Mase Nary, District Two- 18
It was a rush to kill Mary Sue. Time slowed down and every detail stood out stark- her eyes going from annoyance when I grabbed her to terror as my intentions became clear, her scream breaking into an animal noise when terror turned to pain, the way her movements bled from thrashing into twitching. When I thought back on them I reflected that they were all transitions. The essence of life is effecting change on the environment. It was the changes, so many little changes, that made a human into a corpse. And then once they were dead there were no more changes and the fun was over.
It was a letdown to kill Caleb. I'd imagined his neck would slowly break, splinters grinding into the inner tissue, and I would be able to watch the life leave. Instead his spine snapped all at once and his eyes emptied instantly. I dropped him and didn't look back.
When Calvary's time came I was ready. We were on watch together, which was practically an endorsement. I stuck my knife in her back and carried her body far enough away for them to come pick her up. When it was time to switch shifts I said she'd wandered away and then the cannon sounded. No one questioned me because no one cared. I'd spent hours anticipating the thrill of the moment, but when it came it was lacking. It was exciting, but not like Mary Sue had been.
Over the next few days I discovered that killing was a drug. The first hit is bliss. It changes you and leaves you never the same. You chase after another hit but find nothing ever matches up to that first high. Each person I killed brought back fleeting impressions of Mary Sue but less of the ecstasy. It was like drinking from a bottle of vodka with more and more water added.
I killed six of the twenty-three Tributes who died. The only ones that stayed in my head were Mary Sue and Calvary. Later I couldn't even remember the order of the middle three. I wanted to draw it out before I killed Abigail but I didn't have the willpower. That siren call of a kill drew me like a starving animal. I hunted her through the Arena and when I finally found her I stabbed her fifteen times in twenty seconds. The high never even came. It had dribbled away so far by then that I was just going through the motions- an addict drinking cough syrup just to make the gnawing drive in my soul quiet down.
It was quiet in the Victor's Village. It was dead in the Victor's Village. In the sterile white house with the sterile modern Capitolite furniture I sat on the couch and stared at the wall. Everything slowed until time flowed like jelly. There was no noise in the world, no color, no sensation. I felt like an old man lying in bed in some lonely nursing home. It was impossible to go back. It was impossible to have known that vital, virile high and know that I wouldn't feel it again for the rest of my life.
Maybe it was karma or something. I loved the feeling of making people dead. It made me feel doubly alive. The Games gave me a way to do that with the sanction of my country. I'd rushed into it and I'd been so grateful the Games existed. Now I was cut off from my drug forever and it was worse than if I'd never known it in the first place. Now I was nothing but a drifting, living dead.