Proof of Death

When Deputy Cletus Jinks discovers a corpse with a live, ticking Bitcoin wallet tattooed on its tongue, he stumbles into a nightmare hiding in plain sight in rural North Carolina. In Larkin’s Ford, the unclaimed dead are being mined. Their bodies are used as thermal mass to cool a clandestine crypto-mine, their identities erased from the public record for profit by a corrupt network.
But Odessa Pyle, a grieving ex-embalmer, has kept the definitive ledger. For two years, she has documented every stolen body, every corrupt official, and every dollar amount on the blockchain itself. Now she is turning their own brutal industry—embalming tools, crematorium furnaces, industrial incinerators—against them in a series of cold, mirror-image executions.
Drawn into her dark design, Deputy Jinks tracks her to a flooded mountain quarry rigged with explosives and a ticking smart-contract. She offers him a "hard fork" in the blockchain of justice: an alternative ending to her grief that doesn't require a mountain to fall. To stop the collapse, Jinks must prove he can carry the ledger, proving that the names of the dead are not just a transaction, but an immutable, permanent record for a world that tried to forget them.