Chapter 3: The Disposables

Chapter Text

Darkness closed in very abruptly. In the trees, he couldn't see the sunset, but Haymitch noted that the golden light that marked the close of the first arena day lasted mere seconds before being snuffed out by an inky blackness.

Haymitch frowned down at his knees, where he had balanced a short stick. He had carved a series of notes on the wood with which he was going to keep track of the dead tributes, and he could barely see them now. But then the anthem sounded and overhead in the sky the projections of the dead began - the faces of those who had already been killed in the arena. The ghostly light from their faces illuminated his tally - just enough - and he carved a notch for each tribute. Both of the girls from District 3 (the second one being the one who had died in front of his eyes and been plucked from the trees by a hovercraft's giant claw); one of the girls from District 4; a boy and both girls from District 5; a boy and both girls from District 6; one of the boys from District 7; one of the boys from District 8; a boy and a girl from District 9; a boy and a girl from District 10, a boy and both girls from District 11; and, finally, Pavo. Poor, hapless Pavo. Haymitch was classmates with his sister, a good egg. He started to wonder, fretfully, why it had never occurred to him to offer an allegiance to the boy - at least at the outset - for protection. Ellanda, too. They were his neighbors, they were Seam. How would their parents feel, watching him now, confidently striving to survive and wondering why he was not helping them?

But of course that was nonsense. There could be only one winner, so betrayal was the end of all allegiances in the arena. And everyone knew it. How much worse would it be to have to kill them himself? Infinitely worse. It was best that they died on their own.

He returned to strategizing, albeit with a somewhat sick feeling in his stomach. Nineteen dead in total - so the only one who had died outside of the bloodbath was the girl who had eaten the poisoned fruit. Only one Career dead, he noted fretfully, out of the twelve. Careers, the tributes from Districts 1, 2 and 4 were, rumor went, weapon-trained and combat-prepared well before they were reaped. They did tend to make alliances in the arena and had no regrets when the time came to break it. He had seen a District 2 tribute kill his own cousin in the final arena battle. It was all part of the pact they made with the Hunger Games - and it worked. Districts 1 and 2 boasted more Hunger Games winners together than the ten other districts combined. "Not this year," muttered Haymitch. He had been wise to mistrust the arena-grown food and he had been lucky to get proof of its deadliness. But if the Careers did not know any better by the time their initial supplies ran out ….

It made sense. The initial burst of interest the Games held by being twice as packed as usual would soon wear thin if the tributes did not die at twice the rate. Of course, the arena itself would be designed to pick off the tributes who managed to evade the Careers.

Unbidden, his father's voice came to him. All memories of his father brought with them pain. He had been a singer and a storyteller, and a brave man - and a terrible drunk. Haymitch's childhood had been divided into three distinct parts - the fuzzy, warm early years of being bounced on the strong man's knee; the anxious days of secret meetings and a distancing of affection; and the final years of anger and paralysis as Haymitch watched the rapid decline of the man he had loved and no longer recognized; at times dead to the world, at others raging at it with his fists - at all times smelling of stale liquor and sick. "The arena is a weapon," his father had once said. "A psychological weapon - held to our throats for these sick negotiations: all of us or two of our children."

Haymitch shook his head. A pointless and somewhat dangerous philosophy, his father's. "The arena is a weapon, though," he whispered to himself. "At least this one is."

He occupied his mind for a while considering all the ways in which it could be deployed - poison slipped in a water bottle and left for a thirsty tribute? Luring the Careers into a pack of those killer squirrels?

He blinked and steadied himself as he wavered on the tree branch. Sleep was the problem he had not quite solved. He definitely did not want to sleep tonight - he wanted to spend the morning finding a reasonably safe place to hide for sleep, and, anyway, it was a Career tradition to spend the first night of the Games hunting in a pack and killing off any of the tributes without the sense to evade them. But if he did nod off, he might do their job for them by tumbling right out of the tree. He was exhausted - not just tired but dead to his bones. The stress and tumult of the day longed to be resolved by a long rest ….

His ears perked up at a sound. Then his heart started drumming when he heard the footsteps - a lot of them - approaching. Shit. The Careers - how had he managed to put himself right in their way?

