soundbite

A man walked across the bridge, hurrying in the wind, his jacket collar up. He screwed up his eyes against the dust and grit. Peering towards the far side of the bridge, he could see the creatures massing. They were gathering in knots, climbing over each other in a growing frenzy, haphazardly building teeming mounds of themselves, enormous piles of angular limbs and sharp edges, their large black eyes glinting in the streetlight. They were waiting for him, preparing themselves for the fight he would inevitably bring them before his death. He paused at the middle of the bridge, on its highest part. He stopped and looked at them. Then he stepped off the pavement into the middle of the road. There were no cars at this time of night. Even if there had been, faced with this scene they would have disappeared again very swiftly.
The man stopped again, reached deep into his coat pocket and pulled out a small silver object. It looked a little like a steel cigarette case. He considered it carefully, looking down at it in his hand. The creatures moved, rustled and waited, watching him intently. He turned the box over and pressed something on the back. A sound came drifting out of the object, a sound at once gentle and odd, unusual and shifting. It had no melody, it was both lilting and soft but at the same time it had a slight raw undercurrent, as if a quiet bass line might build and grow and smash through the surface to transform the whole sound into something darker and more brutal. The creatures stopped to listen, they became still and quiet, watching the man closely but now also listening to the eerie sound emanating from the slim silver box in his hand.
The man reached slowly up and held the box above his head, his thumb holding it against the palm of his hand and his four fingers pointing upwards towards the sky. The sound grew louder, blacker and more granular, darker and more menacing. The creatures could begin to see the sound now, it was drifting into a visible pattern like a twisting wraith, like something formed of grimly coloured smoke. It drifted towards them, swirling and intertwining, the sound building and shifting, until it reached the foremost knot of the crouched, tense beasts. They paused and moved slightly as the swirling patterns moved over them, touched them, settled on them and moved through them. Some of the creatures swayed a little, and some shook themselves suddenly as if touched by cold. Then shudders began to move through the piles of tangled bodies, violent shudders and jerks. The sound was still building in intensity, the visible colours becoming stronger despite the surrounding darkness, despite the yellowish glare of the streetlights. Some of the creatures emitted high shrieking noises and began to jump from the piles. Some fell on their backs and jerked uncontrollably. The mass of large black eyes no longer looked intent and focused, they looked wild and disorientated, gazing around in confusion. Then quite suddenly, one of the creatures opened its jaws, snapped its head downwards and bit clean through the leg of another. The severed leg fell to the pavement and the bitten creature screamed. Turning, it bit back at the nearest thing to it, taking the head off another. In a matter of moments, the massed piles of creatures became a self-devouring frenzy of screams and snapping jaws. Body parts flew and dropped, black eyes flashed. The sounds from the silver box mingled with the piercing screams, the drifting smokelike wraiths changing colour and form as the sounds grew darker, shriller and more terrible.
It lasted a full minute. Gradually the sound fell back to what it had been at the start, just the eerie half-music coming from the little box, unaccompanied by any sound from the creatures. The street at the end of the bridge was littered with the dry, dessicated body parts of a thousand of them, scattered and torn into many thousands of pieces. Some heads still apparently breathed, some eyes still looked conscious, but the life was going from them all just as surely as the darkness was ever so slightly fading in the east. The man kept his hand held aloft for one long minute more, and all was still.