Chapter 4: Vulcan Bronzedrop
An Excerpt from In the Line of Duty, Captain Gerard Kelly's memoirs
The 4th Hunger Games provided the first documented case of a tribute who actively tried to escape.
I was a 19-year-old kid just starting out fresh, as a prosecutor for the Capitol DA's office. I got the call in the middle of the night from my boss two nights before the Games were to open. A security breach at the Capitol Zoo, he said – "We have an asset out of containment." He told me this had the potential to jumpstart my career.
Or irrevocably tarnish it before it had even begun. When I got to the zoo, the red and blue flashing lights of police cars surrounded the zoo complex. Detectives were taking down statements from the tributes, all huddled together in rags and sitting in the mud amidst the swine in the pigpen. That was the enclosure that had been selected this year; the monkeys enclosure had worked well enough for the season previous, but it had been covered with fecal matter mere hours before the tributes' arrival and had to be deep-cleaned.
A couple of my colleagues assigned to the Peacekeepers straight out of graduation from Law Enforcement Barracks were shining spotlights in the terrified tributes' faces. I remember at least one colleague (I'm pretty sure it was Mike Brandt) seemed convinced that the "runner," as we were now calling him, had had help.
Jeb Wiley, my boss, told me that a passing janitor had been sweeping outside the zoo enclosure not twenty minutes before when he thought he saw a passing shadow literally slip out of the cage and dash off into the night. The shadow kept to the darkness, avoiding the zoo's streetlamps as it had headed for the edge of the property. When we interrogated him later, the poor janitor said the… thing moved like a primate. Moved like a…. human….
Jebby and I interrogated the janitor again. After performing a quick head count to confirm, we interrogated each of the 23 tributes in turn, taking them out of the pigpen in chunks and holding them at gunpoint as we peppered questions like they were bullets from those guns. In my years of experience, it is rare to have even two or three people corroborate each other's stories with close enough accuracy. All twenty-three of the tributes backed up each other's testimony closely enough that Brandt opined the use of polygraphs was unnecessary. Of course it wasn't – we didn't have those kinds of resources for lack of funding, and more importantly, we didn't have that kind of time.
The story, retold to me twenty-three times, was this: the boy had been jittery and scared out of his mind ever since the cattle cars picked him up in the first shipment. Several described how his eyes had been shifty. The tributes arrived at the Capitol Zoo without incident, to be poked and prodded for the patrons' amusement.
Late that night, after closing, the accommodations in the pigpen had started to feel cramped with two dozen kids and half a dozen rather large pigs. The shifty boy had laid down in the cool mud, rolling around in it like one of the swine. He rubbed himself up against the creatures when most of the other tributes wouldn't. It seems that many of the kids had these pigs confused with their wild cousins, boars – told to be vicious and residing in the jungles below District Ten.
The boy slipped about more than he moved, and then finally, he was ringing the barred edges of the enclosure when he just… slipped through, like toothpaste out of a tube. The boys from 4 and 7 had made it clear the other boy was rather skinny.
Skinny enough, it appeared, to slip through bars spaced only six inches apart and half an inch thick.
I remember feeling these bars and vaguely noting how… greasy they were. Pig grease. The kid... rubbing against the pigs….
He'd been oiling himself down.
"Boss! Wiley!" I hollered. The Chief ran up to me, out of breath. "I know how he did it! Feel this!"
When Wiley did, he went white as an albino bat. "Kelly, we gotta find this guy – NOW! Prepare to make a statement."
In law enforcement lingo, a statement could just as often be synonymous with an order. I was taken aback, but flattered, that Wiley was already putting that much faith in me. I still feel that perhaps I didn't have the experience to dish out such authority, but if anything could give you experience, a fugitive tribute was it.
33 hours. We had approximately 33 hours to hunt down a fleeing tribute, hopefully bring him back before the Games were launched. Failure was not an option. If we couldn't retrieve the asset, the Capitol would have to suffer the embarrassment of delaying the Games long enough for someone to head up north and perform another Reaping for a replacement. The President, I knew, would not abide by that.
By now, some in the media had begun to get wind of what was going on, so I was trotted out to make the statement on live CGN as well. "All right, folks, listen up! We have a fugitive who has been on the run for approximately 105 minutes. Average footspeed over uneven, industrial terrain is roughly 4 miles/hour – that will give you a radius of 7 miles. I want a hard-target search of every hovercar station, residence, farmhouse, henhouse, doghouse, jailhouse, courthouse, fashion house, poorhouse, whorehouse, outhouse and every structurally sound building within that zone! This is a tribute – we don't know if he's armed, so assume that he is. And understand right now that armed or not, he is dangerous! Your fugitive's name is Mr. Vulcan Bronzedrop…. got get him!"
We had 33 hours to recover our lost asset. We found Vulcan Bronzedrop in a little under 8. Mike Brandt – a seasoned professional and one of the best guys I've ever known in this business – found the bastard dressed in women's clothing and trying to buy a train ticket out of the city. The stationmaster had become suspicious and been smart enough to detain him.
I gotta say, the subterfuge made sense, if it was also fairly laughable. Vulcan Bronzedrop was from a lower-class family in the projects of District 1. This was a brood that didn't hold down good paying jobs or rise to become guild masters in the graphite mines. The Bronzedrops weren't sending their best to the fashion houses in the Capitol… but they still knew clothing. The trick almost worked.
