PART THREE | THE ENEMY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

"Run! Run!"

Katniss voice is strained. She's in pain. The weight of sleep sits on me, but the sound of her voice so sharp brings me back to the jungle. I'm still feeling the after effects of dying earlier on today, and the exhaustion is unreal. I feel slow trying to pull myself up from the ground.

"What is it? What is it?" Finnick asks, his voice bewildered.

"Some kind of dog. Poisonous gas. Hurry, Peeta!" Katniss urges.

I look back, a wall of fog extending as far as my eye can see. I try to move but I'm conscious of how slow I am, how much weaker I am compared to Finnick and Katniss, and how if I don't get a move on, this fog might kill me. Again.

Katniss' fingers lock themselves into mine. I feel her bones through her skin because her grip is so tight. "Watch my feet. Just try to step where I step." she instructs me. It helps, having her movements to focus on, making my body match her own. We seem to move a little faster, but never fast enough to be ahead and get any sort of a rest, even for a second. The mist continues to lap at our heels, droplets that burn the skin like acid when they touch. The pain is incredibly intense, and my already weak body can't handle it.

Finnick, who is a bit more ahead, stops when he realises that Katniss and I are lagging. He shouts encouragement, the sound of his voice acting as a guide.

My artificial leg gets trapped in a knot of vines and I sprawl forward. The gas reaches up to my skin and burns, burns like anything. But then it becomes more - my muscles seem to start twitching, I feel the side of my face sag into itself and I don't know how, I don't know how to move.

"Peeta-" Katniss starts, getting cut off by her own arm starting to spasm.

She yanks me with whatever power and adrenaline she has within her, and I stumble once more. By the time I manage to get to my feet, both of her arms are twitching uncontrollably. The fog is moving closer, a metre away from engulfing us. I try to move my legs, death looming over us, but they won't co-ordinate. They won't work, I can't get them to work.

Finnick suddenly hurls towards us, and he hauls me along. Katniss wedges herself into me to help me walk and help her arm stop from twitching too. We do our best to keep up with Finnicks' rapid pace and end up putting around ten metres behind us and the fog before he stops. "It's no good." he says. "I'll have to carry him. Can you take Mags?"

"Yes," Katniss says, but the look on her face says otherwise. She tries her hardest, holding Mags above her while Finnick slings me across his back and breaks through vines.

The fog keeps coming. It doesn't seem like it's ever going to stop. We try to head toward the water near the Cornucopia. Finnick's arms keep twitching beneath me and at some point, Katniss begins to start falling. With her tiny frame, she can't manage carrying Mags on her back the same way Finnick does, especially with the spasms. She crashes to the ground a few times until she can't seem to get back up anymore, her leg starting to twitch and fly out of control.

Finnick runs back to her side, with me hanging over him.

"It's no use," Katniss says. "Can you take them both? Go on ahead, I'll catch up."

I can't see Finnick's face from where I lay over him, but I feel his shoulders sag underneath my body. "No," he says. "I can't carry them both. My arms aren't working."

A silence falls over us, the fog looming.

"I'm sorry, Mags. I can't do it."

Mags hauls herself up and kisses Finnick. She walks straight into the fog. Finnick is barely holding me anymore, unable to with the emotion that is flying through his body. Her body is seized by the fog and she begins to be twisted in different contortions until she falls to the ground. A cannon blows.

"Finnick?" Katniss calls out, hoarsely.

But Finnick has already pulled himself together. He hauls me back and keeps going. Keeps walking and running and cutting through the vines. Katniss staggers after us. I'm not sure how long we go for until we collapse. Finnick can't hold me against his own spasms anymore, and we fall to the ground. I can't make myself move off from on top of him, my own body twitching and spasming out of my control. Katniss reaches us and falls.

Exhaustion carries me to acceptance. Maybe this is my death. This is how I die. I close my eyes, and wait.

Katniss' voice brings me back. "it's stopped," she croaks, barely understandable. "It's stopped."

I turn my head and watch as the fog rolls upwards against an invisible wall, as if being vacuumed up by the sky. Somehow I manage to roll off Finnick and lie on my back. We all lay, gasping and panting, twitching.

After a few minutes I managed to open my eyes. Above me, I see something moving in the trees and my heart begins to pace, fear lacing its way through me. I have so little within me to fight against whatever may be happening right now. I feel some sort of relief when I realise it's a monkey, and not another tribute or something. I try to move my arm, gesturing vaguely upwards, and say "Mon-hees." For a while, we all stare up at the monkeys in the trees, letting the silence fall into rest onto our aching muscles.

