Escaping Heaven

by Cliff Hicks

  The Taggers had such disregard for the Cherubim that spinning a story turning Bob into a glorified errand boy only made it that much more believable.

  “Anyway, message delivered, so if you don’t mind, I’ve got my own work to get back to.” Bob tried to sound as annoyed as possible, hoping it would help sell the story. He turned and started to walk away from them, and he could hear a few of the Taggers snickering at him, but he put it out of his mind.

  Taggers were assholes anyway.

  * * * * *

  Jake had spent much of the last day learning the limitations and extent of his abilities on Earth. He could indeed fly, although the speed wasn’t particularly impressive. He’d gauged he was really only moving about 70 or 80 mph when he was trying his hardest, but it was still a fun ability to have. He’d practiced shifting in and out of solidity and found that while it wasn’t hard to do, it wasn’t something he could do over and over again with no effect. In fact, all of his Heavenly abilities were, in some way or another, slightly tiring. Each time he used them, he felt like he was exerting a muscle he hadn’t used in some time, and that he was straining to get it back into shape. This was why he started developing a regimen in his mind.

  He’d never been very good at going to the gym, working out on a regular schedule, which didn’t make him unique. That said, this workout felt different. And he liked doing it. This was a series of challenges he could build for himself, and he kept working on new and inventive ways to practice things. He wanted to be able to do all of the important things – turn visible or invisible, tangible or intangible, fly or not – on a moment’s notice, and under pressure. And since he didn’t have much in the way of pressure at the moment, or at least until the Taggers started chasing him on Earth, he had to invent some.

  That was how Jake found himself falling from four miles up, a sensation he was certain wasn’t one he was familiar with.

  He’d flown up until the ground below him was nearly unrecognizable, and he could see airplanes in the near vicinity. He was, of course, invisible and intangible when he did this. He could fly when he was tangible, but the effort involved was four or five times of that when he was intangible. Once he felt like he’d gotten high enough, he smiled to himself, opened his eyes, turned tangible and simply willed himself to stop flying.

  This induced what is commonly known as a plummet.

  Jake had a large smile on his face as he fell, simply because he knew the possible outcomes. The first and most likely was that he would slow his descent once he got close enough to the ground and land gracefully and without injury. The second option was that he would realize he wasn’t going to be slow himself fast enough, and would turn intangible, passing through the ground until he had slowed his descent and then simply rise up again before turning tangible once safely atop the ground. The third and least likely in Jake’s opinion was that he would neither be able to slow his fall nor turn intangible again, and would splat on the ground, before returning back to Heaven.

  He hadn’t thought to ask anyone where souls that were forcibly sent back to Heaven ended up. He imagined there had to be some kind of special receiving area, since he couldn’t imagine souls returning to Heaven forcibly for any reason other than a Tagger sending them back. That meant he would doubly have to avoid taking any real physical damage on Earth. Caution would be important.

  It might have been better to realize this before deciding to throw myself at the ground from four miles up, he thought, but no risk, no reward.

  He had been falling a couple of minutes or so before he decided it was time to slow his plummet. He wanted to do it while tangible, which increased the difficulty significantly, but he could feel his mind starting to work and apply force against the speed of the descent. The ground was rushing towards him very quickly now, and he could feel the strain on his mind, and for a split second, he wondered if he was going to break a leg or something on impact, as he had slowed, but wasn’t sure it was quite enough.

  About four hundred feet in the air, he came to a complete stop.

  He beamed with a bit of pride, having chosen the middle of the Nevada desert for this experiment, and then slowly lowered himself back down to the ground. As his sandals touched the dusty earth, he bowed with a theatrical flourish, savoring the moment that he could control this.

  And then someone began to clap behind him, slowly.

