by Cliff Hicks
Clearly, this couldn’t have been how it all started... could it? Surely things had to have gotten worse over the years, and simply no one said anything, because the decline was slow but steady. Or maybe no one noticed, because of the scale on which things changed. It’s easy to notice changes when you have only fifty or so years in your life. Move that to centuries, or millennia, and things got a little harder to judge.
It was something Bob intended to give a bit of thought to. Perhaps, he considered, he could follow a few of his cases from the moment he picked them up all the way to the end of the line, just to see if there was happiness at the end of the rainbow for people he was bringing up.
He certainly hoped so, but time would tell.
* * * * *
It took James, Randall and Shelly some time to find a library, simply because they didn’t even really know how to look. Randall had convinced James that they should simply find a pay phone, and look in a phone book. But it seemed like something had happened to make pay phones virtually forgotten, because as much as they searched, they simply couldn’t find one. So eventually they simply started going into local businesses (all of which were closed for the night) and searching for a phone book.
And Shelly had been asking a lot of questions.
So far, Randall had explained to her the following things: telephones, electricity, automobiles, gasoline, light bulbs, photographs, printing, airplanes, computers, newspapers, television and skyscrapers. He had also simply given up on explaining a handful of things, such as the concept of a “buffalo wing.” (They had gone into a closed restaurant to find a phone book, and she’d decided to read the menu.)
The library, however, had been like Christmas morning to her. While Randall and James were doing their research on Jake, Shelly had been picking up books and reading as much as possible. In fact, it was to the point that the two angels were having trouble seeing her behind the walls of books she’d inadvertently erected around herself. Every so often, she would shout at one of them from behind the books about her newest discovery. “Did you know people are flying?” she called at them once, not waiting for an answer before continuing. “I mean, it looks like it’s in these great big chariots, but still! How long ago did they figure out how to do that?”
The world had certainly changed while they had been gone, and Shelly felt like it was a brand new beginning, one she was reveling in. She wanted it all. She wanted to know all about modern times, the technology, the people, the religion... she’d been fascinated by the stories about Jesus Christ. And Mohammed. And Buddha. Hitler. Churchill. And she was starting to read about the entertainers of the last thousand years now.
“It’s all so amazing,” she said quietly. “So unfamilar and yet... so exciting...”
* * * * *
Jake had decided he needed to get away from everyone and everything he was familiar with. His run in with Bob at the graveyard had been nice, but it had also been bothering him ever since. He had been predictable. He had done all the stupid things that people who have come back from the dead would do. See people who used to be important. Visit your tombstone. And he could kick himself for it. Because it was only dumb luck that he hadn’t gotten caught by angels or Taggers while he was doing any of those things. So he needed to stop doing traditional ‘back-from-the-dead’ experiences and do something completely alien to him.
That was how he ended up on the streets of London.
As he’d started experimenting around with things, he had decided to make a large scale jump to some place he wasn’t familiar with. He knew a bit about London, having grown up on British comedies and the like, but he’d never actually been there, nor had he ever given the idea much thought really. So he found a recent picture of the London streets using the Internet, and he did his best to memorize as many of the details as he could.
Then he cut himself a hole in the world and stepped on through.
It was a radically different place then where he’d grown up. (Of course, saying Omaha and London were different was a bit like saying that pygmies were having trouble with their basketball team being competitive.) The first thing he’d noticed was that the streets were so much narrower, and that all the buildings went up so much higher. Omaha had been doing a great deal of growing up during his lifetime, but there was still an endless amount of space to expand into. (Head ten miles in any direction, barring straight at the city of Lincoln, and a person would end up in a dramatic recreation of the nerve-wracking documentary “Children of the Corn.”) London clearly didn’t have that option, and as a result, he rarely saw a building that wasn’t at least three or four stories. The streets always seemed to have at least a handful of people on them at any time, day or night, and when you were wandering through the twisted back streets, people would occasionally wave down from their apartments overhead.
He’d seen a few loose souls wandering around, but after his encounter in the desert, he’d decided to say nothing to them. He had wondered, however, why there were celestial beings moving around on Earth without guidance at all. They seemed to be traveling aimlessly, and none of them paid Jake much mind. He wondered when the last time they had spoken to anyone was. Perhaps they had run from the Cherubim sent to bring them up to Heaven. Perhaps they had simply wandered loose from the lines of Heaven and no one had seen them go. There were many options, and he wanted to stop and ask them who they were and why they were on Earth still. But he knew he needed to keep his mind on his own life. He just wanted to enjoy being on Earth again and lay low and hope that no one noticed him, like all the other nomad souls he’d seen.
He was walking down the streets in the Notting Hill area in tangible form when everything went pear-shaped.
(A local expression he had heard.)
It was late afternoon, and the weather was, as someone told him, “typical London innit?” Grey overcast, somewhat gloomy, as if rain was threatening to attack at any moment, but was waiting just to make people anxious and to force them to grumpily carry umbrellas everywhere.
Jake hadn’t had a particular goal in mind when he’d gotten to London, other than to wander around and think. He figured it would be a good place to lay low in, and there was no reason for angels to be looking for him here, which explained why it was such a shock to him when they did.
