Buckwheat Mager, District Nine (17)
When I was little I used to think I could win the Games if I really wanted to. I wasn't dumb enough to volunteer but if I got Reaped then sure, I'd win. Then I got Reaped. But on the other hand, so far I wasn't dead. That sort of counted as winning?
It was a funny story how I ended up with Ardun. He didn't seem the allying type. He seemed more the "stuffy smart kid who has no friends" type. I didn't know what brought us together. Maybe it was our shared love of dry wit. It was going to take a lot more to get us through the Games.
"What you you think that one's called?" Ardun said, pointing from our perch in a tree to an armored dinosaur that looked something like a lizard crossed with a hippo. It had a club on the end of its tail. I was pretty sure I'd seen it in a science book somewhere.
"Frank?" I guessed.
"Frankosaurus," Ardun said solemnly.
"If I named them, the names would make sense," I said. "I'd name it 'Thick-skinned clubtail' or something."
"Maybe that's what it means in Latin," Ardun said.
"It means 'something lizard', I know that much," I said.
"Wow, you should have been a scientist," Ardun said.
Someone said once that evil was banal. Turned out the same thing was true of fear. After the first few days in the Arena, things started to seem normal. I'd gone from mindblown awe at seeing real dinosaurs to boredly thinking of names for them. We hadn't seen any tyrannosauruses yet, though we'd heard something that sounded like one. Not that I could say I knew what a T. Rex sounded like. It sounded like a very mean and very scary dinosaur, which was probably what the Gamemakers had in mind when they put together a sound mix. For days we'd sat up in our tree hoping no flying dinosaurs saw us ad living off weird fruits that hadn't killed us yet and dew we licked off the leaves.
"How long you think the Games will take?" Ardun said.
"Not long, with these mutts," I said. "You think they destroy them all after the Games or what? Here we are sitting on real-life dinosaurs and the Capitol's only thought was that this would make a really good Hunger Games."
A crashing clamor in the undergrowth got us both huddling down in the leaves. We watched silently as the ground shook, and then low rumblings resounded in my stomach until I just felt some predator was coming. I saw the girl bolting through the grass just before the two-legged dinosaur burst out from the trees after her. I couldn't imagine how panicked she must have been to run into the open from the slim cover of the forest. The dinosaur after her didn't look like I imagined a T. Rex. It had knobby skin and two little horns over its eyes. All these things I noticed as a girl ran for her life. But in the open there was no way to escape. The dinosaur caught up to her in an instant. Its foot actually came down on her. Blood squirted from her torso as she gave one short scream. The dinosaur bent its head down and bit down on her upper body. It tore her in half like taffy, then tossed both pieces down its throat.
"What do you say about something like that?" Ardun whispered thickly. That was all there was to say.
A cloud passed in front of the sky. I looked up, grateful for the shade, and saw the sky was falling.
I lay on my back, my breath aching and a crushing pressure in my chest. Ardun was underneath me, his limbs and back snapped like straws. As the dust settled, I could see the fallen shape of the dinosaur some hundred feet away from me. Everything was still. Everything was quiet. All that was around me was the ringing in my ears and cannon after cannon.