"This is about where the claw picked her up."

The voice just preceded the appearance of the group of Careers. It wasn't all eleven of them - it was roughly half. A tall, muscular girl (District 1 he thought) emerged first from the trees, carrying a torch with her.

No, it's not, you idiots, thought Haymitch furiously. Assuming the Careers would come tracking the dead girl's killer, he had moved further on from where she had died and was a good half mile, he reckoned, from where it had happened.

"Well, whoever did it has had hours to get away from her," came the more sensible response.

Haymitch squinted down, trying to see the faces from his high perch. He thought it to be a mix of tributes - two each from 1, 2 and 4. But he couldn't be sure, and, at any rate, he wasn't sure how the information could be useful to him. So he buried his face into the black sleeve of his tracksuit, in case anyone happened to look up and see him in the torchlight. His skin was darker than theirs, but not darker than the trees. He should think about finding some mud or something to use as camouflage.

"It's going to be near impossible to find anyone in the trees," said another. "At least in the dark. In the day, at least we'd be able to see footprints in these leaves. And it did look like most people were headed toward the mountain, anyway."

"Yes," said the girl with the torch. "I only saw a few people running for the trees. But one was that know-it-all from Twelve. I was really hoping to gut him on Day 1 - teach the fucker to call us all stupid. Make an example out of him."

"Head on a pike, Lumen?" laughed one of the boys.

"Something like that."

Haymitch shivered.

"So, let's keep going through the woods for a couple of hours," said someone else. "We might get lucky. After a couple of hours we'll head back to the cornucopia and see how the others made out in the direction of the mountain. Nineteen's almost half of the tributes; that's a pretty good start."

"District 4 is always so easily satisfied with 'good enough,'" said Lumen. "That's not a winning mentality."

"You don't expect us to win, anyway, do you? So what do you care?"

Another one of the boys held out a hand. "No arguing. It's night one, people. Save your energy for killing the disposables."

Haymitch waited for a long time after he heard them moving away before lifting his head and checking out the scene below. He was awake now - and furious. That he had a specific price on his head was no big deal - let them try it. It was the 'disposables' comment. He supposed it had been said before - he paid as little attention to Hunger Games' minutiae as possible - but to hear it, with his own ears, made him burn inside. They are also mutts, he thought to himself. Little Capitol mutts.

He waited until the first gray of morning to move from his perch. The Careers had not reappeared, so, if they had indeed turned back in the night, they had gone a different way. Hopefully, they would all go concentrating on the mountain at the other side of the arena and leave the forest be for a couple of days. In the meanwhile, he needed to pee.

He didn't know what direction he was going as he headed further into the trees - the artificial sun of the arena was in his eyes as it rose, so he decided to call it 'east.' He was light footed and flitted as close to the trees as he could. There was little he could do about the crunch that the leaves made underfoot, but he comforted himself with the thought of the Careers sleeping at the cornucopia after their night of hunting - and the thought that anyone who had run into the trees, as he had, would be more invested in hiding than fighting. After a couple of hours of walking, Haymitch found the first likely hiding spot. A tree had collapsed and the roots that had come out of the ground had brought up with them a fair amount of the earth in which they had been planted. It turned the base of the tree into something of a shallow cave, just large enough for a smallish tribute like him to sit in. He pushed aside the leaves that had gathered under the roots and carefully examined it. There were some small mushrooms growing on the base of the tree, and these he picked - carefully using his sleeve as a glove - wrapped in leaves and placed in their own section in the pack. That they were deadly he had no doubt - something to use later.

It was a chore to find a comfortable spot between the tree roots that were still stuck in the ground, but he eventually wormed himself into a small spot, covered himself as much as possible in leaves and clasped his knife tightly as he let himself sleep.

The sound of the cannon woke him. It was followed quickly by another cannon blast. Around him in the trees, those singing birds fluttered about in alarm until the echos died away. Two dead - maybe the Careers had found a fight? Or - hopefully - two of them had decided to eat or drink something deadly. He'd know more tonight. In the meanwhile ….

