I've finally updated! A lot of deaths this chapter.
Well I didn't tell anyone, but a bird flew by.
Saw what I'd done. He set up a nest outside,
and he sang about what I'd become.
He sang so loud, sang so clear.
I was afraid all the neighbors would hear,
So I invited him in, just to reason with him.
I promised I wouldn't do it again.
"Bird Song" by Florence and the Machine
D1- 18- (Gleam Diode)
Adelina has practically taken over with her "ingenious" idea of creating a transportation system for the supplies in the Cornucopia so we don't starve or dehydrate on our trek out to the woods in search of kills and whatever that those trees, so distant and seemingly unreachable, hold. That, in my opinion, idea of tempting us with something so far out of reach as more ingenuity in each and every tree's leaf in that forest than Adelina has in her entire body, and it's so honestly easy to think of that a four-year-old could.
"Gleam, get that stick over there," Adelina calls over to me, arms crossed, watching Jackson, Dante, and Azaleigh diligently work while Daphne and Vixen obediently search through the Cornucopia and around the bloodbath area for the supplies the new leader says she needs. I have no doubt that Daphne won't be taking up the job of pack leader after Adelina's stupid, stupid, stupid stunt with supplies.
Stone and I? We refuse to help out the idiocy playing before us. I never thought I'd agree with Stonesia Zhunder. Now we look at each other as Adelina barks commands at me like she's stupider than she actually is, and she's pretty damned stupid, the bitch. I hate her. Hate her, hate her, hate her. Cold fury pushes out of me towards her. I hate a lot of people. I really hate Adelina.
"As if," Stone mutters under her breath, crossing her arms in a gesture of mockery directed at Adelina. I smirk a little and suppress an amused chuckle.
"I know, right?" I agree with a smile that I can't hold down. My hands are at my sides, ready to pull a knife from my sheath within a second's notice. If Ade, as Daphne calls her, gets pissed off and draws her silly little katana, my knife will be flying at her neck before she can even let out a scream. And then the rest of the Careers will turn on each other. At least, Daphne will turn on me. I can take her. Stone and I together can mutilate her. And Azaleigh, Jackson, and Dante will be neutral; they'll probably be indifferent to the change in leadership and the death of the Summerfields.
The idea of killing them both sends a jolt of pleasure through my body.
Adelina turns to us, frowns, and her frown turns to a stern glare. "Did you not hear me?" she spits at us, and I raise an eyebrow, silently telling her that she's walking on thin ice right now without snapping at me. Fury I can control. Rage—well, if I go on a bit of killing spree out of rage, I bet I'll get a couple sponsors and lose my biggest competition. Part of me knows I'd lose my valuable allies too. But, hey, it wouldn't be my fault.
"Oh, I heard you. Hard not to," Stone says casually, and gives me a private little grin that only I see because Adelina is slowly processing that Stone insulted her. For a brief moment Stone is my best, best, best friend just for saying that.
"Shut up and get to work," she snarls, her hand going to her katana.
Stone and I both slide our hands over our throwing knives.
"Make us," I growl.
She knows she's been beaten—long distance weaponry beats hand-to-hand swords in a situation like ours any day—but she pushes it anyway. A cruel look gleams in her eyes and she takes a step towards us, almost scowling. I wish I could throw her off a cliff. Stone steps forward too. She's an impulsive little girl who hasn't been trained long enough to be here, but she's a good fighter nonetheless.
"Get." The first word out of Adelina's mouth is slow and insistent, like she's giving us a chance. Counting to three. "To." The second word is a little more demanding, the little patience left in her fading rapidly. "Work." And now she's yelling, advancing further, drawing her katana, and closing the distance threateningly. And Stone is closing the distance with her. I now see that her dagger, not her throwing knife, is out, ready for a close-up battle.
"Stop it, stop it!"
I haven't heard Azaleigh talk much, but I know that ever since she and Jackson started canoodling each other and kissing when they think we're not really watching, she's gone soft and peaceful, preferring quick kills and not liking to elongate the time taken to torture a victim like the rest of us Careers, who are all, admittedly, morbid, cruel, merciless sadists. I'd admit to that anytime though.
Everyone looks at her. Jackson and Dante kept working while we were fighting, throwing glances, but I now notice that Daphne, Vixen, and Azaleigh all stopped to watch us.
"We can't be killing each other!" she shouts. "We're allies!"
"Let's all hold hands and refuse to kill each other, then," I hiss.
Azaleigh throws me a glare that's not very angry and not very scary. The peacemaker is still most definitely Jackson, but she's his little apprentice.
"Get to work," Daphne calls from her post, and Stone and I both let out laughs. She looks us at a little bit questioningly.
