by Cliff Hicks
He sighed and headed back down one flight, moving to stand in the middle of the empty hall of the Fillmore, looking around him, glancing up at the dimly lit balcony, the walls lined with framed posters, so much history contained within, so many wonderful musicians over the years. He could see why Bob liked the location. It had history, grandeur. And the place just had class. There was a low purple glow from the lights, which weren’t completely off but set to very dim. It seemed like the kind of place the goth kids he knew back in high school would’ve held the senior prom, if they had made the decision.
His fingers moved back to his belt and slid inside to bring out the hilt once more, snapping the blade to life as he cut into the space, opening a doorway in the familiar motion. He had made the decision that he needed to stow the halo somewhere. It was possible they were using the halo to track him, and even if they weren’t it made him stand out a lot to anyone who could spot celestial beings on Earth. None of the loose souls he’d seen had halos, which meant he needed to ditch his somewhere. Still, he wanted to place it somewhere he could go back and get it again if he needed it.
Jake stepped through the portal and breathed that rich Rocky Mountain air with a smile. He looked up at the sky, stretching his neck as he started to move across the terrain over towards the cave.
“Hello Jake,” James said, stepping out of the woods.
Jake reacted immediately, pushing his thumb back on the gem of the sword to make the blade whip out suddenly as he spun to look at the voice. “You.”
“Easy! Easy Jake, I’m just here to talk,” the angel said, raising his hands in the air. “I give you my word, I’m just here to talk, nothing more.”
Of course, Jake didn’t lower the sword, keeping it leveled at the angel. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe you. You angels held me hostage and tried to brainwash me with an endless array of self-help manuals and arts & crafts. I think it’s understandable that I’m a little paranoid, don’t you?”
James nodded. “Absolutely. Keep the sword on me as long as you like. I don’t blame you one bit.” He looked around a bit before he spied a rock about waist height off a few feet to his left. “You mind if I sit while we talk?”
Jake looked over quickly, peering behind it, and saw there was no way the angel could have hid anything easily accessible, so he nodded towards it. “Sure. Sit.”
James moved towards the rock and sat down on it. He inhaled a long breath, looking around at the mountains, then turned to look back at Jake, not sure exactly where to start. “I’m not here to try and take you back to Heaven, Jake.”
“A handful of your boys already tried that, and I’m sure they’re bitching about it in Heaven right now, planning another assault any minute now.”
“You fought off Taggers?” James said with a surprise. “Your ex said you had a sword, but I wasn’t sure you knew how to use it. And you’ve got a halo too,” he added with a laugh. “What did you do, beat up an off-duty Tagger in the halls of Heaven, steal his sword, his halo and his lunch money?”
Jake moved over to a tree near James and leaned his back against it, lowering his arm and taking his thumb off the blade. If he needed to, he could whip it up again without hesitation, but keeping his arm raised and the blade pointed at James was making his arm tired. “Heaven gave it to me, actually. I wandered into a Tagger orientation and they just assumed I was a new recruit,” he said with a laugh. “You’d think they would have a list of names or something, but nope, just had to say that was where I was supposed to be, and next thing you know, I’m an armed felon.” He looked at James carefully. The angel was calm, his hands folded over one another in his lap. “If you’re not here to take me back to Heaven… what do you want?”
James closed his eyes with a laugh, shaking his head. “I don’t think you’re going to believe me. This was such a bad idea.”
Jake cocked his head to one side, peering at the angel cautiously. “Try me. I’ve had a hell of a few days, and I’m learning anything’s possible.”
The angel nodded sagely. “I’ll bet.” He bit his bottom lip, mulling over where to start for a minute or two before he spoke again. “Okay, look, I should probably start by saying I’m sorry.”
He squinted at the angel curiously. “You’re… sorry?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jake.” He looked down at his hands then forced himself to look back up at the man. “What we did was wrong. We shouldn’t have been forcing you to do all those things you didn’t want to. It’s supposed to be Heaven! People are supposed to be happy! Somewhere along the line… I don’t know where it happened, but someone in charge forgot that. And it turned from making people happy to keeping them busy. And we didn’t notice! Or, even worse, we did, and we just told ourselves that someone above us knew better!”
