by Cliff Hicks
Randall’s hand grasped the door handle and pulled it open. “It doesn’t work that way, sadly, although yeah, it does seem kind of weird that no one’s really happy in Heaven. The people who take jobs get bored with them, and they’re not happy after a while. The people who are put into holding areas might be happy at first, but eventually they get bored, and that’s when they start getting drugged, just to keep them manageable. No matter who you talk to, from the common souls to the most experienced Cherubim, no one really says ‘Hey man, I’m one hundred percent happy doing what I’m doing, and I can do this forever.’ It’s Heaven, right? Shouldn’t those kinds of people be all over the place?”
Shelly snapped her fingers and pointed at them, the idea clearly lit up on her face. “We should talk to the guy who brought him in, see if he had any ideas about where he might have gone.”
Randall frowned at her a bit, putting a hand on his hip. “C’mon, Shelly, you really think he might have told some Cherubim what he was going to do?”
Shelly smiled patronizingly. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that men can’t keep their mouths shut when they’re thinking. Let’s go.”
* * * * *
Jake was moving around a series of crates inside a warehouse, holding the sword hilt in his hands, wondering exactly how he was supposed to recognize a dead guy on sight. When he’d been brought to Heaven, he’d looked exactly as he’d died, albeit without all the mortal injury inflicted to his personage. After a few of the stops in processing, they had, as he remembered, taken all of his old clothes and given him the toga/tunic combo he was wearing now. Some of the women he’d seen had long white dresses, but the majority of them were wearing outfits very similar like the men were. Jake had to wonder, with all the sexuality stripped away in Heaven, was there no need for women to wear dresses? Or maybe many of them simply preferred the shorts that came with the togas. Him not being a woman himself, he realized he really couldn’t fathom the reasons for their choices, it was simply something he had noticed.
Still, since Edward had said their target had run from the line almost immediately after getting to Heaven, he wouldn’t be wearing the trademark white-on-white-on-other-white-with-shades-of-white-and-white-highlights that was all the rage in Heaven this season. Or any season, Jake supposed. So there would have to be some way to spot him.
Moving around the warehouse was still taking some getting used to, but Jake was a quick learner of his capabilities. Once Franco and Edward had told him that he could shift from solid to intangible with a thought, he’d been practicing it on and off every chance he got during their pursuit. He’d been picking things up, leaning through walls, getting used to having his field of view jammed into solid objects – it wasn’t so much a skillset as simply a few less rules to follow and a few more things to get used to.
The warehouse was poorly lit, as warehouses often are during the times when no one is expected to be moving around them, and as such, the three of them had agreed not to ignite their swords until one of them had a visual lock on their prey. If one of them saw a great flare of heavenly fire in the distance, they would come running, knowing that the target was there. Jake was trying his best to squint as he weaved through the empty spaces between massive rows of metal and wooden crates. He knew he wouldn’t bump into anything, which was why it came to him as shock all the more when he did.
Later it would dawn on Jake that heavenly things moving on the earthly plane were simply on a different plane, and that all heavenly things shared one common plane that simply overlapped the more earthly plane. The practical upset of all of this is that if two heavenly beings happened to be on Earth, and happened to both be backing up, facing away from one another, the two of them would actually bump into each other like any two people on Earth could do, and would react in about the same fashion, which is what happened.
They bumped. Jake jumped. The target, whose name was Nathan (not Nathaniel, never Nathaniel), screamed and started running in the opposite direction, never once stopping to look at Jake. He was passing through all sorts of containers as he fled, waving his arms in the air. Jake regained his composure and snapped the fiery sword to life. It was almost blindly bright, like carrying a welding torch that burned the eyes in a pleasant way (if there was such a thing, which apparently there was), although Jake felt himself squinting anyway out of pure reflex. There was a quiet hiss of flame when the blade sprung free, something Jake hadn’t heard when he’d opened the blade in Heaven. If anything, it made him feel better, as if the blade had some real presence beyond the visual he had of the shaft of fire. The thing didn’t even give off heat, though, which was all the more strange to him. But having a bit of sound gave it presence to compensate. The light emanating from his sword was almost overwhelming. In the dark of the warehouse it was like Jake had flooded a part of the area with an almost unbearable light. Jake shouted out, just in case the other three somehow missed the supernova he was carrying to light up the room. “He’s running towards you, Edward!”
Across the warehouse, there was another flood of light, and the runner Nathan (not the Nathaniel Jake had known when he was alive) screamed again. Jake imagined he was changing course again, running away from both Jake and Edward, which would, of course, run him straight towards Franco. The three of them had entered the warehouse with this plan in mind, driving him towards one person, who would remain unseen until the last possible second. Jake began jogging after him, not at a full run but enough to make it look he was quickly in pursuit. The light on the other side of the warehouse, Edward’s sword, was moving in his direction. He figured eventually they would both turn and move to support Franco, assuming Franco didn’t get him first.
