Authors: Cliff Hicks
After a minute or two of pondering, Adams lifted one of his hands up and pointed down the corridor. “Down that way, sir. I saw him talking to one of the Cherubim for a minute or so, then he kept heading down that way until he was out of my sight, sir.”
“Thank you, Adams. That’ll be all,” James said as the three angels started to move down the corridor themselves. They were quick in their step, and Adams waved cheerfully behind them, happy to be rid of them, eager to get back to his contemplation of what he was going to do with his next day off. Once they were out of earshot range, James laughed a little bit to himself and looked at the other two. “He wasn’t too bright, was he?”
Shelly shrugged slightly. “I don’t know. I don’t even think he knew what he was supposed to be doing there. I mean, they’re posted on the outsides of the cellblocks, and not the inside. What is management worried about, invasion? Mass riots? Shouldn’t they be more worried about people trying to get out? Shouldn’t they, I don’t know, be on the other side of the door?”
Randall sighed in response as the three continued their way down the long white corridor that looked identical to every other white corridor as far as the eye could see. “I was amazed there were guards at all, actually. Heaven apparently used to be so confident that people would be happy wherever they ended up, there weren’t even doors.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Shelly asked, dodging a tall angel with a massive stack of paperwork in his arms who was moving past them in the opposite direction. It was a sign they were moving into the more populated areas of Heaven and out of the outskirts where places like their cellblocks were kept. It was hard to get an actual picture of what Heaven looked like in terms of layout, mostly because it felt like any hallway was interchangeable with any other hallway, except that the rooms at the ends of them had different people jammed in them, but that didn’t stop the angels from wondering.
“One of the old-timers said it during my training session,” Randall said as he helped steady the giant monstrosity of paper in the angel’s arms as he pushed past him in turn. It wasn’t that the hallways were too narrow so much as the fact that size of the stack of papers in the angel’s arms kept him wobbling back and forth in the hallway to keep the papers from toppling over. Randall simply helped him out of reflex. “You’ve been here a long time, James. That true?”
James lifted his hands, spreading them as he turned flat to press his back against the wall, giving the tall angel as much room as he could to pass. “I guess. That was a very long time ago, though.” He kept quiet, as if trying to discourage the questions with his silence, a tactic that rarely worked with this bunch, and showed no sign of working now, as the angel passed him and the three of them carried on their way again.
Randall stopped in his tracks, causing James to almost walk into him. Randall then turned to look at James with a bit of a frown. “You guess? Either you do know, or you don’t, man, so which is it?”
James’ face reflected a combination of annoyance and resignation, as he stopped as well, making Shelly stop with them. “Look, Randall, I know you’re in charge, so I’m trying to be polite about it all, okay, but what happened to me personally is my business and none of yours. Heaven’s… well, it’s just a lot different than it used to be. It was smaller, more intimate. And it felt like the angels actually gave a damn about us. But that was a long time ago. As the population’s been growing, there’s been less of them and a bunch more of us, so they can’t make us feel as special any more. And mostly? That just makes me sad. I feel like we’re not giving these people an afterlife where they can find eternal happiness, we’re just… keeping them busy. Detaining them. And that doesn’t feel right to me, okay?” His voice had been growing tenser as he spoke to Randall, and towards the end, he was practically shaking a lecturing finger in Randall’s direction.
The change in tone did not go unnoticed by Shelly and Randall, who weren’t used to seeing James get wound up unless he was intentionally trying to project an image of being upset. Here, however, Randall had clearly touched a nerve and he wanted to put James back at ease quickly. “Hey, easy there, James, a’right? I don’t know who these people are and why they get sent into spaces like ours, but I think it’s just because they don’t fit in anywhere else, so it’s our job to help them fit in, okay? I mean, Heaven has to do something with them, so we try and make them comfortable and happy, but we can only do so much.”
“That’s just it, Randall,” James said, pausing for a very long moment. “I almost… I almost just want to let this kid go.”
Shelly jumped into the conversation suddenly, with a gasp. “You can’t mean that, James! You just can’t!”
James turned to look at her, a tired expression behind his eyes. “Honestly, Shelly, if it were you in there, if you’d been forced to sit through that arts and crafts lifestyle Byron inflicts on them day in, day out, wouldn’t you go crazy? Wouldn’t you want to bust out if you were one of them?”
Randall chuckled quietly. “No shit. There’s days
I
want to bust out and I’m one of
us
.”
Shelly sighed with resignation, clearly somewhat uncomfortable with this line of conversation. “I wouldn’t just run out, though. I’d talk to someone first, tell them I wasn’t happy.”
Randall gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. “He did. We weren’t listening. Remember? Remember when he told us he didn’t want to do the things the group was doing?” He started the three of them moving again, as a Cherubim with three newly collected souls in tow starting moving towards them from one of the doorways. The three angels lowered their voices, but continued with their conversation.
“Well,” Shelly said, “that was because we just suspected the drugs hadn’t taken hold, that he’d be fine once he was drugged.”
“But it seems he didn’t take the drugs, Shelly. Or, worse, what if he took them and they didn’t do anything for him? Regardless, we had a guy in there who wasn’t drugged in a situation you clearly need to be on fairly heavy medication to endure.”
Randall snorted a bit. “I know it drives me up the wall.”
