The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [154]
It did, shooting out of the night beside the barrow and latching its jaws onto her uninjured left forearm. Instead of toppling over, Monique spun around the monster, teeth dragging along bone as she fell onto its back and wrapped her bloody right arm around its throat. Manuel heard the splintering of her arm from where he stood but Monique did not relinquish her grip, instead settling all of her weight on its spine and clumsily kicking at its hind legs. She tackled it in a strange parody of how it had pinned Manuel, with the hyena flat on its stomach and Monique half atop it, one arm broken in its mouth and the other gripping it in a headlock. She screamed as it bit harder, blood and marrow bubbling around the viselike muzzle clamped onto her forearm, and the sound finally rattled Manuel out of his shocked stupor.
Running to where she had placed the other two guns, Manuel cursed when he saw that these also lacked lock and trigger, the smooth metal pistols identical to the worthless one she had already given him. Before he could examine them more closely and see where the touchhole was located on the primitive firearms, before he could fetch the lantern to fire them once he had found the touchholes, the hyena began to thrash and roll like the crocodiles its kind would sometimes mate with. Manuel abandoned the pistols, comforting though it would have been to press a barrel to the creature’s canine temple and pull the trigger instead of stabbing at it with Monique so close, but by the time he had raised the sword they were a blur on the ground, Monique screaming ever louder, and Manuel moaned impotently, unable to tell one from the other for more than an instant as they rolled away from him.
Then the hyena was up and before Manuel could close the distance between them it fled, limping. He saw that even though Monique had shot off its right forepaw while it was biting his head it was still hobbling quickly, dragging Monique after it by her mauled arm. She was screaming and screaming as Manuel chased them through the cemetery, the light failing as the monster passed through the gate, Monique bouncing after it, and as Manuel breathlessly reached the edge of the graveyard they vanished into the dark wood.
“Fuck!” Manuel howled after them. “Fuck!”
Going after them, he thought as he ran back to the lanterns, going after them, going to find her, going to save—she’s dead, he realized, Monique’s scream having trailed off, she’s as dead as Awa. It had met her, it must have, to replicate her voice, and it must have gobbled her up, must have gobbled her up and now it was gobbling up Monique, and if those two had not stood against it then what hope did he have? And Monique had let it take her, had put down her guns, the fucking idiot, or maybe it had broken them all somehow, it had—
“Ahhh!” Manuel yelped as a figure lurched out of the shadows toward him. “Paracelsus!”
“The same.” The man looked like his own shade, pale and terrible as a body dragged from a river. “The same.”
“Fuck me.”
“Where is it?” Paracelsus looked around anxiously. “Where did it go?”
“It’s got her,” said Manuel, handing the confused doctor one of Monique’s pistols and the fullest lantern. “Figure out what’s gone wrong here, and hold this.”
The physician looked in bafflement at Manuel, as if the lantern and gun the artist had handed him were made of rock candy. Then Manuel tightened his grip on his hand-and-a-half and walked out the cemetery gate, Paracelsus following close at his heels. As soon as they passed the wall their visibility tightened to the paltry circle the lantern cast, but the creature