fic

Blam!

The creature shrieks in either agony or annoyance and turns one of its many heads towards him, jaws gaping in a vicious hiss.

Crap.

He fires the gun at least four more times, misses twice, and most definitely attracts the monster’s attention. It lifts one massive paw off the chest of its prey, intent on exacting revenge. Crap, Benny thinks, and blanches as his finger clicks uselessly on the trigger. I really didn’t think this one through.

But the woman has.

Benny barely has time to decide that running away would probably be a really good thing right now, if only he could get his legs to move, when the ex-victim leaps to their feet, straddles the beast, and starts doing something to the base of their neck. He doesn’t know what; his legs have finally sprinted into action, and he only cranes his neck to take a quick peek when the monster howls in rage and pain. He doesn’t get much before a convenient boulder looms ahead and he flings himself behind it to the symphony of animal shrieks behind him.

Five - or maybe three, it’s hard to say over the heart palpitations - minutes later, the noises have stopped. Benny pokes out from behind the rock, hoping not to see monster chow time, but not expecting anything less, the quease in his stomach twisting at the thought.

What he sees is a total role reversal.

Curious and more than a little awed, Benny scooches closer, hands in his pockets, as the red-head slams a knife into the last limp head of the monster. “How did you do that?” he breathes, watching from a relatively safe distance as she yanks the knife from the fist-sized eyeball. She glances over at him, then cleans off her knife on her jeans.

“Sliced through its spinal cord,” she replies briefly, with a jerk of her head towards the affected area. Benny stares at the bloody gash on its back, swallows back bile at the invertebra he sees, and returns his attention to the leather-jacketed fighter as she slips the knife into her boot. “They’ve got thin skin and spines close to the surface,” she adds when she sees his googley eyes. “Particularly in the juncture between necks and body.”

“Why stab them through the eye?”

“Insurance.”

Benny nods slowly. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to make darn sure the thing will never get up again, but it seems almost...cruel, somehow.

Oh, crap. Jeff’s rubbing off on him.

Instead of dwelling on it, he drags his attention back to the situation at hand. The woman is eyeing him - not curiously, nor with Interest, but with a calculating, narrow-eyed stare that sends an actual shiver up his spine. “Scavenger,” she says. It’s not a question, but he nods anyway.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Here.”

He still doesn’t know where she gets it from, but in the seconds he’s not paying attention to her hands, she’s retrieved a knife and is holding it out to him by the sheath. Benny tries to smile, but he’s not at all sure it works. “No, thanks, I’m good,” he tries to decline, but the woman glares into his soul and he finds himself thinking that it would really probably be a good idea to just take the stupid thing since she’s obviously not going to attack him with it and he should just count his blessings and run while he still can.

“You need something more than that gun,” she says, and Benny blinks back into the conversation. “Guns run on bullets. These don’t.”

“I don’t know how to use one.”

“Practice,” is her response. Hesitantly, he accepts the knife, mostly because he’s afraid she’ll throw it at him if he doesn’t. To his surprise, something softens in her expression as he clenches his hands around the weapon. “It straps to your wrist,” she tells him, still all business, but the newfound relaxation around her face has somehow transferred to her voice. “Just make sure you don’t drop it and you’ll be fine.”

“...Thanks?”

A smile flits across her face so briefly he wonders if he hallucinated it. Totally a possibility, after all. The dead monster probably has hallucinogens in its blood or something. “Thanks for being a distraction.”

“Anytime.”

 He never meets the redheaded monster hunter again. He does, however, learn how to use the knife.