  Jake spun quickly and saw a man walking towards him. The man looked to be in his mid-forties, with a neatly kept beard to contrast his long and stringy hair that hung past his shoulders. He wore a white button-up shirt that Jake noted was splattered with red, dried desert mud or bloodstains he couldn’t tell. He also a pair of frayed bellbottom jeans that sported more than their share of scuff. “Well done, young man,” he said in a scratchy voice, the sound of a million cigarettes. “Usually when they go up, they don’t come back down again, and if they do come down again, they go a lot further down.” Jake squinted at the man slightly and suddenly the slightly golden glow around the outline of him became visible.

  Jake was talking to a dead man.

  As he considered the man, Jake rolled his shoulder slightly, as if he was trying to work a kink out of the muscle. “Yeah, well, sometimes a man needs to learn what it feels like to fall a long way before he really understands what flying is all about, if you know what I mean,” he said to him.

  The man’s attire confused Jake slightly. He wasn’t wearing any of the Heavenly regalia, but he certainly couldn’t imagine Hell having clothes that looked so respectable. (Although Jake did have to admit he could see bellbottoms being considered a kind of Hell for some people.) Jake also realized the man was slightly transparent, meaning he was intangible in the physical world, so Jake shifted slightly and moved into the intangible plane with him. “So what brings you to Earth, angel?” the man asked him. “What reason do you have for being here among the living instead of up among the clouds where your kind so often is?”

  Jake smiled a little bit cryptically. “I could ask the same thing of you, sir.”

  “This is where I always am, and is where I will always be. This is where I belong and no force on Heaven nor Earth will pry me from it,” he said, as he continued moving towards Jake, who moved slightly, eyeing the man carefully.

  “Well, Earth’s where I want to be as well, so I guess that puts us on the same team,” Jake replied. There was something unsettling about the man, and Jake realized that the man’s attire certainly didn’t make him feel any better. “Is that… is that mud on your shirt? Climbing or something and fell out here in the desert?” He turned to look at the region around them for just a moment, as it seemed like it might be an ideal vicinity for hikers and mountain climbers to go scaling epic walls of rock, what with the rocky terrain just off in the distance.

  He started to consider the man and the situation in his mind, though, and Jake realized that none of his clothes had blood on them when he had arrived in Heaven. In fact, none of the people he’d gone to Heaven with had had blood on their clothing. Which meant that it wasn’t the man’s own blood but someone else’s. The thought dawned on Jake just as he felt the man’s arm wrapping around his neck, grabbing on tight.

  “Liar!” the man shouted as he started trying to choke Jake. “You’re here to drag me to Hell for my crimes, just like all the others! They lied and said they were going to take me to Heaven, but I know what I’ve done, and I know that murder means I’m bound for the fiery pits of Hell, but I won’t go, do you hear me, demon?” The voice was barking in his ear as Jake was struggling to breath, thrashing in a desperate attempt to get the man to loosen his grasp. “You will find no lack of fight in me!”

  Jake coughed and sputtered, trying to toss his head back into the man, but the man’s grip was too firm. Jake’s fingertips dug into the burly man’s arm around his neck and tried to pull it away, but the man was much stronger than Jake, and they both knew it. Jake started to panic, realizing he didn’t have long before he blacked out, and th
at wouldn’t be good. His hand leapt down from the man’s arm and pushed inside the folds of his tunic, wrapping his fingers around the hilt of his blade. Jake shifted his left hand behind him to hit at the man’s hip, but the man ignored it, simply pulling more tightly on Jake’s throat with his arm. He didn’t have an option left and he knew it. His right hand hung down, hilt in hand, and his thumb moved onto the gem, snapping the blade on at the same time Jake whipped his arm inward, twisting his wrist up.

  The fiery sword cut into the man from the hip and Jake could feel the man’s arm slack up immediately. Jake spun around, keeping his hand locked around the sword hilt, moving the blade as he did. There was resistance, but certainly not anywhere near as much as Jake had expected. The fiery sword cut through celestial flesh with about as much pushback as moving an arm through water. He had cut a wicked set of lines into the man’s form, and Jake could see the aghast look on the man’s face as his form collapsed into a pile of white dust as Jake backed away from it.