"You…idiot!" Stone calls back from where we stand, leaning against the Cornucopia. "Oh, God, please. You work for her. She's going to kill ya in your sleep one day and I'm still gonna be alive to see it, and you know what? I'm gonna laugh."
I smile. Stone and I. Such unlikely but good partners.
The tension is rising. But everyone else suddenly leaves the fight. I can still feel it in the air, though. It's coming. The Careers' fight. And I'm going to love it.
D7- 16- (Damien Andrews)
Decon and I agree on one thing.
The girl's got to go.
Or Nick and the girl, for that matter.
He's too nice to her. Ever since we found her yesterday, he's been feeding her too much. We don't have enough food to be feeding her like she's royalty. He's not overly focused when she's saying something or anytime ever because of her, and we need him to be. He's a good fighter, and we're a group that needs to start fighting. The girl slows us down, too. She's wounded and all, in her head and in her calf.
"Do you think she'll survive for much longer?" Decon asks quietly as we walk ahead of Nick and Astrid, down the river between the dying grass and the desert.
The weather and the terrain change so suddenly in the sections of the arena. It's honestly a bit impressive and more than a bit scary that the Gamemakers have such control. I find myself drifting away from focus and gazing at the river longingly. Its water must be so cold, and I am so hot. But we have to make it to the woods. That's at least another week's trek. Eleven days. Most Games last up to an average of eleven to sixteen days. Of course, I may be miscalculating it. Because honestly I have no way of correctly calculating it.
"Because, I mean, that head injury's bleeding a lot and, hell, if she's gonna die, why risk killin' the alliance by killin' her, you know?" he says, taking a brief glance at Astrid, who's being carried by Nick. I glance back too. Blood from the wound to her head spills to his shirt.
She says that she hallucinated a lot before we found her. I think she hallucinates at night even now because of her head. I didn't get a very decent night's sleep because of her crying out at night, asking someone, anyone, to end it. And the temptation rose every time she woke me up last night. She wouldn't admit to it when Nick asked her this morning, but she must be lying. She hallucinates still.
"I think we ought to wait and see," I tell Decon with a shrug.
"True. Don't want to waste a perfectly good alliance," he agrees.
"Besides," I begin with a grin, "she won't make it through the first battle we have. And if she does…well, it'll be very hectic."
"Chaotic," Decon supplies with an encouraging nod.
"Nick won't even notice who kills her."
We grin and continue to walk toward the woods with the plan fresh in our minds.
The flatness of the arena allows a decent view for a long ways if you're standing atop some of the miniature hills here and there. The random patches of woods and shrubbery and other flora give food and shelter. There's no doubt why they're sporadically placed throughout the arena: we'd die without them. They offer us places to sleep, get warm, and find food. The Gamemakers don't want us to die of natural causes. They want battles.
But it begins to get hilly, which I am very grateful for. I've seen this hilliness coming since we started off on our long walk, and I knew that the hills would hide us sometimes. I know we need to get to fight so we can get sponsors and so the Gamemakers don't just send us into traps or send mutts at us, but admittedly I'm very, very afraid. The hills aren't safe, I'm aware, but they're safer. I just want to live. I want to go home so bad. The constant danger surrounding me is discouraging to that distant goal.
We walk for a while and then take a break. We all gather around and eat the birds we caught at the last copse after cooking them.
"We should really think about—" Astrid begins, but before she can finish Decon cuts her off.
He points over at something. It's late afternoon now. The sun has been to its highest point and has already started plummeting away so the moon can bring its eerie, silvery light to us while we sleep. Due to the almost sunset that's falling over us, the figure he points to is nothing but a big, black, moving line against the blue-purple-red horizon. Soon that blue-purple-red will turn into red-orange-yellow, and then blacken and blacken until there's nothing but little yellow and white dots against a dark sky.
"Look, it's a tribute," Decon announces.
Astrid looks annoyed to have been interrupted. I smirk.
"Should we go after him?" Nick asks.
"Or her," Astrid adds.
"Shut up," I say. This earns me a glare from Nick.
"Yeah, let's go," Decon says.
I look at the girl. She looks back at me, eyebrow raised slightly, but she's biting her lip shyly so it erases whatever affect the raised-eyebrow would have. "You can't come," I tell her. She can die at the next battle. Secretly, I don't want to kill her. She's so shy and sweet when we're not being rude to her. She's pretty and girly and fragile. I don't want to be the one to kill that. Decon can. "You'll only slow us down."
"And you're wounded," Nick contributes.
"Fine." Astrid's not hesitant to admit that she needs to stay back.
We take off at a walking pace, as Astrid suggests, saying we should reserve our energy for the fight. As we close in on the tribute, I can see that it's a somewhat large male. He doesn't seem too large, but he might be larger than all of us. Approaching further, I find that this is true. When he spots us, he tries to pick pace up further but falls behind quickly. We can overpower him, the three of us together.
