Officer Caleb Mendez had driven Route 67 for the past twelve years. The two-lane highway carved a winding path through the outskirts of the sleepy town of Halberd, rarely busy except for the occasional trucker or local making their way to the nearby state border. Early Friday mornings were especially quiet—until today.
It was 5:43 a.m. when Caleb saw it.
At first, he thought it was just debris—maybe a dresser or cabinet that had fallen off the back of a poorly strapped truck. But as he slowed his cruiser and turned on the hazard lights, his gut began to twist. This wasn’t furniture.
It was a coffin.
Dark mahogany, scratched along one side like it had been dragged or thrown out of a moving vehicle. It lay crooked on the shoulder of the road, half in the gravel, half in the grass. Caleb parked the cruiser and stepped out, radioing in to dispatch.
“Dispatch, this is Mendez on Route 67. I’ve got an unusual object on the shoulder. Might be a coffin. Going to investigate.”
A beat of silence. Then, a crackled response:
“Copy, Mendez. Proceed with caution. Let us know what you find.”
Caleb approached slowly, his boots crunching in the gravel. The coffin had no markings—no funeral home logo, no tags, nothing. Just the wooden shell, roughly four feet wide and about six feet long. Its lid was askew, not fully closed. It didn’t look like something someone would transport for ceremonial use. This thing had been used. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.
He hesitated a second before placing his hand on the lid.
“Jesus…” he muttered as he lifted it slightly, letting the weight fall open.
Inside was a man.
Late 30s or early 40s, from what Caleb could tell. His skin was pale, lips blue, dressed in a dark suit that was stained with dirt and something darker—maybe blood. But his hands—his hands weren’t folded like a typical burial. They were bruised, fingers bent in unnatural directions, with jagged nails that looked like they’d been clawing.
The worst part?
His eyes were open.
Caleb jumped back instinctively, hand flying to his holster, though the man inside the coffin didn’t move. He was dead. But something about the way the eyes stared, glazed yet intense, filled the air with dread. Caleb took a deep breath and forced himself to lean in closer.
That’s when he noticed something even more disturbing: a faded hospital ID bracelet clung to the man’s wrist. The name was still legible.
Elias Garner.
Caleb blinked. That name meant something.
He backed away and got on the radio.
“Dispatch, this is Mendez. I’ve got a deceased male here—mid-30s, possibly mid-40s. Found inside a coffin dumped on Route 67. Name tag reads Elias Garner. Requesting backup and crime scene unit.”
There was a pause again, longer this time.
“Mendez… Say again, name was Garner? Elias Garner?”
“Affirmative.”
“Stand by. You’re not going to believe this… We have a missing persons report from last week. Same name. Reported missing from Westfield Psychiatric Hospital. But that man… he was declared dead three days ago.”
Caleb felt his mouth go dry.
“Then why was he found here? And why does it look like he tried to claw his way out?”
A distant rumble echoed down the highway—backup was en route.
Caleb stood guard, the morning sun slowly rising over the trees, casting long shadows across the pavement. But even as he waited, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t just discovered a body. He had opened a door to something that was never meant to be found.
By 6:20 a.m., Route 67 was no longer empty.
Two additional cruisers from the Halberd County Sheriff’s Department had arrived, along with a forensics van from the state crime lab. Blue and red lights bathed the trees in pulses of color, while yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the coffin. Caleb Mendez stood nearby, arms folded, watching as the forensics team photographed the scene.
Detective Laura Henley, a seasoned investigator known for her calm under pressure, joined Caleb by the shoulder of the road.
“You’re sure it’s Elias Garner?” she asked, flipping through a file in her hands.
“ID bracelet confirms it. And Dispatch says the hospital declared him dead three days ago. Official cause of death: cardiac arrest.”
Henley looked at him. “Then why isn’t he buried?”
Caleb nodded toward the body. “Take a look at his hands. If you ask me… he was very much alive when they put him in there.”
