PARAMEDICS DECLARED HIM D.EAD AT 3:04 PM — THEN THE HOMELESS MAN SAID “NOT YET” “STOP! You’re breaking his bones!” the woman in the crowd screamed.

“He’s already dead! Leave him alone!” I didn’t listen. I brought my fist down on the man’s chest again. CRACK. “Ribs heal,” I grunted, sweat stinging my eyes.

“Dead doesn’t.” The young paramedic tried to pull me off. “Sir! We called Time of Death five minutes ago. Step away or I’m calling the police!” I shoved him back with a strength that didn’t match my gray rags.

They saw a crazy, 81-year-old bum desecrating a corpse in a tailored suit. They didn’t see the Silver Star pinned to the inside of my dirty jacket. And they didn’t know about the technique I learned in the jungle—the one they banned for being “too barbaric.” I locked my hands. One. Two. CRACK. The police were running toward us, batons drawn.

Then, a ragged, desperate suck of air. The “corpse” gasped. His eyes flew open. The crowd went silent. The paramedic dropped his radio. The man in the suit coughed, blinking up at the sky, then at me. He didn’t look scared.

my face. “I knew it was you,” he wheezed.

“My father gave me this picture before he died. He said if I ever stopped breathing, I had to find the man in the photo. Because you’re the only one who knows where he hid the… the last proof of Project Lazarus.”

My breath stops. Not just because of what he said—but because the photograph he’s holding is my face. Younger. Cleaner. A sharp jawline beneath a soldier’s cap, my eyes still full of fire. The picture is old, worn soft at the corners. But I know when it was taken. Cambodia. 1971.

I snatch it from his trembling hand, my own fingers suddenly stiff with something like fear. The man’s face is turning blue again, and I shout to the stunned paramedic, “Get him oxygen! Now!”

The kid jolts into action, fumbling with his kit. Two cops grab me by the arms, but I don’t resist. My mind is spinning too fast. Project Lazarus. That name hasn’t left my lips in fifty years. And now it’s clawed its way back to the surface like a corpse I forgot to bury.

The man in the suit, maybe early thirties, keeps his eyes on mine as they lift him onto the stretcher. “My name’s Derek,” he rasps. “Derek Voss. My father was Martin Voss.”

I nearly collapse.

Martin Voss was my commanding officer. He was also my best friend. And he’s been dead since 1973—at least, that’s what the official file says.

The paramedics wheel Derek toward the ambulance. His pulse is stabilizing, but his body’s wrecked. Before the doors close, he reaches out again. “They’re still looking for it,” he whispers. “I tried to hide. They found me anyway. Please… it’s in the locket.”

“What locket?” I demand, stepping forward, but the doors slam shut, and the sirens wail to life. The ambulance speeds off, leaving me in a storm of sirens, shouts, and a thousand eyes that don’t know what they just saw.

The cops shove me again. One yells, “You assaulted a paramedic, old man. You’re going in.”

“Good,” I mutter. “Jail’s safer than where this is going.”

But as they cuff me and start reading rights I’ve heard too many times, something tugs at the back of my mind—his jacket pocket. He didn’t just have the photo. He touched something else. A shape I’d know anywhere.

I go limp in their arms, feigning a faint. They roll their eyes, loosen their grip, and I twist like I’m forty years younger. A fast elbow, a foot sweep, and they’re both on the ground.

The crowd screams again. I’m already moving.

I dive into the alley, tear through garbage cans, leap a chain-link fence like I haven’t missed a meal in days. My body remembers this rhythm even if my bones hate me for it.

Ten minutes later, I’m in an abandoned subway tunnel beneath the city, breath ragged, heart hammering, hands shaking not from fear—but from memory.

Project Lazarus.

It was a myth even among black ops. A last-ditch experiment to bring soldiers back from the edge of death. Not metaphorically. Literally. They said it never worked. But we weren’t told everything. Martin had doubts. He stole something. Something vital. He told me if anything ever happened, I’d be the only one who could find it.

I dig into my coat pocket, retrieve the bloodied photograph, and flip it over. There’s something scribbled in fading ink on the back: “Where you left your heart.”

I close my eyes. My heart didn’t die in the jungle. It died in Boston. On a hospital bed beside a woman named Eleanor, holding my hand as the machines beeped their last.

Eleanor. My wife. Martin knew that. He was the only one I told.

Which means…

I’m on the 6 AM Greyhound to Boston, hidden beneath a hoodie a teenager gave me for free. I still smell like blood and rain, but no one bothers the homeless man muttering to himself.