We formulate a plan quickly. The fastest runner will loop around the boy to attack him from the other side while the strongest will go straight on and get him first. Then the second strongest and second fastest will go in from behind and get him there. The fastest will deal the last blow, hopefully, and then we'll escape into the sunset with Astrid and perhaps something from sponsors.
I'm the fastest. Decon is the strongest. Nick is in the middle.
I start my loop. I don't go the fastest I can go, since we're still not super close to him. Pretty quickly, though, I am, and I speed up. I look over and see Decon's axe entering the weaponless boy's neck. He collapses. It's over before it even started, and I'm starting to get pissed. But the boy is still alive! Nick sticks his sword in his back and I race at full speed to get to them so I can deliver the final blow before he dies with my hatchet.
Killer.
A whisper in the back of my head makes me slow for a second, but I pick up pace again.
I am a killer.
I'm going to kill somebody.
Going to end their life permanently.
I raise my hatchet before I even get there and strike it at his face. His screams of agony lower to a pitiful groan and his cannon fires.
We walk back to camp as I whisper silently to myself, unable to stop the voice before it says the awful three words: I'm a killer.
D8- 13- (Alicia Ludwig)
Alicia can't think. Her head pounds. Her castle is full of monsters. Beasts the size of people war with each other, the horns coming from the top of their heads bashing at one another's. They don't see her yet as she cowers behind her throne and watches, but she fears that soon they will. The ceiling was collapsing each time a beast let out a rare battle cry, the sound of death and despair and evil.
Demons, her mind supplies but it's not her thought. It's a thought from before she went mad. It's a different Alicia Ludwig's thought, a young little girl's with a mind that doesn't rage with insanity and anger and violent.
The biggest red human beast with the longest red horns and the evilest of all the terrifyingly sinister smirks and grins and grimaces emerges from a room she allows no one to go into: her room, filled with all the glories she may ever want or need. Devil, the old Alicia tells the current one. That's a devil. The… Before the old Alicia finishes her thought to the current, an even larger, deadlier savage monster tears barbarically through the walls of her castle.
Alicia screams madly against her own will, frightened by the entrance of the demon. She screams louder as the monsters transform, all except for the largest. It shrinks down to be ten feet tall instead of hundreds of feet tall. Its skin turns from red to a sickly pale bluish color, like ice, turning from a monster of pure devilish evil and fire to a coldhearted, bloody, sickening beast that represents death and all its allies.
The others turn into its servants: big sickly blue insects with oversized mandibles and mouthparts that naturally gnash like they're chewing. They're always hungry. And Alicia, queen of the palace and the kingdom around it, hears their thoughts. They whisper to her, cruel words that she's heard before…before…on the outside. When she's aware. When thing are bad.
It's the insane girl, the Chomp Monsters whisper to each other, psychically linked to one another and Alicia herself.
People are starving here and food is wasted on retards like her.
The bitch attacked me once!
She's insane.
There's the psychopath.
There's that stupid mad hatter chick.
Alicia starts to cry as she realizes what all this means, what all the people who ever say anything cruel to her meant. She realizes that the hominess inside her home, her castle, and the world outside of it, is entirely false. It's all not real. She's made it up for herself. She doesn't live there. She's not beautiful. She's ugly scum that doesn't deserve to live because she'll never do anything more than be insane and the food she eats is wasted. It could go to someone else.
She screams in the real world as awareness spreads through her and her castle fades. She looks around at the arena and everything comes to her too quick for her to handle. She moans in pain and sadness. And then she scurries around, looking for what she needs, what she knows she needs to do what she has to do. She screams all the time, her throat beginning to hurt because she's running and almost out of breath and then sucking air. Dehydrated, starving, aware and conscious of life as it is truly, Alicia frantically searches for something.
A stick. A rock. Something. If she can only find sticks she'll build a fire. But how can she do it with a rock? She has to build a fire. The biggest fire that anyone has ever seen.
A fire the size of a body. A body the size of a thirteen-year-old girl. A thirteen-year-old girl with the name Alicia.
She wails. She doesn't want to die but how can she live? She internally wars with herself but doesn't stop looking until she's found sticks and a rock. And then she tries for a long time to start the fire, but she doesn't know how to. She knows you need, like, sticks. Maybe rocks? She remembers just a fragment of people at the fire-starting station. Wail. Scream. Desperation to die and live too.
"Nooooo!" she screams the shrill shriek and falls to the ground. She doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know what's happening. She's plunging back into the castle but she doesn't want to go there. She is no longer Alicia Ludwig. Alicia Ludwig is dead. She is just a walking, breathing, talking body that's left over from a murder committed years and years ago. The body has to follow the name.