  As he expected, the white dust began to swirl in a tiny sphere floating a few feet above the ground, grains of it whipping inwards and then disappearing once they hit the nova-like center. A few moments later, all the white sand had been gathered up and the white star blinked out of existence. (Jake idly wondered if he’d sent the man to Heaven or to Hell, and if there was a way to tell the difference.)

  The white dust had taken a moment or two longer than when Franco had sent that runner back to Heaven not so long ago, and Jake considered for a moment whether or not that was because of how long the man had been here on Earth.

  He sat down and coughed a bit more, catching his breath, his eyes closed as he cursed his carelessness. He had let his guard down for only a moment, and he had been only seconds away from being sent back to that Hellish Heaven. He should have been more careful. He should have been more suspicious. He should have remembered the blade sooner.

  Jake didn’t find himself full of regrets about his actions, though. He’d done what had needed to be done. The man had changed gears on a dime, going from almost politely doddering to radical psychopath in seconds. And the man had attacked him without provocation. Jake hadn’t been threatening towards the man, but apparently the man had been living with his paranoia long enough that it had become second nature when it came to dealing with anyone else who happened to be dead.

  Who was the man, Jake wondered? Judging by his attire, he had to have been on Earth for several decades. Why hadn’t Hell’s forces dragged him down yet? Or, barring that, why hadn’t the Taggers come and taken him up to Heaven?

  Jake started to construct possible scenarios in his head, much like he had when he’d been falling. It was possible the man was supposed to go Hell or Heaven, and had simply attacked the person responsible for escorting them there. It seemed the most likely option, he figured. Bob had been completely unarmed, and while he had implied that he would be dragged up to Heaven if he hadn’t gone along with him, he wasn’t sure how that would have happened. Bob had simply coerced him to come along.

  He wasn’t sure how Hell did its gathering, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if they used similar tactics. The newly dead were generally in a state of shock, and it seemed easy enough to manipulate them. Had Jake gone with Bob straight to Heaven after he’d been picked up, he might not have noticed, but they had picked up the other man, Melvin or Marvin or something, and they had stopped to pick up the other two men, only to be met by the other Cherubim who took them instead.

  He’d been so busy worrying about his own fate, he really hadn’t thought much about that until now, and now he realized it genuinely bothered him. The two men the other Cherubim had taken had killed one another in front of Jake’s very eyes, and murder was the kind of thing that had been fairly explicitly forbidden in just about every religious text he’d ever heard of. And the man Jake had just fought, he’d mentioned that he’d committed murder as well. Unless the process of going to Heaven and going to Hell were exactly the same (which he supposed they could be, although it seemed unlikely), the man he’d just killed had gone to Heaven also. Which meant murder wasn’t the big deal it had been made out to be.

  Or it meant something even worse.

  Something Jake didn’t even want to imagine.

  * * * * *

  Captain Diogenes had gathered up a particular contingent of Taggers, a group that was made up of seven of the meanest, toughest and most deadly members the Captain had serving under him, and had called them into his office.

  Platoons, called choirs, were made up of exactly seven Taggers, and were generally reserved for training exercises. Every Tagger was assigned to a choir, and that choir was his unit. Each choir was ranked based on their level of preparedness and skill, and this choir was the very finest in the Captain’s service. It included a former member of Israel’s elite Special Operations Division of the Mossad, a British colonial solider who had killed over two hundred American revolutionaries single handedly before being murdered while he slept, a Zulu warrior, a Spartan and three other trained soldiers just as lethal, including the blonde ex-Delta Force commando who spent much of his time guarding the Captain’s office and screening visitors, who had grilled Carlos before admitting him earlier.

