Chapter Fourteen
The sunlight trickles in through the leaves, through the branches and fall to the ground. There are no leaves on the ground, just emptiness. The air is hot and it is more humid than I remembered.
The silence is enough, to hear the small rustle of leaves. There is no wind, or a uniform sound of wind rushing through. This is an anomaly, something that the very arena has shown. The beast knew this, so they would use the howling as a technique to mask where they were coming from.
Something about this doesn't ring true. If we were back in the arena, it wouldn't be a question; we would be either running or preparing for a fight. Could it be someone coming?
My muscles cry out for mercy for a moment of rest that my determination will not provide. The arrow stands there in my bow, with a line that is taunt ready to find its mark on anything that comes through the jungle. The line feels as if it could go at any time. I can feel the sweat travel down my face. My heart is beating a mile a minute, but hasn't caused me to lose focus on the mark where the rustling is coming from.
Closing my eyes, I place all my energy on the sound. It is something that we sometimes do, when we are trying to gauge distance.
Was it a branch snapping, or just leaves? Animals would move and the leaves would rustle, but nothing you could hear, not unless you are being chased. It has to be a person. Is it our team from the beach?
The fuzzy static starts to come back in the COMs.
"Katn.." a voice says. "Peet.."
Could it be that the radio silence that the zone places is over? Has it been an hour? There is no way of knowing, and if there is doubt we cannot fire without hesitation.
We are taught by the military to never respond on COMs if you are in a vulnerable position. It is odd how everything that we learned in District Thirteen, we still use it, even in the hunting of District Twelve.
A second attempt is made through the open COMs and then that is when we hear it. A gun fire echoes through the sky. That is a last resort signal for a friendly walking in enemy territory. It is a risky move, because it gives away the location of the person. In this case though, we know that the beast could not operate a gun, so it has to be one of our team.
I walk next to her and tell her, friendly. She nods and lowers the bow. We both remove our knives as a precaution and wait to see who is coming.
"Katniss," I hear a voice call out.
"April," she responds.
Finally there is more movement and just like that we see them all appear in military fashion. Two from front and one from the left and the other from the right, they all move in with weapons drawn.
They all lower their weapons when they see us.
April walks over to us and hugs us both.
"All we could do is watch," she says emotionally. "We couldn't help; all we could do is just stand there."
I know that feeling, I could still remember feeling that helpless seeing her in pain in the ground.
I grab both their hands.
"I know the feeling," I say. "I promise you, that I will protect her."
"Did you guys kill it?" says Cressida.
I point to the one clump of mess, and find that it is gone. Where did it go? Exactly like the monkey muttations, all the bodies that we killed and in a moment after the hour had passed, they were gone.
Was the sound, the rustling; was that the zone retrieving the body? I doubt that our squad would make any noise; every one of them is either a hunter or trained by the military.
"Come on," I say. "Let's get this over with."
We all pick up our gear and start to walk towards where we saw the hollow trees. There is no calm feeling in this zone, even if they are able to come into it. We all know that the Capitol can always change the rules, even if the war is over. It is disconcerting that even after death, President Snow, still knows how to destroy everything.
We walk for ten minutes and nothing. Stopping we look around.
"Are you sure," says Liam. "I mean you could have thought you did."
"No, I know I etched an 'x' in the tree," I say. "If they can take the body of a mutt that we killed without any evidence that it was there. I mean who's to say that they can't remove the 'x' to protect the switch?"
Everyone starts to tap the trees one by one. It takes longer but finally after about twenty more minutes, we find the circle of trees and no marks on them.
"Anyone remembers how the song went," asks Katniss.
We could have asked Plutarch, he would definitely know, but the COMs are still acting up and we cannot even get a signal out. I must have heard it a bunch of times but that is what happens when you hear something various times, they lose their uniqueness.
Finally closing my eyes I search for the times that I had to sit in front of President Snow. The times he came to the Detention Center to see me. I can still hear his voice echo through mind. I can still smell the blood in his breath. Those eyes how they can remove everything you love in a second.
"Isn't it a shame, Mr. Mellark," says President Snow.
"What is?" I respond.
"That in all this time that we have spent here," he starts. "We haven't gotten to know each other. After all I spend more time with you than I do with my own family."
Family? I couldn't even begin to believe that President Snow would even have a family. That would mean that somewhere, sometime, someone loved him, enough to have children with.
"That is a shame," I say. "Tell me about them, you have any children?"
He stops the stirring of the tea and actually looks up. I figured he must have believed that I would be still rattled by him here standing two feet from me. He is probably taken back by the fact that I would be able to have a normal conversation with the one person that is torturing me, and killing everyone that I love.
"Oh yes, one of the one things that I love the most is children," he says with a smile. "I have many children, and even a couple grand children."
It is the very thought of him having children, and killing everyone else in the district is just another thing that I cannot begin to try and accept.