My first stop is Mount Hope Cemetery. Eleanor’s grave is still there, a modest headstone with a rose carving and the words, “She made him whole.” I kneel beside it, whispering her name like a prayer. Then I run my fingers along the base. And there it is.

A tiny rusted key embedded beneath a loose corner of the stone.

I pry it out, clean it with my sleeve. It’s engraved with a number: 3-1-4.

A locker.

I sprint through the pouring rain to the old South Station terminal. It’s mostly automated now, but the basement still has the coin lockers. I pass rows of commuters, disappear down the stairs, and stop in front of locker 314.

The key slides in like it never left.

Inside is a single object: a silver heart-shaped locket. My breath catches.

I open it.

Inside, a microfilm no larger than my thumbnail. Tucked beside it: a USB drive and a folded scrap of paper. One word scrawled on it:

Run.

Suddenly, the hairs on my neck stand up.

There’s a click.

I whirl around just as a silenced pistol hisses, the bullet lodging in the locker door inches from my head.

I dive. The shooter’s dressed in a suit—clean, calculated, eyes like ice. Government-trained. Not FBI. Too quiet. Too smooth. Lazarus cleanup crew.

I hit the ground and sweep his legs. He falls, but recovers fast. He’s younger, stronger—but I’m desperate.

I jam the locker door into his face and take off, heart hammering, clutching the locket and USB like they’re fused to my skin.

Upstairs, chaos erupts. Security yells. The assassin vanishes into the crowd. I leap onto a departing train just as the doors close.

I collapse in the last car, panting, laughing like a madman.

But I’m not crazy.

I’m awake.

On the USB: every file Martin ever copied. Test subjects. Failures. Revivals. Government names. Blackmail. Proof. Names of every Lazarus agent still alive—and the ones they resurrected.

Derek was one of them. I’m sure of it now. He must have died once already.

And someone doesn’t want him—or me—alive.

I make my way to the only person who can decrypt this data without alerting half the intelligence world: Clara Ramos. She was a hacker before hackers knew what hacking was. Used to be on every watchlist. Now she hides behind a flower shop in Cambridge.

When I show her the drive, she swears under her breath. “You really know how to pick retirement gifts, Don.”

“You can unlock it?”

“I can. But you better have an escape plan once I do.”

It takes six minutes. Clara’s good. Too good.

And then she stops, hands trembling.

“This isn’t just a kill list,” she whispers. “It’s a resurrection list. They’ve brought back twenty-seven operatives. Most declared dead between ‘65 and ‘85. They’ve been activating them. Using them for hits no one can trace. Ghosts.”

“Can you send this to the press?”

“Not fast enough. They’ll kill us before it hits public.”

“Then we hit first.”

I copy the files to three separate drives, each labeled with a single word: TRUTH.

I take one. Clara takes the second. The third goes inside a prepaid envelope addressed to the one journalist left in D.C. with a spine.

We’re about to leave when Clara stiffens. “Don. Look.”

Security cam feed shows the flower shop windows go black.

Then bullets.

The first man through the door drops from Clara’s shotgun blast. The second clips me in the arm. I roar through the pain, toss a flashbang into the hallway, and drag Clara out the back.

We escape through the sewer, stinking, bleeding, alive.

Barely.

By sunrise, the files are uploaded to ten mirror sites. Clara’s rewriting code like a demon, building an untraceable net of copies. The truth spreads faster than they can bury it.

By noon, three black sites are exposed. A senator resigns.

By evening, Lazarus is trending on every platform.

But it’s not over.

I meet Derek again in a hospital safehouse. He’s pale, broken, but breathing.

“Why now?” I ask him.

He looks at me, tears in his eyes.

“Because I died last year in a car crash. I remember it. But two days later, I woke up. In a facility. They said I’d always known I was ‘eligible.’ That my father signed me up when I was born. Project Lazarus was never about reviving soldiers. It was about building them from birth.”

I feel ice in my spine.

“You’re saying…?”

“There are hundreds of us. Hidden. Monitored. Programmed. We don’t even know we’re part of it—until they flip the switch.”

He grips my hand.

“But you, Don—you broke the pattern. You woke me up. You gave me back my mind.”

The truth goes viral. Clara makes sure of it. The files hit every major outlet. Government officials deny everything. But whistleblowers crawl out of the shadows, and the dominoes fall.

Project Lazarus dies not with silence—but with a scream.

By midnight, my face is on every news channel.

Some call me a hero. Others call me dangerous.

But I don’t care.

Because I know Eleanor would be proud.

And for the first time in fifty years, I sleep.

Peacefully.

Alive.