Escaping Heaven (14 page)

“
Alright, you pansy-ass lily white novices! I’m going to give you the rundown on the hardest part of your job,” Skip boomed at them. His voice was overwhelming, echoing slightly in the cavernous room. “Tracking down the loose cannons. Tracking and containment. That means tag’em’n’bag’em. That is why they call us Taggers! We Tag and bag. You may find that for some strange reason, the Cherubim may have problems bringing you back the souls of someone who has recently found themselves dead. This is unacceptable. Your job will be to locate these loose spooks and to bring them back to Heaven by any means necessary. Damage to the corporeal soul isn’t permanent and anything you can do to them will be repaired extremely quickly. If that means you need to break both their legs and drag them up to Heaven by their hair, well then, so be it! Do whatever it takes to accomplish your mission!

             
“You are being given a standard-issue A3 sword. You will find that there is no blade attached. This is because you do not need one! When you press your thumb against the blue gem near the top of the hilt, as long as your hand is holding the hilt, the sword will burst into flames. This flame will not hurt you while you are holding the hilt! If you are afraid of fire, I don’t need your ass here, and you can show yourself to the door! No? OKAY! You are to use your sword primarily as a means of intimidation! Usually the very sight of it would send your average spook into fits of panic and submission!” Jake idly wondered how much of this shouting Skip could do before the vein pulsing in his forehead ruptured. The man certainly hadn’t blinked since he started talking.

             
“Should you need to use your blade, you are to use it with all necessary force! Do not hesitate! If you do, it is entirely possible your target may attempt to wound you, with a well-placed kick or punch to the groin. I do not expect any of you weaklings to be downed by this, or I will come and hack you to tiny bits and keep putting you back together again! Pain is for cowards!”

             
Skip looked on at them, as if daring them to say a word in objection, then continued. “After you locate and subdue the loose soul, you are to drag it back up here and take it to the main placement lines. If you damage the soul with such severity it dissipates, you will go and wait for it at Reformation, then escort it back to the lines, as previously stated. From there, the system will take over and you will await your next dispatch. Some days you may be sent out a dozen times. Some days you may not be sent out at all. Those days will be the biggest disappointment. You live to hunt. You hunt to live! This is your major goal in life, to be the biggest, baddest, meanest motherfucker in this corps! Do you maggots understand me?”

             
All around him, everyone except Jake erupted with “Sir, yes sir!” and Jake simply mimed the words with them after he caught himself off-balance.

             
“Good! Now get your gear, meet your C.O. and get your ass to your rack!”

             
Again, his half pounded out “Sir, yes sir!” Then everyone began to move to get into lines. The right half lined up, and Jake moved to slide into the middle of them. They handed him a slightly darker color robe (more cream colored than white-white), a sword hilt and, of all things, a halo.

             
“You can’t be a proper asskicking soldier angel without a halo, now, can you boy?” said the gear officer, who grinned up at him.

             
“No sir,” Jake replied with as much machismo as he could muster, “no, I can’t.”

             
He lifted the halo up and set it atop of his head. He paused to consider the halo first, of course. He’d seen them on other people, but this was his first chance to inspect one up close. It wasn’t flat. He wasn’t sure why he expected it to be flat, but it wasn’t. It was almost tubelike, a rounded band, sort of like a very large gold ring, just a little too thick for him to wrap his thumb and middle finger around. It was neither warm nor cool to the touch. In fact, it felt almost soft, as if it were living tissue. And yet, Jake was sure this thing would not break no matter what you did to it. The feeling of softness was in his mind only. It seemed neither light nor heavy, but it did have a certain feeling of weight to it. Heft, rather. Perhaps, Jake thought to himself, that was all just tied into the idea of it actually being a halo.

             
There was something about the idea of a halo that seemed more important than the actual item itself. He ran a fingernail against it for a second, and it did not scratch or buff. It had a metallic sheen to it, but it also seemed to glow with its own inner light. Not a great deal of light, but enough to give a bit of illumination to his hands. He realized, however, with a quick glance around that he was the only one actually considering his halo, and the rest of them had simply put theirs on. Jake followed their lead.

It was a rather odd experience, putting a halo on. Jake wondered if this was how people who were knighted were supposed to feel. He had raised the ring up and over his head, and then started to lower it until he felt resistance, a good foot above the top of his head. So, his fingers uncurled from the golden band and let it go. It hung there, suspended over his head. He didn’t feel any weight from it pressing down atop of his head, but somehow he was aware of the presence of it. He simply knew that it was there, hovering over his head. It had become an extension of his body, just like that.

(He resisted the urge to see if he could give the halo a good spin, although that took a bit of self-control. He decided to try later, when no one was around to see.)

             
He also took a moment to consider the sword hilt. This was something the others were doing, so Jake felt entirely justified in having a minute or two of inspection here. True enough to the commander’s word, there was a blue gem near the top of the hilt. Jake pressed his thumb against it, and silently the hilt quickly grew a blade of fire. Jake whipped his head back, nearly dropping it, but the minute his thumb moved off the blue gem, the blade itself vanished. It didn’t retract back in, as it had grown out – it simply dissipated, as if the fire simply drifted off into the air, or burned itself out. He turned the blade on again, a little more confident this time.