  Being called into the Captain’s office was very exciting for the men and women, because it was extremely rare for an entire choir to be called in there. Usually if there was a loose soul running around Heaven, one or two Taggers from a unit would be brought in and set on the trail, because that was all that was needed. And they knew it was not a drill, because those were done in the barracks with all Taggers present. Typically, it meant there was some kind of wargame going on, and one choir was being pit against another choir, to see which barracks had the most capable members, but there was always the slightest, most remote chance that it was to see real action on Earth, in combat with demons. None of the members of this barracks had ever had the privilege, and so each of them was yearning that that’s what it was going to be.

  The Captain’s office was cramped to begin with, but with the seven members of the choir, and Carlos still standing quietly in the corner, it was downright claustrophobic. The Captain never unfolded his wings even the slightest in the tiny room. The Israeli, a woman named Yael, spoke up first. “Why have you called us into your office, Captain?”

  “Yeah,” the ex-Delta Force man named Max interjected. “Which sector are we playing against today?”

  “No games today, troops,” the Captain said, as he leaned his hands against his desk. “Young Carlos here has been telling me we have a runner which we’re going to need to apprehend.”

  Max waved his hand dismissively. “You don’t need a full choir for some random guy, top. So someone goes running from the lines somewhere. Get one or two people and they’ll have him tracked down in a couple of hours.”

  Captain Diogenes chuckled a bit, shaking his head at them. “He didn’t escape from the lines, Max. He actually broke out of the quarters.” Suddenly, none of the Taggers were laughing, and all of them were paying attention to every word the Captain said. “That’s right boys and girls, we have ourselves an escapee who successfully got out of the therapy quarters and is loose somewhere in Heaven. Three friendlies are in pursuit, but they have not reported back, and it’s been one week since the man’s escape.”

  “A week?” Yael said. “Why are we just now hearing of this? He could be anywhere by now.”

  “As I said, we have three friendlies who thought they could track the man down on their own. Seems some of our young Mister Carlos’s crew wanted to try and keep their fat from the fryer, so they struck out on their own to prove that they could do our jobs better than we can.” The soldiers laughed, and the Captain offered a soft smile as he waved a hand at them to quiet them down. “Now now, let’s not be too hard on the angels. Their ward had a few days headstart on them, as he locked them in the quarters. As Yael said, our target could be anywhere by now, but first, let me tell you all something I know ab
out this man. No matter what his file said, no matter what his mother would say about him or nice things they said at his funeral, this man is a much smarter opponent than the kind of runner we’re used to dealing with.”

  “How you figure, top?” Max asked, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back against the wall. “A runner’s a runner.”

  The Captain shook a finger at him. “This man is something different. He may not even be what we normally call a runner.” The soldiers looked at him curiously, trying to figure out the point he was obliquely trying to make. “Runners, on the whole, are stupid. They’re running, and therefore stand out. Our guy isn’t standing out, and so no one noticed him. We have no idea where he got to or how he got there, but he did so without attracting attention to himself. He’s not running anywhere. He’s gone native, blending in, disappearing among the crowd. He got out of quarters, which no one, I repeat no one, has ever done before, in the history of Heaven. He got past at least two or three checkpoints without anyone so much as batting an eyelash in his direction. He’s up and vanished like a fart in the wind. This guy is our proverbial nightmare. He’s smart, and that makes him someone we respect. Follow?”

  The soldiers around the room all nodded.

  “Good,” Diogenes said. “Now, just because we’re respecting him doesn’t mean we aren’t going to take him down. People get into places where they’re not supposed to be all the time, and it’s our job to get them back to where they belong. Polydorous, I want you and Max to get us a compass, and Nhlanhla will head down to lockup to get us our target’s personal effects. The man’s name is Jacob Altford, and as of this moment, he is Heaven’s Public Enemy Number One, which means we are going to hunt, subdue and return Mister Altford to the loving care of Heaven, which he has so ignorantly denied in his foolishness. Your choir also needs to be ready to move, in case you have to go topside.”