Escaping Heaven

by Cliff Hicks

  Carlos peered at him, his eyes wide, from his corner, and his voice was a squeak among the lions. “Do… do you think that’s really possible? All the way from the quarters down to Earth?”

  “We’re not going to put anything past him at this point. It’s rare for a runner to get out of Heaven, but it does happen with enough regularity that I wouldn’t put it past our Mister Altford here. Yael, I want you to get to records and read through Mister Altford’s case file. Also, see if you can track down the Cherub who brought him up to Heaven. Maybe he can tell us something about Mister Altford’s last few weeks on Earth that will be of some relevance to our hunt. And get a copy of the portrait the scanner took of him when he turned his things into lockup when you’re down there, Nhlalha. It’ll help us to have an exact picture of what this guy looks like. The rest of you, I want you to do a preliminary sweep of the checkpoints between Mister Altford’s former quarters and the nearest thoroughfares. Talk to the guards at the checkpoints and anyone who happens to be clerking a desk near a door our target could’ve moved in or out through.” The Taggers were whispering quietly to one another until Captain Diogenes clapped his hands with a start. “Let’s go, people! You going to waste all day lollygagging around?”

  The Taggers filed out of the single exit to the room quickly, leaving Carlos alone with Captain Diogenes.

  “Don’t worry, Carlos. We’ll get him.”

  “I hope you’re right, sir. Because sooner or later, word of this is going to get up to the Seraphim, and I certainly don’t want to be the one taking the blame for it.”

  Diogenes walked around his desk and patted Carlos on the shoulder, escorting the man to the door of his office. “The Taggers are just like the Mounties, Carlos. We always get our man. I’ll let you know when it’s done.” He politely pushed Carlos out of his office, closing the door behind him.

  Carlos sighed, looking back at the door as it was almost closed in his face, turning to walk away. “Either it’ll be done, or you will, I guess…”

  * * * * *

  James looked back at Randall and Shelly as the three of them walked along one of Heaven’s endless corridors of doorways. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t get the exact right exit door. I can’t say that Omaha was ever a hotbed for runners to go when I was doing this,” he said before turning back to look at the doors, as if he was trying to find some mental landmark to give them an idea of where they were.

  To Randall, all the doors looked exactly the same, and he wasn’t even sure how anyone could tell them apart. “Hey, you’re definitely the expert here when it comes to these kinds of things. I would’ve probably just ended up picking a random door and then had to make my way across however much endless space before I even found… whatever state it is Omaha’s in.” He laughed a bit as Shelly looked at him, curiously. “What? I’m from the Bronx, hon. Anything west of Chicago’s all one big blur to me.”

  Shelly forced a smile, but Randall could see she was slightly uncomfortable. “Yeah, I think this is going to be a little bit harder for me than it is for you, Randall. How long ago did you die?”

  Randall shrugged slightly. “I dunno. Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago now, why?”

  “Not that much changes on the planet in twenty years, and James here was chasing runners down, both here and on Earth for a while, so he’s seen some of the changes. Me… well, I haven’t been back to Earth since I died, and that was a few thousand years ago, at least. The world’s not going to look anything like I remember it. I’m not going to have any idea what anything is,” she admitted nervously. “I don’t want to be dead weight down there.”

  Randall tried to offer her a warm smile, patting her shoulder. “We’ll be around to help you make sense of it all. It’ll be a lot to take in at first, but you’ve always been a quick study. I’m sure you’ll figure it out all quickly enough.”

  Shelly turned and hugged Randall again, holding him for a moment before James cleared his throat, and she released him so the two could turn again to face him.

  “I think this is the door,” James said, “but I certainly wouldn’t want to stake my life on it.”

  Randall looked at him and waved a hand in the air. “Nothing much left for us to lose,” he said before he placed his hand on the doorknob, turning it and pushing the doorway in, the doorframe filling with white light. “So let’s go.”