In the sky above the streets, Jake heard a ripping sound, like cloth being torn apart, and looked up at the sky to see a tear had appeared, a white rupture of light, and seven angels poured out of it at high speed, the rift closing behind them. They were still some distance from Jake, and Jake could see they were all crowding around one of the angels, looking down at something he was holding.
The rest were holding flaming swords, naturally, already drawn and ready.
Jake could put two and two together, and he shifted to intangibility right away, simply so he could move faster and cover more ground. His Earth clothes collapsed into a pile on the ground below where he stood. He also drew the sword hilt from his belt, although he didn’t put his thumb over the jewel, so the blade didn’t spring free. He simply wanted to have it at hand.
He was fairly certain the angels were here for him, intent on sending him back to Heaven, but that didn’t mean he would need to make it easy for them, he figured. He was done with giving in without a fight. (A voice in the most cynical part of his mind told him, “Give’em Hell, kid.”)
Jake ducked into a building on his left, a hotel of some kind, and moved in, heading up the flights of stairs. He could have just floated up and passed through the ceiling, but he figured sticking to traditional human movements might confuse them a little. (Or lull them into a false sense of security.)
He reached the fourth floor of the building and passed through a door into a hotel room, which appeared to be empty. He stepped into the bathroom and waited. He figured they would stick to similar tactics that he’d seen Franco and Edward use, which meant they were going to send someone straight at him to flush him out.
The flaming swords
gave off no heat, but there was a very slight hissing sound that they gave off. Jake was listening for that hissing sound, and he could hear it approach. He waited inside the bathroom, the lights off, and that singular hissing sound closed in on him, moving closer and closer. He could see the light given from the sword filling part of the hotel room now, and he smirked a little bit, shifting his posture some. He felt certain these Taggers had prepared for a great many things when it came to him, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t prepared themselves for this. Jake continued to watch the doorway of the bathroom, and the minute he saw the point of a flaming sword visible through the left side of it, he acted.
Jake raised the sword hilt up and behind his head, his thumb just off of the trigger as he leaned his face against the wall and peeked through it, his eyes seeing the angel, an Italian looking woman, who didn’t see him. His thumb pushed onto the jewel and his blade snapped to life midswing as he brought the sword down through the wall and through the angel, cleaving off her head at the neck in a fierce strike.
The angel’s form collapsed into dust, but Jake was already moving, floating downward a floor as his thumb moved off the gem to let the blade disappear again. An optimistic part of him thought, “One down, six to go.”
“I saw a flash!” Yael shouted from somewhere outside of the hotel. “Did we get him?”
“The compass is still pointing,” Max yelled back, also from the outside. “He’s still here!”
On the third floor, Jake had found himself in another empty hotel room, and he turned tangible and crawled into the bed, pulling the covers up and over his body, trying to will in his aura as much as he could. As he saw the body of another angel flying up through the floor, moving up towards the room he’d just been in, he turned intangible, let his thumb turn the sword on again and cleaved across the angel’s torso, cutting him in half.
As the sword cut into him, the angel Nhlanhla shouted “He’s got a sword!” just before he turned into dust, and Jake was on the move again. (Jake wasn’t even sure how the Tagger had done that. Everyone else had fallen deathly silent the minute the blade touched them.)
There was no denying Jake had been doing well, but he was pretty sure he’d simply been getting lucky thusfar. They hadn’t known he was armed until now, he realized, so they’d been a bit less cautious then they should’ve been. He decided to keep the blade live and ran through a wall, starting to make his way across the floor.
Polydorous, the Spartan Tagger, tackled him from behind, plowing into him and Jake instinctively stopped floating, so the two began to fall rapidly through the floor. Polydorous had one arm wrapped around Jake’s neck and his right hand extended out, as the blade snapped to life. When they were halfway between the ceiling and the floor of the first floor, Jake could feel the Tagger’s body weight shift as he started to whip the blade around towards Jake’s front.
As the Tagger’s blade come around to the front of him, Jake suddenly snapped back to tangibility, and Polydorous and his live blade kept falling and moving, the blade continuing its path right into the Tagger’s own body as he fell through the floor below him. Jake’s form collapsed onto a table and he could hear the sound of another dust vortex below him as Polydorous dispensed himself. Jake rolled off of the oak top and back onto his feet, turning intangible again as he started to head towards the street.
“Partner up,” Yael yelled, “so he can’t pick us off one by one!”
That, Jake figured, was his cue to leave. Better to run out before his luck did.
He sprinted into the street and saw two angels hovering in the air above him, the Israeli woman Yael and the blonde man Max. To his left he saw a male Caucasian angel, the Brit named Benjamin, and to his right an Arabic angel, named Mustafah. Both men were closing in on him rapidly, and both had their blades drawn, as Max and Yael started flying downwards towards him. So he took the best option available to him.
He dropped downward again, passing through concrete and layers of all sorts of mess before he reached his destination, the London underground transport system. He was intangible and invisible, so the various commuters lingering in the tunnels never even saw him as he passed through them. He turned and flew towards the nearest tunnel, passing through the protective guards and into the tunnel itself.