Running through the various crates was still a little disconcerting to Jake, as his vision was clouded with all sorts of things, ranging from textiles to scrap metal to produce to fish guts. None of it stuck to him, of course, but it still filled his sight like a man standing at the bottom of a movie screen looking upward, unable to look away. A few times Jake even closed his eyes. The fish guts were particularly revolting, especially since the occasional eyeball was still peering back at him as he passed through it.
Eventually, he moved out of the area filled with crates and into a partially cleared loading area. On the other side, he saw Edward, holding his sword in front of him, gesturing towards him. The runner had not gone through his side. There were a number of smaller crates scattered around the section next to the garage doors, and a few resting in the back of a pickup truck. Jake lifted his sword up and stabbed it into the nearest crate that looked big enough to hold a person inside of it if they were folded up just right. No reaction. Jake knew the blade would only harm heavenly bodies, and not cause any damage to the contents inside of the box, so why bother sticking his head in and out of endless boxes when he could just wave his sword through them? Edward smiled on the far side of the loading area and began doing the same.
After about four of five crates, they made their way to the pickup truck, glancing at the boxes in the back of it. Jake moved over next to one, lifted his sword and starting to bring it down. That was when Nathan bolted through the truck, evading the blade just a few seconds before it would have plummeted into him. Nathan passed through much of the truck and started running towards the other side of the warehouse.
Franco stepped from around a corner just before Nathan got to the door, and that fiery blade of his snapped out with almost military precision. Nathan didn’t have more than a second or two before the blade swung at his body. The runner folded his arms up over his face and lowered his head, as Franco brought the blade down to cleave him down the middle to about the midsection. As soon as he did, the body collapsed into a collection of white powdery dust, which sparkled, shimmered then rose up into the air a bit, before swirling into a tiny imploding vortex, which then vanished.
“Good work, guys,” Franco called to Jake and Edward, who had been moving over towards him. “We got him.”
The minute Jake had seen the blade come down, he had stopped in place, his breath held just a little bit, as he had watched what happened when one of their blades met flesh. The scene was stuck replaying in his mind, over and over again.
The man had screamed only until the blade hit him, but the minute that fiery weapon connected with his form, the man had been silenced. His scream hadn’t grown louder or more painful, it had simply disappeared from the air. One moment the man was screaming, the next there was silence followed only by the sound of the dust vortex. It was as though the man had been transformed by the touch of the blade into a pillar of sand, which collapsed only an instant later.
The sand had begun to scatter across the floor, but a white spark had appeared in the center of where the man had been only nanoseconds ago, and that spark began to spin, as the dust was drawn to it. The closest bits drifted up towards it first, then the farthest bits, like a spinning magnet drawing in bits of metal from across the room, only it wasn’t bits of metal, but specks of heavenly dust that apparently comprised their forms. When all the dust had been compressed into that glowing white spark, which hadn’t grown an inch despite all the dust that had been flying into it, it winked out of existence, leaving nothing there to indicate the space had ever been anything other than vacant. It was a wholly remarkable, if disturbing, spectacle, that Franco and Edward seemed completely unphased by.
After reliving the experience a few times, he shook himself out of the cycling memory and turned to look at the other two, trying to push the whole thing into the back of his mind.
Edward yawned a little bit, then smiled as he moved over towards Franco, lifting his thumb off the hilt of his blade, letting the edge of fire dissipate and disappear, while Franco did the same. Jake was still a bit too awestruck to do so, but regained his composure quickly, lifting his thumb off the hilt as his blade wilted like the others. Edward smiled over his shoulder back at Jake. “Congratulations on your first actual Tag, Jacob,” the angel said to him.
“What a rush, huh?” Franco asked him as he tucked the hilt back into his belt, strolling over towards him. “Now we can get off this dirty rock and back to the grace of Heaven.”
It was as if the sentence cut through Jake’s sanity like a knife. He could feel panic setting in quickly, and he knew he couldn’t go back, he couldn’t go back, he couldn’t allow them to take him back. Even setting foot in Heaven would remind him of the confinement, constriction, the prison that was nothing but walls of white as far as the eye could see. He closed his eyes, drawing a deep breath, before he opened them again, smiling casually. That’s it, he told himself; sell them on the story. Confidence would get him through this. He wasn’t the old Jake, who would buckle under the slightest bit of pressure any more, and he could get through this, he would get through this, he had to get through this; he would keep them from taking him back. And it dawned on him just how easy it was going to be to do that.
“You, uh, you guys ever go check in on the people who were still back on earth after you died? Loved ones, family members, the like?” Jake asked, a sheepish smile on his face as he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, putting on his best ‘new guy’ impression.
Franco snorted a bit gruffly. “I didn’t have anyone back on Earth I gave two shakes about, personally.”
Edward smiled that patronizing smile once more, nodding sagely. “I did, Jacob, not long after I was first brought to Heaven, many many many years ago. I found it did not bring me much in the way of comfort, but at least I could see that they had moved on with their lives and I suppose I gained a certain level of comfort from seeing that they had found happiness even with my passing. I take it you would like us to stop by someone you cared about before you left on our way back?”
