InsaneJournal

Current location:	home
Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	"Union Burial Ground" - Woody Guthrie
Entry tags:	snip, twwd

So.... survival horror.
One day I woke up and decided I wanted to do something crazy with my writing. So I made up an off-the-wall urban-fantasy-survival-horror thing which I've dubbed The Night The World Went Dark (or TWWD for short, because it'd be an awkward acronym otherwise.). I've only written a little bit so far, but I thought I'd put some snips up.

How my main characters are different when dealing with dead bodies:


Still frowning, she rounded the bar and reached for the shelf where Johnny kept his rum, wrapping her fingers around the cool glass neck of a bottle -

- and faltering. A feeling like a giant icicle slammed down her spine, because the bar wasn't deserted. Johnny was still there. Sorelia swallowed hard, fingers twitching around the neck of the bottle she had grabbed and felt her stomach turning in on itself. Oh, poor Johnny's still here, only he won't be selling no one nothing any more.

Sprawled haphazardly on the floor, propped up against a crate of soft drinks, lay Johnny Charville. He was a riot in red and black, and he was dead as doornails. Deep, jagged cuts tore through the front of his shirt, the ragged cloth matted down and stiff with the blood that oozed, sluggish, from the wounds beneath. Nausea welled up in her throat, and Sorelia fell to her knees next to him, kneecaps banging on the floor.

"Oh, Johnny, you poor boy," she whispered, and the blood on his chest felt thick and sticky against the palm of her hand. "What happened to you?"

It looked almost as if someone had picked him up and thrown him against the wall with a fistful of knives. The holes in his chest were as long as her hand, deep enough to cut the bone, and she found her head spinning. Someone - I got to get someone. Swallowing hard, she rose on shaky legs and steadied herself on the counter. She turned on her heels and stumbled towards the door, bottle of rum forgotten in her white-knuckled hand, and her shoes tracked Johnny's sticky-red blood on the floorboards.



And....


He stepped forward and something crunched wetly beneath the sole of his heavy boot. Without thinking, he looked down, and saw the skittery, broken shapes of someone's fingers beneath his heel - someone's, because he could not have recognised the wreck of a man even if he wanted to.

The corpse sprawled bonelessly across the back of the van, the police uniform torn to shreds and most of the torso... Missing. Yes. Completely gone. Ivan could count the notches in the dead man's ribs, and carefully shifted his foot onto cold, blood-sticky steel. Counting backwards from a thousand in his head, he looked around the courtyard, counting six bodies in different stages of mutilation. Some were missing limbs, others were merely torn open and strewn across the asphalt, the lamplight glittering in their slick insides.

Six - there are supposed to be seven. He craned his head around and peered towards the front of the van, but the driver's seat appeared to have been left alone. So one got away. But away from what? Slowly, he stepped out of the van and down on the ground, crunching gravel thick with congealing blood beneath his feet. Every noise he made rang loud in the utter silence, and he moved among the corpses as silently as he could. He could not say what had killed the police men, or why, but he knew one thing - he needed to leave this place as soon as possible.

Kneeling down by one of the corpses - this one with it's neck twisted around, face down on the ground - he worked some warmth back into his stiff fingers and began searching through the dead man's pockets. It was difficult, the chain between his wrists far too short, and he cursed under his breath as he worked. It seemed an eternity had passed before his fingertips struck on the small, cold shape of a key in the dead man's pocket, and he fished it out with great care. Flipping it over, he undid the locks on his handcuffs, which fell to the ground with a noisy clatter.

"I suppose I should thank you boys for cuffing my hands in front of me," he said, glancing down at the mute corpse. Then, he reached over and plucked the handgun from the dead man's holster, shoving it in his own pocket instead.