Authors: Cliff Hicks
“
Guys, I think I found what we’re looking for,” she said as she held up the engagement ring. “This is a definite sign of a big change in his life.”
Randall frowned a bit. “It’s an engagement ring. So?”
James rifled through the box quickly then looked at the ring with the other two. “Ah, but you’re missing a few key details, Randall. The important one is that it isn’t inside of a box.”
He cocked his head to look at James curiously. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
The burlier of the two male angels let a slight smile crack on his face. “Well, if it were inside of a box, it would mean he was going to propose to someone. But it’s not in a box, which means…”
“
Which means he was taking it back from someone,” Shelly said in a quiet whisper. “Oh god. He was taking it back from his fiancée. His ex fiancée I guess.”
“
And it was still in his pocket,” James said. “Which means he had just gotten it back from her and hadn’t had time to sell it back, or even put it someplace in his home. God, he must have just found out and killed himself right afterwards.”
Randall shook his head as he put the lid back on the box. “No, I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem the type, even with all that.”
“You can never tell who’s the type to commit suicide, Randall,” Shelly said. “It’s just like you can’t tell who is the type to try and break out.”
He started carting the box back up the ladder. “I bet we could’ve if we’d paid more attention, but we were caught up in just going through the motions like everyone else. No, I don’t think he killed himself. Plus there’s no weapon in here. If he had shot himself or something, that weapon would be in here, along with everything else. No, I think maybe she broke it off and maybe he got careless or something and got into an accident, and that’s why he had the ring still on him.”
He pushed the box back into the place that James had taken it down from. “And that very much sounds like unfinished business to me. It sounds like the kind of thing where he would want to go back and see what kind of impact his death had had on her. And that means he might have tried to go back to Earth.”
Shelly looked up at him with shock as he descended the ladder. “He couldn’t get back to Earth! How would he?”
James handed her the ring. They had kept it, for whatever reason. “Shelly, you need to stop thinking about what this guy can’t do, because apparently that’s not much. He broke out of quarters, something I’ve certainly never heard of anyone doing before. He wandered past security and he didn’t stand out. Most runners, they’re caught right away because…” he laughed softly, “well, because they’re
running
. Our guy wasn’t running. In fact, he was clear of head enough to bluff his way past a pair of guards and convince them he was their superior officer. I don’t know that I would have thought of that, and I’m a lot more familiar with wandering around Heaven than Jake is. At this point, if you told me he had grabbed one of the Archangels, beaten him up and forced the angel to take him up to meet God personally… let’s just say I wouldn’t put it past him.
“This Jake Altford is smarter than we gave him credit for. He’s thinking, he’s planning, he’s doing all of this with some degree of forethought. He figured out right from the start that if he stood out, people were going to notice him, so he didn’t. Remember, not one person we talked to other than those halfwit guards even remember seeing the guy.”
“So?” Randall asked.
Shelly shook her head. “Don’t you see? He’s blending in, trying not to get noticed so that he can disappear. By now, I bet he’s not only on Earth, I bet he’s already got his next step figured out, God only knows what that is, and we’re going to have to start getting caught up to him. I imagine he’s probably been and gone from his ex fiancée and has moved onto whatever he’s going to do next. This guy is not the same guy they brought up to Heaven. Whoever he was on Earth, he is not that guy anymore.”
Randall took the ring from Shelly as he nodded. “That doesn’t mean he might not have left some indication of where he was going. Hell, he might have even tried to haunt her or something, for dumping him. Maybe he’s just standing around watching her, but I somehow doubt we’ll get that lucky.”
Shelly nodded. “We should be so lucky. So… uh… that means we have to go back to Earth.” She stared at both of them, worry lines creasing on her face. “How do we do that exactly?”
Randall sighed softly. “No idea.”
James waved his hand dismissively. “Follow me. Remember, I had to do this for a while. I know how to get down to Earth.”
Randall laughed bitterly. “Finally, some good news for a change. Maybe luck is finally starting to turn in our direction.”
*
*
*
*
*
“
W
hat the
fuck
do you mean, you ‘lost one?’” an angel named Carlos shouted. He was sizable and intimidating and clearly not happy. He was shaking a finger at Terence, who was trying to shrink down to invisibility with no success. “How the Hell do you lose a soul? There’s one door! One single door! No other way in or out! That means he had to walk right past you to get out, and somebody had to have seen it!”
“Er, yes, well,” Terence stuttered, trying to get a word in edgewise. Carlos was their weekly report officer, and when he had arrived to get their weekly report, he’d noticed that Terence had been acting rather strangely. When pressed, the bookish angel had cracked like an eggshell and admitted that one of their flock had gone missing.
Things had pretty much been in steady decline since that point.
“So you let a soul just walk past you and out? Did he just say ‘Don’t worry, amigo. I’m just going out for a stroll and I promise I won’t be long?’ And where the Hell are the other angels? I see Byron’s over there teaching pottery or whatever, but I don’t see Randall, Shelly or James. What, did he take them hostage on his way out? And why the Hell am I just hearing about it now? Why wasn’t the alarm sounded, the Taggers sent out and this little shit dragged back to quarters?” Carlos had a loud voice and it was only getting louder by the second, as the large angel was starting to border on hysterical. Terence wouldn’t have been surprised to see him foaming at the mouth at this point.
