Disclaimer: The Hunger Games is not mine.
She couldn't just sit in the Cartwrights' little shop and wait. She half suspected that her father had sent her running out to get her away from the worst of it, but she didn't know that for sure. What she did know was that as kind as it was for them to have gone, Delly and her little brother were out on an errand that was her responsibility. She needed to go for Mrs. Everdeen. She knew that it wasn't really fair to bother the woman in the midst of what must be her worry over Katniss, but she needed to get a resupply of whatever the mixture was that she had concocted to combat her mother's deterioration. She had to try. She had never seen her mother this bad off before. She needed to do something to help her (even if she already knew that there was nothing that she could do to stop the inevitable). She was not going to just sit here quietly out of the way when her mother was in pain. She was not going to just sit here allowing Mr. Cartwright to blunder around taking entirely too much time to wrap up her injured ankle until everything was all over.
She couldn't just go home either (as much as that was where she wanted to be). If there was the slightest chance the Mrs. Everdeen had something that could help, then she had to make sure that she got it. She would follow Delly as soon as Mr. Cartwright finished. She would either catch up with the Cartwright children, or she would meet them on their way back and take over. She wasn't really as hurt as Mr. Cartwright kept insisting that she was. She could worry about her ankle swelling later. She could assess the scrapes across her hands at a time when the few moments she had left to be with her mother were not slipping through her fingers. She waved the man off as he tried to offer her some water and insisted that she needed to go.
He looked awkward and unsure of what to say to that, and Madge was very certain that his wife had instructed him to keep her there as long as possible. Delly got her disingenuousness from her father, and the poor man couldn't seem to think of a pretense to attempt to use to get her to stay.
"It's okay," she told him having a sudden compulsion to comfort the man that made no sense given the hurry she was in and what she knew was waiting for her. "I know he sent me out on an errand to get me out of the way, but it might still help. I just need to be doing something."
He patted her on the shoulder and offered to walk her home. The lights went off before she could reply. She used his distraction over the sudden power outage to decline as politely and quickly as she could and made sure not to betray that her instinct was to hobble on her now securely wrapped ankle until she rounded a corner out of his sight. It hurt, but it was functional (and functional was all that she cared about at that moment). It was slowing her down, but running at full speed had ultimately only slowed her down anyway when she had fallen the first time over the uneven place in front of the shoe store. That uneven patch had been there for as long as she could remember, yet she had still managed to forget about it in her hurry to try to do something, anything to make the succession of seizures stealing the life out of her mother stop. She needed to pay attention to where she was going (especially now that even the scattered lights still on around the town had been extinguished). The twinge that shot up her leg every time she put weight on her ankle helped to keep her focused on the ground in front of her instead of what might be occurring in her absence.
She was three quarters of the way along the path toward the Victor's Village when she heard the humming sound, but she was too focused on what she was doing to realize what she was hearing for several moments after it first registered. When the fact that there were hovercrafts approaching finally filtered through her worry and driving need to move faster, she was just even with the little patch of trees that marked the invisible boundary between the Village and the rest of the District.
The next sound that she heard was not one that she had any experience with hovercrafts making. As she spun around to try to figure out what was happening, she lost her balance as her injured ankle seemed to crumble underneath her. She went down hard and barely managed to get her arms in front of her to keep herself from face planting under the first (and nearest to the path) of the trees. The first bomb landed in District 12 at nearly the same instant. Its sound swallowed up and covered the sound of the dead branch that was shaken loose by the tremor that landed squarely across her back. Madge, of course, did not realize that that was what had happened. All she knew was a sudden weight forcing her arms to lose their bracing purchase, her head slamming forward, and black.
When she woke up, the world was grey.
She seemed to be looking out between some sort of bars that she realized (after blinking heavily) were tree branches that had fallen down around her. The stinging in her side and the press of something across her hips told her that they had also fallen on top of her. She couldn't figure out why everything beyond the branches had become monochromatic. Then, she turned her head to the other side as a prelude to trying to wriggle her way out of the mess in which she had managed to land.
She was looking at the Victor's Village. It was oddly hazy, but it seemed otherwise normal. She took a minute to process and try to find her last memories to make some sort of sense of the situation. She turned her head back, and the truth dawned on her. The haze hovering over the Victor's Village was blowing from the direction in which she had first been looking. An untouched section of mostly unlived in houses was on one side of her. The other side of her (the side that should have held her home and the rest of the District) was nothing but ash and scattered smoke.