"You are right, you should be home with your children instead of here with me," I say with an air of sarcasm.
"Oh don't you worry about them. They will always have me to take care of them, they are the most important people to me," he says. "Every night I tuck in the smaller ones and they fall asleep with their favorite lullaby playing in the background."
He takes up the cup of tea and takes a sip of it.
"It pains my heart to think of all of those fatherless children out there, that they do not have anyone to tuck them in at night," he says making a reference to my father. "That is why I spend endless nights concerned for all the children of the district suffering at the hands of these so called radicals."
The shaking becomes evident and I can feel my throat begin to tighten.
"My dear boy, do you need help?" He says. "I could call someone to help you, if you wish."
He pauses as he is about to tell the guard that inside the room.
"But who would help the children of the district, that are dying right now," he says mocking. "Well it seems that no one is standing for them, as they are being massacred, bombs everywhere, gun fire in the streets."
He stands up and hands the cup to the guard who quickly grabs it. He grabs his napkin from the chair that he was sitting in, and dabs his mouth carefully. He places it on the table and looks at me.
"Do let me know when you wish to stand up for them," he says.
He starts to walk away and he does the oddest thing.
He begins to hum.
I could hear it but not clearly, because I was shaking uncontrollably. My eyes were closed but I could clearly hear it, the simple melody, the simple notes it repeated itself twice before the door closed.
The shaking is self evident. It is enough to have everyone stop walking. It is enough to have everyone stop talking. Katniss quickly walks up to me.
"Hey, hey, hey" she says sweetly. "It is okay. It is over. The beasts are gone."
She grabs my hands and I can feel the warmth in her hands. She will always leave it all just to make sure that I am okay, just like I would do the same for her.
"A lullaby," I utter.
She starts to hum the lullaby, which I stop her.
"No, the song, it is a lullaby," I say.
"It isn't the anthem like I thought," I say. "President Snow once talked to me about the one thing that he values over anything, his children."
The look of disgust comes over Katniss, almost the same like that I gave when he told me the first time around.
"He came one time," I say. "He was saying how his children were the most important, and that he would play them, their favorite lullaby. But just as he left, he hummed it to me."
I close my eyes, and repeat the notes out loud. I do it a couple of times in a quicker fashion, making sure that I have remembered the correct melody.
"Are you sure?" says Katniss.
"Of my memory, of course not, but I just feel it, that it is the right song," I say looking at her, wanting her to believe me.
"Okay, let's try it," she says.
She asks me to go over the notes a couple of times until I am sure of the melody. We signal each tree as a note with a number in order from one to seven, whether it is higher or lower of the other. It takes a couple of minutes to finally get the note progression as close as possible.
"Let's do it, and get out of here," says Cressida obviously feeling the anticipation of going home. She like most of us cannot wait to be rid of this memory of the Capitol. It is the very essence of suffering all these years.
"Wait," I say. "How can we tell the other team to turn on the switch if our visors aren't working?"
Everyone looks around and realize that the first thing that Plutarch told us was that the switches had to be turned at the same time in order for the arena to go into shut down mode.
Katniss then grabs two fire arrows.
"Peeta you still have that rock?" she says.
I reach into my pocket and find that same rock that I had etched the "X" with. It is the same rock that she had kicked that hit the tree. One could just say that it was lucky that we found a rock in a zone that had absolutely nothing on the ground. Luck. It is a word that always leaves me thinking about that interview. Was it luck that she kicked a rock, or that we even found a rock on the ground where we haven't found any other?
I hand her the rock.
"Lucky you still have it," she says and then shoots me a smile.
Were we lucky? It is the second time that I have heard this question. The first came at an odd time in our lives.
A reporter had come to interview us a while back. It was an odd thing, because there was nothing really going on, no specials of the war, or the rebellion or even of the Hunger Games, it was just a normal day.
We were walking in the district towards the bakery. It is our daily thing, to walk together everywhere. She doesn't mind going to the things that I do during the day, as I don't mind going hunting, or swimming out in the forest. We just love being in each other's company. Even in our alone time, we always found ourselves feeling better in each other's company.
This time around we were walking towards the Square, towards the Bakery.
A man approached us and greeted us.
"Good afternoon," he says. "My name is James and if I could I would love to ask you guys a couple of questions. I mean I don't want to bother you."
The way he approached us, is the first time they asked if it was possible, almost asking permission. It was the first time a reporter did this.
"Come and join us," says Katniss, which takes me back because she has never agreed to have any reporter from the Capitol join us.
He walked with us to the bakery where we sat in a table. It was the same way that my father and I would do.
"So James," says Katniss. "What do you want to know?"
"Well I only have a couple of questions," he says fumbling through papers looking for his notes. It seems that he is nervous and is surprised just like I am that we are having an interview and it isn't forced.