  One by one, the three angels stepped into the doorway of light and left Heaven.

  As he emerged on the other side, Randall looked around him curiously, taking a few steps forward so he wouldn’t have the other two bumping into him when they came through. He was, however, absolutely perplexed, and his head swiveled and craned to let his eyes scan around them. “Okay, so this doesn’t seem right,” he said to himself. James stepped through next and Randall turned to look at him. “Are you sure you were even in the right vicinity, James?”

  James looked at Randall with a slight frown on his face. “Sure? No. I thought I was going to end up pretty close, why, what seems…” he trailed off as he started to look around them.

  Shelly stepped in after them and nearly bumped into the back of James, the door closing shut behind her, then disappearing. She looked around and smiled. “Oh, so the world really hasn’t changed that much at all. That’s a relief,” she said.

  The three of them found themselves in the middle a jungle-like area. It was dark, and the sounds of primal wildlife were all around them. It was a little disconcerting to James, and Randall was one step away from panicking.

  James paused a moment, then started walking a little bit before looking back at the other two. “Wait here a minute.” Then he took off at a quick run into the trees, vanishing into the night.

  Randall knew, deep down, that he was intangible and that nothing in here could harm him, but he was a city boy who’d never much liked the wilderness, and being in the middle of a rainforest jungle wasn’t exactly soothing his nerves. Shelly could see that Randall was jumpy, and she put her arm around his shoulder. “Don’t worry, you silly man, nothing here can hurt you,” she told him.

  From the darkness, there was a slight rustling, and Randall let out a soft sigh of relief. “Oh thank god. James, what did you fiiiIIIYAAAH!” he shouted as a large howler monkey came barreling at him, running straight through him as Randall stood there, arms out in shock. The monkey passed through him without so much as a scratch to either the angel or the primate, carrying on his run and disappearing again into the jungle.

  Shelly couldn’t help it. She began to giggle. And the giggle bubbled over into a laugh. And the laugh boiled up into uncontrollable fits of cackling amusement.

  “Oh, VERY funny, Shelly!” Randall said, stomping his foot as he closed his eyes and shook his head quickly, trying to snap himself back into focus. “How the Hell am I supposed to be prepared for a charging monkey?”

  “Randall,” James’ voice said, right behind him.

  “AHHH!” Randall shouted, as he jumped again. (If he still had functioning bowels, he probably would have soiled himself twice by now.) “Don’t do that James!”

  James looked at him with a slight smile. “What’s the matter, got a monkey on your back?”

  “Oh, ha fucking ha. Everyone have a good laugh at me? We done? Good. Now what did you find?”

  “Seems I wasn’t that far off in the first place. Come on,” he said as he started to walk towards the jungle. “It’s not far.”

  “Not far?!” Randall said in shock. “Look, I don’t know much about Omaha, but I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any rain forests in North America!”

  “You’re right,” James said as he paused on the edge of the trees, looking back at Randall. “You don’t know much about Omaha. You coming or what?”

  Shelly looked at Randall, shrugged and then moved over to James, and Randall sprinted immediately after them, as the idea of moving deeper into the jungle with his friends was less frightening than the idea o
f staying along in the jungle. With the howler monkey.

  The threesome didn’t have far to walk. After twenty paces or so, they passed through a rock wall and found they were in a much more brightly lit area that looked, well, less jungle-like. (Most jungles didn’t have tiny signs.) “What the hell?” Randall asked, looking around him.

  “Keep up,” James said, as he continued walking.

  They kept moving and a few minutes later, they had passed through a handful of walls and were outside, where James turned to look back and point the direction they’d come from, making Randall and Shelly turn to gaze behind them.

  Directly behind them stood a large domed structure, and a sign that read “Lied Jungle.” They stopped and took stock of the area, and Randall turned to look at James. “We came out at a zoo?”

