This is the first scene I ever wrote for the novel I’m currently working on, tentatively titled Children of the End.  I didn’t use it for the beginning, but it’s too soon to say it might not end up somewhere else.  Even so, the ideas in this scene inspired a hundred other ideas.  It’s amazing that so much of what I have written now came from a scene not even 500 words long. 

A Grisly End

The mob stood frozen in the alleyway, staring at the footprints that seemingly disappeared at a dead end.  A few were looking around in confusion, while others were slowly feeling around the walls, knocking in certain places.  The short-statured leader of the group, however, stood completely still.  Something was wrong here.  Something was very wrong.

No one noticed an eerie wind beginning to circle around their feet, or how the snow began to drift upwards around their shins.  However, they did notice when a soft but ominous growl echoed against the walls, freezing each of them where they stood and chilling them down to their very souls.

The silence that followed was deafening and after a few tense minutes one of the men near the back slowly began to reach for a knife strapped to the belt on his waist.  Then all hell broke loose.

The snow seemed to explode all around them, and the man reaching for his knife screamed as something lunged from the ground and bit his hand off with a savage ferocity before disappearing once again.  The others turned around frantically in search of their attacker, but were blinded by the snow and deafened by the growing chorus of screams as each member of the mob was methodically maimed and killed starting from the entrance to the alleyway and working backwards, leaving only the leader standing.  Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, the leader broke into a run towards the alley’s exit.  He made it half a dozen steps before the snow coalesced into a bestial head in front of his and closed its jaws around his neck.

There was a sickening crack and a fresh spurt of blood onto the already stained ground before the man collapsed, his head and the rest of his body falling into separate locations.

With the last man dead the snow began to settle down once again and the rest of the beast’s body shimmered into view.  The beast was a wolf, slightly larger than most and was a sight to behold.  It stood on all fours, it’s body covered from head to toe in pale, pigment-less fur that shone in the reflected light of the snow, and had eyes a red as the blood that covered its muzzle.

It stood on unstable legs and the air around it seemed to hum accompanied by a small flash of light, signaling the disappearance of the wolf and the reappearance of the cloaked stranger in its place.  Almost immediately the man collapsed onto the ground and went into a fit of coughs and dry heaves, with each exhalation of breath coming out as a fine mist in the cold winter air.

More blood was splattered on the ground by the time he was done and he staggered back to his feet, using the walls of the alley to support himself as he slowly walked away.