With thanks to Glassgift for your review of the last chapter.
I took creative inspiration from an 'Hannibal' episode for the imagery in this chapter, so be warned that this chapter gets a little gory.
Y 184-09-01 T 09:41:52
Day 2
It was now that Emma missed the sea.
She had grown up in a house by the coast, before her mother died- it was small and crowded, but it had smelt of the sea, and of the unending cooking that wafted through the house. Her mother, Ana, had loved cooking, and Emma's older brother Andreas had inherited that love. While Emma took after her father, strong and powerful and raring to fight, her brother and mother would spend days together in the kitchen, laughing and joking, warm smiles on their faces.
When their mother was lost to a heart attack, it was Andreas who had suffered most, visibly. Emma and her father had shut down, retreated into themselves, and the downsized family had moved into a downsized house in Fishery Zone 7. It was still by the sea, but there the smell of salt was overpowered by the acrid stench of the oil the dredging rafts used to power their tiny engines. Here her father had met the owner of the restaurant next door, and his son; Emma had retreated into herself, to the sea, swimming in its depths to hide from the world above.
It was now that Emma missed the sea, when the morning had come but it was too bright, preternaturally bright, and she only wanted to let the sun pass her by beneath the waves.
But the arena was a city, the Capitol, a valley of buildings with a wedge of sunlight above them, and there was no water to be found. Thankfully, she had a water bottle to hand, and she cracked it open as she walked along the road with Ronan.
"Gotta say," she hummed in low tones, trying to prevent her voice echoing against the glassy walls of buildings, "I really hope they don't wake us up like that every day."
Ronan snorted around a mouthful of a ration pack. Neither of them flinched as a cannon fired above them; it had been happening for the last hour, and after the first few cannons they had stopped standing in place with their weapons drawn. "I'm just hoping you don't spend two hours getting ready next time."
"Yeah, well, I'm just trying to ration us out so we're good for a few days, instead of eating them all in the morning, dumbass." Emma smacked Ronan on the back of the head roughly.
"I need energy in the morning, don't question my ways."
"Bull. Shit. You're just hogging the food, and I'm not going to stand for it." Emma whipped out her hand to grab the ration pack from Ronan's. But fast, faster than Emma could reach out, Ronan pulled back his hand. He was a large-built tribute, and it was easy to forget how lithe he was underneath his bulky pack of muscle- he was faster than she was despite her light-built figure, and it was disconcerting. Ronan, still casual despite his burst of speed, jammed the rest of the ration bar into his face, grinning around his mouthful of food.
"Godda try har'er tha' that, E'a," he garbled. Emma rolled her eyes and returned her hand to the sword tucked in her belt.
"You're an absolute pig, Rona-"
Her breath hitched and died in her throat as they rounded the corner to a wide road, bathed in sunlight reflected down from the glass buildings around them. It was light, bright, warmly lit.
And bathed in blood.
Small bodies, diminished by being dismembered and strewn across the tarmac ground. A couple were seated against shopfronts, their throats slit, staining the glass fronts of the gambling emporiums- one such body was lacking any arms and legs, the limbs roughly hacked from its torso. Still, Emma was fairly certain it had been the small District Six girl, from the hair; she certainly couldn't guess from the face, as it had been cut up so bloodily it had ceased to be a face.
"Holy shit." Ronan murmured. "Did the rest of the Careers do this?"
Emma did not answer. This level of bloodshed was unprecedented. It was unthinkable. No Career would do this. This was not killing- this was revelling in torture. The sheer amount of blood suggested that the former tributes had been alive when they were dismembered; that their hearts had still been pumping as someone hacked their arms and legs from their body. She had trained as much as any Career, but this was unthinkable. There was little honour in killing, but what little a Career had was entirely lost in this glorification of destruction.
"Emma?" She looked up sharply, hand on her sword, to Ronan's face. "Do you think the Careers did this?"
She stared down at the trails of blood and viscera on the ground. Her hand tightened around the hilt of her sword.
"Keep moving. Through it. Keep moving through it." She walked on, carefully treading around the bodies and through the blood. Ronan stared after her doubtfully, before following behind, deftly weaving through the remains of people.
"You sure we should do this?" Ronan said. A faint hum started up in the background, and he looked back at it. "The hovercraft's coming, and I don't want to be in the way of it when it retrieves these."