He glanced back and could see the light of flaming swords down the tunnel behind him, illuminating the tunnels as they pursued him. And they were gaining.
He shifted left suddenly and then upwards, moving back to the surface, panic starting to grip his mind. He couldn’t outrun them, and he certainly couldn’t take them in combat. He’d gotten far luckier than he expected he could, but Jake knew they were approaching an endgame and fast. His mind was desperately rattling for some option, some idea he hadn’t thought of, some last ditch…
Oh.
He turned and passed through several walls then stopped as sharply as he could, somewhere inside one of the terminal pedestrian tunnels between the subway and the surface. His mind concentrated, although he didn’t have to think that hard, and then he started cutting a hole into the air, hurrying the motions as fast as he could. He probably had more practice at making these doors than most people, he thought to himself, trying to keep his mind out of a state of panic. He stabbed the sword in the center and turned it as fast as he could, and the instant the doorway was live, he ran through it.
“The compass went dead, but the last direction was that way,” Max told the other three angels as they flew in the direction they’d last seen Jake go. “Maybe he’s got some way of blocking the compass!” The angels had been very close behind and they arrived to Jake’s former location fast enough to see the glowing door and all four rushed into it seconds before the door closed behind them, only to find themselves back in the halls of Heaven.
Jake had opened a doorway back to the long corridor of doors and run back into the arms of Heaven, albeit ever so briefly. He had run down the hall and opened three doors, jumping into the second one, with no idea where it would lead him, and no real care either. He had opened the other doors to get them to split their forces up, and he hoped that shortly, he wouldn’t have anyone behind him at all.
He stepped through that second door, knowing the angels would be hot on his trail, and found himself somewhere in a jungle where he immediately set about to cutting another door in the air in front of him. Less than a second later, he stepped through the new doorway, running back into Heaven a second time. This time, however, he had aimed more for the lines of new souls. Franco and Edward had shown him around Heaven a bit when they had thought they were training him, so Jake had built up a fairly good mental map of the layout of Heaven. Jake immediately moved through the lines, not running, but in a brisk walk, maneuvering through the people back to the corridor of doors. He wanted to get moving quickly to his destination, but he didn’t want to stand out too much, and with all the Cherubim coming and going, he figured he might stand a chance at just blending in with everyone else.
As Jake strolled quickly through the lines, Bob saw the familiar form and stopped to peer over at him, as if double-checking his vision. Jake hadn’t seen Bob, but Bob had certainly seen Jake, plain as day, moving quickly past the lines and over towards one of the door corridors the Cherubim used to get to Earth. It had been unusual for a door to open inside the lines. In fact, Bob couldn’t recall it ever happening. The two souls with Bob had looked at him expectantly, but were still rattled enough that they didn’t find it too unusual when Bob asked them to wait there, as the Cherub moved over towards the doorway. If Jake had come back into Heaven, he figured, there had to be a good reason for it.
Seconds later, Max came barreling through the doorway and right into Bob, knocking both of them to the ground, the compass pinned beneath their combined weight crunching as they collapsed on top of it. The door winked shut behind him and was gone.
“Whoa!” Bob exclaimed as he pushed himself back to his feet. “Need to watch where you’re going there, man.” Bob
saw the words “BORN TO KILL” etched into the Tagger’s halo as the bulky ex-commando stood up and peered down at him angrily.
“Did you see someone run through here, Cherubim?” Max asked Bob, trying his best to stare him down.
Bob had to force himself not to chuckle. He saw exactly what was going on here, and knew that Jake had had more than enough time now, so he nodded. “Sure did.” The Cherub was pleasantly surprised by Jake’s actions, and his opinion of the kid grew in leaps and bounds every time they ran into each other. (Or past each other, as the case might have been.)
Max grabbed Bob’s tunic and lifted him into the air. “Where. Did. He. Go?” he asked through gritted teeth.
The Cherub did his best to look intimidated, sputtering as he pointed over towards the door corridor around the corner, “Th-th-that way, sir.” Best to sell the act as much as he could, and Bob’s recent encounter with the Taggers had reminded him exactly what their kind thought of his kind, so fuck’em, he figured, let him look scared and shivering, and the jerk won’t even consider why Bob was standing in front of the doorway in the first place. And of course he didn’t. The angel had other things on his mind.
The Tagger tossed Bob to the ground and started running, rounding the corner before stopping suddenly, looking down the long hallway, seeing a dozen doors open and glowing on either side just for an instant before they all snapped closed in succession of twos, like rows of dominos.
“FUCK!” Max shouted angrily, as he slammed his fist against the nearest door.
Bob, on the other hand, had a grin from ear to ear, as he dusted himself off and moved back to his feet, pausing to look down at the shattered remains of the compass, seeing the tiny bit of cloth that had been at the center of them. He picked it up, looking at it a second, then nodded for a moment, as he considered it. It only confirmed something Bob had been guessing at for a long time, and it meant bad news for Jake in the long run, unfortunately.