Elemental Reverse Harem Quartet (part 1: Earth)

Chapter 7

Officially dead and right pissed off about it

Malka Selby

The more I thought about it while sitting in the dark on the gritty floor, the more pissed off I became.

What a fuckin' load of shit day this is turning out to be.

One moment I was walking through the streets of London, and still on a bit of a high from the multiple orgasms of the night before and those that followed in the morning. The next moment I was chased through something allegedly called a park, but what turned out to be an overgrown forest with toppled gravestones stacked higgledy-piggledy between the trees. It wasn't so much an inner-city wildwood as an inner-city graveyard with trees and ivy. Correction, it was straight out of a horror film. The sort of place I never thought existed in real life.

Whether I tripped over a gravestone or a protruding tree root, I wasn't sure, but the result was the same. I'd fallen and didn't stop when I hit the ground. At first, I thought it might be boggy marshland, but it wasn't wet at all; the earth was a powdery dry mulch.

It was the weirdest sensation. I kept sinking deeper and deeper into it. It terrified me. I thought I would drown or be buried alive. When it reached my nose, I shut my eyes. The soil entered my ears and my nostrils. It seeped under my clothes and closed in around my body, damp and dirty against my skin. Moving through this gritty material was every bit as disgusting and suffocating as one might imagine.

I must have left my actual body lying in the dirt above ground, and it must have been my soul or spirit or whatever that fell through the ground into hell.

Of all the weird things that happened today, dying had to be the worst.

I was officially dead.

And a bit pissed off about the whole dying thing.

The ground swallowed me up, and when I landed in hell it hurt, which didn't seem fair either. I'd imagined that once someone died, they'd stop feeling physical pain.

The injustice of finding myself going down below didn't sit well with me. Admittedly, I could've prayed more in life, but I didn't think I'd been all that bad.

Then there was the big question. Why did I have to die? Varu and I outran the crazy, big, ginger guy with the knives. He was the one who started cutting people up in a London park.

Presumably, if I'd been a better person when I was alive, I'd have flown upward. I'd have liked to try flying. That was just another thing to piss me off; landing in hell meant missing out on the flying up to heaven experience.

Instead, naked, I fell through into a vacuous space and sat where I landed with dirty stones digging into my bare arse. Clothes didn't accompany one to the afterlife, apparently.

My sense of touch still worked; I still had the same body, just without clothes.

Either I'd lost my sight in death because I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, or not a single photon of light existed in this black hole. I'd expected hell to be warmer and bathed in the pleasant glow of firelight.

The pitch-black darkness disorientated me; I couldn't work out which way was up and which way was down. I concluded my arse sat on top of something.

Tentatively, I overcame my dread, stretched my arms out to either side and slowly waved them all around. There was nothing to touch within arm's length. Not even a goddamn creepy spider's web. I didn't dare stand up or move in any direction in case I fell into goodness knows what next.