  “Looks like it. I suppose it is a relatively out of the way location, and it’s not exactly like people are hanging around zoos at night,” he said, waving his hand up at the nighttime sky which was littered with pinpricks of light.

  Randall peered at him curiously. “Why would it matter if they were? It’s not like anyone can see the doors, right?”

  The senior angel swayed back and forth a little bit. “We-ell, technically, that’s supposed to be true, but there are reports of people seeing them throughout history, people who are still alive. I always chalked it up to cosmic coincidence, but I’ve heard stories that there are people who possess some kind of sensitivity to these things, so the doors are designed to appear in areas that currently have a low concentration of people around them, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I guess a little extra security never hurt anything, but damn if it didn’t give me one Hell of a fright,” he said with a laugh. (Stupid monkey, he thought to himself.)

  “Now we have to figure out how to track down Jake,” James pondered as he rubbed his chin. “He may have fled from Omaha already, but his friends and family might know where else he might have gone, so we should probably start there.”

  “Sure,” Randall agreed, “but how do we find out who those people were? I mean, I know it’s been a while since you’ve done this, James, but how did you used to track them down?”

  James frowned a little bit. “When I was a Tagger, we were given a compass that would point their direction, and then we simply closed in bit by bit. Seeing as we can’t tell the Taggers what we’re doing, and that I don’t even know how they got the compasses, that’s not going to work for us.”

  Randall snapped his fingers and pointed at James with a grin. “Got it. They used to run obituaries when people died, so I’m betting they still do. And I’m betting they still keep records of all of those in libraries. So let’s find us a phone book, figure out where a library is and…” he said, trailing off in midsentence as he turned to look at Shelly, who was standing directly beneath a lamppost, staring up at it. She’d apparently been doing so for some time, and was now starting to float upwards towards the light itself. “Shelly, what are you doing?”

  “How… how do they keep fire in such small globes?” she said as she peered at the streetlamp’s bulb. (Were the wires she could see enchanted?) She frowned at herself and then turned to look at the other two as she floated back down to their level. “I’m sorry. It’s something commonplace, isn’t it? It’s something that’s been around for a long time and I’m weird for thinking how absolutely amazing it is, aren’t I?”

  The other two angels smiled at her warmly. “It’s okay, Shelly,” Randall said. “You’re allowed to be amazed by whatever you want.” He paused for a second then turned to look at James. “You know, something just dawned on me… how is it you both speak perfect English? You’re both, like, thousands of years old!”

  James laughed a little bit, his eyes twinkling with mischief at knowing something Randall clearly didn’t. His mouth opened again, and words poured out of it, but they clearly weren’t in English, although Randall understood it perfectly. “You can understand any language we speak,” James said in Italian before shifting to Russian. “So I can use any known dialect on Earth,” he said before transitioning into Latin, “alive or dead,” then into Welsh, “and you’ll understand it perfectly.” He grinned at them, saying to them in Japanese, “they apply the effect when they run the golden rings on you, after they take your clothes, and it never goes away.”

  Both Randall and Shelly looked astonished, staring at him. They had understood everything James had said, and they had been consciously aware that the language was shifting, but they had still understood it without effort. Shelly realized that this had probably been this way since the moment they died, but because they’d never thought about it until now She decided to try, and willed herself to think that she wanted to speak in Sumerian, and opened her mouth to say “This is perhaps the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.” She gasped, slapping her hand over her mouth and then started to giggle.

  “So I just hear it in English, because that’s what my brain grew up with?” Randall asked. “But you’re not normally talking in English, are you?”

  James nodded with a sheepish smile. “That’s entirely true. I’m natively speaking and hearing and thinking in Egyptian, although a lot of words don’t have ancient Egyptian equivalents, so I tend to hear those words in whatever language the speaker is using natively.”

  Shelly nodded. “I’m speaking in Latin, because it’s what I grew up with in Rome.”

