by Cliff Hicks
Neither direction seemed to show much promise, but he had to pick one or the other, so he simply chose a direction and started walking. Every so often he would hear a door start to open so he would grab the closest passageway into a cellblock and step inside of it and wait. He would see some angels pass by and give them time until he couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore before he would step back out and continue along his path.
The hall seemed long and unremarkable until he reached the end of it, where Jake came across a pair of larger doors. It occurred to him that not everyone he’d seen coming and going down the hallways was an angel. The lack of halos gave them away, in particular. But they still, well, they hadn’t even looked important, really. They certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything official that he could see. Several people were just roaming the hallways, looking wholly unremarkable, as if they could be anyone. So Jake decided he would try something. So far, this whole escape had really just been an escape from monotony, and he’d started to reclaim a bit of his sanity since his abrupt departure. He wondered if the angels gave much thought to anyone escaping Heaven. From the lax security once you were past the cellblock itself, he doubted they’d given it much thought. And that meant he just might have stumbled upon a flaw in the system.
He pushed open the larger doors and stepped into a busier chamber. People were coming and going, bustling about, and not one of them gave Jake a second look, not even the two guards who were standing on either side of the doors he’d just come out of. He nodded to one of the two angels who were standing guard, and one of them snapped off a well-practiced salute.
“Sir!” the angel barked.
Jake turned to regard him a little bit, then tried to put on his best air of superiority. He’d dealt with supervisors his whole life, and he was well aware how to act like an asshole to a subordinate. Whatever it took to blend in, he was going to do it. The angel looked him with a mild sense of nervousness and a glutton of respect, as if he was terrified of being chastised for being somewhat slack in his duty. The role of the sneering boss. If that was the role he was expected to play, so be it.
Anything to avoid more damned macaroni paintings.
“So, how’s it going…” Jake trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to remember a lackey’s name.
“Adams, sir,” the angel filled in, helpfully.
“Ah yes, Adams,” Jake said with a patronizing smile. “So Adams, what is there to report?”
“Nothing to report, sir,” the angel sighed slightly. “All quiet in the western blocks. Except, have you heard the rumor, sir?”
Jake let one of his eyebrows raise a bit suspiciously. “Rumor, Adams?”
“Oh, yes sir,” the angel whispered with a smile. “Word on the street is that Lucifer’s been spotted on Earth again.”
“And where did you hear this little bit of gossip from, Adams?” Jake was enjoying putting himself into the part, and the smile of condescending interest was genuine.
“One of the Cherubim bringing a load up from the planet, sir. They claim to have seen him in North America, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.”
“And has this juicy little tidbit made its way up to…”
“Oh, no sir, I imagine they’re trying to keep it from him as long as possible, sir. They don’t want another war breaking out. I’ve heard tell about the last one,” the angel said in a hushed tone, shivering a little, as if reliving those moments, moments Jake somehow doubted the man had personally experienced. “I don’t want to see another internal war, sir.”
Jake smiled and patted the angel on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, there, Adams. The last few times Lucifer’s been spotted, by the time anyone’s gone to look, they couldn’t find him. He’s a crafty one.”
Adams brightened up a bit at that. “That he is, sir!” There was something odd about Adams. Even when he had been whispering, he had practically been shouting. It was odd, someone using a sotto voice when they were standing right next to you. Jake almost felt like asking about it, but it would be entirely out of character to do so. Instead, he would have to keep up the distant superior act.
“Good lad. Carry on,” Jake finished, patting Adams’ back gently, in a vaguely reaffirming way he’d seen generals do in military films all the time. Adams looked as though he was trying to restrain how pleased he was at the compliment. Jake stepped away from the angel and into the more open space, taking a slight look about. It was a bigger corridor, but it still didn’t feel like an actual room. Were there no actual rooms in Heaven, Jake wondered to himself, that weren’t being used to house file clerks or human souls? Was all of Heaven really just hospital corridors?
