Shotgun Diaries, zombie fic

This is a series of fictions I’m going to post off and on. It’s largely inspired by John Wick’s Shotgun Diaries rpg. Enjoy.

Three-steaks’ face stares red and glistening. The tendons like cheeks, hung with strips of flesh. The teeth shattered and jagged. The hands the size of t-bones grasping…

There was a scream as Vinnie woke with a jerk, slamming his head into the skeletal frame of the storie-and-a-half shelving unit into which he’d clambered up and bedded down. He wasn’t sure whether the scream was his or someone else’s, but the result was the same– he had to get out of the liquor store and find a new bolthole. He checked his new wrist watch, but forgot to wind it. The pair of red-lacquered bone dice left little square welts in his palm, but their weight was comforting. Their facing was not– 2,3. Even the railroad 9– 4,5– tattooed on his right wrist or the boxcars on his left could help that. No time to crap out, that’s for goddamn sure. He slid his leather jacket on over a faded Bad Brains tshirt, slipped the dice into a pocket of his jeans.

His stomach protested as he climbed down the shelves. At the bottom, he choked down a cereal bar, washed it down with a fresh sip from his last bottle water. He ran through inventory– more cereal bars, his old numbers book (a black leather Moleskine carried in his back pocket), a felt-tip pen, his dice, and a backpack. He grabbed a fifth of Gray Goose and shoved it into the pack, padding it out with a thermal shirt. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t dare carry more. He was a little guy.

He looked out the massive, convex spy-hole in the back door and got a fish-eye view of an empty alley. The stenches that had chased him into the Bottle House must have found better prospects. He opened the door as far as he dared, took a look around to verify the alley was empty. He stepped out, took another look around, and closed the door as quietly as possible. He turned to his right and made his way to the roof-access ladder.