Free Among the Fallen: Resurrection by Ross Shortall, Scott Beadle

her brain slowly pieced together the missing parts; mentally she began to come round as her brain slowly reformed after such a long period of nothingness. She stared at the shattered coffin, its silk inlay ripped and sodden with dirt and blood. Holding out her hands and glaring at the big splinters of wood buried deep within her fingers and skin, a few of her fingers were painfully threadbare leaving white ivory bone sticking out of the ends. She slowly looked up as she wiped the rainwater from her face, throwing her wet sodden hair over her shoulder, slapping it to her back. She continued to look over the bleak cemetery as the wind howled around the meek horizon, her thoughts lost and her barren mind looking over the haunted land with growing fear and dejection.
    There are certain things a person is never meant to see or experience. Outliving your children, the death of relatives, the affliction of friends and misery of strangers; people that have never crossed our paths thrown into a world of torment and pain. Somewhere in the list of pain is seeing your own grave, which is probably unheard of for good reason; it just doesn’t happen, not in a normal world with normal rules and theoretically it’s impossible; well that is what Alex was telling herself over and over, but if she’s seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling, then surely she must be alive?
    Maybe she survived and they accidentally buried her? Maybe this dark land was the afterlife that she longed to cross into so desperately. She wiped her thick hair from her face and rubbed her painful eyes as the skull covered columns watched her silently. The lightening flashed above her casting her own shadow on the monuments around her, startling her cruelly as she stood shivering in the cold. Alex simply stared down as the macabre image sunk into her conscience mind slowly, the thought of being buried alive was enough to kill anyone through fear, but to actually experience it would be psychiatrist’s career. She glared at her huge towering monument, her stomach sick with fear, anger and grief. A stone reminder of what has been taken from her and etched with words she will never forget.
    Alexandra Louise Beaumont, Gone are the days we used to share, But in our hearts you are always there. The gates of memory will never close, we miss you more than anyone knows, with tender love and deep regret, we who love you will never forget. 1991 – 2012.
    Alex stumbled back as her insides turned over; her stomach heaving and her eyes weeping in torturous guilt and sorrow. Dropping uncontrollably to her knees in the water logged earth, she threw up congealed blood and dirt as the verse tormented her over and over. Her eyes were scorched and her nostrils burned as she cried and begged it not to be true. As the rain soaked her curled up body she clawed at the soil crying into the ground, pleading for a father that despised her and a God she never believed in to help her.
    The winds lashed and blew the rain around her viciously, her damaged and almost war-ravaged, ice cold body curled up in the mud as she sobbed for her stolen life. She closed her eyes suddenly, mumbling and preying, muttering pleas and begging with profound desperation as the ghostly world howled around her. Suddenly, she opened her eyes and stared through the tormented graveyard, her prayers ignored and her pleas coldly rejected. As her tears began to wither, she looked out through her heavy matted hair, her teeth chattering and her soil clogged eyes blinking erratically.
    She wiped her mouth slowly, leaving a dirty smear up her face as the bare wounds on her hands began to tingle and move. She stretched out her hand, watching curiously as the muscles and blood began to regenerate over the bones that crudely protruded. Her muscles and flesh weaved and gelled, arteries and veins started to mysteriously rebuild and restore her fingers. She looked on in bewilderment at her hands, her wounds slowly vanishing and her fingers