“Exactly,” James stated, pointing a finger at him. “And you signed up for it. To this guy, it must’ve been like torture. And really, who wants that kind of thing out of Heaven, you know? I can’t imagine it’s what anyone wants from their eternal respite. This certainly isn’t what I wanted out of Heaven.”
“What
did
you want out of Heaven, not to pry?” Shelly asked as they moved towards the doorway the Cherubim had been leading people out of a moment ago.
“Originally, I just wanted something restful, but after doing that for a few hundred celestial years, I got bored. So I asked if I could do something. They made me a Tagger for a while, but I learned I didn’t enjoy that at all, so I processed forms for a while, but that got pretty tedious, too, so they put me in here. To be honest, though, I don’t like it here much either. I mean, you guys are okay, but it feels almost as bad as when I was a Tagger. It’s Heaven, right? Why should anyone be unhappy? Yet, none of the people we take care of are genuinely happy. They’re just drugged into a mindless zombie state, and we tell ourselves they’re happy when they’re not. Why can’t we just make people happy instead?”
Randall’s hand grasped the door handle and pulled it open. “It doesn’t work that way, sadly, although yeah, it does seem kind of weird that no one’s really happy in Heaven. The people who take jobs get bored with them, and they’re not happy after a while. The people who are put into holding areas might be happy at first, but eventually they get bored, and that’s when they start getting drugged, just to keep them manageable. No matter who you talk to, from the common souls to the most experienced Cherubim, no one really says ‘Hey man, I’m one hundred percent happy doing what I’m doing, and I can do this forever.’ It’s Heaven, right? Shouldn’t those kinds of people be all over the place?”
Shelly snapped her fingers and pointed at them, the idea clearly lit up on her face. “We should talk to the guy who brought him in, see if he had any ideas about where he might have gone.”
Randall frowned at her a bit, putting a hand on his hip. “C’mon, Shelly, you really think he might have told some Cherubim what he was going to do?”
Shelly smiled patronizingly. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that men can’t keep their mouths shut when they’re thinking. Let’s go.”
*
*
*
*
*
J
ake was moving around a series of crates inside a warehouse, holding the sword hilt in his hands, wondering exactly how he was supposed to recognize a dead guy on sight. When he’d been brought to Heaven, he’d looked exactly as he’d died, albeit without all the mortal injury inflicted to his personage. After a few of the stops in processing, they had, as he remembered, taken all of his old clothes and given him the toga/tunic combo he was wearing now. Some of the women he’d seen had long white dresses, but the majority of them were wearing outfits very similar like the men were. Jake had to wonder, with all the sexuality stripped away in Heaven, was there no need for women to wear dresses? Or maybe many of them simply preferred the shorts that came with the togas. Him not being a woman himself, he realized he really couldn’t fathom the reasons for their choices, it was simply something he had noticed.
Still, since Edward had said their target had run from the line almost immediately after getting to Heaven, he wouldn’t be wearing the trademark white-on-white-on-other-white-with-shades-of-white-and-white-highlights that was all the rage in Heaven this season. Or any season, Jake supposed. So there would have to be some way to spot him.
Moving around the warehouse was still taking some getting used to, but Jake was a quick learner of his capabilities. Once Franco and Edward had told him that he could shift from solid to intangible with a thought, he’d been practicing it on and off every chance he got during their pursuit. He’d been picking things up, leaning through walls, getting used to having his field of view jammed into solid objects – it wasn’t so much a skillset as simply a few less rules to follow and a few more things to get used to.
The warehouse was poorly lit, as warehouses often are during the times when no one is expected to be moving around them, and as such, the three of them had agreed not to ignite their swords until one of them had a visual lock on their prey. If one of them saw a great flare of heavenly fire in the distance, they would come running, knowing that the target was there. Jake was trying his best to squint as he weaved through the empty spaces between massive rows of metal and wooden crates. He knew he wouldn’t bump into anything, which was why it came to him as shock all the more when he
did
.
Later it would dawn on Jake that heavenly things moving on the earthly plane were simply on a different plane, and that all heavenly things shared one common plane that simply overlapped the more earthly plane. The practical upset of all of this is that if two heavenly beings happened to be on Earth, and happened to both be backing up, facing away from one another, the two of them would actually bump into each other like any two people on Earth could do, and would react in about the same fashion, which is what happened.
They bumped. Jake jumped. The target, whose name was Nathan (not Nathaniel, never Nathaniel), screamed and started running in the opposite direction, never once stopping to look at Jake. He was passing through all sorts of containers as he fled, waving his arms in the air. Jake regained his composure and snapped the fiery sword to life. It was almost blindly bright, like carrying a welding torch that burned the eyes in a pleasant way (if there was such a thing, which apparently there was), although Jake felt himself squinting anyway out of pure reflex. There was a quiet hiss of flame when the blade sprung free, something Jake hadn’t heard when he’d opened the blade in Heaven. If anything, it made him feel better, as if the blade had some real presence beyond the visual he had of the shaft of fire. The thing didn’t even give off heat, though, which was all the more strange to him. But having a bit of sound gave it presence to compensate. The light emanating from his sword was almost overwhelming. In the dark of the warehouse it was like Jake had flooded a part of the area with an almost unbearable light. Jake shouted out, just in case the other three somehow missed the supernova he was carrying to light up the room. “He’s running towards you, Edward!”