Authors: Cliff Hicks
“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.”
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J
ake 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 selling 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?”
Edward smiled like he was about to instruct a young child in something very rudimentary. “The flock can’t see us unless we want them do, Jacob. Part of the advantage of being an angel on Earth is that we are invisible, in fact intangible, just the same as the Cherubim who picked you up, unless we choose to be solid.” Edward reached over to a stack of trash and moved his fingers through the can as though it wasn’t there. Then he focused for a moment and brought his fingers to close on the handle of the trashcan lid. Jake could see the angel’s form shimmer slightly before his hand closed on the handle and lifted the lid. Half a second later, the angel shimmered again and the can fell through his hand and back onto the trashcan. “We can move among them without any worry of being disturbed. You have no need to be afraid of them. They cannot harm you. And if even you chose to be solid and they did cause you harm, the worst that would happen is that your form would dissipate and you would reform back in Heaven, simply to start your work all over again.” The very idea of that sent shivers down Jake’s spine, but he did his best to conceal them. “So you see, you are in no real danger while we are down here and at work. Even the agents of Hell, should we encounter them, could do no worse than send us back to Heaven. Although I would imagine they could make it somewhat painful before they did.”
“Yeah, well,” Franco said, pulling Jake with him towards the end of the alleyway, heading towards the street proper, “I wouldn’t worry about that. The Hellfiends tend to keep to themselves. We have our charges and they have theirs and rarely the two should mix. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get our mark and be back home again before you know what hit us.”
“How are we supposed to find this guy?” Jake asked them. He was trying his very best to look comfortable, hoping they would simply write off his impatience as nervousness. In his mind, however, he was running through the options of how he could just get loose from these two and how to prevent them from tracking him down after he’d lost them. To be fair, he wasn’t so worried about losing them so much as he was about them finding him again later. He’d already figured out the first few steps of his plan. “That compass thing?” He figured the more ignorant he seemed, the more he would learn and the less likely he was going to have to go back to Heaven.
Edward nodded with a timid smile. “It came with the orders. I’ve never known exactly how they work, simply that they lead us to the particular person who has escaped back to Earth.” This put Jake slightly at ease. It would mean they would have to have a compass for him specifically, and would not just be able to use any old compass to find him. And before a compass could be issued for him, they would have to know he was missing. Jake felt like if he played his cards right, that wouldn’t be for a very long time indeed. He was sure the angels he’d locked in the cell wouldn’t want anyone above them finding out, and would do their best to keep his escape quiet on their own.
Franco shrugged. “It’s another thing in Heaven that just works and I don’t question it. Like the blade. If I stopped to question it, the very concept of it would drive me crazy, trying to figure out how the flame appears and where from. So I just accept it – I don’t know how it works. It just does.”
Jake chuckled. “That’s a lot of faith. What happens if it breaks?”
That elicited another shrug from Franco. “Never has yet.”
“It ever pick up rogue signals? One of theirs maybe?” Jake said, tapping his finger downward.
“Never has yet,” Franco answered again. Franco liked to keep things simple. He was a man who didn’t like things more complicated than point and shoot. He did what he was told, he chased who he was told to chase, he sent back who he was told to send back. He’d met other Taggers like Jake before, newly conscripted and full of questions, but after a period of time, that passed and they learned to focus on the job at hand, whether that be retrieving a loose soul from the halls of Heaven or the shores of Earth, or finding ways to keep themselves entertained while they waited for another task to be given their way.