Prompt: Horror, from Prompts in Panem.
It happens in the night. It's the darkest night I've ever seen, the clouds hanging low and the thick air pressing in through the small window in the kitchen. Father's gone.
Father's gone.
The thought makes my innards curl and my empty stomach turn the bile into my throat.
I should have been there that day in the forest. When father got the bite from that stupid coon. I should have been there to shoot it dead and to stop all of this from happening. But I'd had to be sick that day. I'd given him the flu when I got it from school. I'd come home and I'd made father sick and then I couldn't protect him when I should have. It was all my fault. All of it.
And now mother's sick too.
Mother's sick.
I can hear her coughing down the hallway. Prim's trying to heal her, using everything she's learned from mother over the years. I didn't have the heart to tell her I didn't think mother would make it. Not even Hazelle Hawthorne had been able to sooth her broken and bloody lips with mother's herbal balm. She'd left with her hands coated in the blood from mother's cough, apologizing for not being able to help.
I'd stayed clear because it was all my fault. Because father had gotten sick, and now mother, and I couldn't protect either of them.
Sitting at the table I began to count our coins over and over again. I was there for hours, measuring our household goods up for what they would sell at the Hob tomorrow, when the knock came at the door and my body froze.
The Community House. They must have come for Prim and I. They would come this soon, especially with father leaving us so publicly. My heart raced as I tucked all of the coin into my trousers and shuffled towards the door, all sixteen years of my happy life flickering before my mind's eye.
But it wasn't the Community House coming to take us. Peeta Mellark stood on our doorstep, his hands outstretched with a fistful of pills and his face pale in the moonlight.
"I heard your mother was sick. You need these." He stated quickly, abruptly.
"I can't-" I started, stepping back from the door and getting ready to close it. I barely knew this boy from school and here he was shoving expensive pills at me and trying to have pity on me.
"Katniss," He urged and grabbed at one of my hands, pulling it forward to dump the pills into my palm. "Please. Use them. You need them." Looking into his eyes, he looked almost desperate. I couldn't refuse him, not this boy who was now for the second time offering to save my life. We'd barely spoken a word since the day he gave me the bread.
He didn't stick around long. After closing my palm over the medicine and holding my hand in both of his for a moment, he stepped back and nodded silently before stepping down off our porch.
"Peeta," He was almost gone now but he stopped. Turning around, my heart seized at the look on his face. "Thank you." I whispered. He nodded again but we still continued to stare at each other, the silence creeping over us. It wasn't until another hacking cough and a startled cry from Prim echoed throughout the house that my attention turned inward.
The scream that followed made my blood run cold.
Bolting from the door I swept through the small living room and into the bedroom in the back where my mother was resting. The sight stopped me up short. Bed sheets, pillows, blankets – all covered in blood and a thin mucus that shined a pale pink. My eyes landed on Prim who gripped her left palm in her right hand, staring at me wide eyed from her place by the bed.
"Katniss!" The voice reverberated from two locations and I swung away from Prim to see Peeta standing behind me, his tall frame shadowing mine as he looked into the room as well. "Oh god." It was under his breath but I still heard it.
"What happened?" I shouted and moved into the room tentatively; staring at the mess and the vacant form that now occupied the bed. Mother was unmoving, her small body curled into itself, her skin translucent.
"She bit me. I was wetting her forehead, trying to reduce her fever, when she grabbed my hand." Prim cried, her voice frantic. She was still unmoving from her spot on the floor, staring at the bed as though it was a trap. "She's not breathing now Katniss. She's not breathing!"
My gut clenched. My stomach turned. This was it. Mother was gone too. She wasn't sick anymore, she was gone. My knees were weak; my heart beat thundered in my ears. Oh no.
"Katniss," Peeta called hesitantly from the doorway, his voice warning. I looked towards him quickly, away from my sister for just a minute, but for long enough that my mother crawled to her knees and lunged towards Prim. The scream filled the room and I turned back, watching as my mother's hand scratched down Prim's face and tore her flesh.
I stood, watching it happen in slow motion, as my mother attacked my sister. My dead mother. It was only when Peeta ran into the room and took mother by the shoulders, pulling her off Prim, that I finally came back to my senses. Lurching from the room, I grabbed my bow from where it sat in the kitchen and returned to the bedroom, pulling the nock against the string and raising it.
The sight before me was madness. Peeta stood in the room, his arms locked in a wrestler's restraint around my mother's shoulders, her body pulled flush against his as he fought to maintain control. Across the room, Prim was adding her blood to the mess on the bed, her beautiful face dripping from the scratch marks and her hand swollen red and bright where mother's teeth had bit down.