He decided he was going to continue walking until someone stopped him, or he found something interesting to peer at. At the moment, he had neither. He turned to his right and began a new stroll, a confident step that moved with purpose. It seemed like with the right walk, no one noticed him, and he simply blended into the scores of people coming and going around the place. Heaven was a place where people simply minded their own business, too polite to inquire about anyone else.
Perhaps Heaven was managed by the British, he thought.
He walked down the corridor and came to a door guarded by a pair of angels with sword hilts on their belts. Jake tried his best to look official and offered them a curt nod, which the two angels returned, before Jake stepped through the door and into a much larger room.
This was the kind of room he had first seen when arriving in Heaven, so he expected it was a kind of hub of some sorts. There were plenty of people milling about, moving left and right, standing in lines, pushing carts full of paper back and forth. It had an odd rhythm to it, even though Jake now understood that it was mostly to give them something to do. A giant machine, made up souls and angels, carrying papers back and forth to achieve incredibly small things.
Heaven was a Rube Goldberg machine, it seemed.
(He idly wondered what Rube himself thought of that.)
He thought back to the paperwork he’d filled out and suddenly a lot of the questions made a lot more sense to him. “Do you like delivering things?” “Do you enjoy puzzles?” “Are you good at fact checking?” For these people, this was exactly what they wanted out of Heaven. They wanted to feel good, and useful. They wanted to be doing something. They didn’t believe in the idea of an eternal rest, so the angels had simply put them to work… doing things. Sorting, filing, cataloging. The souls of the dead were nothing more than library books to be put on the proper shelf, in the proper group, in the correct room. He feared to imagine what a worse idea of Heaven could be, but he was sure if he went wandering around long enough, he’d accidentally stumble into it. He was fairly certain it might involve produce in some rather disturbing fashion.
There was a tugging on his robe and Jake turned to see a short man glaring up at him, holding out a clipboard. “Hey Mac, I don’t have all day. You wanna tell me where I’m sending these stiffs or what?” the Cherubim said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder to point at a small gaggle of people who were staring about the place in awe and wonder. New arrivals, Jake realized. He probably had the same look himself when he showed up.
For half a moment, Jake wondered why the Cherubim was asking him where to put them, but then it dawned on Jake – no one really had any idea of what they were doing in Heaven, and everyone was just faking it. So all he had to do was keep faking it and he could probably get away with nearly anything.
Jake took the clipboard from the tiny angel and peered down at it, scanning through the options. It was a page of “blocs” with each one having a number and a letter, and after that a small parenthetical to explain which type of personality fit where. He hadn’t seen a number/letter combination when he came out, but he assumed they were marked somewhere. He scanned down and came across a parenthetical that said “Coffee shop” then looked up at the bunch of people. They were mostly chatting with themselves, when they weren’t trying to look co
ol, which was almost never. He took the small pen from the top of the clipboard and checked the section before handing it back to the diminutive angel. “That’ll keep’em satisfied,” Jake told him.
The Cherubim grinned up at him and gave him a big thumbs-up. “You got it, chief,” he said before moving back to the gang of newly arrived souls. “Okay you motley lot, let’s get a move on. Everyone start heading thataway. And don’t dawdle! If I have to start thumpin’ skulls again, you know I will!”
He shook his head as the tiny angel and his horde started heading towards one of the tunnels. This place was strange, but so far he had just been able to wing it. Look like you know what you’re doing and no one will question you. Confidence was carrying him a long way, and Jake had to idly wonder if he’d projected this kind of “I know what I’m doing” air about him when he was alive, if he wouldn’t have gotten walked on less.
* * * * *
“Push, you wimps!” Randall yelled at the other angels. The five of them had been banging against this door for at least an hour now, and so far it felt like it hadn’t given an inch.
“I swear, Randall, it’s not giving any!” Byron whined. “Why isn’t there some other way out?”
“There isn’t another way out, you idiot, because if there was, we wouldn’t be able to keep them in,” James growled, right before he kicked the door as hard as he could. “This is horrible.”
