Enigma Fenn (13) D1F

Like always, I was hiding. I had snuck off from where I had killed the girl, happy to let the hovercrafts take care of the body. I had to get away from where the cannon had fired. Otherwise, the Careers would find me, which I wasn't quite ready for yet. I had to stay constantly out of their way, seeing as there were still four of them and one of me. One of me and four other non-Careers. I had a fifty percent chance of stumbling upon an outlier next, and a fifty percent chance of stumbling upon a Career. I had to be ready for both while avoiding either.

I wandered around the pre-Dark Days section aimlessly like I had done so many times before. I was intrigued by everything I saw, happy to be away from the creepy giant reptile skeletons. I kept seeing jaw-dropping dresses and art called "Renaissance" paintings. They were realistic and pretty, like everything else in the room. I didn't intend to stay there. It looked nice. Careers would check nice places. I needed an average place, one that didn't stick out at all.

Pre-Dark Days Dark Days, a label read on top of a doorframe. I was very much intrigued. What could be so horrendous that the Capitol would consider it a Dark Days before the Dark Days? What could possibly beat the time of war so bad that we had the Hunger Games to punish it? And how could humanity and civilization survive past something so awful?

A small note below the title read "Though not as bad as the Dark Days, this time frame is considered the worst known to humanity before the Dark Days of the Capitol." I was relieved to see that, but still, I was nervous while I stepped through the doors into the section. I didn't know what I could see beyond them. I wasn't sure how hard it would be to handle. It definitely wouldn't be average, but it might just scare tributes away.

The first sight I saw hardly surprised me. Barbed-wire fences, supposed electric, stuck into the sky, reaching almost to the ceiling of the building. Dark, dull military barracks were painted onto the walls, made to look as though I was confined within them in some places. Piles of striped clothing were left on the ground, along with suitcases full of lost belongings. Names were painted on them. Abraham Bankier. Joseph Bau. Moshe Bejski. They were some of the weirdest names I saw, but I understood the meaning behind them. They were people's belongings left behind when the people died. If the people lived, it wouldn't be the Dark Days.

The next sight I saw made me gag. In a room inside the larger room, there was hair. It had a label that I could hardly read. The hair there overwhelmed me. There was more hair than there was me. The label said it was seven tons of hair stolen from prisoners, prisoners that had been tortured, starved, and forgotten. I believed that it was seven tons of hair. I believed that it was stolen from prisoners. I even believed that humans could be that awful. I just wished that I couldn't believe all of that.

I wanted to get out of there. I also knew I shouldn't. No tribute would last long mentally in a room where pictures of starving people hung on the wall, their eyes sunken into their heads. No tribute would last long near so much human hair that someone could drown in it. I probably wouldn't last long, already near tears at the horror of what I saw. I would try, though. I would abuse someone else's history to get myself a future.

Still, I wasn't going to stay in the hair room. I walked right out of there, not intending to ever return. I walked into a section that said "Fighting tactics of the war," wanting to see what was held. Maybe some weapons were in there. They would be outdated and rusty, but they would be better than the knife and weird crown I had. Anything would be better than the near nothing I had.

I saw what I was looking for right away. It was a gun, sitting near a string of bullets. It was huge. It was covered in glass. The glass was easily shatterable, though, and I shattered it, trying to get as little glass as possible in my skin. I picked up the old, corroded bullets and wrapped them around my waist, then dragged the gun behind me. I couldn't easily pick it up. It seemed to weight more than I did. So I took the risk of dragging it behind me, making noise in order to get the best weapon the Games had to offer.

Once I had a weapon, I went back into the danger zone. I closed my eyes tightly, not looking at anything on the walls. I didn't even look at the floor. I walked right into a wall, ducked around it, then kept walking. I didn't need to see anything. I didn't need to be reminded of horrors that beat everything I had been told about the Dark Days. That was just a war. This was torture.

Finally, I found myself in a room. It was simple. It had grey walls, old and nasty, but plain. It had showerheads, also old and nasty, but nothing to be afraid of. There was a door that I closed behind me, locking myself into the room. There was only one entrance, and I could watch it like a hawk. It seemed to be the only place in the entire section that wasn't enough to make people vomit. Still, I didn't read the label on the wall. I didn't want to know what it would say.

It seemed like I was in a safe room, so I pretended I didn't notice the claw marks on the walls.

Someone asked for a machine gun for Enigma, and I delivered. I also delivered in a horrifying, awful way, but yesterday WAS Holocaust remembrance day...

RIP Enigma's innocence