Dead Letter Bureau - Delta Green

The Idiot God by Nick Sayers

I used to be the type of person who nonchalantly said, "The only time I feel lonely is when I'm with other people." I’d refuse any entreaty to dent my thick shell with curiosity and be on my way. I can’t say I'm the same after the colorless cloud Ryan and I found in the woods.

Hometowns feel like a tomb to the college-bound, but I always regretted leaving. It was never a tomb to me. Not until it was. Back home, Ryan and I would spend an evening drinking cheap beer, talking about high school girls and the cosmic indifference of a post-religious world. Sometimes, the best times were spent in a shitty easy chair, staring at the stars in complete silence. The infinite things we'd never say to each other passed between us with gentle repose. It was usually when one of us would grunt and say something stupid or get up to take a leak—a balance of the sacred and the mundane in every moment.

It was during one of these perfect, quiet evenings that the realization hit me: I'd have to go back to school in three days. The thought gave me a gnawing sense of nausea about my life and my little-to-no place in driving it. I tried looking at Ryan to distract myself, only to develop a feeling of a familiar mix of jealousy and pride over his simplicity. The feeling was quickly siphoned from consciousness as a sound vibrated from the dark woods behind Ryan’s house.

“Did you see that?” Ryan asked.

“No, but I heard it. What was it?”

“The flash.”

I sure as shit would've seen a flash. I looked at Ryan and saw deep fear in his eyes, mingling with the reflection of his cheap LED porch light. I let my “what flash?” become another one of those infinite, unsaid things. My skin turned cold, and I could hear myself panting slightly. I tried to mask it with deep, quiet breaths, but it only made my hunger for oxygen more dire. It meant nothing because Ryan’s eyes were streaming with tears.

“Ryan. What’s going on, man?”

He looked at me as if I had just walked into his trailer after being away for a semester—a hanging “what the fuck are you doing here” in his gaze. “Ryan?”

“What?”

I stared at him, then looked toward the treeline. He stood up and started to walk toward the darkness.

“Dude. No.”

He ignored me. It was like those situations where someone stands in an elevator normally and everyone else enters and faces the other way, until the one person not in on the joke turns around to face the wrong way, too. Here was my dipshit self, standing off my chair and following him.

“Where are we going?”

“Did you see it?”

“No, dude. What? I hear a weird sound.”

“You didn’t see the flash? The air and colors?”

“No,” was all I could get out as we started to jog into the darkness.

Hindsight screams, don’t fucking go into the dark forest after the non-Euclidean, flashy cloud your drunk friend just saw. But that’s not how these things work. Not with Ryan and me. From poking a dead raccoon for hours, to playing chicken with an Amtrak train, to discussing the complete isolation of being an individual in a connected universe, we always chased the bunny deeper. We never asked why or by what means we'd exhaust our curiosity—a boyish hubris about knowledge always present.

I would have scratched my scalp if I had remembered how to work my hand as I saw what was in the clearing under the weight of the starlight. A cloud? A portal? A simple trick of light? What fucking light? Ryan looked at me for the first time since he knew me and simply stated, “Now you see.” A simplistic understatement that shook my grip on my, well, everything.

Then Ryan touched the damn thing. If "touch" were a sufficient sensory experience to describe it. His fingers elongated through the cloud like they were in a fishbowl, reaching for heaven. When he finally collapsed on the ground and woke up three hours later, I had him back at his place. One shoe lost. After giving him a minute to wake up, I wanted to ask, "What was it like?" His vacant stare met mine, looking through my skull and the walls, into the deep, vastness of space. My question became another thing unsaid between us—not one of the infinite things, but one that contained an infinity itself.

What can two great-ape morons do with a mystical cloud in the backwoods of Toledo, Washington? A lot. Throwing shit in it, touching it, farting on it—you name it. It took everything we offered and treated it like a gift given to some idiot god with no mind to rationally communicate back. Dumb, idiot, braindead, but a god nonetheless. This textual medium cannot begin to communicate the sensory experience of engaging with the cloud bestowed on us, like moronic penitents who worship an even stupider god. Like a dog trying to hump a dead beached whale. It was exhilarating beyond compare.