Almost.
Mike Brandt and I were there on scene to arrest the kid – 18 years old, skinny as hell, and petrified out of his mind. The media were all over us, so we took him back to Mike's squad car to interrogate him in the hopes that we could keep it quiet. We questioned him for the next 15 hours, so that by the time we had finished, it was night again and the other tributes would already be in their individual cages under the pedestals.
Vulcan begged us to book him for prison – anything but the arena! I felt for the kid, but prison can't serve as a substitute for the Games.
Mike and I had been about to personally escort Vulcan to his cage under the arena, with the squad car's lights flashing, the whole nine yards, when my colleague got a message from over his radio. The directive was from very high up: we were to take Mr. Bronzedrop to the arena – just not under it.
Mike and I drove with Vulcan to the Capitol Arena, where a squad of Peacekeepers was waiting. We delivered custody of the boy over to them, as in and around the Capitol Arena, they technically had jurisdiction. Then, I went home, dry-swallowed a sleeping pill and took a six-hour power nap.
The next morning, Mike and I were in headquarters taking a coffee break when Mandatory Viewing came on live. The tributes were being launched into the arena.
23 of them anyway, and for a moment, I panicked. Had that little Houdini toddled off again?
But, no. I can still hear Mike Brandt sucking in a breath, and when I saw what he was seeing, I turned pale.
There was a pair of flagpoles planted in the center ring of the arena, stretching towards the sky. I remember, before the Dark Days, going with my dad to soccer games in the stadium and placing my hand over my heart while I stared at the Panemian flag strung between those two poles.
Something was strung between the poles now, all right, but it wasn't a flag. It was a bloodied lump. The thing that might have been human lifted its head and moaned. Hung around its neck was a sign: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO COWARDS.
The landscaping contractors who had been hired to excavate the ground for the last Games had refilled the space in and repacked the soil. Thank the State the kids had finally learned not to move from the pedestals for 60 seconds. By the time the countdown ended, they had all noticed the empty space on one pedestal, but, for all my life, I will never understand how none of them thought to look up.
I remember the gong sounding, and how everyone, minus Vulcan, ran for the weapons. It was with blinding speed, how all the kids turned on each other. Blood flowed like water. I can still see the boy from 3 having his head popped clean off.
Half the field went down in the first thirty minutes. The other half spread out, into little pockets of battle, stabbing and punching over the next four hours.
Finally, it was just the girl from District 2 left. She had won several impressive bouts and was grinning in exhilaration at the roars of the crowd. I recall watching her stand there for a few moments, expecting the trumpets to sound, but the sound didn't come. The girl looked up towards the sky as if to ask, Hey, what gives?
The sound of her sucking in a breath still echoes in my ears to this day, the moment that she saw Vulcan. Her triumphant grin bled red.
The girl thought she could simply scale one of the poles and take out what was more of a sacrificial prisoner than a tribute. For the next half hour, she attempted just that… but she kept slipping down before she could get close enough. I could see that was wiping her hands on her clothes frequently, growling in frustration.
Mike Brandt and I looked at each other, and that's when it hit me: pig grease. Someone had slathered the flagpoles with pig grease. Whether as a crude joke, or as a way to remind Vulcan of his transgressions, I still can't even begin to tell.
The girl tried to vertically lob her sword up at Vulcan. It missed, rocketing back to earth. Snatching it up, she tried scaling the flagpole one last time, clawing for every greasy inch.
I know Vulcan could see her coming, for the cameras zoomed in on his frightened face as she approached. He was hanging by his wrists in manacles so he had nowhere to go (as it turns out, it wasn't to be the last time a tribute was quarantined in this way).
The girl from 2 was really close. She was straining, extending her sword to try and draw blood. One slice, and she could let him bleed out…
Vulcan frantically kicked out with his dangling foot. He caught her square in the space between her legs.
The girl lost mastery over the greased pole in the next moment and tumbled out into empty air completely, letting out a shocked, high-pitched scream. She hit the ground with a SPLAT and lay chillingly still. I'm pretty sure her neck must have snapped. I think Mike Brandt chose that moment to vomit into the trashcan.
The Capitol Arena was deathly quiet for over a full minute. Then the trumpets sounded, and Vulcan Bronzedrop was being heralded as the 4th Victor. I couldn't believe it. The little shit had escaped the Hunger Games twice. Once temporarily, only to be recaptured, and now forever, outlasting everyone with nothing but an errant kick while he was all tied up.
I had at least two friends of my parents who were in the Cabinet in those days, and they say President Ravinstill was furious. Maximus Meridius flatly refused to come out to the Capitol to meet his new successor, as had slowly become tradition. Vulcan himself was sent home quietly. Careers weren't called Careers in those days – there was no such thing – but it would turn out to be decades before District 1 shook the reputation of the man who became infamously known as "The Cowardly Career." Augustus Braun would rehabilitate the district's image somewhat as "The Cavalier Career," 63 years later.
I'm 87 years old. I've seen and done a lot in a distinguished career that eventually led me to being the Chief of the Capitol City Police. But I've never had a case quite like the one of the fugitive Victor.