Take a character, and from that character's point of view, describe their reaction to something horrific and awful, but do so without describing the thing itself.
When I looked around the corner, my brain refused to process the information my eyes were seeing for a couple of minutes. My friends were obviously dead, but there was no way that the indescribable sight before me could have happened between the time they called out and the time I got to the end of the hallway. I think I was in shock. The whole room seemed to pulse and dilate, and I remembered an experiment in time perception that demonstrated that people simply don’t remember all of the visual information that they take in, so when under stress, more stuff gets remembered and it seems as if time slows down because our perception of how quickly things happen gets screwed up by what seems to be additional input, when it’s actually what we’re seeing all the time - we just forget most of it because it’s not relevant.
Gods, I wish I could forget more of what I saw there.
Old fashioned words like “abbatoir” and “charnel house” might work in attempting to describe the scene, but who talks like that anymore? Perhaps if I had been in the military and seen death rained down from above in a shower of high explosives and napalm, I might have the words. Then again, seeing something like this more than once might have driven me to catatonia, and I can't be certain whether that’s not exactly what happened to me at that point. What I remember seems almost as disconnected as the bits of flesh and bone that were once my friends, now littering the room at the end of the hallway. A ring, still encircling a finger bone; a spray of droplets on one wall, outlining a shape that can’t possibly be real; one hiking boot, still smoldering and with a stain I really just don’t want to think about; more will no doubt come back to me in nightmares, should I ever fall asleep again.
Whatever had done this had not come back down the hallway. I looked around the room for another exit, my brain strangely compartmentalized. One bit focused on figuring out where the thing that had done this could have gone, while another processed snapshots of the horror that surrounded me, and yet another distracted my conscious mind from what the second bit was doing.
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I enjoyed this exercise enough that I even started writing an opening chapter - but since I might actually work on that as a short story, I'll keep it under wraps until it's ready for critique.
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