“Now Carlos, try and stay calm…”
“Calm?! I’ll
show
you calm, you nitwit! I’ve never heard of anyone escaping out of the quarters, and of course you five screwups have to be the ones to do it, and on my watch!” He was pacing back and forth while Terence watched him, slouching into his chair, wishing he could just disappear. “I’m not taking the fall for you chuckleheads. You’re going to give me a full report on what happened and I’m going to go to the Taggers on overwatch and let them figure out what to do about it. Then I may pay a visit to our superior officer about your gross negligence. Me, I hope they give you idiots the worst detail they can imagine, and hopefully they won’t make me watch quarters because of your screwups.”
“Randall, Shelly and James have gone out to look for him, so I imagine they’ll be back any time now with the wayward soul in tow, so if you’d just relax…”
“Relax? RELAX? Are you out of your fucking
mind
? Okay, I want you to tell me exactly, exactly what happened?”
Over the next fifteen minutes or so, Terence related the events of Jake’s escape to Carlos, while the bigger angel went through fits of anger, disappointment, panic and back to anger again. Carlos eventually started scribbling notes on a piece of paper so he could get all of the details right. Most of the time, he was shaking his head as he was writing, trying not to scowl at Terence, even at the point where Terence admitted he was the one who was supposed to be standing outside during the shift change, which allowed Jake to rush past him. Terence also went through and filled in as much information they had about Jake Altford before his escape. Carlos was practically biting his bottom lip off by the time Terence got to telling him about the tunnel they had to dig, and Terence could see him writing Celeste’s name down an underlining it several times.
All in all, Terence was actually fairly impressed that they had held together this well. None of the other members of the flock had noticed anything gone astray, nor even noticed that Jake wasn’t around. The angels had covered up the tunnel before they had gone looking for Jake, so there wasn’t any difficulty in keeping it controlled as an exit. Besides, Terence pointed out, it only led to another set of cells anyway, and those cells were guarded by a different group of people, a group Terence had to admit were better at their job than they were. Carlos, of course, pointed out that they hadn’t notified senior staff, as per protocol, but Terence countered by saying angels in the working class had to look out each other.
Inside his head, Carlos was one step away from falling apart. No one had ever gotten out of the quarters before who wasn’t supposed to. It was one of those things that people always joked about because it was clearly impossible. The quarters were tight as drums, foolproof and unbeatable. Except, of course, that some schmuck had just beaten that system by running through a goddamned
open door
. The system, he realized, was fine; it was the people manning it who were flawed. (And why wouldn’t they be, he thought to himself. After all, this is Heaven.)
About an hour later, Carlos had finished compiling all the data for his report, and had inspected both sides of the tunnel to make sure it wasn’t another security risk. He yelled at Celeste and her team for a few minutes before he left the cell block and headed to the regional block of Taggers.
The Taggers weren’t all kept in one central location. It had been determined early on that people could try escaping Heaven from any number of places, so Tagger stations needed to be scattered about like fire stations, so there was a rapid response team handy at a moment’s notice. Still, there were small branches and regional branches. The small branches had Taggers that were the equivalent of mall security, often doubling as checkpoint guards. But the region branches had the more dangerous characters.
Carlos walked into the regional branch and nodded sagely to the receptionist, a big bulky man who looked like he could punch a rhinoceros in the face and eat it for breakfast raw. He was, of course, the scrawniest of the bunch. The receptionist nodded and opened the door for him to enter with a buzzer on his desk. Carlos opened the door and stepped through into the Tagger lodging area.
Tagger quarters were much more like military bunk quarters, with lines of bunk beds, each with a pair of footlockers at the end of them. As Carlos walked down the rows, he only grew more nervous. These Taggers were the kind of men and women who made anyone nervous.
They were rugged, cut and deadly. The high end Taggers were recruited from the likes of the military and warrior elite throughout history – Spartans, gladiators, commandos, Special Forces from all walks of life and nationality. They were doing push ups, chin ups, whatever exercise they could think of to keep themselves fit and trim. They practice with wooden swords, in case they were ever called upon to do battle with demons or devils or the like. (Which had never happened that any of them could remember, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared, they figured.) They ran laps and practiced jumping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels, in case any of that might be necessary in the pursuit of a loose soul on the lam. (It rarely was. Most of the time, ‘tagging’ someone involved finding the person running around Heaven like a chicken with his head cut off and, well, cutting his head off…) The Taggers weren’t sure if exercise affected a soul post-death, but it didn’t hurt to spend the time regardless. For most of them, it was second nature already.
As Carlos reached the end of the row, he came to the office at the end of the barracks, a burly blonde man with a crew cut sitting behind the desk. The Taggers wore much more utilitarian clothing. Gone were the togas and replaced with white tunics and slacks, a white belt around the waist. The blonde man at the desk was busy writing something on a piece of paper, and it took Carlos a few seconds to summon the strength to clear his throat and make his presence known. The angel behind the desk looked up, and it made the halo on his head tilt so Carlos could read the words “BORN TO KILL” etched into it. “Help you?” the man behind the desk asked, his voice a low roll of ominous thunder. His voice sounded American, and those deep blue eyes implied that Carlos was bothering him.