Authors: Cliff Hicks
It was tedious and boring work, however. The angels weren’t doing anything interesting. Mostly, they were like anyone working a dead-end job. They would walk back and forth, pace and gossip. Very little unusual ever happened. Sometimes they would lean against walls and stare out into nothing. Sometimes they would just bicker back and forth, friends having a discussion that got a little out of hand. They were, Jake decided, little different from convenience store clerks. Angels working a 7-11. It would’ve been a funny image on any other day, in any other place. But instead, it was just another surreal thing about this place in particular that didn’t make sense.
Then, just when he thought he couldn’t take much more of it, opportunity struck. Like most escape plans, Jake knew that a lot of his departure would depend on chance and luck. Luck, however, did intend to cut Jake a break, just this once.
It began as a standard shift change. Two of the angels would come out and they would talk with the other two angels for a few minutes, leaving one somewhere behind the door. The four had just begun their usual chat when the fifth angel, an excitable fellow named Terence, came rushing out. “News just broke!” he said, breathlessly. “One of the walkers spotted Lucifer on the planet!”
Suddenly, all four of the other angels stopped talking and looked over at Terence. “Where?” the stoic one, James, asked.
“Somewhere in the Midwestern United States,” Terence panted. “Most of the choir’s talking about it!” Terence was a little out of shape, and was bent over, his hands resting on his thighs.
Jake sneaked closer towards the door, trying to stay behind a bench. This was going to be his only opportunity. He knew this was going to take a lot of pure dumb luck on his part, but the idea of staying here much longer would drive him crazier than anything the angels could do to him. Whatever punishment they could dish out… well, it was worth the risk, Jake decided. How could it be any worse than macaroni paintings?
“Has someone told Michael?” the bookish one, Byron, asked.
“Of course not,” the leader, Randall, dismissed. “If Michael knew about it, he’d be sending half the host out to try and find Lucifer. And the last thing any of us want is another war. We all remember the last one.”
“And the body count,” Terence interjected.
“They won’t be able to keep the news from him forever,” Shelly, the only female angel working with Jake’s group, countered. “Sooner or later, he’s going to find out.”
“The later, the better. If he finds out long enough after it happens, Lucifer will have moved again, and sending angels to find him will be…”
While Jake really wanted to continue listening, he was at the threshold point. Another few steps and he would be through the door, and that meant that he would have to be visible to the angels when he sprinted the last dozen or so feet. Without uttering a prayer of any kind, Jake sprinted out from behind the benches he’d been using to sneak over and bolted through the door, pulling it shut behind him. Hurriedly, he glanced at the back of it and found several deadbolts, which he immediately began turning and latching.
In the staging room of Jake’s old place of confinement, the five angels turned to glance at the door as it slammed shut. Two of them darted over towards it, but it was already locked. They pulled and pushed on it, hoping to force it loose, before Randall put his hands on their shoulders, a silent indicator that they should stop.
The angels stood there in an awkward silence for a long moment, before Byron spoke. His voice was steady, yet annoyed. “Well,
fuck
.”
*
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*
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T
he room Jake found himself in was far more utilitarian than he’d expected it to be. He hadn’t really been sure what to expect, but the sparse command post looking thing he found himself in certainly wasn’t it. The room itself was fairly bare, with small visuals on the wall. Jake examined these closer and saw they were like television screens, but without any obvious source of projection. Each of them showed an aspect of the small quarters in which they were being held. The angels had been spying on them! And now Jake could see on one screen in particular the five angels arguing among themselves. There was no sound, but Jake could tell from the way the lead angel was pointing fingers at the others, that he and the others were not happy.
Other than the screens, there was not much else in the place. A few chairs and a table were all that was in the room. And opposite from the door Jake had escaped from, there was another, single, solitary door. Despite the fact that he had deadbolted the door a few times, he moved the table over in front of it, and then the chair.
He turned around to face the other direction, then inspected the other door without opening it, paranoid perhaps, checking to see if he could glean any information from it. He couldn’t. The door was just as blank as everything else. He leaned his ear up against it, hoping to be able to hear some sound beyond it, but no sound was forthcoming. In short, Jake determined the door would tell him nothing until opened. So he opened it.
On the other side of the room, there was simply another hallway with more white walls and another white door at the end of it. To Jake, it looked like the sort of hallway used to connect two larger rooms. He couldn’t recall being brought in this way, so he pondered for a moment whether they were brought in the same way he was sneaking out, or whether he had found the back tunnels of Heaven, much like the utilitarian passages that lined the areas behind most malls. To be fair, the mall tunnels had more color. (Taupe, usually.) And a mall felt like it had life to it. There was something lived in about the rooms behind malls, maybe just a psychic residue of people coming and going. They had the sense that they saw use. This room felt cold and lifeless, as though no human had ever set foot in it. Perhaps no human had. He walked down the passageway to another door, opening it. He had lost a little of his caution, emboldened by his escape attempt thusfar.
