Chapter 3: Dell Fonio
With the most memorable moment of the 2nd Hunger Games having occurred before the Games began, a healthy debate arose in the Capitol about the usefulness of pedestals. Sure, the landmines had kept the tributes from aping Maximus's tactics and moving off too early. But at the same time, the stupid mistake with the landmines had very nearly rendered the very Games themselves pointless. If only a few more tributes had moved when and where they shouldn't, the Hunger Games could have been the Suicide Games, resulting in a Victor instantly or, worse still, no Victor at all.
President Ravinstill was thus left with a conundrum: dispose of the landmines under the pedestals, and there would be nothing stopping tributes from doing what Maximus did during his 60-second countdown. Now, Maximus was a fine enough Victor, a patriot, but such an approach smacked of cheating and was unsportsmanlike. Take away the landmines, and you might as well take away the 60-second countdown as well – one of the few things that brought order to the pageant. After the war Panem had just been through, the country needed order. However, keep the landmines, and you had the potential for an act of rebellion. Fill an entire arena with rebels, and you ran the risk of twenty-four children, with just a little coordination, committing a mass suicide that could blow up the Hunger Games quite literally in the Capitol's face. In some ways, the Capitol itself had planted that seed after the 2nd Games fiasco. They had been trying to spin away an unintended consequence into a 'we-meant-to-do-that' salvage, and had ended up handing ammunition to lingering dissenters. The fodder from late-night comics had only further muddled the messaging, as they saw it for the joke that it was – a joke made all the more hilarious when those Games concluded with only one murder and an untarnished girl literally running in circles.
What to do, what to do?
For the following year, President Ravinstill came up with a solution. Running…. a lot of the failures from the previous two years had to do with running… But what if the tributes had nowhere to run to?
Not that the Victor that year would have been able to run anyway.
Dell Fonio was a sickly, 16-year-old boy from District 9. He was the only child of a pair of sharecroppers, who worked in the tesserae fields. Muscular dystrophy in his legs had manifested from the time he was a small tyke, requiring the use of a pair of crutches. Dell was able to hobble, but his body had to work hard at it, and the shortest trot down to the nearby mill left him winded.
So when he was called at the Reaping for the 3rd Annual Hunger Games, the crutches and the fact that the brief walk to the stage rendered him gasping for air gained the lad a lot of attention. The Capitol thought it was the most sidesplitting thing ever: how could a boy fight if he couldn't even walk? The humiliation born from feebleness was something the Capitol would remember and encourage during an extra special edition of the Games a couple of decades later. Bets were placed on how fast he would go down in the opening battles. Hundreds of thousands of sesterces pinned him as the first death. Some people even wagered he wouldn't even make it off his pedestal.
The Capitol citizenry was just as eager for the start of Hunger Games Day (for back then, the competition was nothing more than just that – a day) because there had been much activity occurring at the Capitol Arena. The noise of construction, particularly dominated by jackhammers, had been occurring off and on for weeks during the daytime hours. Was it renovations? Basic maintenance repairs? The suspense was maddening.
In the cattle cars and locked in the enclosure at the Capitol Zoo, Dell tried to keep to himself. That wasn't so easy when most everyone else's eyes were instantly drawn to him on account of his crutches. The large black boy from 11 in particular singled him out for special attention. And by special attention that meant taunts and physical intimidation that had Dell whimpering for his Mama. No one came to his defense. He spent an entire day in that zoo enclosure, and when he was finally, mercifully transferred under the cover of blindfolds to his individual cage directly below his pedestal, Dell Fonio spent what was surely the final night of his life curled in the fetal position and choking on his own tears.
The morning the Games were to open, Dell and the others were lifted up into the arena. While in the zoo enclosure, the tributes from 1, 5 and 8 – fierce rebels who had all had relatives die in the fighting – made a pact. Landmines be damned, they would go out on their own terms and step off their plates early, hoping that enough people had been inspired by last year's debacle and followed suit. The Games couldn't be played if there were no players, and last year had proved that the Capitol could be made a laughingstock if you were clever enough to beat them at their own game. The bastards had come tantalizing close to having their Games fall apart in their cradle.
Unfortunately, Ravinstill and "those bastards" were well aware of that.
The tributes from 1, 5 and 8 were clever, all right - too clever by half. For, just as the pedestals were clicking into place and these half a dozen tributes serenely stepped off their plates to go out in a blaze of glory…
… they stepped out into open air.
None of the six were able to catch themselves in time, and they tumbled into the black hole of empty space with petrified screams. The landmines around the pedestals didn't even go off.
For how could landmines be activated if there was no land?
The eighteen surviving, stupefied tributes (including Dell), the Capitol audience, all gaped at the transformation.
The floor of the arena had been almost entirely hollowed out. Excavated. Only the pedestals had supports underneath, capping off cylinders of earth that contained the individual tribute cages. Every stretch of bare earth not being used for that purpose was just…. gone….
In the place of the arena's floor was a series of vines that seemed to stretch up far past where the eyes could see. If any of the tributes had squinted, they might have realized that the vines were attached to hundreds of hovercraft, floating in a clustering armada at cruising altitude.
Forget the walls of the arena. There was truly nowhere to run now.
But that didn't mean the tributes couldn't move. They could, for instance, climb.
The 60 seconds counted down on the intercom without further incident this time. Dell stared at the vines around him, armed with his crutches (the Peacekeepers had wanted to take these away from him, fearful of an unfair advantage, but the optics of that were deemed a little too cruel, even by Capitol standards). Besides, there were still weapons – swords and cutlasses could now be seen twisted and tangled in the coils of vines.
