by Cliff Hicks
“How do we even get back to Earth?” Jake was now completely interested in this mission of theirs, because it would give him just what he needed, a way out of this madhouse they called Heaven. Even if he couldn’t get out this time, he would know how the routes in and out worked, and maybe he would be able to slip away unnoticed. “Just some door or something?”
“Not or something, just a plain ol’ door. Trust me, you’re gonna get disoriented at least the first dozen or so times we go there, because it looks just like any other door you see. There’s nothing remarkable or distinguishable about it in any way, shape or form. It’s just… there. All the doors are. And there are a lot of doors.”
Jake cocked his head to the side while they walked down the corridor. People tended to cut them a lot of space when they walked, Jake had noticed, and he figured it was the sword at their belts that made people nervous, a form of implied authority that just scared the crap out of everyone they saw. It was nice. Jake had spent most of his life with people bumping into him, pushing him around, cutting in line in front of him and just generally making his life miserable. Perhaps there was some justice in the afterlife after all. Assuming you were willing to break some rules, circumvent some processes, ignore some paperwork, steal a halo and a sword, lock up some angels…
A few minutes later, they opened a door and stepped into a long hallway filled with rows of doors, each one looking exactly like the last. Franco had been right, though – there would likely be no way Jake could get back to this hall on his own right now. They had twisted and turned and looped and dipped and folded and maneuvered so much, Jake was starting to feel that Heaven’s main architect was M.C. Escher. “Where on Earth did he pop out, Eddie?”
“I hate when you call me that,” Edward grumbled, looking at the parchment in his hand as he scowled. “Says here he came out in Oakland.”
“Shit,” Franco said with a snort, “we should leave his sorry ass there. It’s gotta be worse than Hell could ever be.”
Edward pushed the circular spectacles back up onto his nose, as they started to slide down. “Now, Franco, you know that’s not our call to make. We have to save these poor souls from themselves.” He lifted a single finger into the air and started counting doors from the left in his head before stopping, pointing at a door. “That one.”
Franco tapped Jake. “That’s why I bring him along. My ass would get lost in a heartbeat.” He had a lazy grin on his face that implied the two were old friends, and that they were simply bringing Jake along for the ride. Jake hadn’t even been entirely sure where Edward had heard about the runner from. Where did Heavenly orders come from, he wondered? Was there a Holy Dispatch, giving out directions for angels who spent most of their days sitting around? Were there beat Taggers, like cops, out wandering around with no real purpose than to watch for, well, people like him, he supposed? If so, they weren’t doing a very good job.
The three angels walked over to the door. It was strange, but Jake had starting thinking of himself as both ‘one of them’ and ‘one of us’ the minute he put the halo on his head. He was an angel, but he wasn’t like the other angels. He looked like a Tagger, but he wasn’t, not really. While all of them were content with simply doing their daily work, puttering around waiting for their next chance to goof off and hope they didn’t get caught, Jake was actively looking for a way to escape the insanity that was Heaven.
He stepped forward to put his hand on the doorknob, almost as if he was afraid it would identify him for not belonging here. Maybe that was how the Taggers were alerted that someone was making a run for it. Would it overlook him because he had a halo on, or was there some sort of clearance he was supposed to have gotten? He grew nervous for a moment, and grasped the door handle, half expecting it to be hot and burn his hand, or cry out in alarm. Instead, it simply felt like average, cold metal. He turned the knob, and started to pull it back. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until Franco yelled behind him suddenly “BOO!” Jake practically leapt half a foot into the air while Franco began laughing in hysterics. “That never gets old!” Franco howled. “Come on, Jake, it’s not gonna bite you.” Jake opened the door a bit more boldly now, and was nearly blinded by the endless white light that flooded over them. “Although they really could stand to turn down the light show, you know?”
Jake wondered if it was some part of the gateway between Earth and Heaven that created this immense amount of light. He recalled having seen a similar doorway of overwhelming light when Bob had first led him and the others into Heaven. It was odd that Bob crossed his mind, but Bob had seemed like a genuine person, much less the mindless robots that passed for angels around here. The other Cherubim he had seen or interacted with when he’d been wandering through Heaven all seemed to have a great deal more personality than the rest of the flock.
“Come on, you two,” Edward said, “let’s go.” Edward, Jake decided, was exactly what Heaven wanted more of. He was docile, obedient and kept mostly to himself. He always was eager to follow whatever order was handed to him without question and never seemed to think twice about anything. Edward was, for all intents and purposes, a lapdog of an angel. Edward grabbed both of them by the arm and the three of them stepped into the white light and back onto Earth.
It was… amazing. Amazingly ordinary, but somehow still amazing nonetheless. To be honest, Jake had to admit, other than the white light and the radical changing of special location, it was simply like stepping through any other door. No tingly feeling, no sudden whoosh of air, no twirly special effects… it was somewhat disappointing, Jake thought to himself. It really did just feel like one big parlor trick, and once you knew the secret, the magic, like the mystery, was gone.
Jake turned to look at Franco, putting his hands on his hips disappointedly. “That’s it?”
