Authors: Cliff Hicks
“So?”
Jake exhaled carefully, closing his eyes again, holding his head in his hands before he looked up, steeling his face. “Call.”
Franco laughed, clapping his hands together, flipping over his cards. “Read’em and weep, sport! Three Kings!” He leaned forward, brushing away the communal cards, starting to reach for the pot of chips in front of them.
“Ah ah ah…” Jake replied with a grin spreading over his face, flipping over his cards, pulling the communal cards back into the center of the table. “Full house, Queens over Kings.”
“Oh you gotta be…” Franco fumed, comically. “Why I oughta… of all the...” Jake pounded his fist on the table, and it was hard to tell if he was really angry at Jake or more disappointed with himself. “You suck, Jake!”
“Look, Franco, you had a good hand, but I had a better one. That’s the way these things work. Just gotta learn to roll with the punches,” Jake said as he pulled the pot of chips back towards him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
After wandering around for a while, Jake had bumped into Franco, who had gravitated to Jake. After a bit of chitchat, Franco had realized that Jake hadn’t gotten settled yet and led him to the bunkrooms. Tagger housing was a bit like military quarters, rows and rows of bunk beds in a large room. Franco helped Jake find a bed (although it wasn’t hard, as this particular barracks seemed almost entirely empty), and then, after shooting the breeze for a while with him, Franco had dragged Jake back into a room off to the side, where they had set up a poker table. They’d been bringing pieces back to make the room better for a while, grabbing things on each run they’d made back to Earth. A card table. Playing cards. Poker chips. They’d built it one bit at a time, and Franco had joked around that it was probably all contraband, but that no one ever seemed to come looking, so they felt okay with it. Nobody had ever checked them when they got back from their duties in Heaven and on Earth, and they felt like they were owed something for all their work and their waiting. Mostly their waiting. Being a Tagger, Franco had explained, was a lot like being a fireman – there was a lot of waiting around, being bored.
The door to the small backroom burst open, and for a second, Jake was afraid it was someone coming to reprimand them, or, worse still, catch him being a regular person faking at being an angel on assignment. It was neither. A smaller angel, Edward, was leaning against the doorway, panting. “Come on, guys!” he wheezed, “we’ve got a runner topside we’ve got to go get!”
“Topside?” Jake asked, a bit optimistically, as he stood up quickly. This might just be the break he was looking for, if they meant what he thought they did, and they did.
“You know!” Franco said, punching him in the shoulder as he also stood up. “Back on Earth. Every so often one of them gets loose and we have to go down and get them. What, you’ve never made a topside run before?”
“Nah, I just got started, remember?”
“Oh man, you’re gonna love this. You get to really put the screws to them. Come on, let’s get moving.” The three angels grabbed their swords from the table, heading for the door. Jake felt odd. The Taggers were the type of angels Heaven would send to put him back in quarters, yet here he was, pretending to be one.
“How do we even get back to Earth?” Jake was now completely interested in this mission of theirs, because it would give him just what he needed, a way out of this madhouse they called Heaven. Even if he couldn’t get out this time, he would know how the routes in and out worked, and maybe he would be able to slip away unnoticed. “Just some door or something?”
“Not or something, just a plain ol’ door. Trust me, you’re gonna get disoriented at least the first dozen or so times we go there, because it looks just like any other door you see. There’s nothing remarkable or distinguishable about it in any way, shape or form. It’s just… there. All the doors are. And there are a
lot
of doors.”
Jake cocked his head to the side while they walked down the corridor. People tended to cut them a lot of space when they walked, Jake had noticed, and he figured it was the sword at their belts that made people nervous, a form of implied authority that just scared the crap out of everyone they saw. It was nice. Jake had spent most of his life with people bumping into him, pushing him around, cutting in line in front of him and just generally making his life miserable. Perhaps there was some justice in the afterlife after all. Assuming you were willing to break some rules, circumvent some processes, ignore some paperwork, steal a halo and a sword, lock up some angels…
A few minutes later, they opened a door and stepped into a long hallway filled with rows of doors, each one looking exactly like the last. Franco had been right, though – there would likely be no way Jake could get back to this hall on his own right now. They had twisted and turned and looped and dipped and folded and maneuvered so much, Jake was starting to feel that Heaven’s main architect was M.C. Escher. “Where on Earth did he pop out, Eddie?”
“I hate when you call me that,” Edward grumbled, looking at the parchment in his hand as he scowled. “Says here he came out in Oakland.”
“Shit,” Franco said with a snort, “we should leave his sorry ass there. It’s gotta be worse than Hell could ever be.”
Edward pushed the circular spectacles back up onto his nose, as they started to slide down. “Now, Franco, you know that’s not our call to make. We have to save these poor souls from themselves.” He lifted a single finger into the air and started counting doors from the left in his head before stopping, pointing at a door. “That one.”
Franco tapped Jake. “That’s why I bring him along. My ass would get lost in a heartbeat.” He had a lazy grin on his face that implied the two were old friends, and that they were simply bringing Jake along for the ride. Jake hadn’t even been entirely sure where Edward had heard about the runner from. Where did Heavenly orders come from, he wondered? Was there a Holy Dispatch, giving out directions for angels who spent most of their days sitting around? Were there beat Taggers, like cops, out wandering around with no real purpose than to watch for, well, people like him, he supposed? If so, they weren’t doing a very good job.