Henley leaned in and examined the bruised knuckles and torn nails. Her face hardened.
“This wasn’t a normal death,” she muttered. “Or a normal transport.”
By 9:00 a.m., they’d traced the serial number on the coffin to a local funeral home—Grant & Sons Memorial Services, a modest family-run business in Halberd. The owner, Marcus Grant, was cooperative but clearly shaken.
“I never prepped that coffin for burial,” he insisted when they arrived at his office. “It was ordered last week, yes, but it was picked up earlier than scheduled—two days ago. Said it was urgent. The man who picked it up had paperwork and credentials. Said he was from Westfield.”
“Can you describe him?” Henley asked.
Marcus hesitated. “Tall, early 50s maybe, wore a hospital badge with a lanyard. But… I didn’t see a name. And now that I think about it… he didn’t talk much. Just nodded and left in a white van.”
“Like a medical transport van?”
“Exactly.”
That led them straight to Westfield Psychiatric Hospital, the same facility Elias Garner had been reported missing from—and supposedly declared dead.
What they found there made the pieces of the puzzle fall into place—and made the air in the room go cold.
Westfield’s head administrator, Dr. Harvey Langston, was defensive from the start.
“Yes, Elias Garner was a patient here. Yes, he had a history of delusions, schizophrenia, multiple escape attempts. And yes—he was found unresponsive in his cell three days ago. The hospital physician signed the death certificate.”
“But no one performed an autopsy,” Henley said.
Langston shrugged. “We don’t always require one for psychiatric deaths unless foul play is suspected.”
Caleb pushed a photo of Elias’s bruised hands across the desk. “What about this? Looks like he fought to get out.”
Langston paled. “That’s not possible.”
Henley leaned forward. “What was he saying before he ‘died’? What was his mental state?”
Langston paused, then sighed. “He was obsessed with a conspiracy theory. He believed the hospital was experimenting on patients… altering their brain chemistry. He claimed he was part of something called ‘the Lazarus Sequence.’ Said they were trying to see if they could chemically induce death and bring people back.”
Caleb frowned. “You saying he was part of an experiment?”
“I’m saying,” Langston replied, slowly, “he thought he was. But—”
“But what?”
The doctor hesitated again. “Elias was one of the test subjects in a discontinued sleep study we ran two years ago. The Lazarus Sequence was a nickname the researchers gave to one of the protocols—extreme sensory deprivation combined with a neural reactivation stimulant. It was never meant to simulate death. It was discontinued. Shut down.”
Henley stood up. “Yet someone removed his body without official clearance. And dumped him in a coffin on the side of the road.”
“That was not hospital protocol,” Langston whispered.
“Then someone inside your hospital did it without your knowledge.”
Back on Route 67, the forensics team made a final discovery: beneath Elias’s fingernails was skin. Human skin—not his. A DNA test later confirmed it belonged to a man named Dr. Patrick Ryles, a former neurologist at Westfield. Ryles had disappeared three days earlier.
They searched his home the next day and found the white transport van in his garage, bloodstained and with remnants of dirt and wood shavings in the back.
Dr. Ryles, it turned out, had been continuing the Lazarus experiments—off the record, without oversight. Elias Garner had been his final subject.
The theory was horrifying, yet simple: Elias had suffered a drug-induced catatonia mimicking death. Ryles declared him dead, collected the body, and intended to continue experimentation. Something went wrong—Elias woke up. Panicked, injured, maybe half-mad, he fought back. Ryles didn’t survive. With nowhere to go and a body on his hands, Elias returned to the one place he associated with death: the coffin.
But his strength failed before he could escape.
Later that week, Caleb stood again on Route 67, now clear and quiet once more. The crime scene was gone, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Elias’s eyes—that desperate stare burned into his memory.
There had been no justice, not really. Just a trail of broken ethics, hidden science, and one man who tried to escape death more than once.
Sometimes, Caleb thought, the dead don’t haunt the living.
It’s the other way around.
