by Cliff Hicks
“Anything can be killed, boy,” the angel sighed. “And it doesn’t go anywhere. It stops going anywhere. It just becomes scattered, loose energy that coalesces elsewhere eventually, maybe contaminates some star off in the distance. But once the Blade of Hell hits you, that’s it. You’re done and gone for good.”
Jake considered this for a long moment. Then a question popped into his head, clear as day. “You ever seen it happen?”
The angel shook his head in response. “No one’s seen it in a long, long time, not since the Last Great Battle.”
“And how long ago was that, exactly?”
“Nine thousand years, give or take.”
“And since then…”
“Since then,” the Tagger picked up, “Heaven and Hell have had an agreement. Both go and collect their souls from Earth after they die, but only messengers and retrievers are allowed. If someone gets out of their flock, either side is allowed to send someone to get them. Thus, our job.”
“That goes for the other side too?”
The angel chuckled a little bit. “’Course. You think Hell wants their people getting out and stumbling into Heaven’s waiting arms? They’ve got demon retrievers to fetch anyone who gets lucky enough to escape Hell’s embrace.”
This gave Jake pause while he considered the idea. He was half-way curious to ask why Heaven wouldn’t welcome an escapee of Hell, if it was so inviting, but instead, a different question popped into his head. “So, what, they carry Blades of Hell? Shards of Night, black flame or something like that?”
Jake was met with the angel scratching his head. “You know, I’m not sure. I ain’t seen one m’self. We aren’t down on planet all that often, so I guess we don’t stumble across each other that much. I think I heard talk of one of the other Taggers seeing a demon pull its prey back once, but he said he was too distracted by the hellhounds the demon had with him to notice anything else.”
“Was he going after one of ours?”
“’Course not. We have ours and they have theirs. Never the two shall mix. Why would we want to get someone out of Hell, anyway? Can you imagine the horrors those people would’ve had to have done to be committed there?”
Jake nodded, sensing the angel (Tagger, he corrected his thoughts) was getting a little suspicious. “You said it. Must be some horrific trash.” He needed to dispel any thoughts that he was out of place. He knew that the best way to blend in was to act like those around you. Most people weren’t smart enough to act out of character to try and lure someone out, no matter how it appeared in the movies, so if your behavior matched the people around you, Jake thought to himself, nobody asked questions.
“Damn right,” the Tagger agreed.
“Once you’re in Heaven, though, you’re here to stay, huh?”
The Tagger laughed, patting him on the back. “Of course…”
They both finished the sentence together. “This is Heaven!”
* * * * *
Back on Earth, Bob had been having a Hell of a day. Not only had a few of the souls been taking their sweet time to die, all of them, as of yet, had been older people. Heart attacks, strokes… Bob felt like he was dragging a retirement colony around with him. Where were the teenagers and college students? Where were people living young and dangerous lives with reckless abandon? Where was a goddamn iPod? He was starting to wonder if cherry picking his assignments would get him in trouble. It would certainly give him better odds of success.
Ever since his conversation with Jake, Bob had been thinking, a dangerous precedent to set. He was hoping it wasn’t becoming a habit. When he’d first started as a Cherubim, he’d asked a lot of questions, and eventually, after getting enough scornful looks, he’d learned the lesson – questions are the enemy of a restful mind. And Heaven believed in harmony.
But God dammit, Bob believed in music.
He idly wondered what else wasn’t on the contraband list that he might consider bringing back with him. He needed small things, of course, stuff he could carry in his satchel he took with him wherever he went, but that left him a lot of options, options he was starting to consider. The restful mind had been awoken again.
Behind him stood three gathered souls who were still in the state of shock and disbelief. Two men and one woman, with a combined age over 200. They were all discussing their various deaths while Bob impatiently tapped his foot. Bob had actually told one of the three he’d picked up already “Why couldn’t you have died younger?” The old man didn’t understand what Bob had been talking about, and Bob hadn’t had the patience to explain it to him. The Los Angeles street they stood on now was a hustle and bustle of traffic, people darting to and fro, zipping around in cars, on bikes, on motorcycles, scurrying along sidewalks. The end of the day, a Friday, and the beginning of a weekend. Exactly the kind of conditions Bob was looking for. He hadn’t been looking ahead to his designated pick ups, not even glancing at the file beyond the pick up point. Checking his clipboard, sure enough, he was picking up someone in their early twenties.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Bob muttered to himself, “be there, be there.”
