1 Week Later
The destruction that plagued district 13 just over a week ago was clearly visible. The clean-up was slow, painfully slow. Debris was everywhere. Bits wood from buildings, bullet casings and festering dead bodies. The smell was intolerable. The vomit inducing smell was rife in the air of district 13; people had to cover their faces with pieces of cloth to keep the smell out. The peacekeepers did nothing to help with the clear-up of the deceased, nor did they help with anything other than ordering others around to do the clean-up for them.
I had an old piece of cloth wrapped around my head from the impact on the floor from me blacking out. My memory was a blur, only bits of what happened were easily recollected. It pained me to think about what had happened. So much death surrounded me. And I did nothing. A tear started to drop from my eye at the thought.
I hadn't lost anyone. But, I suppose you can't lose what you never had.
According to the woman who had take care of me since I had woken up - Alma Coin, she was called; just Coin to most - found me in a sewage ditch next to a graphite storage unit. She says that I was in a coma; she found me 3 days ago. She said 'You were lucky I found you, you would have died if it weren't for me.' She had a certain politician sound to he voice; it was calm, but very persuasive and superior. She looked about 35, which was strange as she had perfectly grey hair; there was not a single strand of it that was any different from the rest. Just a dark shade of grey. Her hair fell to her shoulders in an unbroken sheet. She had eyes of the same colour and shade of grey as her hair did. She was a plain woman, ordinary clothes which were never dirty; always impeccable. She had the features that the people had in the baas, which was what we called the slum area of district 13; but she lived like one of the imperials, who were the rich folk of district 13. I was in neither of those categories, I was an intelligen.
The intelligens were the group of people that ran the nuclear warhead facility that the Capitol recently built in case there was another war. The occupants of district 13 had no idea that what had been built as the Capitol kept it a closely guarded secret, they even kept it from the people in the Capitol. The president had appointed us specifically as he said that we were; 'Gifted in the field of science.' He had sent people from the Capitol to aid in the warhead production and the nuclear research that they were doing, as it was far too dangerous to handle in the Capitol.
We intelligens spent most of our days working in the far depths of district 13, day in and day out, staring at holo screens, just in case there was an emergency. We sometimes spent weeks on end working the reactor cores; testing small nukes in the vast fields that had been built underground solely for this purpose and disposing of all the nuclear waste that was produced from all this urania; which was the Capitols' synthetic substitute for Uranium and Plutonium, as we ran out long ago. I had once spent a month down in the radizone, which is what we called the underground facility, because of a small crack in one of the reactors. Alarms went and gone for weeks; radiation was leaking, leaking everywhere. Hundreds of Capitol specialists kept coming to assess the current situation of the reactor. They eventually decided to fill it in with concrete as there was nothing that we could really do about it. 50,000,000 metric tonnes of concrete had to be created and poured in through a tiny tube that came to the surface. The people were getting suspicious about what was going on underneath their feet. They originally thought that it was just a mining site for District 13's 'main produce', which in fact District 13's mines ran out of graphite nearly 3 years ago. To keep people believing that this was the only produce of District 13, they had to transport it all the way from the Capitol to store in the huge graphite storage units that we have here. But suspicions were being raised and people were getting curious. It would be only a short while before the whole of the district would find out about this.
This was left to the publicity specialists to get rid of the conspiracies that were going around. Some had already guessed what was down there. They were never to be seen again, by the rest of the district that is. The president ordered them to be taken down to the very lowest reached of the radizone. The mutation testing rooms. They were dark rooms covered in white tiles from top to bottom. They were white to start with. Blood stains them now, old and new. Everywhere. The stench was horrific, it seeped into the hazmat breathing masks. There was no getting away from it. It would be enough to drive a man crazy. If the act of having to wade through blood in the corridors didn't get you first. Wonderfully, I have the pleasure of being the head of the department and I take charge of every mutation in it. Some mutations are harmless; like the Jabberjays, perfectly harmless, but very very annoying as they repeated everything that you say, exact to the word. But, there are others that disturb you, creatures of nightmares. There was a constant flow of felons from the Capitol down here. When the Capitol couldn't torture and punish its citizens enough they were sent here. Many of them die from the nuclear exposure I put them through, but others change. They become living nightmares. Creatures that will scare any normal human being to death, that will cause them to go insane. But, thankfully for me they have no impact on my mental ability nor do they scare or disturb me. I just feel sorry for them. they cry out in pain as new arms grow out from parts of their body. Writhing in their own blood and excrement. the cries of children without skin, just piles of organs and muscle and blood. Some radiation exposure causes many brains to change or alter which makes them blood thirst beasts; dangerous, vicious and ready to kill. But what hts me the most is that I have created them, I put them through all this pain.