"Katniss, I can't stop her for much longer!" Peeta shouted as mother thrashed in his grip. Swinging my target from Prim to mother, I stared for a moment too long. "Aghh!" Peeta screamed as he stumbled back into the wall. Mother had gotten loose, her hands outstretched towards me and her eyes blood shot and rabid. The blood from her cough had been replaced by foamy pink ooze, spilling from her lips as she moved towards me.
The room wasn't big enough. My arrow lodged in her throat. She couldn't scream. She couldn't bite. Her jaw was locked open and the shaft of the arrow was visible down her gullet.
But she kept moving.
Stumbling back into the hall, I tripped and landed hard on my back, my bow scattering down the hallway. It was another second before mother was at the door to the room, her deformed face and jaw garish in the dim lighting. I couldn't equate what I'd done to this body with the mother I'd once known. I couldn't move. Couldn't do anything but watch as she lurched towards me, her hands outstretched and her bloody fingers curling towards me.
It was the sound that pulled me back. The low gurgle in the throat that sounded of choking and groaning.
"Mommy!" I heard Prim scream from the room. My chest tightened.
"Katniss, get up!" Peeta was in the doorway now; I could see him over mother's shoulder as he stumbled trying to grip the wall. He wasn't steady on his feet, he couldn't help me. "Get UP!" He screamed and there was a new level of desperation in his voice that brought me back to my senses and forced me away, scuttling down the hallway and to my bow.
My second shot was clean, straight into her bloody eye. Just like the squirrels. Just like what I should have done to the coon.
It took the time for my mother's body to collapse and for the viscous pink to sink into the floor before I could breathe again.
"Katniss!" Prim. Her screams never stopped. Adrenaline pulled me to the room, pushing past Peeta and taking my sister in my arms. "What's wrong with her?" The girl screamed in my arms. She was in shock. I was in shock.
"She was sick. Just sick." I repeated, desperately hoping it was over. I'd take the Community House now. I'd take anywhere that didn't make me look at what was out in the hallway.
"Am I going to get sick?" Her words stopped my hands from rubbing her back. Stopped my blood from pulsing. Stopped my heart from beating.
Prim. My life. I couldn't lose her too. I couldn't.
"No, Little Duck. Everything's alright." I cooed, forcing my hand to resume its soothing gesture.
"She bit me! I've got her blood all over me! I've been with her for hours! Katniss, I'm going to get sick!" Panic was lacing her voice as she screamed in my arms, her small body quaking with sobs.
"No. No you won't. I promise. I promise Prim." I squeezed her tighter to my body as I felt the hand on my back, silently offering comfort. I'd almost forgotten he was here. "Go home, Peeta." I croaked, rocking my body slightly to calm my nerves.
"I'm not leaving you." Peeta replied steadily. I felt the bed shift below my knees as he sat next to me, his hand never moving from its place between my shoulder blades.
I woke up to Prim coughing, her body shaking against mine as the fever overtook her. Peeta was at my back, having lain down behind me on the stripped bare bed. The feeling of dread nearly pulled me under as I held my sister in my arms.
Prim is sick.
"I don't want to go yet Katniss." Prim cried in between bouts of coughing. Every word tore at me. I refused to move. I couldn't.
"You're not going anywhere Prim. I won't let you." I whispered into her hair. Peeta's arm tightened around me. He was awake.
Hours passed. Prim's skin grew warmer. The blood came then, spattering from her lips. She was done crying now. When her left eye burst its first vessel, Peeta flinched. I cried. Prim pushed.
"You have to go!" She shouts and forces her hands into my chest. She's trying to put space between us but I won't allow it. "Katniss! You saw what happens. Please. Please. Go. Get out!" She shouts and cries and moans as her body is wracked with coughs.
I don't even see it coming when Prim escapes from the bed and bolts from the room. My body tries to follow but Peeta has me pulled against him, his arms unmoving as he quietly repeats to let her go. I realize then that I'm the one crying.
"She can't leave me! Take me instead!" I scream viciously as my hands claw at his grip. He never, not once, lets go as we hear the door slam open and the coughing disappear into the night.
Peeta never leaves my side. That is until he gets sick. He locks himself in the attic, tossing me the key and telling me that he won't come out until he's better.
I don't want to think about the if. I've already lost everyone else I love. I won't lose him too – he holds me together.
But I can't watch either. Instead I disappear into the tree line, setting up a rotation with Gale (whose mother has also gotten sick), to kill what we now call the 'infected'. Those who were sick but died and now are back. Every day I spend my hours perched in a tree, shooting down my neighbours and watching the blood spurt from their wounds. I watch as they disintegrate as the days pass. As the wild dogs tear them apart and then become infected themselves.
I never see Prim again. It's better this way I have to think.
But every day I witness the horrors of this war. I kill and maim and destroy. When Peeta is better, he almost asks me why I do it. He never really does, but if he were to, my answer would be easy.
I do it because it's all my fault. And because he's all I have left worth fighting for.