The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [155]
The hyena dropped Monique after a half of a league, the woman having gone silent after it had dragged her into and over a few fallen trees. Looking down at its pulsing, oozing stump, it licked at the wound, watching the woman who had maimed it. She lay on her back, the right hand it had initially bit in the barrow folded behind her, the left arm it had dragged her by twisted and lame. It licked her face until she woke up, which it smelled even though she kept her eyes closed and her breathing even. It stanched its bleeding stump by pressing the wound into her armpit, and mimicked her voice.
“Paw for a paw, bitch? Don’t need tools ta take down a fuckin bitch?” Then it chortled, obviously struggling to restrain itself from howling with laughter. Monique began to pull her arm out from under her back but its laugh turned to a growl and she lay still. She opened her eyes the tiniest sliver and realized with horror that either all the lanterns had gone out or she was far removed from the churchyard. It giggled. “You scared, bitch, you scared out ’ere in the dark?”
“On my fuckin arm,” Monique groaned. “Lemme get it out, brute, you’re fuckin killin me.”
It laughed again at that and she tugged harder, wondering if this was to be her last act, her final words. It did not kill her as she squirmed to get her arm free, the pinky, ring finger, and half a thumb she still had after its bite barely holding on to the slippery grip of the pistol she kept shoved down the back of her trousers. Her left arm, her shooting arm, was fucked beyond repair, the pain of it the only thing letting her ignore the fact that a real fucking demon was breathing its stink in her face.
“Hunted often.” Each word borrowed from a different victim, the hyena addressed her in a dozen accents as she got her arm out from under herself. “Know guns. Smell gun dust. Took fingers, can’t use guns. You different. Wrong hand, wrong fingers. Ba-ba-bad doggie. Now better. No arms, no hands.”
It cackled in her face, the fit so bad its eyes closed, though Monique could see nothing but a shape leering over her, a fiend even darker than the black night enveloping them. Then its laugh stopped abruptly and she heard it sniffing, a low growl building as it did. She raised her arm a little higher, the burning where her middle and index fingers used to be growing hotter as the open, leaking stubs hoisted the heavy bronze.
Monique felt it relax and it chortled again in its broken staccato, “No fire, no fingers, no gun. Stupid bitch.”
“No fire?” Monique breathed back in its face, and focused as intently as she could on the pistol balanced in her mangled hand. “Fire.”
Manuel and Paracelsus heard the roar of a gunshot and quickened their pace. They were far away and moving slowly, and so by the time they reached Monique and the hyena she had extracted all the information she expected to gather from the creature. It was still alive when Paracelsus’s lantern fell on it, the ragged hole in its stomach pushing ripples across the pool of blood it wallowed in as it drew wheezy, ragged breaths. Both men had started back at finding the creature alive but now drew closer in wonder, like pilgrims beholding a miracle, and Manuel looked at Monique with equal measures of respect and horror.
After rolling it off her Monique had stomped all four of the monster’s legs, the hyena crying and whimpering and snapping weakly despite the agony she knew the gutshot must be causing. The interrogation had not taken very long, it telling her all she needed to know, the distinct voices lent a more uniform cadence by the miserable whines accompanying each syllable. It hurt to talk, but it hurt worse to have bones broken, to be kicked in an open wound.
Monique did not look much better. Her right hand was missing two fingers and half her thumb, and the awkward angle she had fired the gun from combined with the recoil