“Isn’t that the kind of thing soldiers have been saying since time began? ‘All of these horrible things, they aren’t my fault, because I was just following orders.’ That doesn’t make you any less guilty.”
“Oh God, Jake, I’m as guilty as you think I am. Probably a lot more. We all are. You’re completely right. Our complacency doesn’t excuse our actions. We should’ve asked questions, we should’ve spoken up, but we didn’t, and look where it lead us – drugging up souls in Heaven just to keep them from realizing the shit we surrounded them with,” James sighed.
“Yeah, I never took those sweets Byron kept trying to give me. I hid them and then disposed of them, or gave them to other people there, and just pretended I was doped up, so I could watch all of you. I’m kind of glad Terrance screwed up when he did. I don’t know how much longer I could’ve kept up the act. It… it was torture, you know that?”
“I don’t know how many times I can you how sorry I am, Jake, but I assure you, I’ve been miserable about it for days now. We were so angry when we started chasing you, but once we got away from the barracks… it was like we started thinking on our own again. We’d been on autopilot as much as the people we were taking care of. Once we were out, we… well, we started talking to each other. I don’t know if you noticed, but we angels never really talked to one another while we were in the quarters.”
“I noticed. It was kind of creepy, actually. For a while I thought you must have been telepathic or something… then I figured it out.”
James cocked his head. “Figured what out?”
“You’re clerks,” he said. “I mean, you’re office workers, drones, the kind of people who do a job day in and day out and never really give it much thought, until you’re completely on autopilot.” He inhaled a breath and then let it out. “What I’m saying is… you’re just like me. Or just like I used to be. ‘Do this. Go here.’ I used to go to a job I hated every day simply because it’s what I thought was expected of me. I mean, I had to pay the bills somehow. And I dated a girl for a long time after I stopped liking her… because I thought it was what was expected of me. And on my last day on Earth, the day I died… everything went wrong. I got laid off from my job, I found out my fiancée was cheating on me with my best friend… and then I died, and there was some part of me that thought to myself, ‘Well, thank God that’s over with. Now I can enjoy things.’ Except that I didn’t. I mean, there I was in Heaven, the afterlife, the eternal resting place, and it was just like Earth. People in dead end jobs. People doing what was expected of them instead of what they wanted. And I just decided, ‘Y’know what? Fuck it. What’s the worst they can do to me?’ So I ran. I ran from Heaven and back to Earth, and suddenly I’m seeing things in a whole…” he trailed off before he started to look at the angel oddly. A weird smile crossed Jake’s face. “You don’t want to go back,” he said, as it dawned on him.
The angel nodded. “We’re not going back. Three of us came out in search of you, and the longer we were away, the more we remembered how much we liked things on Earth. The air, the lights…”
“The colors,” Jake interjected.
“YES,” James gushed. “The colors. My g
od, did it bug you that everything in Heaven was white as far as the eye could see?”
Jake laughed. “Seriously. Why couldn’t they hire an interior decorator or two?”
The angel chuckled with him and nodded. “Exactly. And this is because of you, Jake. You taught us to question things, whether you meant to or not, because you did, and that rebellious spirit… it infected us. We want to stay on Earth… and stay with you, if you don’t mind.”
“With me?”
“Come on, Jake. We’ve been gone so long, we couldn’t blend in like you can. We just don’t know how any more. I mean, I was a Tagger for a while, but the last time I was on Earth and living, I was cutting stone to help build a giant tomb for someone claiming to be a God king in Egypt.”
“You helped build the pyramids?” Jake asked.
“I helped build a pyramid. One was more than enough. Those things take a long damn time, believe me,” James said as he rubbed his hands together to warm them. “It’s me, Shelly and Randall who came down looking for you, and none of us want to go back.”