The three angels walked over to the door. It was strange, but Jake had starting thinking of himself as both ‘one of them’ and ‘one of us’ the minute he put the halo on his head. He was an angel, but he wasn’t like the other angels. He looked like a Tagger, but he wasn’t, not really. While all of them were content with simply doing their daily work, puttering around waiting for their next chance to goof off and hope they didn’t get caught, Jake was actively looking for a way to escape the insanity that was Heaven.
He stepped forward to put his hand on the doorknob, almost as if he was afraid it would identify him for not belonging here. Maybe that was how the Taggers were alerted that someone was making a run for it. Would it overlook him because he had a halo on, or was there some sort of clearance he was supposed to have gotten? He grew nervous for a moment, and grasped the door handle, half expecting it to be hot and burn his hand, or cry out in alarm. Instead, it simply felt like average, cold metal. He turned the knob, and started to pull it back. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until Franco yelled behind him suddenly “BOO!” Jake practically leapt half a foot into the air while Franco began laughing in hysterics. “That never gets old!” Franco howled. “Come on, Jake, it’s not gonna bite you.” Jake opened the door a bit more boldly now, and was nearly blinded by the endless white light that flooded over them. “Although they really could stand to turn down the light show, you know?”
Jake wondered if it was some part of the gateway between Earth and Heaven that created this immense amount of light. He recalled having seen a similar doorway of overwhelming light when Bob had first led him and the others into Heaven. It was odd that Bob crossed his mind, but Bob had seemed like a genuine person, much less the mindless robots that passed for angels around here. The other Cherubim he had seen or interacted with when he’d been wandering through Heaven all seemed to have a great deal more personality than the rest of the flock.
“Come on, you two,” Edward said, “let’s go.” Edward, Jake decided, was exactly what Heaven wanted more of. He was docile, obedient and kept mostly to himself. He always was eager to follow whatever order was handed to him without question and never seemed to think twice about anything. Edward was, for all intents and purposes, a lapdog of an angel. Edward grabbed both of them by the arm and the three of them stepped into the white light and back onto Earth.
It was… amazing. Amazingly ordinary, but somehow still amazing nonetheless. To be honest, Jake had to admit, other than the white light and the radical changing of special location, it was simply like stepping through any other door. No tingly feeling, no sudden whoosh of air, no twirly special effects… it was somewhat disappointing, Jake thought to himself. It really did just feel like one big parlor trick, and once you knew the secret, the magic, like the mystery, was gone.
Jake turned to look at Franco, putting his hands on his hips disappointedly. “That’s it?”
Franco shrugged a bit. “I know, but what can you do…”
All three of them finished together “…after all, this is Heaven!”
*
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J
ames opened the door to their section once more, as Byron and Terence stepped back inside. They would cover for the rest of the angels while they were out looking for their missing ward. The door shut behind them with a certain sense of finality, which made all of the angels nervous, both the ones inside and the ones who were going to go on the hunt.
“You think they’ll be able to keep everyone in check?” Shelly asked James, as the three of them started to examine the area for any signs of anything. Of course, it was as bland and featureless as it had always been. Shelly was shifting about, fussing, the whole area practically alien to her. For the most part, the angels stayed in their individual cellblock. On rare days where she was in a poor mood, she felt like the bunch of them were prisoners just as much as their wards. Still, there had to be some order imposed on the flock.
“I’m not worried about it. Byron and Terry can handle those zombies. They’re all too passive to do anything,” James snorted as he crossed his arms and leaned his back against the wall. James actually found himself looking forward to getting out for a bit of a stroll, although he’d never admit that to the others. James was one of the people who suffered wanderlust, and so he’d wander from one cell block to another from time to time, talking to whoever happened to be on duty that day. He never left the block hub, certainly, because that would have gotten him in all sorts of trouble, and none of the other angels knew that when he was supposed to be keeping tabs on the flock, but he certainly wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be, because it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Nothing ever really happened.
James thought that if he was brutally honest with himself, he felt he was more at fault for Jake’s escape than any of the other angels were, simply because he was never watching the monitors when he was supposed to be. He would be next door, talking with Celeste or down the hall, chatting up the guards at the end of the hallway.
Of course, there was no way that James could have known that all of the other angels were just as guilty of those types of indulgences as he was. At least, James thought to himself, the rest of the people they had been tasked to keep tabs on were still as docile as sheep.
“Yeah, well, that’s what we thought about Jake, and look where that line of thinking got us,” Randall growled in replied. He was crouched down next to both of them, looking carefully to see if he could find any tracks or hints of passage, knowing full well he wouldn’t.
James lowered his head a bit. “Sorry, Randall.”
Randall sighed. The burden of command had never been easy on him. He hadn’t particularly liked being thrust upon the role, but they claimed his personality and temperament made him unsuitable for most other jobs in Heaven. Of course, he never had understood why he simply wasn’t made one of the docile flock, for that matter. Randall had a questioning personality, but kept his opinions to himself. Early on in his time in Heaven, he’d witnessed a couple of Taggers beating up a runner, and he immediately knew that wasn’t going to be him, no matter what it took. (Neither the runner OR the Tagger, actually.) So he’d changed his entire approach. He was still in the lines then, but he started recognizing the filtering process and he decided it was better to be the kind of guy who chased people down instead of the guy who got chased down. Of course, he was surprised enough as it was simply to get
into
Heaven, but that was another question he knew not to ask. And he had a theory of his own about it anyway. “Don’t worry about it,” he said as he stood up again. “We’ll find him, and we’ll handle him. It’s just one lousy human.”