He stretched and pulled his pack out from under its own pile of leaves. He wasn't sure how well to trust the sun in here, but it had moved almost directly overhead, so he had possibly got in five or six hours of sleep. His stomach grumbled. "Shut up," he told it. "We've got a long way to go."

He did take the water bottle out and eyed it for a moment. One mistake, just one, and all his caution would be for nothing. But his mouth was dry as dust, and his head was starting to hurt problematically. Food he could do without for a little while longer, but water …? He held his breath at a sudden rustle in the leaves overhead. He looked up, startled to see not the birds but a silver parachute drifting down toward him.

Unbelievable - unbelievable! His mentor had told him that his sarcastic attitude had surely put off all possible sponsors. Yet, here was an early gift in the arena. Maybe food - hopefully water. He eased himself out of his hiding spot to collect it. Attached to the parachute was a small cardboard box labeled "Aspen Industries VerifyMe Water Test Strip. Easy Testing for Lead, Bacteria, Radionuclides, Sodium Hydroxide, 1,4-Dioxane & More." Inside was one sealed strip, a small orange bottle and a color-coded chart for reading the strip.

Wow! Was someone actually betting on him? This was exactly what he needed.

He found another tree to climb and settled himself on a broad branch to test the water. (The parachute was stuffed into his back. It might be useful as a decoy parachute. He imagined himself dropping poisonous mushrooms disguised as a sponsor gift on top of a Career's head and took great satisfaction in the imaginary scenario.) He poured a small amount of water into the orange bottle and stuck the test trip into it. His hands shook as he waited for the result. His restless mind would not quite allow him to trust even this 'proof' of the cleanliness of his water supply, but he had no other options. When the strip came back clean of anything out of the ordinary except for a high amount of fluoride, he put a drop of the water on his finger and tentatively applied it to his tongue. It tasted all right. After a half hour with no ill effects, he tried another drop and then a small mouthful and finally a larger one.

By midday he had decided that his bottle was in the clear. He packed it back up and saved his next drink for the end of the day. Clambering back down the tree, he made sure the sun was at his back and continued 'east.' The woods were very quiet, aside from the constant warble of the birds. He might be taking just a pleasant hike on a clear, warm day. A few hours in, he was compelled to remove the tracksuit jacket and tie it around his waist, as he was starting to sweat. The shirt underneath was the brightest white he had ever seen, and quite useless as camouflage. But he could not afford to sweat too much.

By the fall of evening, he was parched again, as well as faint with his hunger. He started looking around for a good spot for the night, wandering about in a circle for a bit before happening on a cluster of four small trees growing together in a tight circle. It offered some improvement of just hiding behind a single tree, anyway. He settled himself into the natural little room, took another two mouthfuls of water and ate half of a stick of dried beef and one of the packets of dried fruit. It was not barely enough to satisfy his hunger, but he panicked all the same, worried that he had eaten too much of his limited supplies. The cold grew, so he put his jacket back on and took the blanket out of his pack and wrapped it around himself. It was green, though too pale for his liking. It would probably be detectable were anyone to walk by the trees. But there was an ominous bite to the air. Haymitch hunkered down and reminded himself that only two had died today, meaning the Gamemakers would be attempting to lure the tributes into building warming fires that would signal their locations to the Careers. And the Careers would be frustrated by the lack of a productive day and would definitely be looking for any signs of life.

The night's report in the sky brought mixed tidings. Another Career was dead, one of the boys from District 4. But so was Ellanda.

This time, it took more of an effort for Haymitch to neutralize his horror at this news. Some random school-days memory of her came to him without warning; just a snippet of her playing hopscotch. I want out, he thought. But the only exit is up - pulled from the arena by a hovercraft, either dead or victorious.

Wait - no. Below the cornucopia is the launching center, forty-eight tunnels going straight down and out of here. And also - somewhere, somewhere - there is an edge, a border. The arena isn't infinite. It exists somewhere on a finite piece of land on the very real place called Panem. These borders - the walls - would probably be disguised just like the roof was disguised to look and act like a sky, but really wasn't.

All he had to do, he realized, was keep walking - just keep walking in one direction until he came to the very end of it.