"After Ginger Snaps"
Epilogue
(Seek and Destroy)
"Early morning?"
Brigitte turns to see Sam, with a black jacket draped over his shoulders, arm in sling and cigarette in mouth.
"Late night." She says.
"Ah."
Sam comes up to her side and, trying not to fall, sits down. She stares at Bailey Downs. Whichever house she picks, the suburb seems to sprawl out from there, repeating itself ad nauseam until turning into a labyrinth of dead ends.
"Penny for your thoughts." Sam says.
"It's nothing." Brigitte says, surprised he'd ask, "I was thinking about cul-de-sacs."
"Dead ends? In what way?"
Brigitte just glares at him, and upon his noticing that, turns away to stare at the copy-paste grid of the suburb. He says nothing further. Continues to smoke next to her. She feels a small piece of excitement, a burning desire and a cautious objection to it. These two ends war it out while Sam simply sits there and smokes.
Fuck it.
"Do you want to play a game?"
Sam's turn to glare. A game?
"Maybe. Does it need my right arm?"
"No..." an almost-chuckle, "It doesn't."
"What's it called?"
"Search and Destroy."
"Sounds violent. How is it played?"
"Normally, Ginge and I..." Stop. Backtrack. Correct. "Normally, you use people but we have houses instead. So we'll do houses. You pick a house, and you try to come up with an interesting way in which the family living there can die."
A brief moment of silence, and something inside her screams that this was the worst idea she's ever had, that this is exactly the type of thing that...
"Any rules?"
...that just might work.
"No."
"Okay. Let's see... there. Right there."
He points to a house. One among the many.
"That one. Gas leak, but that's not what kills them."
"It's not?"
"No, the mother miraculously wakes up and stumbles into the kitchen. She feels groggy, doesn't know why, thinks its too little sleep with no meds. Reaches to the counter, takes a cigarette, strikes up a match. Boom."
"Don't they have a dog?"
"Either caught in the blast or killed with a piece of shrapnel."
Brigitte can laugh, if she can just recall how it went. She opts for a smile instead, the only expression close to it that she knows is right. She steals a glance through her hair to see that Sam, too, is smiling slightly.
"So." Sam said, "Your turn. One-up me... if you can."
Brigitte's smile grew wider.
"Oh, you'll be sorry."