Jake offered a nod in return then paused before speaking again. “Actually, I’d like to visit them myself. I won’t talk to anyone or anything, I just kinda want to peek my head in and see what they’re up to, what impact my death had on them. And I’d like to do it privately, if that’s okay.”
Edward placed his hand on Jake’s shoulder and nodded. “Of course it is, Jacob. Do you know how to get to your home quickly, or do you need us to tell you how to travel quickly on the terrestrial sphere?”
Jake cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at him questioningly. “There’s a way to travel quickly on Earth?”
Franco laughed softly, placing his hand on Jake’s other shoulder. “Of course there is. It isn’t entirely accurate, but it’ll let you move great distances without having to walk or fly over them.”
Jake’s jaw almost dropped. “We can fly? How come nobody told me we can fly?”
The two angels shared a chuckle, each taking their hands off of Jake. Edward shrugged a little bit while Franco said, “Look, we haven’t had time to teach you everything yet, now have we?”
“And they certainly are neglectful in those classes these days. Too many important details left unspoken. Perhaps I should take over a few of those training sessions at some point,” Edward said quietly, with the tiniest hint of annoyance.
Franco snapped his fingers in front of Jake, making him turn his gaze back to the less prim angel. “Now, pay attention. Traveling long distances quickly is done by creating doors on Earth, kinda like the one we used to get down here. The difference is that these doors don’t stick around very long, and you can’t pinpoint exactly where it’s gonna open. It’s usually accurate within a few miles or so, but sometimes you can over or undershoot by as much as fifty miles. You’ll get better as it as you go, or if you’re traveling to some place you know really well, so this first one should be cake for you. What you do is you take your sword out, right?” Franco removed his sword hilt from his belt as he explained, holding it in his hand. “And you turn it on. I’m not gonna turn mine on right now, ‘cause I’m just walking you through it, okay? Then you think about the place you want to go to. Then you jam the blade in the air right above the ground, and drag it straight up in the air, like you’re cutting space. If you’re doing it right, you’ll see a flaming white trail left in the air you just cut. You cut it until it’s just over your head, like so, then across, like so, and back down to the ground, like that.”
Franco moved the hilt around as he spoke, so Jake could tie the explanation to the gestures attached. “Basically, you’re cutting a door in space. This should leave you with a door-shaped outline floating in the air. Now, if you’ve done it right, here’s the part that’s important. You take and stab your blade in the middle of that hole you’ve cut and then you turn your sword, like you’re turning a key. If you were focusing well enough, it’ll fill up with white light and your sword will extinguish for a few seconds. Take your thumb off the gem, put the hilt back on your belt and step into your newly created portal. That should take you where you want to go. You’ve only got about thirty seconds or so from the point you turn your sword off, though, until the portal disappears. I think it’s a safety protocol or something so the demons can’t go chasing us, or whatever. So, give it a shot.”
“And when I want to get back to Heaven?” Jake said, purely for the sake of seeming like he’d ever want to go back. If he didn’t ask, he knew it would be suspicious, so he forced himself to ask the question regardless. Asking itself was harder than it should have been. He knew he had to sell the lie, but the very idea of going back to Heaven put a bitter taste in his mouth. It was difficult to pretend like he cared what their answer was.
“You do the same thing, Jacob, except you think of Heaven while you’re doing it,” Edward said. “But this process does not work within Heaven’s boundaries, so if you’re planning on going back down to visit them again on Earth, you will need to locate which of the more static doors in Heaven lead to a location close to them. Or, I suppose, simply choose any door and use the sword to cut a location to them once you are on Earth.” Edward frowned for a moment, as if considering this for the first time. “Now that I think about it, it does seem a frightfully i
nefficient way of doing things. How odd. Just as odd, I suppose, is that I have never thought about it until now.” He pondered it a moment more, then shrugged. “Oh well, nothing to be done for it now. Franco, if you will?”
Franco nodded, sliding his thumb onto the gem on the hilt, causing the blade of fire to erupt once more. “Sure thing, Eddie. Don’t take too long, Jake. Heaven needs more good Taggers like you making sure people don’t get out of where they’re supposed to be in Heaven.” With that, he crouched down and jammed his blade into the air, just as he’d described. He cut through the air in a quick motion, almost second nature to him at that point, cutting a doorway into the air, the lines of white fire flickering in the air. Franco jammed his blade into the center of it, and cracks of white fire rippled from the blade to the edges he’d just cut. When he turned his hands, the cracks bled fire all the way to the doorframe before it was all filled with white light. “See you back in Heaven, Jake!” Franco said with a smile and a wave as he extinguished his sword and tucked the hilt back into his belt, then stepped into the portal of blinding light.
Edward patted Jake on the shoulder once more. “Remember, don’t be too long getting caught up in the affairs of the living. They have to move on without us.” Jake was about to say something in reply, when Edward held up a finger to silence him, then smiled again. “And we are better off without them. Goodbye Jacob. We’ll see you soon.” With that, Edward turned and walked into the portal of glowing light. A few seconds later, the portal collapsed, much the way the runner’s body had done earlier, turning into dust, then a whirling vortex, then nothing, although this time there was a playful popping sound, right at the end.
