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Every Name Ends in Blood

Flash Fiction | Espionage Horror | Strategic Elimination Protocol | Macabre Satire

By Jesse ShelleyPublished 5 months ago 2 min read
Death Swapped for Death

The doctor was halfway through telling me about my gallbladder when he started talking to God.

Not the generic God of hospital chapels and get-well cards—this one was precise. Orders, coordinates, a voice that knew which cells were dying and which ones should.

I didn’t interrupt. People who start hearing things never think they’ve just started. They think you’ve been hearing them too.

Over the years I noticed the same pattern—perfectly compliant men and women, loyal to the point of boredom, suddenly receiving divine dictation. Diagnoses got sharper. Deaths got quieter. Nobody called it murder; they called it “accurate prognosis.”

The trick was simple enough. Take the brainwaves of one obedient host, overlay them onto someone useful—like a CIA director—and watch as the hymns start slipping into kill orders. Meanwhile, the Agency runs a quiet balancing act—chewing through mass-recruited fresh agents in vanishings so efficient they barely leave a stain: staged "natural causes" that smell of poison, twisted steel on rural highways, midnight gunfights that leave nothing breathing, and stabbings in alleys where the snow crust hides the blood until spring. It’s a ledger of meat and ash, a vicious arithmetic meant to keep their own bombings and assassinations in check—blowback dressed as balance, death swapped for death in a game where the rules are written in other people’s marrow.

Within weeks, the whole building hums like an organ. The secretary hears her boss in the next room, groaning and typing, the sound amplified by the ceiling fan. She mistakes it for an invitation. She becomes a point of leverage. She starts hearing voices.

Her husband works in the missile silos. Soon, he’s dead—because someone decided a name on a list was worth less than the echo it left—threads pulled taut between her whispered conspiracies, a connection that made his absence more valuable than his presence. His replacement’s fresh. Fresh is always foreign. Foreign always listens.

This isn’t about America. It isn’t about Russia. It isn’t about Israel. The PLA just learned how to make the big three cut each other into ribbons while harvesting the rest of us for spare parts.

They kill the rich when the account gets fat enough. They take the ones with “magic” to Lubyanka-style black sites and strip them down past bone and memory, carving out the pieces they need. Those pieces don’t come back. Scream, and the "magic" doesn’t just work better—it tears through the ethereal fabric of the intended target like shrapnel in soft fruit.

I learned not to scream.

But I do listen.

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About the Creator

Jesse Shelley

Digital & criminal forensics expert, fiction crafter. I dissect crimes and noir tales alike—shaped by prompt rituals, investigative obsession, and narrative precision. Every case bleeds story. Every story, a darker truth. Come closer.

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