Blood and Blanks
written by
jaron summers (c) 2025
Reverend Dr. Gideon Voss was America’s theologian. He preached to millions. His sermons aired nightly on three networks and twelve Christian streaming apps, all echoing one thunderous message: “Virtue is worth more than breath.”
He said it from pulpits, TV studios, and even at the National Prayer Breakfast, where senators clapped like wind-up monkeys. “If a girl must die defending her virtue,” he bellowed, “then her death is her crown!”
The nation listened. So did his daughter.
Fourteen-year-old Rebecca Voss was his pride and joy. Sweet-faced, steel-spined, and trained in three forms of self-defense by the age of twelve, she testified of Christ’s blood and her own chastity with equal fervor. Her Bible—King James, 1611 edition, leather-bound and blood-red—never left her side.
But evil doesn’t care about sermons.
One spring evening, while walking home from youth group, Rebecca was ambushed in a church parking lot by a man the size of a refrigerator. She reached for her concealed blade—an engraved gift from her father—and slashed at him with a prayer on her lips.
The man knocked the knife away. He overpowered her. He killed her.
And then he defiled her corpse.
The nation wept. Gideon Voss roared. On national television he declared, “The murderer shall not escape God’s law. Nor mine.” He invoked the ancient principle of blood atonement. The killer, a drifter named Frank Bode, was sentenced by special legislative vote to death by firing squad—an ancient law revived for this modern outrage.
The day of execution drew millions of viewers. Bode stood blindfolded against a pockmarked brick wall. Seven riflemen fired.
He fell. A medic nodded. Dead.
That night, under a moon red as spilled wine, Gideon Voss crept into the city morgue with a crowbar and an alibi.
He opened the casket.
Frank Bode blinked.
The reverend smiled. The bullets, of course, had been blanks.
What happened next is mostly whispered among janitors and night watchmen. They say the screams lasted hours. They say the morgue smelled like pennies and burnt hair. They say Voss flayed the killer alive, quoting scripture with every peel of skin.
“You have heard it said, Thou shalt not kill,” the murderer gasped, eyes bulging.
“But I say unto you,” Gideon whispered, “You should have read the footnotes.”
When the job was done, he sewed the skin into a banner.
It hung from his pulpit the next Sunday.
Some called him mad. Others called him righteous. But everyone remembered his final sermon:
“My daughter died for a lie I taught her. I wrapped her in theology like a burial shroud. But when I saw her cold and cut open like meat— I realized: God never asked her to die. I did.”
And then he lit his banner on fire.
No one saw Gideon Voss again.
But some say, late at night, a man walks the cemetery where Rebecca sleeps, leaving behind scraps of scripture and the scent of ash.
This is where I came up with the notion for Blood and Blanks.