Eventually, I get to my knees, struggling as I do so. I crawl down the slope, and the others follow behind me, until the vines turn to a narrow strip of sandy beach and the warm water that laps the Cornucopia laps our faces.

Katniss jerks back the second the water touches her skin, but it seems to be rubbing away the milky substances that lie within the wounds. I copy her, the water stinging like an open flame, but an immediate relief following. I watch as the wounds seem to just... melt away into the water. Katniss goes over to help Finnick, who seems to be stuck on the sand, into the water. After a few minutes of trying to rub the poison out of my own skin, I go over to help her. We can't drag him fully into the water as the pain would shock him too much, so instead we cut away at his jumpsuit and concentrate on soaking his arms. We can both tell he's incredibly weak as he barely reacts to the painful poison seeping out of him, instead only moaning occasionally.

The night sky on darkens as we work on helping Finnick, making us more susceptible to attack as each minute goes by. "We've got to get more of him into the water," Katniss whispers. I nod to Finnick's feet, with the hope that if we start from the bottom and make our way up, he'll eventually gain proper consciousness. We take a foot each and pull him around, then drag him inch by inch into the salt water. We go from his ankles, and wait for a few minutes, then go further to the middle of his calf and wait more minutes.

Clouds of white seep from his body, detoxifying him from the fog. The longer I sit in the water, the better I feel. I can't bare to imagine how much of the poison has sunk further into my skin, and how much is still pouring out of me.

Finnick slowly starts to revive, coming back around to us both. His eyes are focused on us both, recognising that we're helping him. Katniss lays his head on her lap and we let him soak for around ten minutes from the neck down. When he lifts his arms above the water by himself, Katniss and I exchange a small smile.

"There's just your head left, Finnick. That's the worst part, but you'll feel much better after, if you can bear it," I try to tell him. We sit him up and let him hold onto our hands as he plunges into the water.

Katniss begins to fumble at her belt. "I'm going to try to tap a tree," she tells me.

"Let me make the hole first," I say. "You stay with him. You're the healer."

I find a good tree about ten or so metres from the strip of beach. The sound of my knife working into the wooden tree trunk echoes around me, loud against the quiet of the arena. I'm so into the task that I barely notice when Katniss seems to have joined me.

"Peeta," she says, softly. "I need your help with something."

"OK, just a minute. I think I've just about got it," I say, the hole almost perfect. "Yes, there. Have you got the spile?"

"I do. But we've found something you'd better take a look at," Katniss says, her voice measured and off. "Only move toward us quietly, so you don't startle it."

My heart feels like it's stopped again, my lungs along with it. There's something in Katniss' voice that conveys danger, as calm as she is trying to make herself sound. I turn around to them. "OK," I say, trying to mimic the tones in her voice. I begin to move through the jungle slowly, but my strong suit isn't moving quietly like Katniss. Every step I take sounds like an explosion of twigs and vines, but it doesn't seem to bother whatever it is Katniss is so afraid of me bothering.

I'm only a few metres from the beach strip now, but I make the mistake of turning to look. It seems to set off an explosion of noise and action. Giant orange beasts, monkeys, I think, shriek from the trees and come colliding toward me, bowling me down onto the jungle floor.

"Mutts!" Katniss shouts over to Finnick.

In seconds, I have my knife out and I'm slashing away at monkey after monkey. Katniss uses her arrows, bringing them down, and Finnnick spears the beasts with his trident as if it were no effort for the sharp blade to pierce their flesh. Working together, we manage to arrange ourselves into a triangle as we fight against them non-stop. I don't know where they're all coming from, but they're relentlessly here.

"Peeta!" Katniss screams over to me. "Your arrows!"

I look over, seeing her sheath empty. So many arrows, now gone. I don't manage my spare sheath of arrows over to her just as a monkey lunges out from a tree and straight into my chest. I'm struggling with the sheath, trying to wriggle it off me, while keeping the monkey at bay, so that Katniss can shoot it down, but I can't manage both. I slash at it, but it's useless and overpowering.

All of a sudden, from nowhere, a woman runs out at me. Her body replaces mine, and the monkey kills her. Her mouth opens and emits the highest pitch of scream I can imagine as the monkey sinks it's fangs into her chest.