Authors: Cliff Hicks
“
You’re right,” James said as he paused on the edge of the trees, looking back at Randall. “You don’t know much about Omaha. You coming or what?”
Shelly looked at Randall, shrugged and then moved over to James, and Randall sprinted immediately after them, as the idea of moving deeper into the jungle with his friends was less frightening than the idea of staying along in the jungle. With the howler monkey.
The threesome didn’t have far to walk. After twenty paces or so, they passed through a rock wall and found they were in a much more brightly lit area that looked, well, less jungle-like. (Most jungles didn’t have tiny signs.) “What the hell?” Randall asked, looking around him.
“
Keep up,” James said, as he continued walking.
They kept moving and a few minutes later, they had passed through a handful of walls and were outside, where James turned to look back and point the direction they’d come from, making Randall and Shelly turn to gaze behind them.
Directly behind them stood a large domed structure, and a sign that read “Lied Jungle.” They stopped and took stock of the area, and Randall turned to look at James. “We came out at a zoo?”
“
Looks like it. I suppose it is a relatively out of the way location, and it’s not exactly like people are hanging around zoos at night,” he said, waving his hand up at the nighttime sky which was littered with pinpricks of light.
Randall peered at him curiously. “Why would it matter if they were? It’s not like anyone can see the doors, right?”
The senior angel swayed back and forth a little bit. “We-ell, technically, that’s supposed to be true, but there are reports of people seeing them throughout history, people who are still alive. I always chalked it up to cosmic coincidence, but I’ve heard stories that there are people who possess some kind of sensitivity to these things, so the doors are designed to appear in areas that currently have a low concentration of people around them, just to be on the safe side.”
“
I guess a little extra security never hurt anything, but damn if it didn’t give me one Hell of a fright,” he said with a laugh. (Stupid monkey, he thought to himself.)
“
Now we have to figure out how to track down Jake,” James pondered as he rubbed his chin. “He may have fled from Omaha already, but his friends and family might know where else he might have gone, so we should probably start there.”
“
Sure,” Randall agreed, “but how do we find out who those people were? I mean, I know it’s been a while since you’ve done this, James, but how did you used to track them down?”
James frowned a little bit. “When I was a Tagger, we were given a compass that would point their direction, and then we simply closed in bit by bit. Seeing as we can’t tell the Taggers what we’re doing, and that I don’t even know how they got the compasses, that’s not going to work for us.”
Randall snapped his fingers and pointed at James with a grin. “Got it. They used to run obituaries when people died, so I’m betting they still do. And I’m betting they still keep records of all of those in libraries. So let’s find us a phone book, figure out where a library is and…” he said, trailing off in midsentence as he turned to look at Shelly, who was standing directly beneath a lamppost, staring up at it. She’d apparently been doing so for some time, and was now starting to float upwards towards the light itself. “Shelly, what are you doing?”
“
How… how do they keep fire in such small globes?” she said as she peered at the streetlamp’s bulb. (Were the wires she could see enchanted?) She frowned at herself and then turned to look at the other two as she floated back down to their level. “I’m sorry. It’s something commonplace, isn’t it? It’s something that’s been around for a long time and I’m weird for thinking how absolutely amazing it is, aren’t I?”
The other two angels smiled at her warmly. “It’s okay, Shelly,” Randall said. “You’re allowed to be amazed by whatever you want.” He paused for a second then turned to look at James. “You know, something just dawned on me… how is it you both speak
perfect
English? You’re both, like, thousands of years old!”
James laughed a little bit, his eyes twinkling with mischief at knowing something Randall clearly didn’t. His mouth opened again, and words poured out of it, but they clearly weren’t in English, although Randall understood it perfectly. “You can understand any language we speak,” James said in Italian before shifting to Russian. “So I can use any known dialect on Earth,” he said before transitioning into Latin, “alive or dead,” then into Welsh, “and you’ll understand it perfectly.” He grinned at them, saying to them in Japanese, “they apply the effect when they run the golden rings on you, after they take your clothes, and it never goes away.”
Both Randall and Shelly looked astonished, staring at him. They had understood everything James had said, and they had been consciously aware that the language was shifting, but they had still understood it without effort. Shelly realized that this had probably been this way since the moment they died, but because they’d never thought about it until now She decided to try, and willed herself to think that she wanted to speak in Sumerian, and opened her mouth to say “This is perhaps the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.” She gasped, slapping her hand over her mouth and then started to giggle.
“
So I just hear it in English, because that’s what my brain grew up with?” Randall asked. “But you’re not normally talking in English, are you?”
James nodded with a sheepish smile. “That’s entirely true. I’m natively speaking and hearing and thinking in Egyptian, although a lot of words don’t have ancient Egyptian equivalents, so I tend to hear those words in whatever language the speaker is using natively.”
Shelly nodded. “I’m speaking in Latin, because it’s what I grew up with in Rome.”
“
Good lord, we really do know so little about each other, don’t we?” Randall said with a sigh. “We should fix that.” He turned to James, cocking his head with a slight smile. “The, uh, language thing… that apply to the written word too, or am I going to be doing all of the reading on this little field trip?”
James laughed slyly, shaking his head. “Don’t worry, it’s written as well as spoken. We’ll all be fine.”