"Hang on." Emma said, her grey sneakers turning black-red under the viscera at her feet. One of the gambling emporiums seemed to be the focal point for the bodies- the disembodied limbs all pointed inwards to the door, two mutilated bodies flanking the doorway. The bloodshed lead to this place. Emma stopped at the doorway, smeared in blood. She drew her sword.
And, Ronan at her bloodied heels, walked into the shadowed gambling emporium.
It was carnage. It was awful, desperate carnage. The heat of a summer day at noon, amplified by the large glass windows, created a heavy, rotting atmosphere in the emporium. Emma imagined that once, the gambling emporium must have looked almost beautiful- rich purple carpets were just visible, as were shining crystalline structures. A huge screen took up the far wall, and Emma supposed that in the real Capitol it held the odds of each tribute.
But now it was littered with bodies. Blood and gore stained the rich purple carpets, mixing with fabric to create a darker hue. Emma was horrified to recognise some of them from the bloodbath- the unseeing eyes of Chal Detria, his head once pierced by one of Ronan's spears, bored into her. Every head was turned to face an entrant to the building. Chal had been dead when Ronan had sent his spear through his skull, and so little blood had flowed from him when his arms had been hacked off his body.
Emma choked on the heavy, blood-drenched air. The huge screen, that should have contained the odds for every tribute, was covered in something else. Hoisted by paracord to hang from the wall-mounted screen, his arms raised as if beseeching the ceiling-covered heavens, extra arms tied to his torso in the same position, a long, jagged hole in the center of his skull, the District 1 Career Sheen Astara hung with eyes unseeing and boring into hers.
This was beyond glorifying destruction. This was celebrating it.
Behind them, a hovercraft picked up the remains of the bodies outside. It hovered a moment longer, rotors whipping and spreading the blood left on the ground, then took off again, leaving behind little trace of gore.
"It can't get inside," Ronan muttered. "It can't pick up any bodies that are outside. They must've dragged them inside- so they could-"
He trailed off, disgust thick in his voice.
"She." Emma said.
"What?"
"She. We know who this is."
"-Are you saying Anna did this?"
"Who else?" Her mouth was dry. Her breaths came in short gasps to avoid the worst of the rotting smell. "She did this. She-"
"We knew Sheen was dead." Ronan said, his voice hoarse but continuing inexorably in the face of the horrors in front of him. "But- Anna must have done this. Careers wouldn't do this but she was- she's crazy, she could do this."
Emma had seen many things in Games past and present. Blood and gore were part and parcel of the affair of the Hunger Games- it was what the Capitol hungered for, it was what they wanted. But this- this was mutilating dead bodies. This was dishonouring the dead. In most arenas this wouldn't be possible, the hovercrafts took care of that, but in an insular building-based arena like this one the hovercrafts could not reach inside to take any bodies someone might drag inside- that Anna had dragged inside.
Emma again missed the sea, but realised that with the pools of viscera at her feet she was as close as she might ever get again. She had to fight hard not to throw up.
Ronan shook his head. "She's been killing people and making them some sort of- tableau? Is that the word for this freaky shit? Is there any word for this?"
Emma closed her eyes, wanting to escape from the dead eyes watching them.
And then she heard the faint sound of cannon, and realised.
"Ronan," she said, turning sharply, sliding slightly on the bloodied carpets as she caught him by the shoulder. "Cannons have been going off for hours. When did the last one go off?"
"Uh, just now-"
"-Before that."
Ronan's eyebrows shot up. "A few minutes ago."
Emma swallowed. "She's on the move. She'll be coming back." And then the two of them were scrabbling for the bloodied door, escaping the carnage, out and away into the sunlit, blood-drenched streets of the fake Capitol.
Emma resolved as she ran that she would kill any tribute she met. It would be a greater mercy than leaving them to Anna's hands.
Wow. I'm unsettled by my own imagery here, but in my defence I slightly ripped it from 'Hannibal' so that's probably why. I love Bryan Fuller's cinematography, what can I say? It really captures the dark tones needed for the psychological horror of Lecter's world.
And given we're a writing community I thought I might take this moment to also recommend the book 'Cause of Death: A Writer's Guide to Death, Murder and Forensic Medicine', by Keith Wilson (MD). It's basically my handbook for Jacquerie's deaths and injuries. Though I claim myself as reference for the superdislocation of that guy's leg back in Theon's volunteering chapter.
But I digress. Thank you, as ever, for reading this far.