This is when the schism happened. Ryan, a prosthletizer, started to strategize on who we should show the cloud to. My insides revolted at the mention. I had only ever been chosen by Ryan. I used diversion and fear to dissuade him, which worked for a time. Weeks passed, and I had over fifty missed calls from school friends, all but reporting me missing. Ignore. Dismiss. Phone off. Ryan started to remind me to eat. I didn't feel hungry, so I stopped. He was always better about caring for himself in that way. Another thing I started to hate about him.

Ryan wanted to preach the gospel of the cloud, while I became its monastic adherent, jealously guarding its secrecy. Ryan and I never fought.

I wish we had.

Day, or weeks, maybe months? I don’t know, but Ryan brought his father out without telling me. I was lying nude under the cloud in the leaves when I heard their voices. Ryan’s father was a father figure for me. My dad had Parkinson’s disease and wasn’t around much. My mother—well, fuck her. She wasn’t around at all. Still isn’t. Ryan’s dad, much like him, was the type to remind you to eat and look in your eye and actually care about what he saw reflected back. He became my dad in ways. Even so, I still felt this was an affront to our pact—my pact of secrecy. I looked down at my nude body, down twenty pounds, maybe. Who knows. Who cares. I sat up and watched Ryan’s dad fall to his knees in its presence. He closed his eyes and started to smell and pant through his nose, if one could do such a thing. The cloud seemed to flex toward him, but it was always moving. They didn’t even see me under the thing. I could tell the cloud was manifesting through a smell for Ryan’s dad. Ryan was shielding his eyes; the visual component was always too much for him. I could feel the cloud touch them. I could feel my jealousy. It was in the cloud. Or was it the cloud's jealousy?

It would be easy to blame the cloud for what happened next. I rushed from under the thing. Tackled Ryan's father. The man was anything but frail. I had a different kind of strength. He gasped my name, a short-lived smile crossing his face, soon turning to a gasp as my teeth sank deeply into his throat. I tore outward like a feral wolf. It was an explosion of flavor overwhelming my senses, as the warm blood mixed with my taste buds. The cloud made every taste bud explode with a different color, flavor, sound, again, no words for it. I don't understand. It was like time stopped, yet I was still moving lightning-fast, my fingers quickly finding a trachea under some muscle and flesh. It came out with a pop. Ryan dove on me and knocked me over. He was screaming something, but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. I'm not even sure I was breathing.

I walked away from their bodies. My nude form bathed in the cloud’s “light,” and it roiled in the air. I bent over, prostrate, baptized in blood. Its moronic pulsing suggested nothing. I felt it. It wasn't confused; it had no logical structure to its suggestions. It was like a toddler putting something in its mouth, and it found poison and then swallowed it. I was that poison. It wasn't even disgusted in me. It just dumbly started to whirl faster and flash colors without names, until it was gone, and I was on the ground asking for it to hold me again.

It's been weeks in some alien perception of time that is completely meaningless to anyone but me. I'm a different person. My skin, well, I don’t know. The food Ryan used to remind me to eat tastes like ash. My limbs feel both lighter and stronger, and I’ve been practicing running through the woods at night. I never get lost. I always know where I am. I always know where they are.

I carry Ryan’s skull with me. In the quiet hours under the sun, among the pines, I work toward expressing the infinite things I regret not saying. Anyway, the only time I feel lonely is when I’m with other people. I used to say that nonchalantly, but now, I can’t be with them. Not anymore.

The agents push into the black water of Boggy Depot, a primeval landscape where the air is heavy with the weight of things left to rot. One of them feels it first: a gaze without eyes, the unnerving sense that the land itself is aware of their intrusion. The trail is a paradox of old decay and new trespass, leading them to the bones of a forgotten town and a single, sealed building that even the desperate souls haunting this place have left untouched. Breaking the seal, they don't find a monster, but something far more insidious: a presence in the decay, a strange and terrible faith that begins to bloom in their own minds, pulling them toward a dark sacrament at the heart of the rot.

Guest intro done by Charlie of Null Project. Hear him regularly on This Line Isn't Secure.

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Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Cast

Nick Sayers... Writer, Handler, and Editor

Kristina... Agent Ryan

Ryan... Agent Barone

Jordan... Agent Del

Podcast art by Studio Janie

Music and Sound Effects from Envato.

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

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Black Flare

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Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

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This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this podcast are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

The desert is behind them. The black water awaits. A new operation sends the agents to the swamps of Oklahoma on the trail of an ex-MAJESTIC scientist. But the swamp has its own secrets—a ghost town where an entire community vanished without a trace. The hunt for Dr. Karras begins now.