Franco shrugged a bit. “I know, but what can you do…”
All three of them finished together “…after all, this is Heaven!”
* * * * *
James opened the door to their section once more, as Byron and Terence stepped back inside. They would cover for the rest of the angels while they were out looking for their missing ward. The door shut behind them with a certain sense of finality, which made all of the angels nervous, both the ones inside and the ones who were going to go on the hunt.
“You think they’ll be able to keep everyone in check?” Shelly asked James, as the three of them started to examine the area for any signs of anything. Of course, it was as bland and featureless as it had always been. Shelly was shifting about, fussing, the whole area practically alien to her. For the most part, the angels stayed in their individual cellblock. On rare days where she was in a poor mood, she felt like the bunch of them were prisoners just as much as their wards. Still, there had to be some order imposed on the flock.
“I’m not worried about it. Byron and Terry can handle those zombies. They’re all too passive to do anything,” James snorted as he crossed his arms and leaned his back against the wall. James actually found himself looking forward to getting out for a bit of a stroll, although he’d never admit that to the others. James was one of the people who suffered wanderlust, and so he’d wander from one cell block to another from time to time, talking to whoever happened to be on duty that day. He never left the block hub, certainly, because that would have gotten him in all sorts of trouble, and none of the other angels knew that when he was supposed to be keeping tabs on the flock, but he certainly wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be, because it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Nothing ever really happened.
James thought that if he was brutally honest with himself, he felt he was more at fault for Jake’s escape than any of the other angels were, simply because he was never watching the monitors when he was supposed to be. He would be next door, talking with Celeste or down the hall, chatting up the guards at the end of the hallway.
Of course, there was no way that James could have known that all of the other angels were just as g
uilty of those types of indulgences as he was. At least, James thought to himself, the rest of the people they had been tasked to keep tabs on were still as docile as sheep.
“Yeah, well, that’s what we thought about Jake, and look where that line of thinking got us,” Randall growled in replied. He was crouched down next to both of them, looking carefully to see if he could find any tracks or hints of passage, knowing full well he wouldn’t.
James lowered his head a bit. “Sorry, Randall.”
Randall sighed. The burden of command had never been easy on him. He hadn’t particularly liked being thrust upon the role, but they claimed his personality and temperament made him unsuitable for most other jobs in Heaven. Of course, he never had understood why he simply wasn’t made one of the docile flock, for that matter. Randall had a questioning personality, but kept his opinions to himself. Early on in his time in Heaven, he’d witnessed a couple of Taggers beating up a runner, and he immediately knew that wasn’t going to be him, no matter what it took. (Neither the runner OR the Tagger, actually.) So he’d changed his entire approach. He was still in the lines then, but he started recognizing the filtering process and he decided it was better to be the kind of guy who chased people down instead of the guy who got chased down. Of course, he was surprised enough as it was simply to get into Heaven, but that was another question he knew not to ask. And he had a theory of his own about it anyway. “Don’t worry about it,” he said as he stood up again. “We’ll find him, and we’ll handle him. It’s just one lousy human.”
“And when I find him, oh Heaven help me, I’m going to make him regret it,” James spit. “Goddamn troublesome humans.” James wasn’t normally this excitable, but it was as though getting out of their standard quarters were awakening emotions in them again, and because they’d been so, well, tranquil for so long, their emotions were in double-time overdrive.
“We were all human once,” Shelly pointed out, trying to calm him down.
“Yeah,” Randall said, “but we haven’t been for a long time. We’re angels now. That means something like this should be a piece of cake for us. We’re the best of the best. We’re the ones the other angels chose to elevate beyond the level of mere mortals.” Randall didn’t really buy the propaganda, but he knew once he’d been put in charge, he needed to play the part of the tough guy to a tee. And it had worked (at least when he had first started) as the rest of the angels under his supervision looked to him as the icon of how to act, even if they didn’t follow the examples themselves. He knew he and his fellow angels weren’t any better than the people they were watching over, just different.
He couldn’t really learn much about the people they kept watch over other than the little details he picked up in talking to them when they were first brought in, before the quiet settled on them. He’d been studying, learning, and he couldn’t find any common thread that united them, and so his current working theory was that these were simply the people who didn’t fit anywhere else. They were people who didn’t have a clear idea of what Heaven was supposed to be, so Heaven didn’t have a clear idea of where they were supposed to put them. So they ended up in these…rest homes, and Randall liked to think of them as. He started to look around, then closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and banged his fist up against the wall. “Dammit!”
“What?” Both James and Shelly looked up at him suddenly.
Randall shook his head. “There’s not going to be anything we can track. No footprints, nothing out of place – you know how Heaven works. Anything that would be considered unclean is removed before it has a chance to soil the holy hosts. Shit … this is going to be fucking ridiculous. Heaven’s huge, and we don’t have any clue which way he could’ve gone or how to find him. Why the Hell does Heaven have to be so damn clean?”
Shelly scrunched her face up, and James thought it made her look less pretty. Her voice was steady as she started to reason out loud. “Okay, let’s assume he just started going in a random direction. That means he’d eventually hit one of the two main subsection corridors. If we split up and…”
“No,” James said as he pushed himself off the wall.