A bike messenger came zipping down the street towards their position and Bob was pretty sure he could see a pair of trademark white earphone wires running down from the man’s ears. The messenger’s face had all sorts of metal punctures – pierced eyebrow, pierced lip, pierced nose… Bob didn’t even want to imagine what else was pierced. Kids these days. You’d think they were trying to get themselves magnetized.
The bike whizzed past and the messenger raised his hand to signal his turn, and was smashed from the side by a guy who was running a red, the bike and its rider crumpling instantly.
Bob skipped across the street, weaving his way between people who couldn’t see or hear him, as he said, out of habit, “Excuse me, pardon me, angel comin’ through, make a hole!” Nobody could hear him consciously, but there was a sort of subliminal impression an angel made that inspired people to subconsciously get out of his way. He could have, of course, simply passed through them all intangibly, but if Bob could avoid seeing the inside of someone’s skull, he was certainly going to do so.
Bob cut through the crowd that was starting to form around the guy’s corpse, as the spirit sat up from the body, standing up and dusting itself off.
“Whew,” the messenger said. “I thought I was a goner for sure, man.”
“You are,” Bob shot back. “Now shut up while I snag your iPod.”
Sure enough, Bob was pulling the headphones from the corpse’s ears, tugging the iPod out of his pocket, holding it up to the light. “Dammit, well, the iPod itself is fine, but it looks like the headphones got damaged when you died.” Sure enough, the wires were mangled enough that Bob couldn’t force a signal out of the tiny machine. Still, he was part way there. The kid’s iPod was the largest current model, and looked like it was filled with endless music ranging from classic rock to a billion bands Bob had never even heard of. The kid was probably downloading it all illegally, but who was Bob to judge? The kid was still going to Heaven.
“Died?” the messenger asked. His face lost all of its color as he looked down, seeing the mess of his body. He then turned to the side and puked, before he was gasping for breath. “That… that’s me?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bob comforted, patting the kid on the back with one hand as he tucked the iPod into his satchel with another. Technically, people were supposed to keep what they had on them when they died until they reached Heaven, but people were in such a state of shock after dying that they didn’t remember to check their possessions later. Besides, during processing, all the goods were rounded up anyway. Bob had seen the lockup more than a few times and he was fairly certain that simply taking things off newly deceased would be easier than searching through an endless cavalcade of boxes trying to find what he was looking for. And, besides, Bob was inherently lazy. “You’re dead, and I’m here to take you up to Heaven. Now if you’re quite done, let’s get going.”
Bob rolled his eyes, pushing the kid on the back as they moved away from the crowd, the three elderly spirits shuffling along behind them. “Why oh why didn’t anyone tell me I was just going to be answering the same ten questions for the rest of Eternity? I swear you guys are my own personal Hell. Let’s go.”
* * * * *
As soon as they had moved through the hole, Randall knew they were in trouble. Thankfully the angels in the cellblock over hadn’t had any idea who they would tell about the noises they had been hearing for the last few hours. There wasn’t exactly training for an escape or an invasion or random sounds of a wall being knocked down. For the last few minutes, they had somehow convinced themselves Hell was trying to burrow in. So they had simply waited, holding whatever they could find at hand as a weapon, to see someone come through the hole that had been dug between the two cellblocks. But the last thing Randall had expected to hear was a battle charge. The smoke and dust had prevented the angel, a woman named Celeste, from seeing that it was a fellow jailer coming through the hole and so she screamed and rushed when she saw a figure emerging. “Die, Hellspawn!” she howled as she dashed forward, coatrack flailing in the air desperately.
Randall’s hand flashed up, grabbing her wrist as she started to bring that improvised weapon down. “Dammit, Celeste, it’s me! Randall!”
Celeste dropped the coatrack immediately and she draped herself over Randall in a relieved hug, practically clinging to him. The other angels, seeing a familiar face, lowered their guard and started moving back to keep an eye on their wards again. All of them knew something was fundamentally wrong, but none of them wanted to get wrapped up in the mess. Celeste had silently been appointed as ‘the person to deal with the mess’ by being the first to talk to the angels coming through. “Oh thank Heaven,” she sobbed. “I thought we were being invaded by demons!”