  “Good lord, we really do know so little about each other, don’t we?” Randall said with a sigh. “We should fix that.” He turned to James, cocking his head with a slight smile. “The, uh, language thing… that apply to the written word too, or am I going to be doing all of the reading on this little field trip?”

  James laughed slyly, shaking his head. “Don’t worry, it’s written as well as spoken. We’ll all be fine.”

  Randall nodded, pleased at the progress that had been made. “Okay, let’s get ourselves to a library, then…”

  * * * * *

  As Bob walked back from the Taggers quarters, he felt as though he was seeing Heaven for the first time. Only this time it seemed so very different. Bob couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Heaven had changed.

  Or, he had to admit to himself, he had.

  Normally, Bob was the kind of Cherub to move from point A to point B without too much lollygagging around (that kind of thing could be done at point A or B, but rarely between) but now he found himself taking a more leisurely path, observing Heaven more than he ever had before. And he found himself coming to one inevitable conclusion...

  Jake was right.

  Heaven sucked.

  Sure, it wasn’t a horrific place, but it wasn’t good either. When he’d first been offered the assignment of Cherub, he’d leaped at the opportunity, simply because it would shake the monotony of his life. Bob hadn’t been in the type of section Jake had been in, but he hadn’t found all that much joy in the section he had been in either.

  When he’d first arrived, it had completely seemed like paradise. Sunshine, beaches, tropical drinks (no alcohol in them, naturally), pretty girls walking around everywhere... but after about a decade of that, it had grown stale. The drinks never got him buzzed, the beaches never really changed, and he certainly wasn’t allowed to do anything with the pretty girls he saw walking everywhere (not that they generally talked to him anyway), so he didn’t honestly see the point. (Shouldn’t someone in Heaven, well, put out? He’d quite liked sex on Earth, and was hoping to do that for the rest of eternity...)

  One of the angels watching his section, a rather nice Brazillian woman named Yaritza, had sensed his growing ennui and recommended to the local Cherubim leader that Bob be considered for a position relaying souls back and forth between Earth and Heaven. And Bob had been ecstatic.

  Because it was change.

  Now he realized that change was the thing Heaven was most against. For decades, he’d been bringing people back and forth, and every sidestep of the rules, or of protocol, had never
gotten him in trouble, because, it seemed, nobody cared. (Or, more often, could be bothered to actually do anything about it...)

  He walked along the lines, no real destination in mind, simply observing all the angels at work, trying to see something that would make him feel better about all the people he had ferried up here. Angels moving back and forth, people standing in lines, forms being passed out... he even went to a few of the more closed off sections (he wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one told him not to, so he just walked in) looking for someone in Heaven who looked genuinely happy.

  And he didn’t see it.

  All of the people in line were like sheep, just souls being herded and railroaded into lines to keep them busy until Heaven could find (or carve) some place to stuff them. They were given paperwork that was needlessly complex, just to keep them busy. And no one ever seemed to stop and just ask how they were doing. They weren’t being treated as people – they were simply numbers to be filed and forgotten about.

  Bob stood amidst the lines and frowned, scratching his head as he wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. Sure, Bob thought to himself, he was no great fan of the process, but somehow it hadn’t seemed this bleak before. It was almost as if the blindingly white walls had distracted him from looking at what was within them.

  He wasn’t alone in being distracted, it seemed. The people who were passing out the forms, manning the lines, working the desks... they all seemed completely content to just continue about their day without a care about any of the people they were tending to. Even the angels themselves didn’t seem to pay much attention to people, unless there was a problem, or the angels wanted something.

  How could he have missed this?

  The Cherub felt slightly angry with himself, then let out a soft sigh. His problem was that he couldn’t think of how to fix it, or more accurately, where to begin fixing it. Any one string he pulled would cause a dozen other things to come off the rails. And more importantly, no one else seemed interested in fixing anything. He hadn’t been around Heaven since the beginning, but he was no spring chicken here either, and he found himself wondering how long this had been going on. How had Heaven gotten itself here?