             
Like the halo, the blade itself seemed to be almost weightless. The hilt itself had some weight to it, but when he added the blade to the sword, it grew no heavier. He turned his wrist back and forth a little bit, feeling the blade slice through the air effortlessly. He brought his other hand to the blade and closed his finger around it, and just as the instructor had promised, it didn’t hurt him. He could feel a solidarity inside of the flame, but it felt dull against his hands, even though he was consciously aware that it wasn’t. Jake had no experience with a sword before now, but somehow he felt as if he was learning how to use it simply by handling it. As if the blade itself was teaching him the longer it was out. Jake let the blade extinguish again and tucked the hilt into the belt that hung on his new robe.

             
As they lined up to file out of the auditorium, Jake caught his own reflection in the halo of the person before him, seeing himself with the gold ring atop of his head. Perhaps he was taking this blending in thing a bit far, but certainly no one would question his authoritative presence now, as he certainly looked the part of an angel. If only the angels who’d held him hostage could see him now, Jake thought to himself, he wondered what they’d have to say about this.

*
             
*
             
*
             
*
             
*

             
“
W
hen I get my hands on that miserable little shit, I’m going to spend the rest of eternity cutting him up into penny-sized bits and letting him regrow,” Randall growled. The five of them had begun hammering away at a bit of the wall in the back of the small compound they were trapped in.

             
Shelly paused, wiping sweat from her brow. There was a good chunk of Heavenly stone beneath them at this point, gathered in piles of rubble. They had chosen a specific spot, one wall that was thinner than the rest, which they figured would connect them over to the next cellblock over, and begun digging. They had even talked the souls into helping, moving rubble out of the room and making things out of it. It seemed the only way to keep them distracted, since it was quite clear they weren’t doing a shift change any time soon. But, for the most part, the souls simply puttered around, doing what they were told, unaware that anything unusual was going on. The sedatives would keep them placated for up to two weeks celestial time before they would start to get antsy.

             
“You’re sure this’ll get us into the next block?” Shelly asked Terence.

             
“I’m sure,” he replied. “When we were constructing these blocks, these walls were cut the thinnest, and we always joked that a really determined prisoner would be able to get himself from one cellblock to another with only a year’s worth of work or so.”

             
“Well we don’t have a year, now, do we?” Randall fired back, angrily. “We’ve been in here two days celestial time, by my estimate, which means in five more days, they’re going to come and get the weekly report and find no one in the goddamn control room!”

             
“Relax, Randall,” James said. “Judging by the sound of the stone, we’ll be through here in another day or two, which gives us plenty of time to get someone back into place in the reporting station.

             
“And how in the host would you know that?”

             
James paused a second. “I was a stonecutter back on Earth.” He said it with a certain amount of solemness, a quiet tone that filled the room, even with the pounding of the hammers. None of them had talked about their time before they came to Heaven. It was something they simply didn’t do. None of them had so much as mentioned a word of it until now. James had been in Heaven the longest of the five, some three thousand years, but none of his fellow angels knew that. It was almost as if he had shared his most intimate secret with them. Their pasts were not something they discussed, because it reminded them of Earth, and each of them occasionally felt homesick for it, even if they would never admit it to anyone else.

             
There was a long pause before anyone spoke again, the revelation hanging in the air uncomfortably. “I was a priest,” Byron said quietly, an almost relieved tone to his voice, as if he was finally getting something off of his chest. “Not a very good one, really, because I wasn’t certain whether or not I believed in God, but apparently I was good enough, because here I am, halo and all.”

             
Shelly snorted, moving a large chunk of rock over to one side. “That has nothing to do with it and you know it.”

             
“Doesn’t it?” he replied as he paused in his digging, pointing at her. “You’re so smart, what were you, then?”

             
She looked away from their gaze. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

             
“Oh no you don’t, Shelly,” James said. He’d always been the one with the most volume to his voice, on the rare occasion when he wanted to employ it. “You wanted to get all high and mighty, so let’s hear your story.”

             
“Isn’t there some sort of rule that we shouldn’t be talking about this?” Byron asked meekly, suddenly trying to defuse the situation even as he took a step back away from the others.

             
“Isn’t there some sort of rule that we shouldn’t let our wards out while getting ourselves locked in?” Shelly snapped at him as she swung the hammer down on the wall again.

             
“And whose fault was that?” James growled as he kicked at the wall, knocking a chunk of stone loose from it.

             
“QUIET!” Randall boomed. The other four angels immediately fell silent, staring at him, as Randall tapped the small hammer he’d been using to slowly chip away at his section of the wall. He tapped it again, leaning his head very close to the wall. Then he paused before striking the hammer down hard, as a portion of the wall opened up, a hole giving way to a tiny view onto the other side. They could see another room, another cell, another subsection of their stockades. “Okay, go.”

             
As soon as he spoke, all four of the others began again with renewed vigor, breaking open the section as fast as they could, widening the hole with efficiency, all conversation lost for the moment.

*
             
*
             
*
             
*
             
*

             
A
fter a while, Bob had eventually found the list of contraband he was looking for, although he found himself almost wishing he hadn’t once he did. The “list” turned out to be an entire volume by itself, a seemingly endless collection of things considered improper to bring back into Heaven. Some of these things were obvious, like explosives or sexual toys. Some of them were unusual, like chocolate or soda. Some of them were just downright strange, like crayons or matches.