Authors: Cliff Hicks
“Were you already helping him at that point?” Randall asked the Cherubim.
Bob chortled. “I didn’t even know he was
out
until you told me he was, actually. When you told me that he’d broken out, I sort of figured he might go back and look at his old life, see what had happened since he died. Of course, Jake had done me a square one himself, and so I felt like I owed the guy one. So I tried to throw you as far off the trail as I could,” Bob said with a smile. “Sorry.”
James waved his hand and returned the smile. “It’s understandable, Bob. Nothing to forgive. So when did you meet up with him? We’re just trying to fill some holes in for our own understanding.”
The Cherubim nodded. “By coincidence, actually. I figured Jake would’ve done all that traditional stuff and been long gone before I could catch up with him, so I just went about my business, carting souls back up to Heaven. And, as fate would have it, I had to pick up a guy who was dying in the exact same graveyard where Jake was buried, and where he happened to be visiting, er, himself. We talked, and I told him how to get in contact with me if he needed. What about you guys? What brought you over to Team Altford?”
Shelly had been leaning against Randall since they’d gotten to the coffee shop, and his arm was around her shoulder, her head resting on his. “We were chasing Jake,” she said, “and somewhere along the line, we realized he was right. We would’ve broken out too, if it had been us. Pretty soon, we figured out that it
was
us. We were prisoners, just like Jake, and we liked Earth. We didn’t want to go back to Heaven.”
James nodded. “Eventually I talked to Jake’s ex fiancée and she told me where I might be able to find him, if I got really lucky. As it turned out, I did, and I talked to him.”
Jake sighed. “They’re just like me, Bob. Just like you. People doing a job, only one day they wake up and realize they don’t like their job very much, and then they realize their job isn’t the only thing they don’t like very much. So they change one thing, then another, then another, and pretty soon, well lookee here, you’re an enemy of Heaven.”
James glanced at the clock, nervous, like he’d been doing since they arrived. “Speaking of which, I’m surprised we haven’t had to fight off an army of Taggers yet. We should be on the lookout just in…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Bob interrupted. “Right now, they couldn’t find Jake if their lives depended on it.”
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T
he Tagger barracks were a bustle of activity. For the last few hours, any number of Erelim had been examining the two compasses they’d set up to track Jake after their last one had been broken.
Captain Diogenes had met up with several of the other captains of Tagger barracks, and they had assembled a small army of Tagger contingents, all just waiting for the order to head to Earth and bring Jake back to Heaven, by any force necessary. Diogenes and the other Erelim Captains were already nervous. No one wanted to be the one to have to go and tell the Seraphim about this whole mess. The Archangels were a touchy bunch, and the Erelim reported to Michael.
Michael was considered the field commander of the armies of God, and Michael took his job incredibly seriously. He had an intensity to him that scared all of the Erelim, because unlike them, Michael had never been human. He and the other Archangels were the direct creations of God, and had been in Heaven since its formation, long before the dawn of humanity. They were the only ones who spoke to God directly these days, and as such, talking to an Archangel was more than a little frightening. So telling the Archangel who had the nickname “The Sword of God” that they had screwed the pooch was the last thing any of them wanted to do. That was why the Erelim had gathered a full host, 77 choirs of 7 Taggers each, and that army was going to bring in this one man, this Jake Altford, before Michael heard so much as a whisper about this mistake.
All the Taggers had been told to take no chances when they found him, and Max and his team had relayed all the information they had about Jake while they waited for the compasses to be ready.
They had taken the scrap of fabric Max had brought back from the lock up and split it into two, placing each section into a different compass, then closing them shut to let them get configured.
Normally, the compasses would be closed, they would wait eight hours and then the compasses would make a pleasant “ding!” noise. A Tagger would open the compass and there would be a small gold ring inside it, which meant the target was on Earth, and the lock would complete as soon the target was sent back to Heaven. If the target was still inside of Heaven, the ring would be silver, although it was rare for Taggers to get a compass to hunt down loose souls when they were still in Heaven. Most of the time, runners were easy enough to find in Heaven, wandering into someplace they weren’t supposed to be, and buckling under the very first question they got. And it wasn’t as high of a priority, because as long as they were Heaven, many times, that was enough. But the option was still there. Gold for Earth, silver for Heaven. The rings inside the compass were, in essence, region locks, helping to narrow down the vastness of all of Creation into two groups that were easier to parse.
This was why Max and his team had begun to panic the minute they’d followed Jake back into Heaven. The compass lock had been reset, and would have taken another eight hours to reacquire him before it would’ve been able to track him again. They didn’t know how Altford had figured it out, but it was something they were planning for now. They weren’t going to give him enough time to open a door, even if it meant thirty or forty angels went back to Heaven with him.
If the target was still in Heaven, there would be a glowing needle, pointing the direction they were in. This was how Taggers were able to pinpoint people when they were simply loose among the halls of Heaven.
It was a simple system that had never failed them.
Until now, of course.
