1583 A.D., Siberia

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A scouting party for the notorious Cossack Yermak, lost and starving to death, was rescued by a local Asiatic tribe. The scouts "repaid" the kindness by declaring themselves to be the de-facto rulers, at least until the reinforcements arrived. After gorging for several weeks on the villagers' stored food, the scouts cleaned out their entire stock, forcing them to turn on the villagers themselves - thirteen people were killed and eaten, and the rest fled into the wilderness. The Cossacks then spent this last-ditch source in a matter of days, leaving them to try cannibalizing the corpses in the village's burial mound, based on an assumption that the freezing temperatures would have preserved any corpses there. However, when the Cossacks dug up and dethawed their first body (a woman in her early twenties, with her appendages bound and mouth gagged), the "corpse" revived, and one of the Cossacks had the bright idea of removing her gag, hoping she could tell how she performed her apparent feat. The only thing he got was a zed bite to his hand, and the other Cossacks killed the woman, roasted her remains, and ate her flesh. Only two abstained from this fatally ignorant feast - the bitten Cossack (since the others believed the meat shouldn't be wasted on a dying man) and a superstitious man who believed the woman's meat to be cursed. And, in a sense, he was right - the men who feasted on the toxic zombie flesh would all die (quite painfully) that night. The bitten man expired early the next morning.

The lone survivor attempted to burn the bodies, but just as he set the blaze, the bitten man revived. The ensuing chase across the steppe only lasted about an hour, when the zombified Cossack froze solid (this being the first case of a zombie doing so with the possible exception of the woman). The survivor would be saved several days after by another scout group for Yermak, and his tale would be recorded by Father Pietro Georgiavich Vatututin (only for it to be stored in the remote monastery on Valam Island on Lake Ladoga, with the account only now being translated into English). It is unknown what the fate of the other villagers was, or even what their true ethnic identity was (the subsequent genocide of the populace by Yermak left few survivors).

The frozen zombified cossack was later recovered in 1998. It thawed out, reanimated, and attacked the archaeological crew handling it. (see 1998 A.D., Zabrovst, Siberia)