on his back in the mud under the corps's death grip, no pun intended, in an attempt to free himself. The corpse had its right shoulder pinned against the ground.
When his thrashing didn't work, he blindly threw a couple of punches at the dead man on top of him. Some of the punches connected and made a dull thump, but they looked like they did nothing.
The dead man's face was turned towards me. Its eyes, clouded over with a thin milky film, stared at me and did not blink once.
Henry, who must have finally figured out his punches weren't doing anything, began trying to push the dead man off of him. The corpse did not budge one bit. Henry was ridiculously strong, so if nothing he did worked, it must have been due to some kind of unnatural strength. Not a comforting thought, when you were alone in the middle of the woods with it, with the sun sinking and the sky turning darker by the second. Did I mention we had no weapons, too?
Meanwhile, I stood frozen to the ground in shocked silence, while my mind tried to frantically come up with a solution to this ah... the problem we were currently experiencing. Quickly, some of the self-defense moves that Henry had shown me, in case I ever found myself in a situation where I would have to fight off an attacker, popped into my mind.
Henry and I had spent an entire day in an abandoned farm, one early spring day, where he had tried to show me how to fight. At the end of our grueling first and last session, he had strongly suggested that I would be better off just hiding or, even better yet, running away. Well, hiding or running wasn't an option here, unless I wanted to leave Henry to fend for himself, which wasn't looking like a good option based on his performance thus far.
Henry, with much effort, raised his head and turned it to look at me with electric blue eyes. Even though his eyes weren't panicked, I could see just how much that small movement had cost him on the rest of his face,
"Run! I can take care of this myself, just get out of here!"
For some reason, Henry acting as his stupid macho self calmed me down a little, and I found myself shaking my head at him, "Yeah, how you're handling this right now really makes me think that you got this no problem. No, I am not running and leaving you behind!
The shadows of the trees around us were growing longer, and they seemed to be reaching towards Henry, like the long, spindly fingers of a skeleton. The feeling in the air that I had felt earlier was growing in intensity even faster than the sun was setting. It was becoming more and more difficult to just breathe properly.
"I'm about to get free, just give me some time," he growled and tried once again to push the dead man off him."
"I'm a little confused on how much time I should give you, should I give you an hour, a day, because it doesn't look like you're going to get free anytime soon?!" I shouted back.
"Violet, for the last time, go!"
The dead soldier's head snapped away from me with a loud snap and stared down at Henry. This meant one of two things: one, that I had an even stronger urge not to get any closer to it than I already was, and two, it had its back was now facing me, which made it easier for me to attack it.
I knew then which attack I was going to use, but now, for the problem of my feet, which were still rooted to the ground. I still hadn't completely gotten over the sudden shock of the corpse's reanimation. You would think having the ability to raise the dead would make me less surprised when it happened. Nope, it didn't, at least when I wasn't the one doing it.
That problem of my paralyzed foot solved itself when the corpse placed its other hand in the center of Henry's chest and pressed down, resulting in several sharp cracks. Henry yelled out in pain.
"Henry!" I cried out, alarmed.
"It's okay!" Henry wheezed, "It only cracked some of my ribs. Stay calm and stop freaking out!"
"How can I not freak out!?" I cried, "You just said it cracked your ribs!"
The dead thing opened its jaws wide and revealed two rows of perfectly square white teeth. It inched its mouth closer and closer to Henry's face, and I had a sinking feeling about what was going to happen next. It was going to eat his face with those rows of perfectly square, white teeth!
Yellow saliva oozed from its mouth and dripped onto his cheek. Henry swore loudly and began to fight harder, but the creature showed no trouble in keeping Henry pinned to the ground. He wasn't going to make it! My mind filled with images of a dead boyfriend with no face, and that was enough to help me propel myself forward over the brown, dead leaves and moldy twigs that lined the forest floor.
I stopped abruptly and used my forward motion to propel myself through the air. I collided with its ice-cold body midair, wrapped my legs, monkey style, around its torso, and leaned my body to the right, planning to use my remaining momentum to throw it off balance. To my alarm, it didn't budge at all.
In hindsight, I should've known that this would happen, seeing that even Henry wasn't a match for its strength, and I wasn't even a quarter as strong. The dead man began to groan, a horrible, soul-shaking, drawn-out sound, and reached one cold hand behind his back and wrapped it around my arm and tossed me off like I was a sack of potatoes. I fell on the leaf-covered ground with a loud crunch.
The dead thing got off Henry and started to move towards me on all fours, but its movements were all wrong. Its limbs bent at unnatural angles and made a horrid cracking sound with each movement, like it was breaking all of its bones in its arms and legs. Behind those dreadful, cloudy white eyes was pure hunger.
I quickly recovered from my toss and frantically began to feel for something, anything I could use to fend it off, like a rock or stick, on the moist ground beside me. My hand touched something hard, and my fingers wrapped around it, and I jumped to my feet.
Whatever was in my hand was heavy, cold, and produced a tingling sensation over my skin. I allowed myself a glance away at it. It was a knife, with a simple metal blade and a red cloth hilt, which my fingers were wrapped so tightly around. At the end of the hilt was a crystal sphere, and while I looked on, I noticed a black mist was swirling inside it. I blinked and looked away, believing that my fear had caused me to hallucinate.
I looked back, and a scream lodged itself in my throat when I came face to face with the dead man. It was now on its feet and a mere inch away from me. It didn't move, it just stood there, staring at me with its lifeless eyes.
From the fringes of my vision, I could see Henry slowly rising to his feet, but he would be too late to help, even if he could. With a hand that trembled so badly that it was a wonder that I could hold onto anything at all, I raised the knife over my head and drove it into one of its milky eyes.
For a split second, nothing happened, and I had a fleeting moment of absolute terror and despair. I thought this was the end, but then the corpse just crumpled to the ground and did not move again. The knife in my hand went down with it and stayed stuck in its eyeball.
Henry staggered over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder, but when I said placed I mean a poorly disguised lean. He looked into my face, "Are you okay?"
I nodded.
"Are you able to walk back on that foot?" he asked, pointing to my leg I had sprained just a little bit earlier.
I nodded my head, "I think," I said.
"Good, I don't think I can carry you anymore," he said, and my eyes traveled down to his side, which he was clutching.
"Are you alright?" I asked, reaching a hand towards him.
He jerked away from my touch and took his hand off me, "I'm fine," he grumbled. He let go of my shoulder and bent down to examine the corpse.
"Henry!" I called out in alarm, "Don't get too close to it!"
"Why, is it going to reanimate?" Henry asked, and his eyes flickered to me. "You felt it last time, didn't you?"
I looked at the body of the dead soldier and back at Henry, "No, I'm not getting the same feeling I felt earlier."
He nodded and crouched down beside the body again, a little farther away from it than last time. He gingerly flipped the soldier onto his back and reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of folded paper.
Henry held the paper up, unfolded it, and squinted at it in the almost extinguished light, "The lighting's too bad to read anything right now. But this is Greta's watermark, no doubt about it," he said while he pointed to a fancy G stamped in its upper right corner.
"Okay, great, now we know she had something to do with this, can we go now?" I asked him.
Henry's electric blue eyes flickered to me, "Not till I get some answers."
Present
"And daughter, did you come across an answer?"
I gazed up into Neeva's dark purple eyes, "Only one. That man wasn't dead; his soul was just gone. And that's why I think Greta is so desperate to get to me, because I can cross over souls."