This time, the two compasses hadn’t acted the way they were supposed to. In fact, they acted in a way none of the Erelim or Taggers had ever seen before. While some of the Erelim were arguing that it meant Altford was in Heaven, others argued that he had done something to break the compass system. But none of them really had any idea what was going on.
After the eight hours, the compasses did ding, as they were supposed to, but when they were opened, there was no gold ring. The rings were silver, which meant that Altford
should
be in Heaven,
but that wasn’t the part that bothered the Taggers. There was a glowing needle, but the needle was spinning around and around wildly, never stopping in any one direction for even an instant. Both compasses were exhibiting this erratic behavior.
“Altford,” Max spat with venom dripping from his voice.
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“
W
e Cherubim have never really known how the Taggers’ compasses work,” Bob said, “but when you ran into Heaven, the Tagger who had their compass plowed into me, and we both fell. On top of the compass, actually. When he took off after you, I looked at the wreckage of it, I found this.” Bob took out the scrap of cloth he’d picked up after the incident.
“What is that?” Jake asked, curiously.
“This, Jake, is a piece of the boxers you had on you when you came to Heaven,” Bob answered with a chuckle, tucking the fabric back in his pocket. “That’s one of the reasons they strip you naked. All of your clothes are put into storage, and if they need to track you down, the Taggers come, take a bit of cloth from it, toss it into one of their compasses and away they go. The compasses take eight hours to get a lock, as I’m sure James told you, and they reset when you’re back in Heaven.”
Jake shook his head. “I don’t get it, Bob. So you’ve got the bit of cloth they used for them to get a lock on. Can’t they just go and get another?”
Bob laced his fingers together, lifted them and pressed them against the back of his head as he leaned his chair back. “Nope.”
James snapped his fingers and pointed at Bob. “You took all of his clothes out of lock up.”
“Even better,” Bob grinned. “So I took all your clothes, and a bunch of other clothes from the same area, but there’s also a little box on the inside of each lid, that holds a small cutout they make right when they put your clothes into lockup. I replaced that.”
Randall shrugged. “So? They’ll just go grab some other guy in Heaven and realize it’s not Jake. What’s so clever about that?”
The Cherubim nodded. “That’s what would have happened if I just put some other guy’s sample in Jake’s sample box. But I didn’t.” He paused for a long moment and when Jake rolled his hand for Bob to continue the story, he cackled throatily. “So I have a friend, Roddy, another Cherubim, and he’s got a project. We Cherubim get bored when we’re not working, y’see, so we all pick up hobbies. Ol’ Roddy’s is quilting. Except he’s, well, a bit more intense about it. Each single thread of Roddy’s quilt is taken from a different article of clothing from a different soul we’ve brought up to Heaven. He weaves them all together, and that’s how he makes his quilt. So I traded him a few hundred pieces of clothing for a small bit of that quilt… which I stuck in Jake’s sample box.”
James’ eyes widened as he slapped the table with a laugh. “The compass would go mental. It would have hundreds of different leads from even the tiniest of samples. It would never stop spinning!”
The Cherubim kept smirking as he sipped from his cappuccino. “They’ll realize the samples are bad eventually, but it’ll keep them busy for at least a few days, give us some time to think.”
“Sure,” Jake agreed. “I mean, eventually they’ll just send hundreds of angels to Earth to comb the surface looking for me.” That started Bob laughing all over again. “What’s so funny, Bob?”
“Oh, kid, you don’t get it,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “
They don’t know what you look like!
”
“What the Hell are you talking about, Bob?”
“So you remember when they brought you up to Heaven, they made you take off all your clothes and they gave you your toga and tunic, right?”
“Sure,” Jake agreed.
“Well, you remember when they scanned you with that bright golden ring of light, to make sure you didn’t have any of your old clothes on you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, the second time, after you had your toga on, you covered your eyes, so that bright light didn’t get in them.”
“Bob,” Jake said, starting to sound a little annoyed. “I don’t see where you’re going with this.”
“When that second ring goes over you, Jake, it takes a picture of your face, and that picture is what they put in your file, in case anyone needs to go looking for you. Except in your case, there’s not a picture of your face…”
“There’s my two arms blocking the shot,” Jake said with a laugh. “They don’t know what I look like?”
“Not unless they got a look at you the last time they were chasing you,” Bob said. “But judging by the look on that Tagger’s face when he bumped into me, I don’t think he did.”
“They didn’t,” Jake said. “Holy shit. They don’t know who I am. They don’t know what I look like.”
James nodded. “True, but I don’t think that matters all that much. You’ve pissed them off something fierce. If that means they have to come down to Earth and send every loose soul they see back to Heaven, just to get you, they will,” the senior angel said. “You certainly know how to make enemies, Jake.”
“Let me think,” Jake said.
The fivesome sat in silence for a bit, before the other four started to talk to each other, chatting about odds and ends. Shelly and Randall were in the “new couple” phase, and were trying to learn as much about each other as they could. James and Bob found they could talk to each other on a professional level at first, but found out not long after that Jake and Bob had become friends because of Jake’s suggestion about music, and got heavily engaged in a discussion about music.