Maybe if she dies, she'll go to a place she remembers her parents speaking of sometimes in the back of her mind: Heaven. Heaven and Hell and the Devil and God. She doesn't want to go back to her castle. Her castle is Hell with its own Devil. She wants to go to Heaven where her God waits for her, and He holds her soul, waiting to return it to its body so she can live happily with Him in the sky.
She wonders if it's real. She wonders if it's a memory or if it's a figment of her imagination.
She sees a real-life Chomp Monster before her, gnashing, chomping, biting, chewing.
Extreme pain.
And then obliviousness.
D9- 17- (Fiona Ryder)
One minute I'm walking away, just away, away from where yesterday. I want to distance myself as far as possible. The next I'm faced with death again.
The blood has stopped flowing from my bad eye unless I prod it or try, painfully, to blink. The girl who killed Sage snagged my eye deeply with her sword and now it's useless. It's weird—seeing out of only one eye. The pain overwhelms the weirdness of the situation though. Searing pain shoots through my head. I have a headache, and the worst of it is directly above my left eye, which is my bad eye.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, jabberjays fly down around me. I look around at them and recognize them from previous Games. I wish they were mockingjays, the more preferable mutant jays. They only mock musical things. Jabberyjays mock voices. I raise an eyebrow at them as they continue to swoop. "Shoo," I say, annoyed. They echo the syllable repeatedly around me, annoyingly too.
I walk forward but run into an invisible wall. Blood is left on whatever the wall is made of from my eye.
Panic immediately swirls through me. I dart back the other way, arms outstretched, but my hands hit the other side three yards from the bloody wall. The right and the left walls are about three yards apart too. I judge how tall it is by looking up at how high a jabberjay that sits perched on the top is. I'm trapped in a prison that's probably impenetrable because of the damn walls.
Fear also hits me. I look up at the birds and see that when they mimic my "Shoo," long, sharp teeth are visible.
I scream in fear. The jabberjays mock my scream as they attack me, teeth sinking into my flesh. They chew at me until the agony is so great that I black out and don't wake up. The last thing I hear is my own scream.
Tributes whose names are in bold are alive:
D1- (Luxuries)
1. Gleam Diode, 18, female. Megalor9
2. Adelina Summerfield, 17, female. CapitolRules
3. Daphne Summerfield, 17, female. CapitolRules
D2- (Masonry)
1. Azaleigh Rommel, 16, female. Araka-chan
2. Beck Ferrari, 18, male. WhyNotDream
3. Stonesia "Stone" Zhunder, 16, female. XOXOFutureFame
D3- (Technology)
1. Forrest Montgomery, 17, WhyNotDream
2. Calypso Oswald, 14, female. WhyNotDream
3. Rylan "Ry" Ashmore, 14, male. the epic bookworm
D4- (Fishing)
1. Vixen Payne, 17, female. jblonde123
2. Nelly Carter, 13, female. Bowserboy129
3. Jackson Brothel, 17, male. Araka-chan
D5- (Power)
1. Anya Saitov, 18, female. the epic bookworm
2. Allegra Ride, 12, female. WhyNotDream
3. Tenne Bradhe, 18, male. BlueYoshGuy
D6- (Transportation)
1. Dante Kyanide, 17, male. Megalor9
2. Cade Allens, 17, male. bijtjen
3. Phoenix Grant, 18, male. the epic bookworm
D7- (Lumber)
1. Decon Crow, 17, male. Bowserboy129
2. Jaelyn "Jae" Nicole Analetto, 15, female. SpunkyFun
3. Damien Andrews, 16, male. Jammerock2000
D8- (Textiles)
1. Damon Grey, 18, male. sportygirl123
2. Dan Axton, 17, male. Jammerock2000
3. Alicia Ludwig, 13, female. the epic bookworm
D9- (Grain)
1. Asher Lightwood, 17, male. Rikachan101
2. Aeris Lockhart, 15, female. Rikachan101
3. Fiona Ryder, 17, female. sportygirl123
D10- (Livestock)
1. Nick DiLaurnetis, 16, male. CallingMeFakeWontMakeYouReal
2. Jak Crenshaw, 17, male. Jammerock2000
3. Leo Rivers, 16, male. WhyNotDream
D11- (Agriculture)
1. Skylar Mitchell, 14, female. Jammerock2000
2. Kayla Baker, 16, female. Jammerock2000
3. Sage Birr, 17, male. the epic bookworm
D12- (Mining)
1. Krumr Strongthews, 18, male. CapitolRules
2. Carlyn Hansen, 17, female. CapitolRules
3. Astrid Levine, 15/16, female. CallingMeFakeWontMakeYouReal