I'd found a tiny cave. The door was partly concealed and half buried behind rubble. I'd discovered I'd grabbed some matches and an axe. I was used to axes – I sometimes helped at the slaughter house back home. There wasn't much difference was there? I was in a real life slaughter house with 23 little pigs and 1 axe man. I guessed I was probably a piggy, destine to die. I snapped myself out of my gruesome nightmare and looked around the area.

I couldn't help feeling that I'd been blessed with a small stroke of luck. As this thought crossed my head, I heard voices. Distantly at first, but soon they began to get closer to where I was hiding. I snuck over to the side of the wall closest to them; axe in hand.

"That girl with the brown hair, the one from 10, she can really run!" I grinned to myself in the darkness as the small children excitedly discussed my long legs and speed.

"Yeah, she'll probably go far. She could win this, maybe." A second voice, a boy's, joined the girl's and then some more muffled tones that I couldn't make out.

"C'mon," a third voice joined the others, "We need to keep going if we're too escape the Careers."

As they walk away I turn to watch their backs. I'm pretty sure that it was the Boy and Girl from 3 and the Boy from 7. They were so young; 13, 14 at the most; only a few years younger than me.

I heard them round the corner, followed by piercing screams. They seem to ricochet off the walls in every direction, hurtling through my spine and sending shivers of helplessness al around my soul.

Without thinking, I jump out from behind the brick wall to face their attacker. A quick slice of my axe and the Boy from 9's head is severely bludgeoned in. The laugh on his twisted face, from his first and last, triple murder still there.

I take his knives and his bag as I return to my hole. I feel nauseated as I realise what I've done. Mindlessly, still in shock, I add his knives a meagre water supply and a blanket to my small hoard of stuff.

Then I hear them. Louder than the screams; but with just as much meaning and horror. Cannons. They blast all around me, 1, 2, 3, soon 10 cannons have been blasted. I could have prevented three of them. I feel like a murderer, blood that I didn't spill crawling into my soul. If only I'd teamed up with those kids they might have survived, even if it was just for a little while longer. Then I might not have had to murder. Not yet, at least.

For the first time since I left home I cry. I open up my soul to the Game makers as the tears fall in waterfalls down my face. I cry for my mother, the woman who raised me, who I may never see again. I cry for my situation, of the blood that hangs like a cloak around us all. The tears fall onto the stone floor beneath me and I begin to rock myself, like a poor little baby, in the blanket I'd claimed.

Next thing I know, its morning; I've survived my first night in the Hunger Games.