I Applied for a Delivery Job and Got Turned Into a Flying Reindeer?!

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Five

The darkness had claimed Justin.

He hovered in a void of nothingness. The silence echoed in his ears more deafeningly than any sound he had ever heard. Neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry, soft nor hard, the darkness simply was...or rather, it wasn't.

I must be dead.

Oddly, that didn't bother him. He knew it should have bothered him, but the place in his heart where he normally would have felt that emotion was as empty as the void in which he now floated. He could remember everything that had happened to him before he'd died. Going with Santa on his trip around the world. The straggele horde. Lucas being injured. His fight against Krampus, where he had been wounded badly enough that he'd ended up here.

Wherever here was.

But he felt a sort of detachment to those memories. He could remember the emotions he had felt during them, but they were like the emotions a character displayed in a movie. He understood those feelings, perhaps even sympathized with them...but they weren't his feelings.

If I'm dead, he thought, then this must be the afterlife.

How boring. Wasn't he supposed to get, like, his own cloud to sit on? A harp to play? What was he expected to do here? Float in this endless nothing for all eternity?

Actually, he found himself thinking, that might not be so bad.

He wasn't comfortable, but at least he wasn't uncomfortable. Somehow, he could tell he would never need to eat, sleep, or do anything else here in the void. He didn't even need to think. If he wanted, he could just let himself float here, drifting through the darkness, letting the nonexistent seconds turn into nonexistent years into nonexistent centuries.

It wouldn't be a happy existence, but neither would it be an unhappy one. Perhaps that was all he really needed.

Although, he thought suddenly, I do wish I could find out what happened to my friends.

In the distance, so faint that he didn't even notice it, a speck of...something...appeared.

Did Santa manage to save Lucas? he wondered. I wish I could at least know if I got myself killed for a good reason.

The something grew a little brighter, a little stronger.

And poor Lena just lost her second reindeer! Will she at least have Lucas and Willow there to comfort her?

Willow...

Maybe Krampus was right about one thing. I know we only met a few days ago, but I wish I had told Willow how I felt about her. Yeah, it was just a stupid crush, but maybe if she'd known, that crush could have eventually become something more?

Of course, I would have had to NOT DIE for that to happen, but still...

The something grew even stronger, and suddenly Justin found himself blinded by a bright light—or, at least what he thought was a blinding light at first. When he lowered his hand to look more closely at it, he realized it was actually a very dim light. It only looked blinding because the shadows around it were so dark.

Curious—and suddenly capable of being curious—Justin drifted toward it to investigate. The light was a beautiful shade of blue, but barely the size of a golf ball. Even so, Justin couldn't tear his eyes away from it. What was something like that doing in a place like this? Tentatively, he raised his hands toward it, and...