-The Land of the Dead – 01

Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.

-4-

"...Have you ever seen a man eaten alive?" Oliver Leek's own words, spoken moments before, came to literally haunt him, as the future predators, released from the neural control by the actions of Nick Cutter, turned upon him with a vengeance – and a swift efficiency. He got ripped and eaten alive so quickly that he was unable to feel any pain (at least register it in his own brain) before he fell on the floor and died.

And then there was a thump. "Hah?" the supposedly deceased civil servant blinked and got on his feet. "I am – alive?" He blinked as the sun shone through the rapidly dispersing rain clouds. "I'm – where?"

As a matter of fact, Leek appeared to be standing on a side of a mountain ridge, with the sun shining down on him, and a wind blowing downwards, away from him, with a somewhat mocking tone, to Leek's ears.

"Okay," Oliver gulped, "I seem to be somehow untouched by the future predators on one hand, and be someplace that is not London on the other. Is it good or bad? Time will tell, for right now I'm just confused as Hell."

As a matter of fact, the former civil servant was lying once again, even to himself, as it was in his nature. Subconsciously, he knew that while there was some confusion in his mind, mostly he was upset (to put it lightly) that he plans of taking over the English government have failed; at the moment, however, that wasn't too important...

Abruptly, a shadow passed between Oliver Leek and the sun; the passing was brief and fleeing, but long enough for him to look up and feel faint, as he saw two or three giant reptiles fly past him like several giant kites. "Impossible," he said weakly, as he sat down onto the hard, rocky ground. "Inconceivable. Is Helen Cutter behind this?"

Indeed, this was a reasonable assumption, Leek mused. The woman was very knowledgeable about all things prehistoric, as a certain failed mission to the Silurian time period had proved. However, she also had a huge ego that had allowed Leek to run rings around her during their period of co-operation, and finally come on top – only to be toppled by Helen's husband. Could it be that Helen decided to put her own two bits into Oliver's humiliation and make it even more poignant?

"No!" Leek snapped as he looked outwards from his perch on the mountainside, "I will not believe it! I defy you! I did not survive the multitude of Johnson's plots only to be foiled by a pair of scientists! I will find a way out of this!"

"See, I told you that someone was here," a completely unfamiliar voice broke through Leek's rant.

Startled, the former civil servant whirled in the direction of the speaker. A couple – a man and a woman – of complete strangers were coming up to him.

"Hey, dude," the young man continued to speak. "I'm Tom, and this is Valerie. And who are you?"

"I'm Oliver," the latter replied, eyeing the woman suspiciously – for some reason her name sounded vaguely familiar. "Where am I?"

"This is our afterlife," Valerie shrugged. "You can consider this to be Heaven or Hell, but here we'll be until the end of the time or whenever."

"...I'm Catholic," Oliver admitted after a prolonged silence.

"...Hah?" Valerie and Tom exclaimed after prolonged silences of their own.

"I believe in the Purgatory as well," Oliver realized that an elaboration was needed, "and unlike Heaven and Hell the Purgatory was supposed to be on a mountainside... it's complicated. The point is that I expected my afterlife to be worse than just a pristine wilderness or something."

"It's not pristine," the woman – Valerie – said with a surprising vehemence. "It's wild and full of cave lions and cave bears, of mammoths and dinosaurs in the forest that grows below-"

"The two of you have dealt with them," Leek pointed out, "and this could've been a real, old-fashioned Hell. Now that would be bad. This – I can handle." He paused and looked at the sky: as the three of them had talked, it had moved further up the sky and was going over the top of the mountain ridge. "Out of curiosity, do you have a place I can spend the night in?" he added, belatedly.

"Sure, come on in to our cave – the nights here are cold, much colder than the days," Tom nodded, sagely.

Oliver shrugged. Honestly, the Catholic part of him expected to end up in an infernal cauldron full of boiling pitch or tar, so a wild cave on a mountainside didn't sound too bad, honestly. "Lead on," he said cheerfully, unaware that an unlikely friendship was beginning to manifest between the three of them. "And, by the way, what's on the other side of these mountains? Down here, I think I can see a really massive forest, but there-"

"The mountains go down straight to the sea, where more than just fish do live," Tom shrugged. "We'll show you tomorrow."

"Oh, good."

To be continued...