A WAR IN HEAVEN
an excerpt from the latest cyberpunk novel by J. David Osborne
In celebration of his thirty-seventh winter, Okie juggalo noir and neocyberpunk author J. David Osborne—my brother and fellow Agitator—has gifted the world with the second entry in his Gods Fare No Better series.
A War In Heaven is a masterpiece. I went in on a lot of shit I loved about it right chea, but basically, if you’re a fan of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game but thought it could use a bit more esotericism, or if you love Ghost in the Shell but thought it could use a little more Beavis and Butthead humor, you have to hop on this series right now.
Peep the excerpt below:
cover art by Tony McMillen
3
The serpent let off a warning. Its muscles tensed, its rattle like a matchbox full of fingernails. A coyote had been driven to the rocky outcropping by the sweet smell of fast food trash, but took the hint and scampered down the steep hill into the dry valley below. Still hungry.
The outcropping was spacious, luxurious. The snake picked it as a fine place to have her babies. It was shaded from hawks, but not so deep that it would be difficult for her young to emerge into the heat and grow.
The snake relaxed, felt the eggs open up inside of her. She gave birth. Her children writhed in the dirt. Curling and slithering. The mother slept, her lidless eyes staring off into the dawn.
The owner of the casita woke up at eight to tend to her property. She looked to be in her thirties, and wore a pair of jeans and a paint-stained Oxcorp “No Mames, Guey” T-shirt. Her guests, local artists from back in town, had already left. She tossed the beer cans, made the bed, checked it for stains, dusted the windows. No dishes in the sink. She took a break, smoking a cigarette outside, checking on the ristras. Considered her day, realizing she had a whole lot of time and not much to do. Might finish the holovid she started three days ago. Could she even remember what was going on? Something about a killer with no memory, full of Yarn, eager to get his life back.
She might see what Alex wanted to do. Maybe they could go into town for coffee and supplies. But would it be worth the hassle, considering the nomads between here and there, then the checkpoints to get into town…is that a way to spend a day?
The cigarette made her dizzy. A herd of deer wandered through the crepe myrtle and boxwood on her property. Mostly synthetic animals, if she had to guess.
The sun came all the way up. The foothills going from oblivion cutouts to sharply formed blankets. Not too many clouds. Might be hot today. Might not. The night had been cold.
Cielo Vargas missed work. Retirement wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. No, she thought, not retirement. She’d called it an “extended sabbatical” when she’d pitched it to the Oxcorp brass. That had been the biggest risk she’d taken in her career, and she’d once flatlined a Cheer Squad hopped up on Lion’s Mane. Oxcorp’s executives did not take kindly to an employee “moving in another direction.” But she’d been so good, so reliable, that they’d let her go. For the time being. The way she saw it, they’d come calling eventually. They’d put her on a shelf, let her feel like she had some kind of normalcy in life. At some point, though, shit would get too heavy for even their next-best fixers, and she’d be back in the shit.
Would she even put up a fight, if the Oxcorp goons came to take her away?
Her terrier, Luna, was spinning in circles, ready for Cielo to open the screen door. She let the dog out, watching the little furball kick up dirt as she sprinted for the kill. Vargas hollered after her. I’m not gonna pay for another vet visit, she thought. Eventually everything that lived out here had to understand its place. You can’t chase coyotes if you barely weigh fifteen pounds. If one day she found Luna torn to pieces, she would be sorry about it, but she would understand all the same.
The smell of bacon and eggs wafted out of the kitchen, and her stomach knotted up. She hated eating breakfast. That never stopped Alex. He’d tuned the holoscreen to the local news. The death count in Cyclone City had gone down in the past few weeks, to a modest average of forty-three souls a day. The search continued for Jimmy Apanatchi, the snake-oil preacher who’d been making big claims in the past few months that he had “solved the problem of death.” Vargas knew through the grapevine that Oxcorp had put out an APB on Apanatchi. Nearly every killer in the city, from your boutique assassin to your low-life shithead, would be out there looking for him. Again, she felt that urge to get back in the game. To hunt a person down and drain their life. To feel the satisfying etheric weight of tens of thousands of credits hit your account. The adrenaline…
Then the weather report came on, followed by a LastBike commercial.
She decided to see what Luna had been so intent on pursuing. She left the house and followed the distant barks. They got louder as she rounded the shed with its burnt-out transmissions and hanging tools and coils of inert Yarn and pieces of a Bear-12 chrome neural net, all neglected. They got louder still as she stomped past the adobe wall and into the wilderness. She felt it every time she ventured away from the casita: it’s her property, but she’s in the desert’s house now.
Luna stood between two bits of scrub, barking at an outcropping. Vargas heard the rattle and sighed. “Don’t get killed,” she called out to the dog.
The dog kept barking.
She found her intact and unbit. She knelt down and pet her and grabbed her collar. Saw the viper in its home, and all the small snakes wriggling in the dirt, taking their first breaths.
“C’mon,” she said to the dog, leading her back inside.
“Morning,” her husband said. He sounded friendly, if not a little hungover.
She nodded. She’d leave him soon. “Whole bunch of snakes out there.”
“Yep. Lots of snakes out there.” The conversational trees had long since run out. He mostly just echoed her now, or the news he heard from his dial.
“I’m thinking I should do something about that. It’s close to the house.”
He put down his coffee cup. “Leave them alone.” “Luna could—”
“Luna will learn, or she’ll get bit.” Her husband shrugged. “Those are the options.”