Beyond the door… there was another hallway. He had opened a door into a hallway that ran in either direction, with doors lining both walls. It was an endless white corridor, as far as the eye could see in other direction. As he stepped into the hallway, he realized that the tunnel he had moved up to get here was slanted. He had been climbing, and the area where he’d been living was below the level of the tunnel. He looked to the left of him, stepping out into the main hallway, and opened the next door down the line. Sure enough, it had a slight incline, as he expected it would. The hallway served as a hub, each hallway going up or down, and Jake was pretty sure he knew what lay behind each hallway – another area filled with people, each completely unaware of what was going on.
It was, Jake realized, a prison of its own.
Heaven was a prison.
It was something of a daunting realization. But one that Jake realized he had no time to linger on. The longer he was exposed like this, the more likely someone was to catch him standing around, and that would make him stand out, and they would ask him what he was doing, and they would realize he was someplace he was not supposed to be. And Jake did not want to be captured again. Anything was better than the day in and day out monotony of being trapped. The captivity had nearly driven him mad. He would not let that happen to himself again. Not easily, at least.
Neither direction seemed to show much promise, but he had to pick one or the other, so he simply chose a direction and started walking. Every so often he would hear a door start to open so he would grab the closest passageway into a cellblock and step inside of it and wait. He would see some angels pass by and give them time until he couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore before he would step back out and continue along his path.
The hall seemed long and unremarkable until he reached the end of it, where Jake came across a pair of larger doors. It occurred to him that not everyone he’d seen coming and going down the hallways was an angel. The lack of halos gave them away, in particular. But they still, well, they hadn’t even looked important, really. They certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything official that he could see. Several people were just roaming the hallways, looking wholly unremarkable, as if they could be anyone. So Jake decided he would try something. So far, this whole escape had really just been an escape from monotony, and he’d started to reclaim a bit of his sanity since his abrupt departure. He wondered if the angels gave much thought to anyone escaping Heaven. From the lax security once you were past the cellblock itself, he doubted they’d given it much thought. And that meant he just might have stumbled upon a flaw in the system.
He pushed open the larger doors and stepped into a busier chamber. People were coming and going, bustling about, and not one of them gave Jake a second look, not even the two guards who were standing on either side of the doors he’d just come out of. He nodded to one of the two angels who were standing guard, and one of them snapped off a well-practiced salute.
“Sir!” the angel barked.
Jake turned to regard him a little bit, then tried to put on his best air of superiority. He’d dealt with supervisors his whole life, and he was well aware how to act like an asshole to a subordinate. Whatever it took to blend in, he was going to do it. The angel looked him with a mild sense of nervousness and a glutton of respect, as if he was terrified of being chastised for being somewhat slack in his duty. The role of the sneering boss. If that was the role he was expected to play, so be it.
Anything to avoid more damned macaroni paintings.
“So, how’s it going…” Jake trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to remember a lackey’s name.
“Adams, sir,” the angel filled in, helpfully.
“Ah yes, Adams,” Jake said with a patronizing smile. “So Adams, what is there to report?”
“Nothing to report, sir,” the angel sighed slightly. “All quiet in the western blocks. Except, have you heard the rumor, sir?”
Jake let one of his eyebrows raise a bit suspiciously. “Rumor, Adams?”
“Oh,
yes
sir,” the angel whispered with a smile. “Word on the street is that Lucifer’s been spotted on Earth again.”
“And where did you hear this little bit of gossip from, Adams?” Jake was enjoying putting himself into the part, and the smile of condescending interest was genuine.
“One of the Cherubim bringing a load up from the planet, sir. They claim to have seen him in North America, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.”
“And has this juicy little tidbit made its way up to…”
“Oh,
no
sir, I imagine they’re trying to keep it from him as long as possible, sir. They don’t want another war breaking out. I’ve heard tell about the last one,” the angel said in a hushed tone, shivering a little, as if reliving those moments, moments Jake somehow doubted the man had personally experienced. “I don’t want to see another internal war, sir.”
Jake smiled and patted the angel on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, there, Adams. The last few times Lucifer’s been spotted, by the time anyone’s gone to look, they couldn’t find him. He’s a crafty one.”
Adams brightened up a bit at that. “That he is, sir!” There was something odd about Adams. Even when he had been whispering, he had practically been shouting. It was odd, someone using a sotto voice when they were standing right next to you. Jake almost felt like asking about it, but it would be entirely out of character to do so. Instead, he would have to keep up the distant superior act.
“Good lad. Carry on,” Jake finished, patting Adams’ back gently, in a vaguely reaffirming way he’d seen generals do in military films all the time. Adams looked as though he was trying to restrain how pleased he was at the compliment. Jake stepped away from the angel and into the more open space, taking a slight look about. It was a bigger corridor, but it still didn’t feel like an actual room. Were there no actual rooms in Heaven, Jake wondered to himself, that weren’t being used to house file clerks or human souls? Was all of Heaven really just hospital corridors?
He decided he was going to continue walking until someone stopped him, or he found something interesting to peer at. At the moment, he had neither. He turned to his right and began a new stroll, a confident step that moved with purpose. It seemed like with the right walk, no one noticed him, and he simply blended into the scores of people coming and going around the place. Heaven was a place where people simply minded their own business, too polite to inquire about anyone else.