“Well, if Terence had stayed out like protocol says to, we wouldn’t be in this damned mess, now, would we?” Shelly scolded.
“Oh, shove it, Shelly,” Terence shot back. “You were just as excited about the Lucifer news as everyone else.”
“Sure, up until I got locked out of the fucking control room!” she bellowed, starting to take a swing at Terence. James stepped between them and shoved Shelly back some, glaring at her.
“Cool it, you two. Getting pissed off isn’t going to get any of us out of here,” Randall said with a sigh. “Shelly, go check the herd, see who’s missing, so if we ever get out of here we can go nail his ass to the wall. I’m curious why the placating sweets didn’t work on him. We’ll throw him in with the cannibals once we catch him.”
Shelly nodded, pulling her hair back into a ponytail, tying it back as she walked off in a huff. She headed in the direction of the rooms, and Byron watched her go before turning back to the others. “Tell me someone’s got a plan to get us out of here. Tell me. The last thing I want is one of the angels to toss me into one of the sadist cells.”
“You’d be lucky if that’s where they tossed you,” James snarled.
“Us, James,” Randall corrected, “where they tossed us. Look, at the very latest, we’ll be out of here in a week when they come to get the shift reports and find nobody in the control room. But we need to be out of here first, because explaining to old Raphael that we just lost a soul doesn’t strike me as the best of solutions, How about you guys?”
The other angels shook their heads in agreement.
“Okay then, so let’s assume for a minute that we want out of a heavenly cell. What would we do?”
“Wait until one of them comes in and then sprint out the door after him?” James offered, before Terrence smacked him. James still sighed afterwards. “It was a good plan, you have to give him that.”
Randall waved a finger in his direction. “You’re thinking about it wrong. This was a crime of opportunity. He wasn’t planning it. He was looking for a way out, but we simply got sloppy and he took advantage of that.”
“Of us,” Terrence added.
“Shut up, Terrence,” James replied.
“But there was only one of him, and there are five of us. We’re much smarter than some average schmo from Earth. We’ve been here longer. We’ve had more time to study the place. We should be able to figure out some escape plan.”
“I can’t believe we don’t already have some sort of emergency plan for this kind of thing,” Byron bemoaned.
“We could always hit the panic button,” Terrence said.
Randall spun on him quickly, fire in his eyes. “Oh yeah, that’d be real good. ‘Hey, look at us! We’re too stupid to even do our jobs and need to call for your help now that we’ve fucked up good and proper!’ That’s exactly what I want to do, Terrence.”
“Well, we’d be out of here, wouldn’t we?”
“And in the worst parts of Heaven immediately after, I imagine,” Byron sighed. “No, I have to agree with James and Randall. I’d rather we try and find our way out until they find us. That way we can deal with it ourselves.”
Shelly came jogging back from the rooms, shaking her head. “You won’t believe it. It was Altford.”
Byron frowned. “Of course I can believe it. I warned you he was going to be a problem. I told you. Did I not tell you? He wasn’t taking to the activities. He just did not want to try to fit in, no matter what we did.”
“You know what, Byron?” Shelly asked. “It’s a little late for ‘I told you so’s. Was the guy hung up on girl he left behind or something?”
James shook his head with a sigh. “Doesn’t seem likely. He didn’t talk about his life much. He didn’t talk much at all really.”
“Lost relative? Best friend? His dog Fluffy? Unfinished business back on Earth? Wants revenge on someone for some reason I can’t possibly imagine? … Why the hell is that guy out there?” Randall demanded.
“I can tell you why he’s out there,” Byron grumbled, leaning his forehead against the door. “He’s out there because he’s got nothing to lose.”