Cielo Vargas flushed red. She didn’t want to kill the snakes. She didn’t care whether or not they were close to the house, or even if they bit her dumbass dog. She’d just said something to start a conversation, and now she was being lectured about an opinion she already held. A uniquely shitty feeling.
Her fault for trying to make conversation.
She wanted to say If you’d let me finish… but instead she stood up from the table, left the house, walked to her shed and grabbed a shovel. Committed to doing something now, forced into feeling some kind of way.
Luna barked from back inside the house.
She’d gotten halfway to where Luna had found the snakes before she came to her senses. This wasn’t her life. She wasn’t someone who had opinions about dumb shit. She definitely wasn’t someone who did this kind of thing out of spite. A creeping sensation came over her out in the beautiful temperate high desert morning, the wind blowing a strand of hair into her mouth, the taste of roses and magnolia and sharp cleaning product on her tongue. She twisted the shovel in her hands, finding it unnaturally smooth, tracing her fingers along the brand name burned into the wood.
That feeling that had driven her away from Oxcorp to begin with.
The feeling that she was on rails. Not real. Living someone else’s life.
The hell with it.
She put the shovel back.
The rattlesnake sensed danger approaching. She’d calmed herself after the dog had been dragged away, but felt Cielo’s presence nearby, felt even the half-ass intention of fucking up her world. Then it left, and she calmed as her children tensed up, shook their first buttons. No sound came out, wouldn’t for a while.
Yeah, she picked a good spot to raise her young. Back to the wall, safe from predators. She could build a life here.
The sensation of finality and calm, of life stretching out in front of her, that determined god’s will that’s behind instinct, earlier than it, welled up in her sun-warmed blood.
And the heat began to rise in the Sangre de Cristos.
4
They were waiting for her when she got back to the casita.
A brand new Volox Gehenna parked in her front yard, her blue bottle trees coated brown with the dirt it kicked up when it landed. Oxcorp logo on the side. Cat girl sticker on the rear bumper.
Jose.
She took a deep breath before opening the screen door. Luna was yapping at someone inside. Intruder alert.
Voices in the kitchen.
Kantin stood by the far wall, near her rig, admiring a painting of buffalo. Black felt Tecovas hat pushed back on his head. He turned when she entered, his blood red botas picudas grazing the legs of an endtable. “Cielo!” he yelled.
Jose pushed the kitchen table chair back and stood up when he saw her. Rail thin with a blown out shock of black hair. Blue bandana around his neck. Faded T-shirt for some jotocore band she’d never heard of. Los Cojones Morados. He smiled too many teeth. Adjusted his glasses. “Hey girl,” he said. “I’m eating your breakfast. Sorry.”
Vargas went to the fridge and pulled out a few beers.
“It’s too early for me,” Jose said.
“The breakfast is all yours,” she said. Holding the beers up by the neck and rattling them back and forth, she said, “These are for me.”
“It’s not too early for me,” Kantin said, almost to himself.
Vargas thought about it and shrugged. “Help yourself.”
He clapped. “Let’s go, guey.”
She took a seat next to her husband. They’d already powered him down. He sat motionless, eyes glassy, staring off into space.
“You fuck that thing?” Kantin said, grabbing a beer. “That’s weird, homie.”
“Where’s my dog?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, popping the cap. “Fucker ran off that way. Didn’t even say ‘hi.’”
Jose pointed at Vargas’ Oxcorp shirt. “Still representing, I see.”
She looked down. “This is my paint shirt. For when I paint.”
“Still.”
“It’s like a shirt that I’d use to wipe my ass.”
“You use shirts to wipe your ass?” Kantin leaned against the counter. “Savage.”
She stared at him for a moment. He was made of muscle, and she’d seen what he could do when he activated his Yarn. Handsome in a way, raised knife scars in his face intersecting with indented surgical patterns from the chrome. She smiled at him. Of all her coworkers, she wanted to kill him the least.
Jose, on the other hand, topped her list.
“We need you to get cleaned up and come with us. Situation in Cyclone City.”
Apanatchi, she thought. She said, “Why should I give a shit?”
“Because you’re still employed.”
“We had a deal.”
“The deal wasn’t some kind of permanent retirement.”
Vargas finished her first beer. “That’s exactly what the deal was.”
“You’re remembering it wrong,” Jose said, sitting back down. “You’re retired from the normal shit. The grunt shit. You paid for it. No more small potatoes. But you’re never out of the big stuff. None of us are.”
Vargas pulled her hair into a ponytail and sighed. “What if I just kill the two of you?”
Kantin had been busy staring at her tits as she tied her hair up. When her arms dropped, he blinked and said, “Sorry?”
Jose kept a straight face. In a monotone, he said, “She’s talking crazy. That’s all.”
“Ah, right.” Kantin studied the magnets on the fridge. He scraped off the one with a grizzly bear on it. The bear posed in front of a roaring stream, salmon in its jaws. “Just like you said she would, boss.”
“Just like I said.”
“Didn’t you already pay her?”
“I did indeed.”
“Kind of fucked up to get paid for a job and not do it.”
“Very fucked up.”
Vargas knocked back half the second bottle and waved her hand in front of her face like she was swatting away flies. “We can skip this,” she said. “Just turn the bomb on and let’s get to it.”
“Weren’t you listening?” Jose said. “We already paid you. The bomb has been on.”
“I didn’t get a notice.”
“Check again.”
Vargas accessed her HUD. The little fucker was right. She’d been activated.
True benevolence, gifting this to the world.