“What?”
“Look, we’re just going have to stick together and start walking through Heaven one step at a time, seeing what we see until we find him. Anything else and people are going to start asking questions. If we stick together, we can claim we’re checking security or something.” James moved his hand through the air while he spoke, a tone of authority and confidence to his demeanor. He spoke with the air of someone who had thought through the process, considered the options, and was pointing out the only obvious solution. It was the kind of confident tone that was hard to argue with. It also sounded like James had done something like this before, Randall thought to himself before James spoke again. “That should be more than enough of a cover story to discourage anyone who isn’t already looking for us. Or him.”
They were changing. Barely out of the quarters and they were already changing, Randall noticed. He felt less confident, while he noticed James seemed to be gaining confidence.
“Alright, you’re right. We don’t want anyone asking questions about what we’re doing, so let’s just go,” Randall agreed. He pointed in a direction and the three angels started to walk down the hallway which Jake himself had walked down not long before them. The three came to the big hallway, and Randall sighed, looking at the constant bustle of people to and fro, many of them not standing still long enough to be anything more than a blur in time. “Right, I forgot,” he said with a sigh of resignation, glancing around, noting that no one had paid them any mind at all. “No one’ll ask questions… This is Heaven.”
* * * * *
Jake looked around at Earth with a sense of awe and wonder. He was in a horrific alleyway, the kind of dirt and squalor only a major city can summon up. And yet, it was as though it was the greatest thing Jake had ever seen. Never had he thought he would be in a sense of joy about seeing a pile of garbage he was pretty sure had been pissed on by a few bums over the last day. The sky was dark night, a deep shade of ebon black with pinpricks of light. It was an unbearable bit of beauty. He wanted to cry. He wanted to get down on his knees and kiss the ground beneath him. It was an amazingly ordinary Oakland alleyway, and that made it glorious. Sounds that weren’t filtered, or controlled, or limited. Dirt beneath his feet. Smells that were genuine and didn’t smell of lemon.
Colors. Oh. God. Colors.
The real world. It was real again.
“God, I hate this place,” Franco said, stepping behind Jake, who had been lingering just a few steps through the door. “Filth. Scum. Feces. Urine. Trash. All the things we’re better to be without.” Franco looked around with a sense of disdain plain as day on his face. It was clear Franco considered this the worst part of his job, made only tolerable by the level of force they often had to use on people here.
“Come come now,” Edward said as he stepped behind the two, closing the door behind him, cutting out the white light that had been flooding in from Heaven behind them. “We all lived here once. We were all human. It has a certain sense of charm to it, in a childish sort of way. This was where we proved ourselves worthy of God’s love, where we proved we were ready to join the ranks of Heaven, where we would live out all eternity in perfection.”
It made Jake nauseous just to listen to them. Their disgust and despise was beneath them, and they had no place talking about Earth like some cheap whore. It was here that Jake realized that Heaven had certainly taught him one thing – it had taught him how to hate. How to hate the angels who watched over him, how to hate the inane activities he was subjected to, how to hate confinement and loss of freedom. Before, he had been content to mostly sleepwalk through his life, but that attitude had gotten him to Heaven, and he hadn’t liked it one bit.
Heaven was no place for him.
Still, Jake admitted to himself that the angels were probably just buying into the whole propaganda that Heaven was s
elling in bulk. Either that or they were drugged beyond belief. Quite probably both, he thought to himself. As much as he wanted to hate them, he realized that, more than anything, he felt sorry for them. He wanted to wipe the veil from their eyes and show them what they were missing. Sure, some of it was wretched and horrible and appalling, but some it was just the opposite. The old adage was right – there could be no light without dark. And Jake found himself savoring the darkness surrounding him. Except that it really wasn’t darkness, just life. Just life.
“Whatever, Ed,” Franco sighed as he reached into the folds of his toga and pulled out a small compass, looking down at it. Edward had given him the compass while he’d been reading the parchment earlier. Apparently it had come part and parcel with the assignment. “Let’s just get this done with and get out of here. The less time I have to spend here, the better.”
Edward peered over Franco’s shoulder while Jake tried to keep calm. He almost felt a sense of agoraphobia – it’d been so long that he’d been trapped in the corridors and pathways of Heaven, he’d almost forgotten what it was like to look up and see no ceiling looming overhead. Being caged had almost turned him into an animal. Almost.
The two angels looked up from the compass and Edward tilted his head up skyward to get a sense of their current location. From the way the two of them were acting, it seemed Edward had been at this business for much longer than Franco had. “It looks like he’s off to the north of us, my fellows,” Edward stated. “Let us get moving.”
“Aren’t we worried about people, y’know, seeing us?” Jake asked, cocking his head to the side curiously.
Both Edward and Franco laughed at him, Franco slapping Jake on the back. “That’s a good one.” He paused a second, then grinned and laughed even bigger as they could see Jake honestly meant the question. “Good God, they really don’t teach you anything in training classes these days, do they?”