“You’re sure?”
James laughed, a dusky laugh that exposed how long he’d been watching people. “Let me put it to you this way, Jake… I left Randall and Shelly alone together and came out to find you myself mostly to give the two of them some alone time.”
“Oh,” Jake said. “OH. You mean they’re…”
“Having their first sex in several lifetimes?” he replied with a laugh. “Correct. I don’t even want to go back there for a couple more hours. I can’t even imagine how many times they’re going to end up doing it before they start to run out of energy. They started flirting with one another even before we got out of Heaven, even though they’ve never so much as smiled at one another when we were in the barracks. I’m almost wondering if we were just as drugged as the people we were watching over.”
“I wouldn’t put it past Heaven,” Jake agreed. “Aren’t they going to send someone out to look for you guys, though? I mean, they sent out a hitsquad for me, so I can’t imagine they’ll just let you walk away.”
James smiled. “See, that’s my point, Jake, and I think that’s how I can convince you we’re on your side. If they don’t catch you, they’re going to assume we’re still looking for you. Hell, even if they catch you, they may just figure we never heard about your return, and they’ll simply let the Cherubim know that we should be told to return to Heaven if they happen to see us. But if we don’t come back, I don’t think they’ll ever get particularly nervous about it. They’ll consider us failures and figure wandering around on Earth for a hundred years or two to be ample punishment. And then they’ll just forget about us, because Heaven is a complete nightmare when it comes to details. Still, now I’ve told you this, if you get sent back to Heaven, you can tell them all this, and they’ll know we’re actually hiding from Heaven. And they’ll dig out our files from the archives, even if it takes a decade or so to find them, and then they’ll send Taggers out to try and get us. So we’ve got a vested interest in helping you avoid going back.”
“You do, don’t you? And you just gave it away by telling me that, so you can’t back out of it.”
James shrugged his shoulders with a smile. “See what I mean? I’m putting my faith in you, because my heart’s telling me it’s the right thing to do, and I should’ve started listening to my heart again a long time ago. You’re one hundred percent crazy, Jake Altford, but you’re also the best shot any of us have at remembering what it’s like to be happy.” He paused for a moment, watching Jake’s face as he mulled it over. It was a lot to take in, and Jake was clearly running through all the options in his head, all the possible outcomes, what could go right and wrong before he closed his eyes, inhaled a deep breath then let it out once more, the look of a decision on his face. “So what do you say?”
Jake shoved the hilt of the sword into his belt and moved over towards James, holding out a hand. “You’re on.”
James laughed warmly, grabbing Jake’s hand in a handshake as the man helped the angel to his feet again. “Oh thank God. I had absolutely no idea what we were going to do if you said no.”
“Thankfully it didn’t come to that. Now all we have to do is figure out how to get Heaven to stop chasing me and leave us all alone,” Jake said, rubbing his eyes with one hand wearily. “And as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much impossible.”
James patted him on the back as the two started to walk into the cave. “I’m sure you’ll think of something. Maybe we can even help. Why’d you come back here anyway? I found the clothes you’d stashed in the cave, and I wasn’t sure you’d double back, but figured it was my only shot at finding you.”
He reached over his head and grabbed onto the halo. His fingers closed firmly around it and he pulled. The halo resisted slightly but then reluctantly gave way, sliding off of his head as Jake held it before him. “Well, I needed to get rid of this, but I figured I might need it again later, so I wanted to put it here with my clothes. I figured they might have been tracking me with it.”
James shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that, but you never can be too sure, I guess.”
The two men stowed Jake’s halo with the bundle of clothes, and then hid it beneath a handful of leaves and rocks, at James’ suggestion.
“We should probably go and get your two friends then,” Jake said. “We’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning.”
James turned to look at him with a sense of surprise. “A meeting? With who?”
Jake laughed softly. “My man on the inside.”
* * * * *
Max and his team were more than a little ticked off. This Altford guy had made a fool of them, and they were going to make him pay for it, even if it was the last thing they did. The blonde Tagger had had plenty of time to stew in his anger and he was itching to take it out on someone or something.