* * * * *
Jake had been exploring Heaven for several hours now and he realized something with a weird sense of clarity. Most of the people who claimed to know where they were going within Heaven were just pretending to know. Cherubim meandered a lot. (Which was a nice way of saying they were often very lost themselves, but wouldn’t admit it. They did, however, have a very confident way of looking lost, which Jake figured was why no one called them on it.) The short angels (and they were all short, for some inexplicable reason) would take people back and forth, dropping a few off, picking a few up, but mostly there was no real organization to the system, and if a couple of people happened to get misfiled, so be it.
Shit happens. Heaven was, he could hardly believe, a “shit happens” kind of place.
By pretending to be management, people cut Jake some space, and he was able to stroll around with a swagger that brought him some respect. He didn’t even need a halo to convey an air of authority. Some of the people he saw wandering around had them, some didn’t.
He still had absolutely no idea where he was, though. He hadn’t wandered back to any of the sections he’d come in through. There weren’t any maps, but every so often, he would feign mild confusion, poke one of the angels and would get directions out of the section. (Half the time the directions were wrong anyway.) He was only asking, however, after checking several doors on his own. Most of the time he would find angels or other people like himself milling about, not really doing much of anything. Or wandering. It seemed like there was a lot of wandering in Heaven. No distinguishing landmarks, nothing on the walls … it reminded him a lot of his old office, truth be told, only whiter, and filled with a more international variety of people.
He opened a door and came across another small hallway that looked like any other small hallway, except, of course, this one had two angels guarding the door out on the other side. And these two angels looked a little more battle-hardened than the ones he’d seen early. Thus far he’d really only stumbled into low-level guards who weren’t doing much other than standing there and looking impressive, and even in that regard they were usually failing. But these two, they looked more buff, more alert, more aware.
“Halt!” one of the angels said, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword at his side. “Who goes there?”
Jake paused for only a second before deciding that bravado had gotten him this far, so maybe it could get him a little further. “Don’t be da
ft,” Jake said as he approached the two, trying to look as confident as he could. Perhaps he should mix a little annoyance in his appearance, he thought. Confidence had certainly gotten him this far, so perhaps it could get him just a little farther. He gazed at the angel who was questioning him with a look of mild disdain, as if projecting ‘how dare you question me, you little grunt’ and he hoped it would be enough. He was using the look he’d seen on many a boss during his days on Earth, not generally directed at him, but directed at people in general. “I’m going to go get one of the Cherubim, because he screwed up and brought the wrong civilian into this section.”
The angel squinted at him a little bit. “I didn’t get any paperwork authorizing a pass-through to the sub-hub.”
“Didn’t get any… I swear. It’s a good thing we just have you standing guard and not doing any actual management.” He was getting into this part without too much effort at all, really. It wasn’t hard to simply recreate the kind of snotty, disinterested tone he’d seen for years. In fact, it was kind of fun. “You’d have total anarchy in the cells, wouldn’t you? Look, Cherubs and Cherubim management don’t need paperwork to go into the sub-hub, and you should know that by now. Honestly.” Jake snorted, abusively. “How long have you been at this post?”
He straightened up a little, glancing nervously at his partner, who was keeping his eyes on Jake very intently, like a recruit in boot camp. “Uh, since we opened this section, seven years ago, sir.”
“And before that?” Jake asked, tapping his foot impatiently.
“Before that I was in training, and before that I was a guard back on Earth, sir.”
Jake had to pause a second at that, but tried very hard not to let his surprise show on his face. Of course, it made sense – to keep the angel population up and at a manageable rate to deal with the constant influx of people, they would need to be growing the ranks of the angels every day, but he hadn’t actually considered where they would be coming from. But now that he knew this, he felt a lot more confident. Angels with flaming swords raining sulfur and brimstone down on sinners was a lot scarier image than some halfwit getting his sword after a two-week training course. And, to be fair, he had a much easier time imagining this guy being a rent-a-cop at a megastore somewhere than standing watch at a military post. What had seemed like battle readiness on first glance was painfully obvious as arrogant bravado now. Security guards seemed to be the same no matter where you went, even Heaven. “And what, exactly, did you guard?”
