"Brigitte Snaps Back"
Chapter Two
"Recovery"
Sam finally manages to sit up. His body feels like it's been through the grinder, as if his final memory of teeth sinking into his neck ended prematurely and left out the part where the teeth broke in his skin and the shards are now hurting him with every move, sending signals across muscles he didn't even know were connected that way.
He turns to his side, and there he finds Brigitte, her eyes wide open, watching him with what is either idle curiosity or rabid fixation.
"..." he tries to talk, but all he can manage is a croaking hum that feels like it's drenched in phlegm.
Brigitte springs to action. She gets on her knees and slides over to him.
"Don't try to talk, your throat is still pretty fucked. Can you stand?"
He's not sure, but how to relay that to her, he's even less sure about. So he shifts, his hands slide across the blood and he pulls his knees up. Brigitte stands immediately, and one thin, skeletal hand slides under his arm to give him a lift.
Together, they rise. Sam wobbles. His balance is still a bit off and his head is only halfway on, but Brigitte helps him stand.
It takes a full fifteen minutes for him to be able to walk. Without his voice, he sort of shuffles along after Brigitte to her room. The bedside lamps are the only source of light, and he can barely see anyway... but it doesn't take much for him to see the lycanthrope's carcass. It's just this slab of dead flesh, pure muscle and tense sinew all bundled up on the cold, concrete floor of the room.
Sticking out of the mass is a knife, a shiny point in a sea of blurred, pale-light shapes.
"..." he tries to speak again, but his throat still isn't accustomed to making actual sounds. The hoarse hum he manages captures Brigitte's attention, whose wide-open green eyes look on.
What can he use..? Oh. That's right.
He makes a writing gesture and points at his throat. This springs her to action, and she successfully navigates the room and returns with a pen and a pad not five seconds later.
Sam grabs it, and sees that both of his hands are coated in blood. Hoping not to wet the paper before he gets a chance to write, he forces his shaking fingers to grip the pen and scribble, with a barely-legible font:
What do we do now?
Brigitte braces herself as she goes up to the first step. The stairs leading up to the house will carry, she hopes, the weight of both the carcass and herself. She holds the body by the front legs, using them as a leverage point as she lifts it, ascends one step, repeats until the hunk of flesh is halfway up.
She takes a moment to catch her breath. She's sweating like a fucking pig, her shoulders are aching and she's itching, from head to toe.
Brigitte remembers something that Ginger said, something she believed she had made up: that the dead bodies are so heavy because all their lives are now in them. If so, she's dragging along burdens, but they aren't Ginger's. They're her burdens, always have been, always will be.
This body, the boy-sans-cooties downstairs, the body in the shallow grave in the shed and the infected, live body of hers are all burdens of Brigitte.
She has to carry them.
Heave-ho.
Sam doesn't quite recognize this asshole looking back at him. He looks like he just got through swimming in a butcher's lake, his hair is all fucked up, his clothes are a few stitches shy of indistinct rags and there are huge fucking teeth marks that he swears heal more every time he re-checks them.
Who is this?
(he's a stupid, paranoid drug addict who wants to be a hero)
Some part of him thinks, yeah, you thought you would be playing it cool in the party because you didn't have a costume – now you not only have the look, you're living the part. Happy Halloween, fucker.
Sam returns to the room, feeling somehow like he is in a temple or chapel or any kind of place of worship. There's a sense of sanctity he can't quite place or understand embedded in the room. This is where they died, Sam knows, but he's not sure if this is where they lived.
Brigitte finds Sam standing in the middle of the drying pool of blood on the floor, aimlessly looking around. She can't help but notice that he's better by the minute, and in the time she spent carrying the burdens of her late sister, he has picked himself up.
(he's not bleeding anymore, right? Just... spare him you finding out)
Too late.
She lingers, unsure how to call out, how to announce her presence. She was sort of just there when he came to. All the other times, she just came in and started to talk. It's different now, this is (used to be, like everything else, in the past, gone and done) her kingdom.
"Sam." She says, prompting him turning.
"H... hey..." he manages a hoarse whisper and his face shows that forming a single syllable hurts him considerably.
Another moment of hesitation. Deep breath.
"Look, this can't go both ways, there's only one way to go."
"You got a..." blood in his throat, blood and wounds, "...plan of some kind?"
"Yes. I already loaded G... I mean the lycanthrope to the van. Are you good to drive?"
"...yeah. Think so."
"You take her out to the woods, as deep as you can go. Bury her. Mark the grave. That's important, we need to know where she's buried."
(and be careful out there – there are things in the night that we didn't even suspect)
"You..?"
Brigitte looks around.
"I'll clean this up... somehow."
Sam, without a choice, stumbles up the stairs and into his van. With shaking, slick hands he turns the ignition. As the engine roars to life, he wonders if he's in any shape to drive.
The carcass sitting in the back reminds him that it doesn't matter – he doesn't have a choice.
Brigitte thanks the years of research into everything death-related as she slowly spills the cold water from the plastic bucket and onto the blood. There are two ways to do this: one is to use Clorox to bleach the stains. Brigitte knows that for this to work, there'd have to be stains and not pools of blood on the ground. After soaking up the still-liquid portions in rags and depositing the rags into a garbage bag, she has an ocean of stains in her hands, leading from the lycanthrope's mark and into the hallway.
The second option, then. A shitload of lye. Thank fuck for Pam's fastidiousness, there's multiple containers of Gillett in the pantry.
Pam. The thought jumps through and screams, loud and clear.
Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit shit, how did you, you stupid fucking... Pam.
Brigitte stops pouring the water down and jumps to that aspect of tonight. Pam, waiting in the car, or, if Brigitte knows her mother at all, Pam not waiting in the car, possibly mixing into the party and oh God...
Full stop.
No.
(God I hate our gene pool)
Clean the blood first. Whatever wreck Pam creates will be salvageable.
Brigitte gets back to pouring the water.