Randall nodded, pleased at the progress that had been made. “Okay, let’s get ourselves to a library, then…”
*
*
*
*
*
A
s Bob walked back from the Taggers quarters, he felt as though he was seeing Heaven for the first time. Only this time it seemed so very different. Bob couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Heaven had changed.
Or, he had to admit to himself, he had.
Normally, Bob was the kind of Cherub to move from point A to point B without too much lollygagging around (that kind of thing could be done
at
point A or B, but rarely between) but now he found himself taking a more leisurely path, observing Heaven more than he ever had before. And he found himself coming to one inevitable conclusion...
Jake was right.
Heaven
sucked
.
Sure, it wasn’t a horrific place, but it wasn’t
good
either. When he’d first been offered the assignment of Cherub, he’d leaped at the opportunity, simply because it would shake the monotony of his life. Bob hadn’t been in the type of section Jake had been in, but he hadn’t found all that much joy in the section he had been in either.
When he’d first arrived, it had completely seemed like paradise. Sunshine, beaches, tropical drinks (no alcohol in them, naturally), pretty girls walking around everywhere... but after about a decade of that, it had grown stale. The drinks never got him buzzed, the beaches never really changed, and he certainly wasn’t allowed to
do
anything with the pretty girls he saw walking everywhere (not that they generally talked to him anyway), so he didn’t honestly see the point. (Shouldn’t someone in Heaven, well,
put out?
He’d quite liked sex on Earth, and was hoping to do that for the rest of eternity...)
One of the angels watching his section, a rather nice Brazillian woman named Yaritza, had sensed his growing ennui and recommended to the local Cherubim leader that Bob be considered for a position relaying souls back and forth between Earth and Heaven. And Bob had been ecstatic.
Because it was
change
.
Now he realized that change was the thing Heaven was most against. For decades, he’d been bringing people back and forth, and every sidestep of the rules, or of protocol, had never gotten him in trouble, because, it seemed, nobody cared. (Or, more often, could be bothered to actually do anything about it...)
He walked along the lines, no real destination in mind, simply observing all the angels at work, trying to see something that would make him feel better about all the people he had ferried up here. Angels moving back and forth, people standing in lines, forms being passed out... he even went to a few of the more closed off sections (he wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one told him not to, so he just walked in) looking for someone in Heaven who looked genuinely happy.
And he didn’t see it.
All of the people in line were like sheep, just souls being herded and railroaded into lines to keep them busy until Heaven could find (or carve) some place to stuff them. They were given paperwork that was needlessly complex, just to keep them busy. And no one ever seemed to stop and just ask how they were doing. They weren’t being treated as people – they were simply numbers to be filed and forgotten about.
Bob stood amidst the lines and frowned, scratching his head as he wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. Sure, Bob thought to himself, he was no great fan of the process, but somehow it hadn’t seemed this
bleak
before. It was almost as if the blindingly white walls had distracted him from looking at what was within them.
He wasn’t alone in being distracted, it seemed. The people who were passing out the forms, manning the lines, working the desks... they all seemed completely content to just continue about their day without a care about any of the people they were tending to. Even the angels themselves didn’t seem to pay much attention to people, unless there was a problem, or the angels wanted something.
How could he have missed this?
The Cherub felt slightly angry with himself, then let out a soft sigh. His problem was that he couldn’t think of how to fix it, or more accurately, where to begin fixing it. Any one string he pulled would cause a dozen other things to come off the rails. And more importantly, no one else seemed interested in fixing anything. He hadn’t been around Heaven since the beginning, but he was no spring chicken here either, and he found himself wondering how long this had been going on. How had Heaven gotten itself here?
Clearly, this couldn’t have been how it all started... could it? Surely things had to have gotten worse over the years, and simply no one said anything, because the decline was slow but steady. Or maybe no one noticed, because of the scale on which things changed. It’s easy to notice changes when you have only fifty or so years in your life. Move that to centuries, or millennia, and things got a little harder to judge.
It was something Bob intended to give a bit of thought to. Perhaps, he considered, he could follow a few of his cases from the moment he picked them up all the way to the end of the line, just to see if there was happiness at the end of the rainbow for people he was bringing up.
He certainly hoped so, but time would tell.
*
*
*
*
*
I
t took James, Randall and Shelly some time to find a library, simply because they didn’t even really know how to look. Randall had convinced James that they should simply find a pay phone, and look in a phone book. But it seemed like something had happened to make pay phones virtually forgotten, because as much as they searched, they simply couldn’t find one. So eventually they simply started going into local businesses (all of which were closed for the night) and searching for a phone book.
And Shelly had been asking a
lot
of questions.
So far, Randall had explained to her the following things: telephones, electricity, automobiles, gasoline, light bulbs, photographs, printing, airplanes, computers, newspapers, television and skyscrapers. He had also simply given up on explaining a handful of things, such as the concept of a “buffalo wing.” (They had gone into a closed restaurant to find a phone book, and she’d decided to read the menu.)
The library, however, had been like Christmas morning to her. While Randall and James were doing their research on Jake, Shelly had been picking up books and reading as much as possible. In fact, it was to the point that the two angels were having trouble seeing her behind the walls of books she’d inadvertently erected around herself. Every so often, she would shout at one of them from behind the books about her newest discovery. “Did you know people are
flying?
” she called at them once, not waiting for an answer before continuing. “I mean, it looks like it’s in these great big chariots, but
still
! How long ago did they figure out how to do that?”