"James," I say. "Just talk to us, what do you want to know?"
He stops and smiles.
"Okay," he says. "Well I am about to marry the woman that I love, and there is actually only one question. Do you ever feel lucky to have married Katniss?"
This was not a question that a typical reporter would ask.
I look at her and she just sits there looking as beautiful as the day I met her. She lowers her head and I lift my hand to touch her cheek.
"Lucky?" I say. "There is no such thing."
He is taken back with the response.
"Well let me explain," I say. "Ever since I was five I knew that I would love her forever. It didn't matter if it would happen, it only matter when it would. I knew that I would love her. There isn't anything lucky about that, it is only what I was destined to happen."
That is why it isn't lucky that I found the rock, it was that I was destined to do so. For her to kick it and hit a tree that wasn't suppose to be there. That I kept it, after etching an 'x' into the bark.
She tells us that with the rock she will strike the fire arrow and shoot it up into the air as a signal flare. Two arrows, one up and then another she explains that means five seconds, and three arrows, one and then two at once means ten seconds.
A confirmation is then sent up after the first arrow to signal that they are awaiting the time.
Pollux grabs a good size tree branch to use as a mallet. The lullaby is actually a very beautiful song, and if you didn't know where it came from you could say that it is a sweet song.
We hand Katniss the tree branch since she is the one running point on the team. Seeing her hitting the trunks one by one in the order of the lullaby something begins to happen. The low tones longer, combine with the higher shorten tones and actually sustains it. They overlap one over the other, like the song of the mockingjays that time in the arena. It creates a whole new tone that is sustained.
Once we reach the last note, it causes the trees to maintain the tone almost like we have unlocked something. A panel slides on the floor and a small box is lifted.
The glass panel shows a red button.
"Could it be this easy?" I say. "Just push the button? Katniss you ready to signal Gale?"
She nods and strikes the first arrow.
"Five seconds after the second one reaches the highest point," she says.
The first arrow soars through the air. After it reaches its highest point it the first is quenched as it comes down. We look up to see if there is the confirmation.
"Come on, come on," she whispers barely audible.
I quickly remove the glass cover and look at her, for confirmation. She becomes impatient and climbs the nearby tree up. It is the quickest I have ever seen her go up a tree.
"Anything," I shout up.
She looks around looking for the zone.
"No, nothing…wait," she says. "Peeta, the arrow, I see it. Count down…now."
I start to count one second, two second, three second, four second, and finally five seconds. I reach up and finally press the red button.
A loud computerized voice comes over the speakers.
"Arena shutdown initiated," it says. "Total cleansing procedure in t-minus ten minutes."
Total cleansing? Even the computerized voice makes it sound ominous.
"Katniss," I yell. "We need to go. We need to go now."
She quickly climbs down.
"Everyone, we have to get to the hovercraft and airborne in five minutes," I say. "You are to go now. We will be right behind you."
They all get going, with the exception of April.
"April, honey," I say. "You need to go. Liam will keep you save."
She looks at me.
"You promise me," she says. "That you both will be on the hovercraft."
I grab her by the hands.
"I promise you, that we will make it," I say.
Liam grabs her by the hand and they are off through the jungle.
Looking up, I see that she is halfway down.
"Katniss,…umm….darling," I say. "Kind of on a time table here."
"I am going as fast as I can," she yells. "It is easier to go up than down."
Looking at the distance, I know that we would really have to get going in a couple of minutes if we are to make it to the hovercraft in time.
"You are going to have to jump," I say.
"Jump?" she yells. "Are you crazy? I am about fifteen feet up."
"Don't worry, I will catch you," I say opening my arms.
She stops and looks down. I am pretty sure she is weighing the options.
"You better catch me," she says.
"I haven't missed you yet," I say. "On three. You ready?"
She begins the countdown and finally at one she lets go and I just stand there positioning myself to catch her. The force of her coming down was something that I was not anticipating.
I manage to grab her however it does bring me to my knees.
"Come, go," I say pushing her up and towards the beach.
She turns and grabs me by the hand and helps me up. I don't know if it is the adrenaline, of whatever total cleansing means but we run like the hunger games had just started. That day when fear took over and we are running for our very lives is something that still I can remember. The beating of my heart as I ran to stop the Careers from killing her is now beating as we run through the jungle not caring anymore on if we create any noise.
We are at the beach, when I see that the hovercraft is there waiting for us. It is already airborne with the ladder. She jumps for the rung and grabs it. I do the same and finally just like that. The hovercraft starts to lift up as quickly as it can without dropping us.
"Climb," I hear Cressida yell from the entry of the hovercraft.
Katniss starts to climb to the entry way. Once she is inside, I can feel my heart give a sigh of relief. A loud explosion jolts my grip even tighter. I look down and see the entire arena engulfed in a huge fire bomb.
Everything is gone.