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Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

In the shadow world, some operations are too sensitive for the official channels. When a rival black-ops program, MAJESTIC, makes a move to transport a piece of recovered alien technology, a deniable asset team is activated. They are not agents; they are scalpels, deployed when the official instruments of power have failed or gone rogue. From the belly of an AC-130 gunship, this three-man team is dropped into the Arizona desert with a single, clear objective: intercept the convoy. Their handler gives them the choice of engagement—an ambush on the open desert highway where there is no cover, or a high-stakes takedown at a strategic chokepoint on a 500-foot canyon bridge. The mission is simple: neutralize the security element and deny the asset to the enemy. At all costs.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

The agents walked out of the mine and into the hard light of a world that no longer looked the same. The trail led them back to the town and to a lawman who carried ghosts of his own from a war fought in a jungle half a world away. He spoke of men with a certain tattoo who moved like smoke and dealt in a kind of violence that left no clean wounds, and in his words, the agents saw the shape of the enemy they now faced. The lawman gave them a name and a place on a map, a parcel of scorched earth out in the waste. They drove the car as far as the road would go and then walked, and what they found there in the dark was a place of profound wrongness, a squalid testament to a mind that had gone digging for the truth and had struck something awful and alive in the deep rock of the world.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

Out in the waste, a rifleman watched from the rocks. But the real trial was not under the sun, but in the deep dark of the earth, where they found what they were looking for, and learned that some secrets are best left to the silence of the stone.

Sniper played by Max of 9mm Retirement Radio!! Thank you, Max.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

After discovering Arthur Finch's ransacked apartment, Agents Ryan and Dell know their target's secrets are on a hard drive at a local internet cafe. As night falls on the haunted town of Jerome, they take a surreal detour on a ghost tour before launching a late-night B&E to recover the data. But are they not alone, and more importantly, will they make it out of Jerome alive?

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

In 1998, a whisper on the early internet drew two agents to Jerome, Arizona, a ghost town clinging to a mountainside. They are an unlikely pair—one a man of technology, the other a man of instinct—sent to erase the digital ramblings of a conspiracy theorist named Arthur Finch. As they navigate the strange, sun-baked streets, they soon discover that some secrets refuse to stay buried in a town this old. The operation turns sharply into the Unnatural when they break into Finch's apartment and find not just a mess, but a sign that something has passed through the very fabric of the world, leaving them to wonder what kind of horror their target has truly uncovered.

Cast

Nick Sayers... Writer, Handler, and Editor

Kristina... Agent Ryan

Ryan... Agent Barone

Jordan... Agent Del

Podcast art by Studio Janie

Music and Sound Effects from Envato.

Here are some other shows we love! Search them up.

9mm Retirement Radio

RPG Reanimators

Black Flare

Hand on the Door

Sorry, Honey, I Have to Take This

Stories and Lies

This Line Isn't Secure

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/576NbWAEm1uOBDxlW1F4Os?si=c7228e49ddb94035

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-letter-bureau-delta-green/id1826992923

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deadletterbureau

Find transcripts: https://dead-letter-bureau.captivate.fm/

Talk to us on Discord: https://discord.gg/2RFYaWHm33

Welcome to the Dead Letter Bureau. This season, we start deep in the sun-scorched deserts of Arizona, where two parallel operations collide in a storm of cosmic horror and black-ops violence.

It begins with a whisper: a conspiracy blogger in the haunted ghost town of Jerome starts posting things he shouldn't know. Two Delta Green agents are sent to silence him. Still, they soon find themselves caught in the crosshairs of a ruthless rival agency, leaving a trail of bodies from a bloody hotel shootout to the dark, echoing tunnels of an abandoned copper mine. What they find in that darkness, and later in a squalid desert trailer, will redefine their understanding of the alien threat.

Meanwhile, a specialized Delta Green strike team moves to intercept as the convoy of a shadow government program known as MAJESTIC transports a priceless and terrifying piece of alien technology across a remote canyon bridge. What follows is a brutal, high-stakes ambush where failure means more than just a failed mission—it could hand the enemy the keys to the kingdom.

Join us for a season of paranoia, desperate firefights, and the horrifying truth about the things that fall from the sky.

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Nick Sayers, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.