No One Believed Her
No one believed her. And why should they have? They called her mad after the incident. Or, at least, they called it an incident despite no one bearing witness. Maybe it's best to start before then.
Abigail was a lovely girl from a well to do family in a small Pennsylvanian town. She was engaged to the town's most handsome and rich gentlemen, Gerry, and they were set to marry in the fall. She enjoyed long rides on her horse through the country, swimming in the lake, and organizing charitable events. It was on one of those long rides, however, that she went missing.
The town organized a massive search and rescue throughout the forest and mountains, but she was not to be found. After two months the townspeople pronounced her dead and gave her a proper burial despite there being no body. Her fiancée found someone new and married a year and a half after her disappearance, and her family moved away after five because their home brought too many sad memories.
It was a cold February morning a decade after her disappearance when a farmer noticed a girl wandering though his field. It was Abigail, and she had not aged a day. When she was brought back to the town and questioned about where she had been all those years, she merely mumbled about some sort of creatures rising from the ground and feeding on people. No one could get answers to where she had been, or why she wasn't any older than when she left. Was it because she refused to say? Is it possible she didn't know? There were only her rants, which the town psychiatrist explained as imaginative substitutions for whatever really happened.
When Gerry came to visit her she asked, "Who are you?" She didn't recognize her much older fiancée.
"I'm your Gerry," he said softly. She pulled away from his arms, refusing to believe him. He didn't give up, and slowly she began to believe that he was who he claimed to be.
The townspeople began to scorn her, and the adulteress activities they believed to be taking place, whispering ill phrases between one another. She never let up her rants about those that would rise from the ground to consume the living.
One day Gerry was found dead in a brook not far from where Abigail had returned. His wedding band was missing from his finger, which was the only finger left on his hand, for he had been consumed by all manner of forest creatures. At least, that is what the townsfolk believed. They all suspected her, and her rants grew. She was despondent and absentminded, for she had lost her only love again. She knew the time of the creatures was close.
An angry and jealous widow took a knife to Abigail, but not before hearing Abigail's last words, "Beware the zombies." As her coffin was lowered into the ground, the spectators walked solemnly away oblivious to their impeding doom.