As the countdown neared its end, Dell felt a glimmer of hope. He might not be able to walk or even limp, at least not very well; with the arena's orientation, he wouldn't need to anyhow. But he could climb.
When the gong sounded, the eighteen tributes began to shimmy madly up any near-hanging vines for weapons that were surely woven somewhere up there. The vines, however, proved to be slippery, and three more death screams were soon heard with a chilling Doppler effect, as their owners fell down, down, down into nothingness.
Scared though he was, Dell managed to use his head. Keeping a firm grip on his crutches, he wound them together around one vine in a crossed pattern, his fingers gripping both the crutches and the vines. With the added friction, he kept his grip better than most. His all-but-useless legs he crossed at the ankles, and he began to shimmy up, climbing the way he had learned how to climb the trees back home, often to escape bullies. Dell Fonio may not have been able to run, but he could out-climb anyone in District 9.
He was about fifteen feet up his vine when he came across a weapon. It was a dagger, barely bigger than his hand, but it would do. With his hands full of crutches and vines, the only way for Dell to retrieve the blade was to clench the jeweled hilt tightly in his teeth and wriggle it out of its jungle cradle.
By now, many of the tributes who were able to climb had reached weapons as well. They were armed. They were safe as they could be at the moment, provided they didn't lose their grip. But what now? How to kill each other besides waiting for others to slip and fall?
It started out with risky experimentation, and a close examination of one's surroundings to realize that nearly all the vines were in some way connected. One tribute cut a vine, and then swayed dangerously across the expanse, looking like Tarzan in the trees or a pirate navigating the rigging in one of those old stories. When his trajectory took him close to a tweenie girl, limbs wound about her vine and frozen with terror, the swinging tribute jabbed the tip of his arrow through the girl's chin and out through her mouth as he passed. She was killed instantly.
Another tribute blatantly cut a critical stretch of vine linked to that of his closest neighbor, and the whole piece of natural rope went slack, sending the lattermost tribute into a free fall of doom. Unfortunately, the previous cutter quickly followed as he failed to realize that he'd foolishly cut down his own vine as well.
The HISS of blades continued to split the air, followed by the creak of vines and the surviving tributes swung around each other like monkeys, hacking at each other if they were in reach. There wasn't any real skill to it, just pure luck and hope that you were cutting the vines in the right places. One wrong slash would mean instant death.
Dell watched his competition swing and sway around him like those monkeys he had seen while quarantined in the Capitol Zoo. His vine quivered along with his body as he realized the thing could be severed at any moment, if a passing tribute didn't stick him first. One girl – from Six, he thought – was swinging way too close with that dirk she was carrying, and was clearly using her momentum to try and get to him. Thinking fast, Dell manipulated the hilt of his dagger around inside his mouth, so that the blade pointed out. He waited, and…
PA-TOOEY! Dell spat the dagger out at just the right moment and it bulleted straight into the neck of the girl from Six. She gargled, her grip on her vine slacking, and her dead corpse plummeted silently into the gloom below.
Fewer vines were in motion now. Dell's arms were starting to feel some twinges of discomfort, if not outright hurt yet. The tributes from 12 were still swinging and trying to hack at each other, but they kept passing each other by in parallel. Their blades met, though, the CLANG of steel echoing. The deaths were growing farther apart now, but could reliably be foretold by a drawn-out scream, followed by the din of the crowd.
By the time an hour and twenty minutes had elapsed, there were only four tributes left: the girl from 2, the girl from 4, Dell and the large boy from 11 – Clayton.
Clayton was still swinging around with a machete in his free hand. The girl from 4 showed no fear when she swooped to meet him, armed with a cutlass. The reach of Clayton's blade was longer, though, and he pierced her through the abdomen, sending the girl reeling to her death.
The war cry alerted Dell to the girl from 2 closing in on him, and he nearly panicked. I need a weapon!
He still had one, he realized. Shifting his weight, and tightening the grip in his one hand so that the knuckles turned red around the crutch and his vine, Dell windmilled desperately out with his other crutch when the Two girl got too close.
There was a sound like a melon hitting the pavement as the butt of his crutch clocked her in the head. Part of her skull caved in; she was dead before she let go.
The Games were now down to just Dell and Clayton. The fierce boy from 11 grinned devilishly and his hacking became relentless, chopping at the vines and swinging to get closer to his last opponent. Dell eventually had to resort to jumping from vine to vine, losing his grip on one of his crutches in the process. Clayton chased him around the arena, Dell staying one leap ahead and flinging used vines back at the other boy.
When next he looked back, Dell could see that Clayton was tangled in a web of vines. Frustrated, the black boy began hacking at these with his machete, pulling at them with his teeth… all the while not noticing that one particularly nasty coil was tightening around his neck.
But Dell did. "Clayton! Clayton, DON'T!"
Too late. Clayton suddenly let out a terrible scream as one last cut caused the bottom to literally fall out from under him. Hands clawing at the vine around his throat, he plummeted into the abyss, his sound choked off as the vine to which he was attached suddenly snapped taut.
Dell's muscles were starting to ache. So it was a relief when the trumpets sounded. He had won the Hunger Games with nothing but ingenuity, a couple of crutches and unparalleled upper body strength. The whole ordeal clocked in at an hour and 32 minutes.
Maximus and Acacia were summoned to the Capitol from their respective districts, all expenses paid, to greet their new comrade. Now leaning on only one crutch, Dell smiled when the giant boy from two years ago ruffled his hair. He blushed when Acacia Ivy, smiling radiantly, took his face in her hands and gave him a deep kiss on the mouth – his very first.
Dell carried a torch for the pretty District 7 Victor from that moment on.