Escaping Heaven by Cliff Hicks

caretakers, who’ll refer you to an eternity specialist, barring additional consultation. They’ll work diligently to help you solve your problem, or, barring that, help you forget about it.” Gilbert closed up the folder and put the single sheet of paper he’d been filling out on top of it, then handed the stack to Jake. “That’s it, you’re done here. See? Painless and quick. Only took you…” Gilbert said, looking down at his watch, “thirty four celestial days, which means not even a day and a half Earth time.”
    Jake was amazed the man had a watch, and though he considered himself an honest man, Jake had the almost inescapable urge to try and steal it from him. “What do you mean ‘celestial time’?” Jake pried. “Does time run differently up here?”
    “ Of course! This is Heaven, after all,” Gilbert replied with a toothy smile. “Celestial time and Earth time run a relative scale. What seems, approximately, like a day here runs about an hour of Earth time. Therefore, you get to experience even more of Heaven’s greatness than you would if we adhered to Earth time.”
    “ Is that why it’s that way?”
    “ Well,” Gilbert said secretively, leaning forward to put his hand alongside of his mouth, “I’ve always suspected it’s just so we can handle all the large influx of people coming in these days. Seems like there’s more and more every day.”
    “ Isn’t there some religion that believes only 144,000 people are going to get into Heaven?”
    “ Yeah, so?”
    Jake scratched his chin for a second then looked at Gilbert again. “How many of those guys do you have?”
    “ Those guys alone?” Gilbert swayed his head back and forth, as if he was estimating. “Two point eight million, give or take.”
    This brought a chuckle to Jake’s lips, the first honest laugh he’d had in a while. “So they were wrong?”
    In response, Gilbert smirked. “Well, let’s just say the system doesn’t work the way anyone expects it to. You can imagine the fit the reincarnationists throw when they get up here. Night mare. Now go on and get out of here, before those forms expire and I have to do them all over again.”
    Jake’s arms wrapped around the paperwork and he scooped it up. Gilbert was holding open the back door, giving him room to move out, and Jake slipped out the door silently, nodding his thanks to Gilbert. As he was leaving, he heard Gilbert’s voice behind him, talking into an intercom or a phone, although Jake didn’t remember seeing anything like that in the office. (It was, he conceded, possibly concealed beneath a cleverly placed avalanche of paper.) “Doris, can you put in a request for Murray to stop by my office please? Thank you.”
    From Gilbert’s office, Jake entered yet another long white hallway that was featureless in every way. The walls were white, the floor was white, the ceiling was white. Hell, Jake half expected to look down and see that all of his color was gone. The hallway seemed to go on endlessly, no turns, no entrances or exits, only the long white hallway seemingly stretched on for eternity. It occurred to Jake after a while, that he wasn’t sure how the rooms were lit. He had yet to see any lights in the place, but he noticed that the walls themselves seemed to give off a soft glow, and that was a little creepy on its own. In a clean way. If there was such a thing.
    By the time he neared the end of the tunnel, Jake was afraid his legs were going to fall off. He’d been walking for what felt like a lifetime, and although he wasn’t physically exhausted at all, he was mentally just tired of walking down a long, featureless tunnel. Eventually, though, the hallway did open up into a large room. Jake had to push open a small golden gate that latched closed behind him when he was through it, so as to prevent him from turning back.
    Before him laid another large open room, with another set of lines. There were at least a dozen walkup windows, and the one with