“How the Hell would they even get this close, Celeste?” James asked as he wriggled through the hole. “I don’t think they even know how to get to Heaven any more.”
“Oh screw you, James,” Celeste snapped back as she pulled away from Randall. “What did you expect me to think? Why the Hell are you breaking through the wall anyway? Why didn’t you just come over through the hallway?”
Shelly stepped through next. “Because we can’t Celeste.”
Celeste peered at them, not understanding a second before her hand snapped up to cover her mouth as it felt open in shock. “No,” she whispered in fear. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“We did,” Byron said as he squeezed through the hole. They had barely made a hole big enough for them to crawl through one at a time. Randall had volunteered to go first, claiming his voice would be the most recognizable to the angels next door. Most of the other group, however, was guessing that Randall was simply hoping they’d beat him up so he could guilt trip them about it later.
Her eyes were as wide as they could go, and she had turned paler than the walls of Heaven themselves. Even her blonde hair seemed to shirk some of its golden color into a withering shade of platinum as it dawned on her. “You lost one? Holy shit, you fucking lost one?”
“We didn’t lose one, Celeste,” James corrected. “He escaped, okay?”
“And that’s better how? How the Hell does someone escape? That’s why there’s a person outside at all times! Exactly to prevent this kind of thing from happening!” She looked back and forth between them, ringlets of hair whipping around. “You broke protocol, didn’t you? Oh Heaven save us, you ignored the rules and someone proved to you exactly why we have them in the first place! I can’t believe you guys!”
“Okay Celeste,” Randall interrupted, “we screwed up. We got it. We’ve learned our lesson. We even learned that lesson before we began digging through the wall to get into here. What we haven’t done is caught the guy who’s running around Heaven. We need you to let us out into the halls, so we can get cracking after him.”
“He’s probably wandering around aimlessly. How the hell did you miss him not popping the pills? God only knows. He’s probably lost in Heaven’s woodwork. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t picked up already,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“I would,” Randall replied, “otherwise they would’ve dragged him back to our cell block and had the rest of us on the worst detail they could find for us. But seeing as no one’s come to that door, he’s still out there. Probably hiding in the shadows.”
“There aren’t any shadows in Heaven, Randall,” Celeste chided him. It wasn’t true, of course, but the angels liked to say it, as if they could make it true by repeating it.
“You know what I mean. We need to find this loose guy, and we need to find him fast.”
“Oh, we’ll find him,” James snarled a bit, curling his hand into a fist. “And we’re going to get him. I’ll bet he’s running scared already.”
* * * * *
Jake Altford was scared, and his mind was running. He was thinking hard, trying not to cave under the pressure. He was focused, alert, almost overly so, closing his eyes, trying to think, One hand clenched the table, both of his legs pressed together. He opened his eyes up again, looking over at the grinning face across from him, that Tagger who had been taunting and mocking him for the last fifteen minutes. The room was less lit than most other areas of Heaven. Jake figured it was to give the room a bit more ambiance, make it feel more confrontational.
“Well, Jake,” the Tagger, whose name was Franco, asked him, not once looking away. “What’s it going to be?” Franco had an intense stare, the kind that burrowed. His hands were folded together, propped up under his chin.
“Give me a minute,” Jake stalled, frantically considering his options. He had a decision to make, and he could feel the pressure stacking up on him. These were the kinds of situations Jake had made a life on earth around avoiding. He hadn’t liked confrontation, but now he felt himself rising a bit to the challenge. He didn’t have to be who he’d been on Earth. He could fashion a new him out of the ashes of that person.
“Time’s up, Jakey boy. Gonna need that answer from you, and I’m gonna need it now.”
Jake raised one of his hands, waving it at the angel defiantly. “You never said anything about a time limit!” One thing Jake knew both the old Jake and the new Jake didn’t like, however, was arbitrary time limits, structure being imposed where none was called for. He lost a slight bit of the fear in his eyes and replaced it with a bit of resistance. He wasn’t going to be pushed around and bullied, no matter what the situation.
“I don’t want to be here all night, Jake. I’ve got places to go, things to do. And this waiting crap is starting to make me angry.”
“Okay, okay…” Still, Jake realized, there was no way out of this one. Not right now, so he’d have to come up with something.
“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 t
hat 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.