While he’d been waiting for his team to rematerialize, he and the rest of his crew had been taking flak from all the other Taggers around the reformation cell. None of them could ever recall a Tagger reforming inside of the cell, and certainly not more than one at once. They endured the jeers and taunts and tried to stay focused. Two hours later, the seven of them were walking back down to the lockup to get what they needed for another compass.
“Did you see his face?” Yael asked Maria, who’d been the first Tagger Jake had cleaved with his sword.
“No,” she replied, her voice thick with an Italian accent. “It was too fast.”
“There is no way this man could be who they claim he is,” Polydorous said. “He had a sword of his own. And he shifted into the solid plane without so much as batting an eyelash.” The seven had been discussing the encounter on the way down to lockup, and none of them were pleased with their performance or the intel they’d been given on the guy.
“And a halo,” Max agreed. “And none of us got a good look at his face. Either this guy is the luckiest S.O.B. ever, or there’s something they aren’t telling us about him. How the Hell would he have gotten a sword and a halo? Did they send another team after him before and he took one of their swords and one of their halos?”
Yael shook her head as they turned the corner into another seemingly identical white hallway. “Not possible. It is possible he acquired a sword from some other Tagger, but the halos can’t be taken away from you. You can give yours to someone else and then it becomes theirs, but if someone tries to take yours from you, it will very shortly disappear from them and return to you.”
“So someone gave this guy a halo?” Max asked her. “How does that happen?”
She sighed softly. “The only thing I can think of is that may he stumbled into a storeroom where they keep unassigned Tagger gear and stole a halo that wasn’t keyed yet. He could’ve gotten a sword at the same time.”
“I believe how he got them is irrelevant to our discussion,” Nhlalha said. “What is important is that it will make him much easier to recognize on Earth. There are sever
al loose souls wandering around, but none of them have a halo or a flaming sword.”
Max nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Right, unless he ditches them, which he might. We can’t underestimate this guy. Can. NOT. We sold him short ourselves, even when we were specifically told not to.”
“C’mon Max,” Polydorous interjected, “how were we supposed to know the guy had a sword?”
“Moving forward,” Yael said, “I think we should assume he’s got the full legions of Hades behind him. That way if he doesn’t, we can be pleasantly surprised. Because at this point, I would not put it past him.”
“Are we sure he isn’t Lucifer?” Polydorous asked.
“I certainly hope not,” Max sighed. “But let’s not go betting on these kinds of things.”
The Taggers walked past Bolormaa, who was still engrossed in her manuscript. She glanced up as they were approaching, saw that Nhlanhla was with them and then looked back down. They were cleared to go in and she had much better things to be doing, like making her way through the fantastic story on the pages in her hands.
They walked into the lockup and down towards the place where Jake’s box was stored, being led by Nhlanhla. When they reached Jake’s box, he climbed up and pulled it from the shelf, a worried expression crossing his face. “This feels a lot lighter than it used to be,” he said, tossing it down to Max.
Max lifted the lid off the top and shouted. “Dammit!” he shouted. “His clothes are gone!”
Yael pulled another box out at random, lifting the top off, finding it empty as well. “So’s this one.” Then another. “And this one.”
“Altford,” Maria snarled.
Max growled, looking around at the boxes, then caught the upturned box lid from Jake’s box, seeing the small box attached to it marked “TAGGER SAMPLE” and he chuckled. “No, I don’t think so. This would’ve taken way too much time for him, and there’s no way he would’ve taken clothes from a bunch of other people. And anyway, it doesn’t matter…” He crouched down and popped open the inner box, taking out the two-inch scrap of cloth. “We still have our sample.” He fished out his sword and shaved off a small corner the size of his thumbnail, putting the rest of the sample back inside the box in the lid, then placed the lid on the box. He shoved the box into the first open space he could find, tucking his clipping into his pocket with his sword, before moving back out the way they came.
